It's damn the melody, full riff-digging ahead on loose-limbed tunes that often sound as if they're being constructed from the bottom up, only to be deconstructed and shredded apart on the spot. "What I Say," heard in five incarnations, is driven by Henderson's sticky stair-stepping funk riff and DeJohnette's spacious backbeat. Jarrett's Rhodes fights fiercely and nastily with that groove in the version on Disc 4, which also features sprawling displays by an open-horn Miles, and Bartz on soprano. Miles, throughout, spouts an aural splatter of sounds, using his wah-wah to fuel nasty shrieks and barks, and sometimes, as on the same disc's "Sanctuary" (by Wayne Shorter), simply feeding gorgeous long tones into electronic delays.
These recordings mark an explosion of sound and artistic energy that led to some of jazz fusion's highest peaks and worst excesses, as well as the sometimes-inspired, sometimes-imitative work of jazz-informed jam bands, from Phish to Medeski Martin and Wood to the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey.
