Miles Davis

LP version. Released by Columbia in November 1974, Get Up With It gathers studio recordings that Miles Davis made between May 1970 and October 1974. It was the last new album he issued before stepping away from music for the rest of the decade. It opens with He Loved Him Madly, a half-hour tribute to Duke Ellington, who had died that spring. Brian Eno later named that piece as an influence in the notes to his Ambient 4: On Land. The rest moves from dense funk to calypso, blues and long trance-like grooves. No other single release shows the range of his electric bands of those years so fully. Davis plays organ on several of the pieces, a sign of how far he had moved from the trumpet as his only voice.

The core of the record is the band of 1973 and 1974, with Michael Henderson on electric bass, Al Foster on drums and Mtume on percussion. The guitars are by Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, and Teo Macero produced. On He Loved Him Madly, recorded in June 1974, Dave Liebman's flute floats over three guitars at a slow, suspended pace. Calypso Frelimo, from September 1973, runs past thirty minutes, and Davis moves between trumpet, electric piano and organ as the rhythm shifts underneath. On Rated X from 1972 he plays only organ, over electric sitar, tabla, bass and drums. Maiysha and Mtume come from October 1974, with Sonny Fortune on flute and saxophone. Billy Preston, from December 1972, adds Carlos Garnett's saxophone and Khalil Balakrishna's sitar. Honky Tonk goes back to May 1970, with John McLaughlin, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock and Billy Cobham. Red China Blues is a straight blues with harmonica, Cornell Dupree's guitar and a brass arrangement by Wade Marcus. In Rolling Stone in 1975 Stephen Davis described the players as a who's who of Seventies jazz-rock.

This Music On Vinyl edition (MOVLP1513), made for Sony Music and released in 2016, spreads the eight pieces over two 180 gram LPs in a gatefold sleeve.