What do you get when you cross a jazz icon’s re-emerging taste for hard drugs with a desire for his music to reach the ghetto, add an entirely skewed sense of fusion, then flood the above mixture with a buttery batter of Sly & the Family Stone cut with Funkadelic? You get On the Corner, Miles Davis’ earthiest and perhaps most indelicate concoction, a heady bisque that was possibly more a product of the times & the extra players (perchance) than ol’ Miles himself. For real, this shit is far out but entirely danceable... well, maybe not actually danceable, but you know what I mean: relative to Miles’ other jams. Having assembled a veritable legion of players behind him (no less than 12 people on this cut, or as Miles put it, “…I got everybody in the band but the devil on tambourine…”), the music develops accordingly, sinking into a cavernous groove from the very first measure onwards; quite frankly, there is scarcely a vestige of proper “jazz” to be found herein, but pure funk this is surely not either, its closest relative (which may have served as an influence here) was probably Funkadelic’s track “Wars of Armageddon”. The torrent of polyrhythmic vibrations swirl around the listener from all angles (two drummers, congas, djembes, tablas), that rubbery bassline showing you the way forward, and all the while Miles squeaks away in the background, seemingly disparate pieces to a puzzle which coalesce into a funky union---in my humble opinion, it’s those trusty sleigh bells that hold everything together!
