Miles Davis - "He Loved Him Madly" (1974)

Music to get utterly, profoundly lost and found inside of. Meditative, enveloping, haunting, blissful. Like much of the music of the “Electric Miles” period (late-‘60s/mid-‘70s), what is heard here eludes tidy categorization, but a descriptive estimation of “He Loved Him Madly” might be “psychedelic ambient jazz fusion,” or a long walk down a hypnagogic corridor. Clocking in at 32 minutes, the piece is paradoxically massive yet lighter than air. The title of this work riffs on a favorite saying of Duke Ellington in paying tribute to this legendary man who had passed away two months prior; it is a hybrid composition assembled from snippets of a day spent jamming in the studio and was released as an entire side of the double LP Get Up With It in autumn 1974.