Description
In May 1972, Miles got together with Paul Buckmaster, an English classical cellist involved in pop music and experimental rock, who introduced him to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s music. The two men immediately thought up scenarios combining funk rhythms with the formal and resonant abstractions of contemporary music. On June 1, amid the utmost confusion, Miles called into the studio a number of musicians using a variety of instruments: a guitarist, a bass player, multiple drummers and percussionists, as well as three keyboards and the “Indian room” sitar and tablas. The structures imagined by Paul Buckmaster were quickly forgotten, and when David Liebman arrived in the studio directly from his doctor’s waiting room, he was thrust in front of the microphone without headphones, even though the sounds of the bass, the keyboards, and the electric guitar could only be heard in the recording booth. The only indication he was given was the pivotal note of E flat, and the chaos created by the strangely discontinuous polyrhythm of the percussions. The album On The Corner was completed by other sessions that Teo Macero put into shape, and it would become a cult album for the avant-garde of ambient and electro-jazz. New, sealed.