Call it anything, and mean it
Afton Down, Isle of Wight, 29 August 1970. The festival had swollen past any polite idea of a jazz audience. Estimates still argue between a few hundred thousand and the organisers’ larger boast. Miles Davis did not come to settle the argument. He came with the electric band that had just put Bitches Brew into the world, in March of that year, and he played one continuous set of a little over half an hour. Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett on electric keyboards, Dave Holland on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums, Gary Bartz on saxophone, Airto Moreira on percussion. No announcements a crowd could clap between. The music moved through Directions, Bitches Brew, Spanish Key, and did not stop to be admired.
He had a habit of turning toward the band more than toward the people who had paid. On a festival stage that reads as disdain, and it is partly that, and partly a working method. The interesting sound was happening between the keyboards and the drums, not in a smile to the back of the hill. Rock audiences in 1970 were learning that jazz could be loud without becoming a solo clinic. This set is the lesson, taught quickly, with no chalkboard. The Fender Rhodes occupies the middle of the picture. The trumpet cuts across it in short, bright sentences, then leaves a hole for Jarrett or Corea to misbehave in.
Asked what to call the piece, he declined the dignity of a title. Call it anything. The phrase stuck, which would have annoyed a man who disliked being quoted, and it is the right name. A festival set that will not break into songs is not being difficult for sport. It is refusing the idea that attention comes in singles. The Isle of Wight, full of people who had come for guitars, got thirty-odd minutes of a music that did not care whether they had a favourite track. Some of them found one anyway.
Call it anything.
(Miles Davis, asked for a title, Isle of Wight, 1970)
The tape survived, in the film Miles Electric and on later issues, which is how a hillside in 1970 became a document you can put on in a kitchen. What the kitchen misses is the scale mismatch: a jazz group, even an electric one, is a chamber idea, and this chamber had been dropped into a crowd the size of a town. Davis did not enlarge the gestures to match. He played as if the town would have to lean in. A surprising number of people did.
Jazz on this site is a thin shelf. This night is why the shelf should not stay empty. Not because the Isle of Wight made Miles a rock star. He did not want the job. Because for half an hour a festival built on volume and repertoire had to sit with a music that was volume and no repertoire, or rather a repertoire that refused to announce itself. Call it anything. Then listen long enough to hear that the shrug was a form.
