Customer Reviews

Sky Garden: Yo Miles [SACD]

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The title of this review pretty much says it all. If you like what Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith were up to on Yo Miles! then you have to like Sky Garden.

But my real reason for writing this review is to let people know that even though amazon.com lists this as a SACD only disc and requires SACD equipment to play, that's not true. It's one of those hybrid discs that has a regular cd layer and a sacd layer. So if you don't have a sacd player, don't worry, you can still play it. I'm listening to it right now on my regular old five year old cd player.

So, don't hesitate, buy it if you like the Miles Davis electric period.

There are two sides to the great Miles Davis music of 1967-1975 (In a Silent Way - Phaedra). The first side is the studio experimentalism, often one-shot bands, often remixed by Teo Macero, very experimental. The second side is the live bands, tight and telepathic and committed to the new structures Miles had created.

Yo Miles!, the first Kaiser/Smith collaboration, felt like the studio Miles... a shifting kaleidoscope of musicians, interesting but not locked into a groove like a more established band. Sky Garden is more like the live Miles, a more coherent-sounding band. Like the live Miles work, the result is ultimately a more rewarding album.

One big improvement here is the ever-interesting drumming of Steve Smith. He's a deep fusion drummer with a taste for older tradition, powerful enough for the heavy and sensitive enough for the sparse. Moreover, he's a heavyweight in his own right, someone who can actually go toe to toe with Al Foster or Jack DeJohnette. For a project like this, it's important to get the style without sounding imitative. Kudos, Steve!

Another nice player choice is Tom Coster on keyboards. His rich electric piano tone has the perfect funky ambience, and his solos are never boring or cliched. Sensitive comping behind all the soloists makes him a real asset to the band.

Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith are their usual marvelous selves, as is Michael Manring on bass. If anything, i think Smith was more himself and less imitative of Miles this time around, and Henry Kaiser showed more restraint and commitment to the groove.

Overall? Still not quite up to the level of Miles Davis. But who the heck is? This time around, it's more like a commentary on Miles than an imitation, and that's a good thing. Well worth your money and time!

Look...it's simple...if you like this period of electric miles you'll dig this cd.

Bass is bottom end thorough. Bang on Miles!

Enjoy it and weep.

The Rolling Stone directed me to this CD. I've always loved electric Miles but found it a little hard to live with. One or two listens and it was time to move on to something a little more accessable for a few weeks.

Sky Garden grabed me and wouldn't let go. The covers are true and new compositions inspired. The Kaiser guitar solos soar.

No, it isn't new Miles. How could it be. It will do until something else comes along.

In a word, this is a rather lame attempt to imitate or pay homage to early 70's electric Miles Davis.

I was pretty excited about hearing it; a double-disc set with long jams on themes composed by Miles, but after listening for quite some time I found myself bored stiff and pretty exasperated.
The musicians are all terrific, the recorded sound is top-shelf, but the major problem here is that the group, as a whole, brings nothing new to bear on the material at hand, and this album sounds very tame in comparison to the great Miles Davis albums of the era this modern group is paying homage to: "Bitches Brew," "In a Silent Way," "At Fillmore," and so on.

Worse yet, some thirty years after the originals were recorded, this band can't even approach the level of telepathy and sheer guts of the Bitches Brew band; Leo Smith's playing has none of the ferocity of Miles' tone, which keeps this music from gaining any true momentum. The 30-minute version of "Great Expectations" rambles on endlessly and is more or less formless. There are no great keyboard battles a la Keith Jarrett/Chick Corea; everyone sticks pretty close to home, and this entire set never even gets 10% as far out as the original Miles albums did, and the band collectively has about as much soul as a McDonald's hamburger.

This stuff was done a hundred times better more than thirty years ago, and with that said, this Kaiser/Smith outing is downright dull and pointless. Though it's not a bad album to put on and hang out with, there are no visceral thrills at all. A serious disappointment.