Miles Davis

In truth, I'm here to talk almost exclusively about the track that, with its sprawling thirty-two minutes and fifteen seconds, takes up the entire first side of "Get Up With It", 1974, the trumpeter's last studio album before his descent into the psycho-physical troubles that would keep him away until his return in 1981.

"Get Up With It" is a collection of tracks recorded over the preceding years, with different musicians and in various sessions. The oldest is "Honky Tonk" from 1970, while one of the most recent is "He Loved Him Madly", the flagship of Davis's sonic research from this period, a black hole that absorbed every instance of its creator's path, leaving behind a sense of bewilderment, a cosmic void. After a creation like that, all Miles could do was disappear.

"He Loved Him Madly" is made of sounds that are no longer really sounds, but shreds, fragments, particles dancing freely in the dark. The musical rarefaction is total, with the drums abandoning their usual role to become a morse-code signal from hyperspace, movements that are faint signs of life ready to collapse at any moment. Holding the sonic weave together are the guitars of Reggie Lucas and Dominique Daumont, though they too soon find themselves swallowed by the darkness looming over them, as the leader weaves grim electric organ chords.

The suite is dedicated to Duke Ellington, who had passed away just days before this recording. And the tribute to his friend and mentor carries a painful intensity: its way of hanging suspended in the air is a requiem that moves precisely because of what it doesn't say, what it lets you sense without ever laying itself bare. Only Morton Feldman's art has reached such quietly intense peaks of elusiveness.

Around the eleven-minute mark, the drums begin to trace the memory of a steady rhythm — jazz as it's usually understood, even factoring in Davis's forays into rock and funk, feels light years away. Not long after, ECM would come along to set the template, bringing to wider attention the interplay between jazz, contemporary composition, electronics and silence. But here everything is free of the perfectionism of the Eicher school; it's a cavity seething with nothingness, undone, rough, never condescending.

When the flute comes in to soften things and, with the help of delay, to spatialize the texture, the track's true essence is finally laid bare: the musicians throw themselves into a jam session with melancholy itself. Then, around the sixteenth minute, the instruments drift to the margins and pull back a curtain, setting the stage for the grand entrance of the leader's trumpet and its ghostly gait — now just a distant memory of the passionate onslaught with which Miles had flattened everyone and everything until shortly before. Sound, then silence; silence, then sound. The wah-wah pedal and a wide reverb, nothingness all around, him blowing two-notes-two and it's as if the sky cracked open to let in a sliver of light amid a torment of storm clouds that then close back up; long stretches of dead calm, then those two notes again, and very slowly the faint mass of sound converges toward a single point, the musicians trading ideas and feelings, gathering together and embracing one last time in farewell to their departed friend.

There remain the other tracks to mention: the Latin-tinged “Calypso Frelimo” (1973) with trumpet to the fore, “Rated X” (1972), which still pushes into avant-garde territory, its electric organ conjuring atmospheres dear to figures like Xenakis and Penderecki, “Honky Tonk” (1970), from the “Live-Evil” sessions, the blues of “Red China Blues” (1972), “Maiysha” and “Mtume” (both 1974), which foreshadow the pop-leaning Miles of the '80s, and finally “Billy Preston” (1972), riding a more funk-driven groove. Plenty on offer, and succulent stuff at that, but none of it holds a candle to the elegy of “He Loved Him Madly,” a point of no return for its creator, a twilight sabbath of everlasting magic.

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08/02/2026