22. “Black Satin,” Miles Davis, from On the Corner (1972)

​When he entered the studio in June of 1972, Miles Davis ostensibly wanted to make an album that celebrated Sly Stone and James Brown—and spoke directly to young Black audiences. “It was with On the Corner and Big Fun that I really made an effort to get my music over to young Black people,” he explains in his 1989 autobiography. “They are the ones who buy records and come to concerts, and I had started thinking about building a new audience for the future.”
 
Yet Davis was chasing other seemingly incompatible influences during the summer of 1972, including the harmolodic theories of Ornette Coleman, the baroque counterpoint of J.S. Bach, and the electronic music and tape manipulation of Karlheinz Stockhausen. His close listening to Stockhausen was largely spurred by his then-houseguest Paul Buckmaster, a British composer who played electric cello—an instrument not often associated with funk.
 
How did Davis marry these far-flung ideas in a session that also included three drummers, three keyboard players, tabla, and electric sitar? The key was producer Teo Macero’s aggressive tape editing and mixing: Perhaps like no album before it, On the Corner was assembled through cutting and splicing, overdubbing, and fader-pushing that occasionally drops nearly all of the instruments out of the mix to briefly highlight drums, hand-claps, or a lone trumpet, blown atonally through a wah-wah pedal.
 
“Black Satin” is not so much a song as it is a collage of rhythmic fragments; it begins and ends with the same copied-and-spliced piece of tape, a disjunct mash-up of looped tabla and high-pitched electronic whistling. This approach reflected lessons Davis had drawn directly from Stockhausen’s work: “I could see that I didn’t want to ever play again from eight bars to eight bars, because I never end songs: They just keep going on,” Davis explains. “Through Stockhausen I understood music as a process of elimination and addition.”
 
The result was, at the time of its release, Davis’s worst-selling album ever, and it completely baffled the critics. “Take some chunka-chunka-chunka rhythm,” as Downbeat magazine describes it, “lots of little background percussion diddle-around sounds, some electronic mutations, add simple tune lines that sound a great deal alike and play some spacey solos…stick with it interminably to create your ‘magic.’ But is it magic or just repetitious boredom?”
 
Even the musicians who participated had regrets. “It was my least favorite Miles album," says Paul Buckmaster—who felt largely ignored by Miles and the rest of the musicians during the recording process, despite having written the arrangements for the session. Saxophonist Dave Liebman was equally unimpressed: “I didn’t think much of it,” he recalls. “The music appeared to be pretty chaotic and disorganized.”
 
The structures that Davis introduced on this album and explored over the next three years—long, repetitive vamps; competing melodic vignettes that appear, disappear, and re-emerge with minimal development—bore little resemblance to either the jazz he had played before or the Top 40 radio sounds of the day. Yet this idea of music as layered motifs, accumulated and pared down over time, would make perfect sense to future generations of dance music producers, hip-hop DJs, and post-punk noisemakers. Despite the incomprehension with which it was originally received, On the Corner would go on to be re-examined, heavily sampled, and treated as a blueprint for groove-oriented dissonance long after Davis’s death in 1991.