John Fordham
Panthalassa was the name given to the ocean surrounding the primordial, unbroken continent. If Bill Laswell, the gifted producer and sometime free- jazz bass player, hears Miles Davis’s 1970s music as an “ocean of sound”, he’s gone to considerable lengths to reinforce the point on the remarkable Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969-74 (Sony), remixing and re- sampling several of the trumpeter’s key performances to make one fluid and continuous suite.
The source material comes from the albums In a Silent Way, On the Corner and Get up with It, when Davis was moving away from modal jazz toward a kind of impressionistic, electronic free-funk inspired as much by pop funkateer Sly Stone as the avant-garde European composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.
A little of the music is significantly altered, with a few riffs sampled from elsewhere in his voluminous studio experiments. But for the most part Laswell has altered dynamics, restored discarded edits and made a piece of music of gripping coherence. For Laswell to extend the trumpeter’s use of the studio as part of his creative palette seems not only legitimate but sheds a light on his subject’s lengthy musings with avant-rock.
Guitarist John McLaughlin is heard a lot more in the early stages here, sounding as lean and bluesy as he did just before he left Davis’s service.
The guitar-like trumpet wails (manipulated by a wah-wah pedal) of the mid-1970s often sound as apposite and complementary to the surroundings as anything he did with the unplugged version. Rated X is a tabla, drums and organ groove that shuffles on ecstatically like a drum’n’bass track a quarter-century too early.
A tautness and purpose has been brought to hours of exploratory studio time from a period when Davis was throwing himself, his partners and his preconceptions up in the air to see how they would fall, and, set against the trip-hop and re-sampling jazz of the 1990s, it sounds startlingly contemporary.