Released 1976 Venue Festival Hall in Osaka Length 88:38 | Recorded February 1, 1975 Genre Jazz-rock, funk Label Columbia | |
Pangaea is a double album recorded by jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. It was released in 1976 in Japan. Both Pangaea and its predecessor Agharta (1975) were recorded on February 1, in Osaka, Japan, at the Festival Hall. The Agharta concert took place during an afternoon matinee, whereas Pangaea was recorded in the evening.
Contents
Background
The 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". According to music scholar Enrico Merlin, the two tracks contain performances of the segments originally developed by Davis under the titles "Moja", "Willie Nelson on Tune in 5", "Nne", "Zimbabwe", "Ife", and "Wili (= for Dave)", performed in that order.
Like Agharta, Pangaea was originally released in Japan in 1975, after Davis retired from music. The 1975 Japanese-edition LP released by CBS/Sony included a 7-page booklet with photos and Japanese text. It was digitally remastered in 1990 and released for the first time in the United States as part of the Columbia Jazz Contemporary Masters CD series.
Critical reception
In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau gave Pangaea an honorable mention, citing "Zimbabwe" as the highlight while lamenting the flute playing and scant track listing. Davis biographer Jack Chambers found it "vastly" inferior to Agharta, as did Paul Tingen, who lamented Davis' reduced presence and role directing his septet. He also observed "a sense of tiredness and drift" from having played the first concert that day: "There are several extended periods during which the band just plays out the grooves, waiting for Miles to give the next cue." 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".
AllMusic's Thom Jurek was more enthusiastic. Although he found the band less impressive than on Agharta, Jurek said some individual members stood out more on Pangaea, which he found just "as relentless" and "plenty satisfying". J. D. Considine rated it half-a-star higher than Agharta in The Rolling Stone Album Guide. 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". At the end 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.
As with several other of Davis' live albums from the period, Pangaea became an influence on several no wave, funk, and highbrow new wave and punk rock musicians, including Tom Verlaine of Television and Robert Quine.
Track listing
- "Zimbabwe" – 41:48
- "Gondwana" – 46:50 (49:46 on 2000 Japanese remaster)