Agharta (album)

Miles Davis in 1971

In the early 1970s, Miles Davis continued exploring directions radically different from the jazz music that made him renowned in the 1950s and 1960s.[1] The music from this electric period in his career found him experimenting with rock, funk, African rhythms, emerging electronic music technology, and an ever-changing lineup of musicians who played electric instruments.[2] The trumpeter attracted younger audiences as his fusion music became more radical and abstract while alienating older listeners, musicians, and critics in the jazz scene who accused him of selling out.[3] After recording his 1972 On the Corner album, Davis began to focus more on performing live, working in the studio only sporadically and haphazardly; the 1974 releases Big Fun and Get Up with It compiled recordings he made between 1969 and 1974.[4]

By 1973, Davis had established most of his band's line-up, a septet featuring bassist Michael Henderson, guitarists Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, drummer Al Foster, percussionist James Mtume, and saxophonist Dave Liebman; Liebman left the group the following year and was replaced by Sonny Fortune.[5] Lucas, Foster, and Mtume functioned as the band's rhythm section, while Cosey, Henderson, and Fortune were given space to improvise as soloists.[6] Their concerts – played frequently at rock venues and festivals – became opportunities for Davis and his sidemen to test new musical ideas and ways to exploit electronic equipment.[7]

Davis toured relentlessly for two years while tolerating intense physical pain and difficulty walking, caused by joint pain from sickle-cell anaemia, badly damaged ankles after a 1972 car wreck, and osteoporosis in his left hip, which had been operated on a decade earlier.[8] He had also developed nodules on his larynx that often left him short of breath, especially when playing the trumpet.[9] To numb the pain, he became increasingly dependent on self-medicating with painkillers, cocaine, and morphine, which combined with his alcohol and recreational drug use led to mood swings; he would by turns feel vulnerable and hostile.[10] By the end of 1974, a disappointing showing in DownBeat magazine's readers poll reinforced to Davis that his reputation had diminished.[11] Unfazed by detractors and personal troubles, he kept his touring schedule intense.[12] As Henderson recounted:

He was like the general looking at the fort and they had a moat and we were going to get in that fort. That was the attitude of the band. We didn't give a shit what the critics said. People are gonna like what they like, but if you don't like it, respect it. Respect that I have the right to do what I do. Because with or without you, we're going to do it anyway.[13]

Festival Hall (left center) in Osaka, where Agharta was recorded

In 1975, the 48-year old Davis embarked on a three-week tour of Japan. Between January 22 and February 8, he played 14 concerts in large-hall venues to capacity crowds and enthusiastic reviews.[14] Japanese critic Keizo Takada said at the time that Davis is leading his "magnificent and energetic" band just as Duke Ellington had his orchestra: "Miles must be the genius of managing men and bringing out their hidden talent."[11]

Throughout the tour, Davis was sick with pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer that grew worse, while his hip occasionally and unpredictably slipped out of its socket. Unable to work his trumpet's volume and effects pedals because of the pain in his legs, he would go down on his knees to press them with his hand during performances. To relieve his pain and perform, he used codeine and morphine, smoked, and drank large quantities of Heineken beer. On several occasions, Davis was able to play two concerts in one day, as he did on February 1 at the Festival Hall in Osaka.[15]

The Festival Hall performances were recorded by Japan's CBS/Sony record label under the supervision of Teo Macero, Davis' producer of 15 years.[16] "The Japanese people were very beautiful", Henderson recalled from the concerts. "They came in with their suit and ties on and we proceeded to blow the roof off the suckers with a million amplifiers."[13]

Agharta's title was proposed by CBS/Sony as a reference to the subterranean utopian city.[56] The city's legend was one of several Eastern versions of the Hollow Earth theory, which proposed that an ancient high culture originally lived on the Earth's surface but was forced to flee below because of some political or geological crisis.[57] The myth depicted the city as a divine source of power, claiming that its inhabitants were highly spiritual, advanced beings who would save the Earth from materialism and destructive technology after a cataclysmic event.[58] It was first conceived by 19th-century French thinker Louis Jacolliot as a land ruled by an Ethiopian ruler; Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre later described it as "drowning in celestial radiances all visible distinctions of race in a single chromatic of light and sound, singularly removed from the usual notions of perspective and acoustics."[15]

