Get Up with It

Miles Davis

Issued just before Miles Davis entered the dark years of his retirement in 1975, Get Up with It includes tracks recorded between 1970 and 1975, and offers a roster of stars from throughout that period: Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, Dave Liebman, Steve Grossman, Sonny Fortune, Pete Cosey, Billy Cobham, and Al Foster. Though something of a mixed bag, the disc does contain two of Davis's most important compositions. "He Loved Him Madly," dedicated to Duke Ellington, is a slow, almost novelistically developed meditation on Ellington's life and work, more than 30 minutes of music. "Rated X" is a buzzing, rattling essay on studio minimalism, and one that prophetically links world music and hip-hop, even before there was a name for such repetitive, incremental musics. Among the other tracks here, "Calypso Frelimo" offers some splendid Davis trumpet, a corrective for those who thought he had lost it by that time. Now digitally remastered, with a brighter sound, Get Up with It seems something of a summing up of Davis's great electrical period of 1970-1975. But it also hints at things to come when he made his comeback in the 1980s. --John F. Szwed

Get Up with It Album: