Uno straordinario articolo di Nate Chinen sul sito http://atlengthmag.com documenta l'incontro tra due mostri sacri della musica moderna come Neil Young e Miles Davis, avvenuto al celebre locale newyorkese Fillmore East, all'angolo tra East Sixth Street e Second Avenue a Manhattan, il 6 e 7 marzo del 1970.
Ecco un estratto dell'articolo che si può leggere in versione integrale a questo link:
Ecco un estratto dell'articolo che si può leggere in versione integrale a questo link:
In the loosely related fields of planetary science and apocalyptic fiction, the phrase “minimum orbit intersection distance,” or MOID, describes the closest point of contact between the paths of two orbiting objects. Most vividly invoked whenever an asteroid encroaches on our corner of the solar system, that bit of jargon also has its aesthetic uses. Consider the coordinates of Neil Young and Miles Davis on the evenings of March 6 and 7, 1970, at the juncture of East Sixth Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.
That setting, cosmic only in culturally suggestive terms, was the Fillmore East, a New York outpost of Bill Graham’s hippie empire. Young was the headliner, and Davis the opener. As far as we know, there was no particular spark of friction or connection between the two. But the musical evidence, even 40 years later, attests to the mysterious gravity of that moment. For all their differences — what you might inadvisably call their intersection distance — Young and Davis were both in the thrall of reinvention, pushing a distinctly contemporary, shrewdly cooperative agenda. It also happened that they were each in the midst of creative transition as they took the Fillmore stage......
At that time, he was on tour with Crazy Horse: Danny Whitten on guitar, Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums. Not quite a year earlier they had released their first album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Young had spent much of his time since toiling as the final consonant in CSNY: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the supergroup whose album Déjà Vu would be issued within a week of Young’s Fillmore East shows, delivering what Billboard hailed as “a skill and sensitivity bound to be the measure of excellence in rock for 1970.”
Whatever he thought of such proclamations, Young felt the call to work with musicians who upheld what you might call different aesthetic aspirations than CSN. Their raggedness was not entirely planned. Young himself has said: “With Crazy Horse it’s such a special thing, because none of us can really play. We know we aren’t any good. Fuck, we’d get it in the first take every time, and it was never right — but we could never do it better.” That’s overstating the case a bit, as his own solos at the Fillmore would demonstrate. But there is something to his assertion of anti-virtuosity. Long before Crazy Horse, he was a skinny kid with a nervous voice, the embodiment of vulnerability. After a session with his Winnipeg high school band, the Squires, the engineer complimented his guitar playing but said he’d never make it as a singer.
Which somewhat implausibly brings us to Miles Davis, a trumpeter long appraised in jazz circles more in terms of resourcefulness than proficiency. Gary Giddins has credited him with “a thoroughly original style built on the acknowledgement of technical limitations.” The conservative orthodoxy often compares Davis unfavorably to Dizzy Gillespie or Clifford Brown, which is not unlike saying Neil Young was no Stephen Stills.
In a 1993 essay, musicologist Robert Walser analyzed the most notoriously flawed performance of the Miles Davis canon, a 1964 rendition of “My Funny Valentine,” and argues that Davis had mastered the process of signifyin’ famously articulated by Henry Louis Gates. To really hear what he’s saying, you have to dislodge standard notions of legitimacy, or spike them with the awareness of an alternative technique. To that end, perhaps the most striking analogue between Miles Davis and Neil Young, or just the most obvious, is the fact that both artists make expressive and powerful use of an instrument regarded in some circles, even now, as imperfect......
That setting, cosmic only in culturally suggestive terms, was the Fillmore East, a New York outpost of Bill Graham’s hippie empire. Young was the headliner, and Davis the opener. As far as we know, there was no particular spark of friction or connection between the two. But the musical evidence, even 40 years later, attests to the mysterious gravity of that moment. For all their differences — what you might inadvisably call their intersection distance — Young and Davis were both in the thrall of reinvention, pushing a distinctly contemporary, shrewdly cooperative agenda. It also happened that they were each in the midst of creative transition as they took the Fillmore stage......
At that time, he was on tour with Crazy Horse: Danny Whitten on guitar, Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums. Not quite a year earlier they had released their first album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Young had spent much of his time since toiling as the final consonant in CSNY: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the supergroup whose album Déjà Vu would be issued within a week of Young’s Fillmore East shows, delivering what Billboard hailed as “a skill and sensitivity bound to be the measure of excellence in rock for 1970.”
Whatever he thought of such proclamations, Young felt the call to work with musicians who upheld what you might call different aesthetic aspirations than CSN. Their raggedness was not entirely planned. Young himself has said: “With Crazy Horse it’s such a special thing, because none of us can really play. We know we aren’t any good. Fuck, we’d get it in the first take every time, and it was never right — but we could never do it better.” That’s overstating the case a bit, as his own solos at the Fillmore would demonstrate. But there is something to his assertion of anti-virtuosity. Long before Crazy Horse, he was a skinny kid with a nervous voice, the embodiment of vulnerability. After a session with his Winnipeg high school band, the Squires, the engineer complimented his guitar playing but said he’d never make it as a singer.
Which somewhat implausibly brings us to Miles Davis, a trumpeter long appraised in jazz circles more in terms of resourcefulness than proficiency. Gary Giddins has credited him with “a thoroughly original style built on the acknowledgement of technical limitations.” The conservative orthodoxy often compares Davis unfavorably to Dizzy Gillespie or Clifford Brown, which is not unlike saying Neil Young was no Stephen Stills.
In a 1993 essay, musicologist Robert Walser analyzed the most notoriously flawed performance of the Miles Davis canon, a 1964 rendition of “My Funny Valentine,” and argues that Davis had mastered the process of signifyin’ famously articulated by Henry Louis Gates. To really hear what he’s saying, you have to dislodge standard notions of legitimacy, or spike them with the awareness of an alternative technique. To that end, perhaps the most striking analogue between Miles Davis and Neil Young, or just the most obvious, is the fact that both artists make expressive and powerful use of an instrument regarded in some circles, even now, as imperfect......
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