So finally it has come to this: a critical study celebrating Miles Davis' almost perpetually controversial electric period. Let's face it: 'Miles Beyond' had to be written in whatever form. Greg Tate's 1983 essay 'Electric Miles' may have started the critical re-evaluation of the great trumpet player's most radical period; it took the 90s to come to terms with it musically and start implementing its ideas on a wider scale. Up till the 90s these, almost forgotten, maps of new worlds were studied by a select few. It was at the edges of Lester Bangs' writing that one could find mentions of titles like 'Rated X' or 'On the Corner', but if you went looking for the albums they were hard to get, since most of them weren't even considered for CD-reissue.

Even so, I finally got into Miles Davis (and ironically into jazz) when, in 1991, on a high from Loop-style minimal rock and the onslaught of rave, I bought the vinyl version of 'On the Corner'. What I heard was mind-blowing: an intricate forest of rhythm, bass, synths, a few jazz instruments, and a lot of studio-trickery. It remains, with 'Bitches Brew' (which followed soon), one of my favourite albums of all time. It never bores, you find something new every time you hear it. Steadily collecting these worlds of sound magic, I also started to learn a bit of the story behind the albums, the way the shift Miles made in 1969 with 'In a Silent Way', infecting jazz with funk and rock elements, was deemed not right by the jazz establishment. One has a hard time connecting the bitter words of fundamentalist critics like Stanley Crouch with the wonders this music presents. Often I get the image of Miles Davis suddenly growing wings, joyfully starting to fly, saying something like: "Hey look at me, I can fly, motherfuckers!", whilst little men like Crouch and his crony Wynton Marsalis shout in frustration at being stuck on earth: "No, you can't do that! It's against the law. "