Pangaea (album)

Pangaea
Live album by Miles Davis
Released	1976
Recorded	February 1, 1975
Venue	Festival Hall in Osaka
Genre	Jazz fusion[1] jazz-funk[2]
Length	88:38
Label	CBS/Sony
Producer	Teo Macero
Miles Davis chronology
Live at the Plugged Nickel (1976) Pangaea (1976) Water Babies (1976)
Miles Davis live chronology
Agharta (1975) Pangaea (1975) We Want Miles (1981)

Pangaea is a live album by American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Miles Davis. It was originally released as a double album in 1976 by CBS/Sony in Japan.

Recorded during Davis' electric period, the album captures the second of two concerts he performed on February 1, 1975, at Osaka's Festival Hall. As with the first concert (captured on the 1975 album Agharta), Davis led a band featuring guitarists Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, saxophonist Sonny Fortune, bassist Michael Henderson, drummer Al Foster, and percussionist James Mtume.

Both Pangaea and its predecessor Agharta were recorded on February 1, 1975, in Osaka, Japan, at the Festival Hall. The Agharta concert took place during an afternoon matinee, whereas Pangaea was recorded in the evening.^[3] This album's music was split into two tracks, "Zimbabwe" and "Gondwana", the latter of which was the name of the ancient supercontinent, as was "Pangaea".^[4]

As with most of Davis's live performances from this era, the band used a number of riffs or fragments as the basis for long semi-improvised suites rather than performing individual songs. The musicians were mostly a generation younger than Davis, and the overall sound was inspired by rock and funk as much as jazz. According to discographer Peter Losin, the first track contains performances of "Turnaroundphrase", "Tune in 5", "Turnaroundphrase" again, "Tune in 5" again and "Zimbabwe" (not to be confused with the actual medley recording's title). The second track contains performances of "Ife", and "For Dave (Mr. Foster)", performed in that order.

The album was first released exclusively in Japan by CBS Sony in 1976.^[5] It did not see release anywhere else until 1990, when in May that year, Columbia Records released Pangaea on CD in the United States, as part of the label's Columbia Jazz Contemporary Masters reissue program.^[5][6]

Retrospective professional reviews

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[2]
Christgau's Consumer Guide	[7]
Down Beat	[8]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[9]
The Great Rock Discography	6/10[10]
Los Angeles Times	[11]
MusicHound Jazz	5/5[12]
The Penguin Guide to Jazz	[4]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[13]
Tom Hull – on the Web	B+[14]

In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau gave Pangaea's CD reissue an honorable mention, citing "Zimbabwe" as the highlight while lamenting the flute playing and scant track listing.^[15] Davis biographer Jack Chambers found the performance "vastly" inferior to Agharta,^[5] as did Paul Tingen, who lamented Davis' reduced presence and role directing his band. Tingen also observed "a sense of tiredness and drift", which he attributed to the septet having played the first concert earlier that day: "There are several extended periods during which the band just plays out the grooves, waiting for Miles to give the next cue."^[16] In the Los Angeles Times, Bill Kohlhaase called Pangaea "a striking personal soundtrack of decline that, like Miles himself, suffers from exhaustion before playing itself out".^[11]

AllMusic's Thom Jurek was more enthusiastic. Although he found the band less impressive here than on Agharta, Jurek said some individual members stood out more on Pangaea, which he found just "as relentless" and "plenty satisfying".^[2] J. D. Considine rated it half-a-star higher than Agharta in The Rolling Stone Album Guide.^[13] In The Penguin Guide to Jazz, Richard Cook and Brian Morton wrote that like its predecessor, Pangaea's lengthy performances combined musical forms from African-American genres with Karlheinz Stockhausen's "conception of a 'world music' that moves like creeping tectonic plates".^[4] Furthermore, Cook and Morton write that 'Miles's trumpet playing on these bruising, unconscionable records is of the highest and most adventurous order...'^[17] In May of 1991, Pangaea was voted the ninth best reissue of the year in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics published in The Village Voice.^[18]

As with several other of Davis' live albums from the period, Pangaea became an influence on several no wave and funk artists.^[19] Highbrow new wave and punk rock musicians, including Tom Verlaine of Television and Robert Quine, were also influenced by the album after managing to obtain copies as an import from Japan.^[20]

• "Gondwana" runs a length of 49:46 on the album's 1996 Japanese reissue.

• Miles Davis – electric trumpet with wah-wah, organ
• Sonny Fortune – soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, flute
• Pete Cosey – electric guitar, synthesizer, percussion
• Reggie Lucas – electric guitar
• Michael Henderson – electric bass
• Al Foster – drums
• James "Mtume" Foreman – conga, percussion, water drum, rhythm box

• Producer – Teo Macero
• Director – Keiichi Nakamura
• Engineer – Tamoo Suzuki
• Assistant Engineer – Mitsuru Kasai, Takaaki Amano
• Package Coordination – Tony Tiller
• Artwork – Teruhisa Tajima [ja]

Footnotes

Bibliography

• Chambers, Jack (1998). Milestones: The Life and Times of Miles Davis. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306808498.
• Tingen, Paul (2001). Miles Beyond, The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967–1991. Billboard Books. ISBN 0-8230-8346-2.
• Nakayama, Yasuki (2011). マイルス・デイヴィス『アガルタ』『パンゲア』の真実 [Miles Davis: The truth of Agharta and Pangaea] (in Japanese). Tokyo, Japan: Kawade Shobo Shinsha. ISBN 978-4309272412.

• Pangaea at Discogs (list of releases)