Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969-1974

by

Miles Davis

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The idea behind this CD is brilliant. Take the high points of Miles Davis' "electric period" and blend them into one long song. Bill Laswell pulls it off, creating a beautiful and moving tribute that will send you to the source CDs in a hurry.

Starting with music from In a Silent Way, Laswell lets the songs play just as they did on the original album, condensed slightly. This leads to a 30-minute suite (the two tracks in the middle of the disc) that draw from On the Corner, Get Up With It, and Agharta. Laswell has added a little dub to the mix, enhancing it in a subtle way. The CD ends with 14 minutes from Davis' incredible "He Loved Him Madly" (the first track on Get Up With It). The original is 32 minutes of perfection. This excerpt will make you want to hear it all.

The only thing missing from this album is music from Bitches Brew, but here again Laswell is way ahead of everyone. Bitches Brew is the Davis album you probably already have (and love) if you were thinking about buying this, so there's no need to sample it here. This is an amazing CD. It made me want to hear more Miles Davis --- and more Laswell albums, too.

Laswell's mixes are inferior to Teo's original mixes. The original mixes had a real pop and kick in the bottom end, which in Laswell's hands is obliterated by a generic-sounding bass drone.

But I kind of like his shortened version of "He Loved Him Madly" - a track that I don't care for much in the first place. In Laswell's hands it becomes a decent trippy late-night vibe for some of it's length. I don't mind his abridged version of "In A Silent Way" either, which I've always found overrated. The other half of this album I don't even want to talk about though. The fact that "Get Up With It" is not in print and this is instead is absurd.

4 years later - I listened to this again - it is really bad. Everything that Laswell changes from the original, he makes less powerful and more corny. I appreciate Laswell's contributions to modern music, but this shows his limitations. What makes Teo Macero's approach so much more successful is that he did Miles' bidding, and Miles was a genius. Laswell uses Miles as grist for his own approach to music, and the genius evaporates from the music.