Miles Davis - Agharta [Columbia LP (dutch 1st pressing)] 24-bit/96kHz 
Posted By : aksman | Date : 09 Sep 2010 21:00:52 |


While Pangaea is awesome as well, there is simply nothing like Agharta in the canon of recorded music. This is the greatest electric funk-rock jazz record ever made -- period.
- Thom Yurek/AMG

Agharta is an album recorded by jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in 1975. Both Agharta and Pangaea were recorded on the same day in Osaka, Japan. The Agharta concert took place during an afternoon matinée, whereas Pangaea was recorded in the evening.

The song *Interlude* contains a version of the theme from *So What*, a track from Davis*s Kind of Blue (1959).

Review by Thom Jurek

Along with its sister recording, Pangaea, Agharta was recorded live in February of 1975 at the Osaka Festival Hall in Japan. Amazingly enough, given that these are arguably Davis' two greatest electric live records, they were recorded the same day. Agharta was performed in the afternoon and Pangaea in the evening. Of the two, Agharta is superior. The band with Davis -- saxophonist Sonny Fortune, guitarists Pete Cosey (lead) and Reggie Lucas (rhythm), bassist Michael Henderson, drummer Al Foster, and percussionist James Mtume -- was a group who had their roots in the radically streetwise music recorded on 1972's On the Corner, and they are brought to fruition here. The music on Agharta, a total of three tunes spread over two CDs and four LP sides, contains the "Prelude," which clocks in at over a half-hour. There is *Maiysha* from Get up With It and the Agharta *Interlude*, which segues into the *Theme From Jack Johnson*.The music here is almost totally devoid of melody and harmony, and is steeped into a steamy amalgam of riffs shot through and through with crossing polyrhythms, creating a deep voodoo funk groove for the soloists to inhabit for long periods of time as they solo and interact with one another. Davis' band leading at this time was never more exacting or free. The sense of dynamics created by the stop-start accents and the moods, textures, and colors brought out by this particular interaction of musicians is unparalleled in Davis* live work -- yeah, that includes the Coltrane and Bill Evans bands, but they're like apples and oranges anyway. Driven by the combination of Davis* direction and the soloing of Sonny Fortune and guitarist Pete Cosey, who is as undervalued and underappreciated for his incalculable guitar-slinging gifts as Jimi Hendrix is celebrated for his, and the percussion mania of Mtume, the performance on Agharta is literally almost too much of a good thing to bear. When Cosey starts his solo in the *Prelude* at the 12-minute mark, listeners cannot be prepared for the Hendrixian energy and pure electric whammy-bar weirdness that's about to come splintering out of the speakers. As the band reacts in intensity, the entire proceeding threatens to short out the stereo. These are some of the most screaming notes ever recorded. Luckily, since this is just the first track on the whole package, Davis can bring the tempos down a bit here and there and snake them into spots that I don't think even he anticipated before that afternoon (check the middle of *Maiysha* and the second third of *Jack Johnson* for some truly creepy and beautiful wonders). While Pangaea is awesome as well, there is simply nothing like Agharta in the canon of recorded music. This is the greatest electric funk-rock jazz record ever made -- period.

Track listing

All compositions by Miles Davis.

      Prelude (Part One) - 22:27
      Prelude (Part Two) - 10:03
      Maiysha - 13:05
      Interlude - 31:47
      Theme from Jack Johnson - 28:39



Personnel

      Miles Davis – electric trumpet with Wah Wah, organ
      Sonny Fortune – soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, flute
      Pete Cosey – electric guitar, Synthesizer, percussion
      Reggie Lucas – electric guitar
      Michael Henderson – electric bass
      Al Foster – drums
      Mtume – conga, percussion, water drum, rhythm box

      Production

      Producer - Teo Macero
      Director - Keiichi Nakamura
      Engineer - Tamoo Suzuki



Technical Log

RCM Hannl limited with Rotating Brush
Music Hall MMF 9.1 Turntable
Tonearm: Pro-Ject 9cc evo with Pure Silver Wires
Cartridge: Nagaoka MP-500
Brocksieper Phonomax (Tube Phono PreAmp)
E-MU 0404 external USB 2.0 Audiointerface
Interconnections : Silent Wire NF5
WaveLab 6 recording software
iZotope RX Advanced 1.21 for resampling and dithering

Vacuum cleaning - TT - Brocksieper Phonomax - E-MU 0404 - WaveLab 6 (24/192) - manual click removal - analyze (no clipping, no DC Bias offset) - converted to 24/96 with iZotope RX Advanced 1.21 - split into individual Tracks - FLAC encoded (Vers. 1.21)

No silence been removed, please burn gapless to match original tracklayout.


Personal Note

With my vinyl transfers, I try to catch the whole beauty of vinyl records; therefore I don't use any post-processing or any sound improvement. What you get is a clear and flat transfer. For getting a clear sound, I'll do an extended washing of each record with my RCM, which can take up to 30 minutes brushing on each side. Resistant ticks and clicks I try to remove as good as possible, but the priority is not to lose any musical information in the process. Surface noises, as long they are not too high, are left in place. Only on bad pressings or on records recorded at extremely low levels do I use a fade in-/-out. As John Peel said, *Life is full of surface noises.* In some cases this means that I have to make a compromise.... The result has to pass my personal quality criteria, which is IMO quite high.