Miles Davis – On The Corner

I got mine in late 90s or very early 2000s. It's indeed an abomination. One of the deadest, flattest sounding albums in my 2000+ collection.
It sounds like a 5th generation cassette dub of an mp3. No exaggeration.

When did this especially ugly & cheap looking release version came out? any infos on that!
Even VinylBeat information for the label design version is not fully correct, as it shows the label design, but comment "(12) Red label TEM prefix {1980s}" does not fit the earlier number system! any guesses?

On The Corner was regarded at the time of its release as one of (if not the worst) Miles Davis album ever produced, and its failure pushed Davis into semi-retirement, and he didn't go back to studio albums for the remainder of the 1970s. To describe On The Corner you would need to create an entirely new concept: free funk. Its backbone is certainly funk, but everything on top of it can't be easily pegged into any sort of recognizable jazz structure or rhythm. And it was intentionally designed that way by Miles, who wanted the album to be opaque, to push everything already known about jazz right out the window, and to connect with the Black youth who were moving away from jazz and towards funk and soul music. It was a risk that almost wholly in its entirety didn't work out for Davis, and put him into a bit of a quagmire. On The Corner was a bold statement: Either you do something completely new in jazz or you do what was done before. But you can't keep doing what you're doing now because jazz needs to evolve to stay relevant. Or it needs to be nostalgic. But it can't be status quo. In fact, the biggest reason I enjoy On The Corner is because it's obvious that he's trying to dismantle everything he made jazz to be, if only for it to keep up with the world. And it just didn't work. (At least not for him anyway; many jazz musicians were happy to stick with what was status quo for the rest of the '70s.)

All that praise being given, On The Corner isn't my favourite Miles Davis album, or even in my top 10. Black Satin is the standout track (and some of its vibe is injected into Helen Butte as well) but the rest comes off sounding aimless and unrehearsed. Which again: was kind of the point. On The Corner however didn't really smash barriers; it just stuck a big middle finger up at them. People talk today about it being an influential album on styles of music that would come after. Perhaps. I think it was probably more "influence adjacent" in that when you look back to who did it first, it turns out (as usual) it was Miles Davis. But I don't know if the people who did it second even knew about On The Corner, which lapsed into obscurity relatively quickly.

"On The Corner" was Miles' attempt to reach the young black audience that had eluded him. This also became a very controversial record at the time, but has been defined today as avant-garde with the use of overdubbing, looping and intense dance rhythms.