The album's artwork was designed by Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo, who had been creating silkscreen prints on themes of Agharta and the mythical kingdom of Shambhala the year before the Festival Hall concert; his design for Santana's Lotus (1974) featured such themes.[59] In the early 1970s, Yokoo had found his growing popularity in Japan distracting and moved to the United States, where he was able to get more of his work published. After returning to Japan, he received a phone call from Davis, who had seen his art and wanted him to create a cover for Agharta.[60] Before designing the cover, Yokoo listened to a preliminary tape of the concert, meditated, and reflected on his reading of Raymond W. Bernard's 1969 book The Hollow Earth.[61] Bernard had written that the city existed in a large cavern in the center of the Earth where displaced inhabitants of Atlantis had taken refuge following its destruction, using mythological aircraft known as vimanas as transport, although Yokoo said he believed "Agharta could be down there under the sea like Atlantis or even hidden in the jungle like the lost city of El Dorado."[62] Yokoo also drew on elements from other Eastern subterranean myths and Afrofuturism in his design.[63] Critics who eventually saw the album's packaging thought he had been inspired instead by the psychedelic drugs popular at the time.[61]

The back cover design by Tadanori Yokoo, who was inspired by the legendary city of Agartha

The front cover depicted an advanced civilization with a vast landscape of skyscrapers and red, sunburst-like flames rising out of the cityscape as representations of Agharta's power.[64] Yokoo used a combination of collage, airbrushing, and painting techniques as he had with his previous work, along with postcards collected from his trips to Tahiti and New York City; the cityscape on the front cover was taken from one of his postcards.[60] The back cover showed the city submerged in water, embedded in coral reefs, and hovered over by a diver, fish, and a squid ascending from the city.[65] According to graphic designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, Yokoo depicted groups of jellyfish, coral reefs, and brightly colored fish to suggest an association between Agharta and Atlantis.[61] The foreground of the back cover's illustration featured a reptilian creature. Cultural studies researcher Dagmar Buchwald interpreted this image as an allusion to similar ideas about Lemuria; this mythological continent supposedly existed during the Earth's prehistory and was inhabited by an advanced civilization, later forced under the Earth's surface after its homeland was destroyed by a great flood.[65]

A UFO was depicted on the back cover, flying in a spotlight over Agharta, while the album's inside packaging featured images of winged superhuman beings known as the Agharta supermen, who guarded the city's entrances and secret tunnels.[66] An inscription in the LP's gatefold sleeve explained the connection between the UFO and the Agharta supermen:

During various periods in history the supermen of Agharta came to the surface of Earth to teach the human race how to live together in peace and save us from wars, catastrophe, and destruction. The apparent sighting of several flying saucers soon after the bombing of Hiroshima may represent one visitation.[65][nb 1]

Agharta's North American release had different artwork designed by John Berg, the art director from Davis' U.S. label, Columbia Records.[68] In its liner notes, an inscription said the record should be listened to at the highest possible volume, and the arrangements were credited to Davis.[69] After it was released, Macero received a complaint from Columbia's accounting department about the trumpeter being compensated $2,500 per arrangement, arguing that none of the music sounded as if it had been arranged.[70]

Davis' producer Teo Macero (1996) prepared Agharta's original release.

In preparing the Festival Hall recordings for release, Macero abstained from editing and splicing them with pre-recorded parts, a departure from his usual approach to Davis' electric-era albums. As the producer later explained to Musician magazine, "the Japanese specifically wanted me to leave in the spacy things."[71] They were released as two double albums – Agharta, featuring the afternoon concert, was first released in Japan in August 1975 and later in North America in 1976; the evening show was issued exclusively in Japan as Pangaea in 1976.[72] Because Columbia disapproved of Davis' live recordings, both Pangaea and Dark Magus remained Japan-only releases until the 1990s, when they were reissued on CD format.[73]

Agharta was reissued several times. In January 1991, Columbia re-released it in the U.S. on CD, featuring a remaster Tingen deemed inferior to the original LP in sound and mix quality. "Had the CD been my first introduction, I might never have liked the album much", he said.[74] Sony later remastered Agharta again as part of their Davis reissue campaign and Master Sound series in Japan, with improved sound using Super Bit Mapping.[75] This 1996 Japanese CD edition restored nine additional minutes of atmospheric feedback, percussion, and synthesizer sounds to the end of the final track.[17]

