by the time the band hit the studio again, the group was so tight that it got all the tunes right on the first take. On this recording, Miles Smiles, the group had only a brief rehearsal of each tune, just enough to nail down the melody and settle in to a tempo before heading off into orbit with it, with the very first pass around the globe committed to record. Miles Smiles included Wayne’s “Orbits” and “Footprints,” the tune that earned him a legacy as a composer. “Footprints” originated with a practical need: “I wrote ‘Footprints’ when Miles asked me for something to play at gigs,” Wayne said. It was a 12- bar minor blues in 6/4 time, played over a repeating five- note bass figure. The tune sounded like Miles, with a restrained range of melody, soothing as a gentle wave in its gradual ascent and relaxed descent. “Footprints” had the even temper and calm pace of the music on Miles’s popular Kind of Blue. Wayne had recorded the tune eight months before on his own Adam’s Apple, but this version with Miles was more memorable. As soon as the horns made a sustained impression of the melody, Tony’s drumming washed it away, creating a comfortably melancholic mood that had to be felt before it could be understood. (...) The irony was that for all of the haunting beauty of “Footprints,” the song offered only a trace of Wayne’s talent as a composer. Wayne could easily jot down several such melodies on a cocktail napkin between sets. On Miles Smiles it was actually another tune, “Dolores,” named for Wayne’s cousin, which was a step in a new direction. “You can hear the roots of Miles’s stuff to come on ‘Dolores,’ ” Wayne said. It was a departure from the old head arrangement concept, not just the same old tidy theme, solos, and restatement of the theme. “Dolores” was a looser sketch for improvisation, a 38- bar piece in five sections of assorted lengths. The first, third, and fifth sections had melodic lines for the horns; the second and fourth sections were open expanses for drums and bass only. “We were actually tampering with something called DNA in music in a song,” Wayne said. “Each song has its DNA. So you just do the DNA and not the whole song. You do the characteristics. You say, ‘Okay, I will do the ear of the face, I will do the left side of the face. You do the right side of the face.’ Everyone took a certain characteristic of the song and . . . you can do eight measures of it, and then you can make your own harmonic road or avenue within a certain eight measures.” After playing mostly 8- bar phrases throughout the tune, Wayne and Miles tumbled their way out of it at the end, repeating the melody line as if they were in search of its source. Tony inherited the ending, and went out with a big roll. Form had usually dictated the course of their improvisation, but by the end of this tune they were improvising the form itself. These formal experiments on “Dolores” planted the seed for Miles’s openended excursions into electric jazz. “Wayne has always been someone who experimented with form instead of someone who did it without form,” Miles later wrote. “That’s why I thought he was perfect for where I wanted to see the music I played go.”
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 04:03:11 +0000
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