October is Miles Month here on Edge of the Line. We’re celebrating 75 years since the recording of Miles Davis’ The New Sounds (October 1951). 2026 also marks 100 years since Davis’ birth (May 26, 1926).

Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography that in 1968, he was listening to James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and Sly and the Family Stone, who had just released their breakout hit, ‘Dance to the Music’.

Miles wrote of Sly:

“The shit he was doing was badder than a motherfucker, had all kinds of funky shit up in it.”

Later, Miles was so enamored with Sly’s ‘In Time’ that he played it for his band on repeat.

On the Corner

In 1971, a couple of years before ‘In Time’, Miles was thinking he’d get away from white rock and into funkier vibes. In 1972, Miles went in the studio to record On the Corner, arguably one of his most baffling records.

Miles was inspired by the popular street wear, black women wearing “real tight dresses” showing off their “big butts”, Brown, Sly, the Last Poets, and imagining people coming into a concert showing off all their outfits.

But he’d also got into “the musical theories of Karlheinz Stockhausen”, which goes someway to explain why On the Corner was never a hit with the kids like he thought it might be.

Stockhausen’s avant-garde compositions weren’t going to make people shake their butts like Brown’s ‘Get on the Good Foot’ did the same year. Neither were the compositions of Paul Buckmaster, another inspiration who stayed with Miles during the time of recording (Buckmaster played electric cello with wah-wah pedal).

Miles was also inspired by Bach, courtesy of Buckmaster, and Ornette Coleman having said things could be “played three or four ways, independently of each other”. Miles wrote, “Bach also composed that way”.

Miles didn’t see the record as funk, exactly. People called it funk because they didn’t know what else to call it, he wrote. But Bach-inspired music “could be real funky and down.”

Young audience

Miles said that On the Corner and the following record, Big Fun (also recorded in 1972, released in 1974), were made in an effort to build an audience of “young black people” – the people “that buy records and come to concerts”. Miles was thinking about building an audience for the future. 

On the Corner made it to #1 on the Top Jazz Albums chart (just as Bitches Brew had done the previous year), but only #156 on the overall US charts.

He put the record’s relative lack of success down to the way Columbia marketed it as “any other jazz album”. The “old-time jazz people” couldn’t get into what he was doing, and young black people didn’t listen to the jazz stations that the record was pushed on.

The following year, Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters “sold like hotcakes in the young black community, everybody at Columbia said.” (Head Hunters hit #13 on the Billboard 200 and #2 on the R&B charts.) Miles was already pissed off at the label, and watching how Herbie’s album sold “just pissed [Miles] off even more.”

But whether the record could have ever caught on like Head Hunters is debatable. The latter had an immensely catchy bassline on ‘Chameleon’ (even if it is repeated through much of that track’s 15 minutes), and the supremely cool, laid-back funk of ‘Watermelon Man’.

There are moments where you can imagine dancing to On the Corner. Check out the hi-hat pattern and whip-like snare on the opening track. (Listen from 2:59 for a nice rhythm-led section from the whole band.)

But Miles picturing it as a hit record will go down as one of the oddities in a career and life not short of them.

Over half a century later, the album is still disorientating. Host of the Free Thinking podcast, Matthew Street put it like this:

“We’re used to hearing [Miles] often in quite domesticated situations, aren’t we? We can hear Kind of Blue sometimes if we’re in a lift or if we’re eating a pizza. We don’t hear On the Corner, do we, in those sort of social contexts?”

The music writer Paul Tingen agreed, “it’s still slightly too strange.”

Top image from Discogs.