Another remaster of the album was engineered by Mark Wilder and Maria Triana at New York's Battery Studios. It was made available in the U.S. in 2009, when Agharta was one of 52 albums re-issued in mini-LP replica sleeves as a part of Miles Davis: The Complete Columbia Album Collection, a box set commissioned by Sony Legacy.[76] According to Tingen, this edition sounded "like a woolen blanket has been lifted from the previous CD", clarifying especially Cosey, who had sounded muted in the mix. He still found it somewhat low on bass, which he attributed to the original master tapes: "The LP version also didn't have a lot of bass, but I always assumed this was due to the LP cut: with long album lengths the grooves can hold less bass information."[77]

The Festival Hall concert itself had been received enthusiastically by the Osaka audience. "I had no idea what [they] were going to do", Henderson recalled. "They gave us a standing ovation that was almost as long as the concert."[13] The music translated poorly to the commercial marketplace, however, as Agharta was ill-suited for "FM airplay, dancing, or passive listening", in Nicholson's words. The LP's only appearance on a popular music chart was in April 1976 on the American Billboard chart, where it spent five weeks and reached a peak position of 168.[78]

Agharta was also largely unsuccessful with professional critics.[79] According to Robert Christgau, it proved the most widely panned of Davis' double albums in the 1970s.[80] The Stranger's Dave Segal claims it was one of the most divisive records ever, challenging both critics and the artist's core audience much in the same way Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music album had in 1975.[81]

Gary Giddins (2009), one of several jazz critics who originally disliked the album, though he later warmed to it

Reviewing for The New York Times in April 1976, Robert Palmer said Agharta is marred by long stretches of "sloppy, one-chord jams", disjointed sounds, and a banal quality clearly rendered by the impeccable Japanese engineering. He complained that Davis' use of the wah-wah pedal inhibits his ability to phrase notes and that the septet sounds poor "by rock standards", particularly Cosey, whose overamplified guitar "whines and rumbles like a noisy machine shop" and relegates Lucas to background riffs.[82] Jazz Forum reviewer Andrzej Trzaskowski wrote that Fortune seems to be the only jazz musician on the record, finding his solos often flawless, while disparaging the performances of Davis, Lucas, and Cosey, whose guitar and synthesizer effects he found pointlessly brutal. In Trzaskowski's opinion, the individual segments do not cohere as a whole and are further hampered by the clichéd "rock phraseology" of the guitarists, who he said lack wit, harmony, and taste.[37]

Jazz critic Ian Carr thought the album "suffers from a monotony of sound" that he attributed mostly to Lucas and Cosey's relentlessly eruptive guitar playing. Alongside the band's intense rhythms, Davis' trumpet sounds fatigued, dejected, and out of place to Carr. In general, he deemed the music "too non-Western in the sense of too much rhythm and not enough structure".[83] Gary Giddins penned an angrily dismissive review of Agharta in The Village Voice, in which he charged Davis with failing to assert his musical presence on what he said is not "just a bad record" but also "a sad one". In Giddins' mind, the trumpeter "doesn't exploit the backbeat, he succumbs to it, and the worst consequence is not the ensuing monotony, which theoretically a soloist could turn to his advantage."[84] A few days after his review was published, he was sent a package full of large cotton swabs, industrial-strength scouring pads, and a card that read, "The next time you review Miles Davis clean out your head."[85]

Agharta received some positive contemporary commentary. Nathan Cobb from The Boston Globe appraised the record favorably in 1976, calling it "a kind of firestorm for the '70s" with a "positively cosmic" rhythmic foundation. In conclusion, he regarded Davis as "the one who leads the others through the unknown waters of electronic jazz rock".[86] In DownBeat, Gilmore said the band sounds best on the breakneck segments opening each of the two discs, where Cosey's ferocious improvisations "achieve a staggering emotional dimension" lacking on the slower passages, which he felt are still redeemed by Davis' elegiac trumpet playing. He rated the album four stars, out of a possible five.[41] Lester Bangs found Agharta too difficult to definitively assess but nonetheless more fascinating than most other music being released at the time. He wrote in Phonograph Record that Davis' new music is the product of his heart's once luminous "emotional capacities" having been shattered by "great, perhaps unbearable suffering", but that "the soul beyond it" could never be destroyed and interestingly "almost glows uniquely brighter in its own dark coldness; and that, that which is all that is left, is merely the universe".[87]

