#Sonic cd soundtrack funk influences full#

In essence, it's compression in a narrow stereo field to make the music work on AM radio.' According to The Complete On the Corner Sessions producer Bob Belden: 'The original album version was an effect.

Here, he went deeper than before into overdubbing and studio effects territory. In addition, producer Teo Macero did his wild cut-and-paste thing, which he had pioneered on Miles Davis's In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. Inundated by an ocean of rhythm instruments, including sitar, tabla and three electric keyboards (played by Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, among others), and without any harmonic development, the soloists had very little space, and became merely strands in a tangle of grooves and colours. On the opening track, the bass plays the same few notes for 20 minutes. These were superimposed over grooves and bass riffs that were more tightly circumscribed than ever before. First there were the influences of Stockhausen, Paul Buckmaster, and Ornette Coleman's atonal 'harmolodics'. But there were a number of other things that set the album apart. So what is this most mysterious and outré of albums? The culmination of Davis's two-decade-long quest for the African roots of his music, On the Corner has a huge, extended rhythm section rotating around circular, one-chord bass riffs. And whatever remains of jazz-rock continues to be too deeply in thrall of the pyrotechnics aspect of such 1970s bands as Mahavishnu Orchestra to take any notice of On the Corner's repetitive funk, which was the antithesis of virtuosity. Yet, the mainstream jazz community still won't touch On the Corner with a barge pole. On the Corner's influence can be heard in the music of such varied artists as Underworld, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, Red Hot Chili Peppers, David Byrne and Squarepusher. Since then, the list of musicians who have namechecked Miles Davis's electric music in general, and On the Corner in particular, has become seemingly endless knowing and liking the album appears to have become indispensable in the hipness stakes. 'It was the first hip-hop/house/drum'n'bass/breakbeat album I'd ever heard,' explains American musician and longtime Village Voice writer Greg Tate. It's worth pointing out, though, that the re-evaluation of On the Corner has been going on since the early 1990s, when hip-hop artists began quoting it as an influence. The release this week of The Complete On the Corner Sessions, a six-CD box set, is timely. So it seems On the Corner simply went underground, only to emerge again when the world was ready for it. You can't do it with any old riff.' And New York guitarist Gary Lucas, who has come through the Captain Beefheart school of warped aesthetics, loves the 'ominous, dense, swampy jungle of urban desperation its dub-like grooves conveyed'. 'I'm highly influenced by the collage process producer Teo Macero applied on the album,' he says.īassist Jah Wobble chips in: 'On the Corner is fantastic, because this same riff comes back to you again and again. He is echoed by Paul Miller, aka electronic and hip-hop musician and producer DJ Spooky. It's so offensive, and pushes boundaries at the same time.' 'I love the rhythm section, and the way you're just thrown into the music at the beginning. 'On the Corner is a huge influence on us,' he says. Jamie Morrison, drummer with post-punk band the Noisettes, is one of them. All the more striking, then, that 35 years after its first release it is hailed by many outside the jazz community as a visionary musical statement that was way ahead of its time. By contrast, On the Corner remained shunned, if not forgotten, for decades.

#Sonic cd soundtrack funk influences full#

The history of music is full of works that were derided on first public exposure - Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1910), Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1960), the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) - but within a few years enjoyed a critical rehabilitation. 'It was my least favourite Miles album,' says Paul Buckmaster, the British composer and arranger who supplied musical sketches for the sessions, and turned Davis on to the music and method of Karlheinz Stockhausen. 'I didn't think much of it,' recalls saxophonist Dave Liebman. Even the musicians who played on the album were bewildered. 'An insult to the intellect of the people,' remarked another. W ithin weeks of its release in 1972, Miles Davis's On the Corner had become the most vilified and controversial album in the history of jazz.