VMP Magazine

The latest release from VMP Anthology, Miles Davis: The Electric Years collects seven albums in Miles’ electric period from 1969 through 1974 — the first of his career where he literally plugged in and used electric instruments. These albums exploded what jazz could be in the wake of rock music, and set the path for the future of many, many genres.  

Read below for excerpts from the box set’s liner notes, written by author, jazz critic and historian Ben Ratliff, and click here to learn more about The Electric Years. 

Editor's Note: Today, we're reissuing the Max Roach Trio's album with the Legendary Hasaan. The album came to our attention from Ben Ratliff, who wrote the Listening Notes booklet for our Vinyl Me, Please Classics reissue of Max Roach's Percussion Bitter Sweet. Hasaan only made one album, and when Ben told us about it, we looked into the album and helped organize this reissue. When we realized we could have new liner notes for the album, we knew who to ask.

You can buy the album, which has been remastered by Kevin Gray, here.

Sorcerer has never quite gotten its due, especially after the fact.

One of the marks of a truly complex artist is that the devoted fan values whichever points of entry into the artist’s work that was most attractive to them in the first place, and judges everything else by that standard. A few of Miles Davis’s records are widely understood as particularly attractive, which in Milesian terms means that they encapsulated a moment in the history of jazz, or in the history of American art, or in the history of 20th-century cool. Those who are attracted to the harmonically ancient elegance of Kind of Blue, or the ensemble counter-intuitions of Live at the Plugged Nickel, or the cinematic unfoldings of Miles Ahead, or the swampy altered-sensorium of Bitches Brew, might not hear enough of any that stuff in Sorcerer and find it lacking. I understand. Those other records are clear; they are markers of something. This one doesn’t work the same way.