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Page and Miles Davis


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Just listening to the Jack Johnson Tribute album which is the first Miles album to feature guitar I'm pretty sure, and it's McLaughlin, who in fact taught Page some more advanced jazz phrasings/chords/licks while Page showed him some more bluesy stuff apparently (both have done interviews talking about it. their relationship goes way way back and the two Jims and McLaughlin were the 3 main session guitarists in that mid-60s period. I ran into Branford Marsalis once in the elevator of RCA studios in NYC when we were both recording and I was arguing with my bass player who was a Sly fanatic who was the better live band - Zep or Sly and the Family Stone, and into the elevator walks Branford, so I asked him who he thought was the greatest live band ever and without missing a beat he said Zep. There was a moment in the early 70s, i think epitomized by the live versions of TSRTS, D&C and No Quarter where the band were operating at such a high level of musicality, the grooves were so intense and the connection between the musicians so tight and Page's soloing so otherworldly that if Miles had walked on the stage in those moments he woulda fit right in with the band, but perhaps not with Page so much as his energy was so much more explosive and in overdrive than Miles' had at this point. That was the closest rock ever came to jazz without being jazz -- or rather it was a more elemental jazz, the jazz of the Master Musicians of Joujouka, of improvisation that might sound constrained to a limited number of notes but when you listen more closely you realize is actually fractal and far deeper than the mind can ordinarily comprehend. In fact, I think those grooves were too funky and too powerful for Miles' music. Just like Miles couldn't have really fit into James Brown, etc. He needed a wider open tapestry that he could float above, and Zep was like a musical freight train...

Edited by Mark LeVine
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