This mix is my best shot at carving out a second LP to augment Miles Davis’ 1970 album, “Jack Johnson.”
That album contains two very different, 25-minute tracks (“Right Off” and ”Yesternow”), each made up of multiple takes, brilliantly spotted and edited by producer Teo Macero.
The complete sessions for that album run to 368 minutes and cover a bunch of different compositions and jams. You can hear them all on "The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions” (5-discs, 2005, still in print, with a fantastic book of liner notes).
Quite a few outtakes from the sessions ended up sprinkled (whole or partial) across a decade of subsequent Davis releases. That might be why there’s hasn’t been an official, concise “Jack Johnson Sessions” collection.
This is my version of that collection, almost exactly equal in length to the original “Jack Johnson” album, and an attempt to meaningfully expand and enrich that album, rather than simply providing a grab-bag of cool stuff.
This material gets more abstract than the chillest moments of “Yesternow,” and extends the fusion-jam-rock attitude of “Right Off” further into blues and funky Herbie Hancock zones – but not too far! I’ve tried to make this a credible, every-minute-counts, jazz-fusion album, avoiding performances you could say are just a riff that is hoping for something great to happen.
I ignored whether or not a recording appeared on a later album somewhere, so several tracks will be familiar to fans of post-1970 Davis releases. I also edited a couple of tracks.
52-minute mp3 mix zipped up here
Side 1:
- The Mask (part 2) (15:46)
- Little High People (tk 7, edit) (4:44)
- Archie Moore (4:45)
Side 2:
- Selim (tk 4B) (2:14)
- Little Church (tk 7) (3:16)
- Konda (16:28)
- Ali (tk 3, edit) (4:38)
Once you get used to these "sides," I recommend putting the original album's "Right Off" before both, and "Yesternow" in between them.
Session and release information on Wikipedia