A Czech jazz group at Prague's AghaRTA Jazz Centrum in 2008

By the time of the second Osaka concert (captured on Pangaea), the band's level of energy had diminished significantly, and Davis sounded particularly absent. As Mtume recounted, "he became ill in the evening, and you can hear the difference in the energy."[40] Upon returning from Japan, the trumpeter fell ill again and was hospitalized for three months.[88] He held a few more shows and studio sessions with the band, but his health worsened; their last show on September 5, 1975, in Central Park ended abruptly when Davis left the stage and began to cry in pain.[89] He retired soon after – citing physical, spiritual, and creative exhaustion – and lived as a recluse for the next several years, often struggling with bouts of depression and further medical treatment, before resuming his recording career in 1980.[90] He abandoned the direction he had pursued in the 1970s, instead playing a style of fusion far more melodic and accessible to audiences, until his death in 1991.[91] The day after he died, Prague's Wenceslas Square saw the opening of the AghaRTA Jazz Centrum, a small jazz club named after the album, hosting nightly performances and an annual festival played by local and international acts.[92]

Agharta underwent positive critical reassessment, beginning in 1980 when Davis returned to the jazz scene.[93] Of the albums documenting his 1973–75 band, it was considered by many critics to be the best, in retrospect.[44] For Giddins, it had become one of his favorite albums from the trumpeter's electric period, as he reevaluated its elements of drama, relentless tension, and what he considered the best performances of Fortune and Cosey's careers. "There really is not a moment when the music fails to reflect the ministrations of the sorcerer himself", he later said.[94]

Retrospective professional reviews

Review scores
Source	Rating
All Music Guide to Jazz	[27]
Christgau's Record Guide	A[80]
DownBeat	[95]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[96]
Hi-Fi News & Record Review	A[97]
MusicHound Jazz	5/5[98]
The Penguin Guide to Jazz	[52]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[99]
Sputnikmusic	4.5/5[100]
Tom Hull – on the Web	A–[101]

In Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), Christgau saw Agharta as Davis' finest music since Jack Johnson. He called it an "angry, dissociated, funky" record built on the septet's virtuosic performance, particularly Foster's "guileless show of chops" and Fortune's performance, which he deemed the best woodwind playing on a Davis album from this decade.[80][nb 2] Reflecting on the trumpeter's 1970s concert recordings in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (1992), J. D. Considine contended that Agharta's "alternately audacious, poetic, hypnotic, and abrasive" music had endured the passage of time best.[103] Davis biographer Jack Chambers believed it proved far better than most of his other electric albums, and that the "Maiysha" and "Jack Johnson" segments in particular "magically brought into focus the musical forces over which many thought Davis had lost control".[104]

Although Davis' use of wah-wah was frequently dismissed in the past as a failed experiment, Richard Cook and Brian Morton believed the effects pedal had in fact helped Davis achieve remarkably adventurous playing on Agharta.[52] Cook named it among Davis' best works and the culmination of the music he had begun to explore on Bitches Brew (1970). While possessing an "epic" sound and scope, Agharta is also "a great band record", in his opinion: "Even though Davis contributed only telling details, he still cued exceptional performances from his men."[105] In Tingen's mind, it represents the "high plateau" of Davis' electric explorations. He said that, because Davis gave the band leeway for constant interplay, the music exhibits an "organic and fluid quality" as well as a greater variety of textures, rhythms, timbres, and moods than Dark Magus.[33] Henry Kaiser called it the best ensemble performance of jazz's electric era, and Steve Holtje, writing in MusicHound Jazz (1998), credited Davis with conducting the album's "heroes" to sculpt "moments of shattering beauty and soul-rending vehemence".[106] In the All Music Guide to Jazz (2002), Thom Jurek considered the album inarguably the "greatest electric funk-rock jazz record ever" and declared, "there is simply nothing like Agharta in the canon of recorded music."[27]

Influence

Back in the mid-1970s, fans who had formed emotional attachments to the moody soundscapes of Filles de Kilimanjaro and In a Silent Way had trouble adjusting to the electronic firestorms of Agharta. While Mr. Davis was being treated for two broken legs and a bone disease, a newer generation of listeners and musicians was inspired by the abrasive music his last band of the 70's had recorded.

