GET UP WITH IT

Whereas Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters material found him creating a mixup of funk and fusion by applying fusion chops to funk material, Miles Davis on Get Up With It sucks funk deep inside the black hole his fusion sound had become by this point and takes it to pieces, just as he'd been taking various rock traditions to pieces in his fusion releases in the previous years. His last studio album before he took an extended sabbatical, here Davis has moved so deep into the highly experimental territory he launched himself into from In a Silent Way onwards that you can't even see the mainstream any more.

Murky and inaccessible, it certainly isn't the best place to start with Miles' fusion material, particularly considering that - whisper it - there's more than a little padding going on here, the overlong ambient-free jazz intro to He Loved Him Madly being far from the only culprit (though that composition is an absolute space fusion joy once it gets going). By this point in his fusion experiments, Davis was actually getting the best results out of his live material - and even then, that particular well was beginning to run dry at this point. The ensuing creative holiday to recharge his batteries was, in retrospect, rather well-timed.