at a glance...

Hometown: St. Louis, MO
First recordings: 1945

Members:
Miles Davis -organ, trumpet
Al Foster -drums
Michael Henderson -bass
Pete Cosey -guitar
Reggie Lucas -guitar
Dominique Gaumont -guitar
Mtume -percussion
Dave Liebman -flute
Badal Roy -tabla
Khalil Balakrishna -electric sitar
Herbie Hancock -clavinet

Related artists:
Weather Report, Ron Carter, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane, and a host of others

This double album was so far ahead of its time that people were actually afraid of it; Lester Bangs compared it for sheer bleakness to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. I always thought this was hyperbole until how I read (in the Davis biography "Milestones," which was so good that Miles plagarized it for his own autobiography) how they made the damned thing: just a bunch of guys jamming without much idea how it really sounded, no one really liking each other very much, Miles playing organ as often as trumpet, and Teo Macero stitching it all together under Miles' semi-direction. So I looked really hard for it -o nly to find out that it didn't exist on CD outside Japan, and that no one knew how to get ahold of it. Crap.

And then Sony/Columbia/Legacy/whatever goes and puts it out and our intrepid Ink Blot people get a review copy for me and I hear it and everything everyone has ever said about Get Up With It is true. It IS a frightening record, really pretty scary on songs like "Rated X," which is a funky rock number faded by Teo so that the band disappears every so often, and we're left with Miles hammering discords on his organ, all puns intended. It's also pretty scary that two songs here are over thirty-two minutes long, the ambient/trance shiva for Duke Ellington called "He Loved Him Madly" (just as influential on modern dance music as anything German) and the three-part workout titled "Calypso Frelimo" (probably just too damned hot to be influential on anyone). These are not extended CD-only tracks; they were this long on the original vinyl. Miles was a bad mofo back then, and wouldn't shut up for anybody. So this record's got that going for it, y'know, which is nice.

But it's not all scary weird stuff. Get Up With It features some of the greatest kick-ass guitar solos ever put on any kind of record, courtesy of the criminally underappreciated Pete Cosey and, perhaps, the gypsy Dominique Gaumont, otherwise known as "The French Hendrix." (Dave Liebman's liner notes pretty much suck for details.) "Billy Preston" out-Billy-Prestons Billy Preston at a svelte 14:52, and "Mtume" features percussionist Mtume, thereby making him the only person ever to have a Miles song named for him and be dissed by Stetsasonic ("Talkin' All That Jazz"). There's a resumê for ya.

On this album, Miles Davis reached his goal of assembling the greatest rock band in the world, invented ambient dance music, and retained the spontaneity of his best jazz works. Is the record tight? No. Is it sometimes boring? Yes, although further listens definitely reward careful ears. Do all the experiments pay off? Not really. Is this record absolutely essential? Oh, yeah. Hell, yeah. Or, as Miles himself would say, "Shut the fuck up."