— Robert Palmer (1985)[107]

Despite being one of Davis' lesser-known records, Agharta belonged to a period in his career that influenced artists in British jazz, new wave, and punk rock, including guitarists Robert Quine and Tom Verlaine.[108] It inspired a generation of musicians to focus on cathartic playing rather than precise instrumentation and composition.[109] Quine was particularly fascinated by Cosey's electric guitar sounds; Bangs, who attended Quine's performance with the Voidoids in 1977, claimed "he steals from Agharta! And makes it work!"[110]

Writers have since lauded the quality and originality of Cosey's playing on the album, viewing it as a standard for guitar mastery and contrast.[44] Jazz critic Bill Milkowski credited his excursive style for "spawning an entire school of 'sick' guitar playing" and said the combination of Fortune's acerbic sax lines atop Foster, Henderson, and Lucas' syncopated grooves were 10 years ahead of Steve Coleman and Greg Osby's M-Base experiments.[109] Tingen found Cosey's solos amazingly revealing and advanced when heard decades later: "Sometimes growling, scurrying around all corners like a caged tiger, sometimes soaring like a bird, sometimes deliriously abstract, sometimes elegantly melodic and tender, his electric guitar concept is one of the most original to have been devised on the instrument."[111] In Christgau's opinion, the noises he produced on the first track's second half "comprise some of the greatest free improvisations ever heard in a 'jazz'-'rock' context."[80]

A Guild S-100, played by Pete Cosey on Agharta

According to Nicholson, Agharta and other jazz-rock recordings such as Emergency! (1970) by the Tony Williams Lifetime suggested the genre was progressing toward "a whole new musical language ... a wholly independent genre quite apart from the sound and conventions of anything that had gone before". This development dwindled with the commercialism of jazz in the 1980s, although Agharta remained a pivotal and influential record through the 1990s, especially on artists in the experimental rock genre.[112] It became one of the favorite albums for English musician Richard H. Kirk, who recalled playing it often while working at Chris Watson's loft during their early years in the band Cabaret Voltaire. "I can see how this album might have annoyed people but for me it was really nice grooves with improvisation and would open out and become more minimal", Kirk later told The Quietus.[113] Along with On the Corner, it was also a major influence on the Beastie Boys' 1994 album Ill Communication.[114]

In 1998, composer and bandleader David Sanford completed his dissertation on Agharta as a doctoral student in composition at Princeton University. In it, he argued that the album demonstrated how jazz has utilized a variety of external influences "to evolve or modernize itself". In an interview several years later, Sanford said it was an important work that had gone to the "fringes of jazz" and a place most other music has not explored since.[115] Visual artist Arthur Jafa, among the generation of fans originally attracted to Agharta, later drew on the album as a predominant influence behind his digitally animated film AGHDRA (2021), an abstract meditation on trauma in the African-American experience expressed through visuals of an eruptive sea and a soundtrack recalling Davis' experimental sounds and arrangements.[116][nb 3]

Information is taken from the liner notes for each edition.[117]

Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.[121]

• 1970s in jazz
• Black Beauty: Miles Davis at Fillmore West
• Miles Ahead (film)

• Batey, Angus (February 6, 2015). "Miles Davis Live In 1975: Agharta Versus Pangaea". The Quietus. A comparative essay on Agharta and Pangaea.
• Christgau, Robert (October 14, 1997). "Miles Davis's '70s: The Excitement! The Terror!". The Village Voice. A critical essay on the recorded works of Miles Davis' "electric" period.
• Nakayama, Yasuki (2011). マイルス・デイヴィス『アガルタ』『パンゲア』の真実 [Miles Davis: The Truth of Agharta and Pangaea] (in Japanese). Tokyo, Japan: Kawade Shobo Shinsha. ISBN 978-4309272412. A biographical profile of Miles Davis and examination of Agharta and Pangaea.

• Official website
• Agharta at Acclaimed Music (list of rankings and ratings)
• Agharta at AllMusic
• Agharta at Discogs (list of releases)