Back in '73, a DJ on New York's Top 40 station WABC portentously proclaimed Deodato's version of Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra to be "the music of the future." What he didn't mention was that for four years already, Miles Davis had been making the virulent source music that Deodato had been pasteurizing into hits. Inspired by Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and James Brown, Davis was morphing jazz's swing into a slammin' funkified pulse amped up with electric bass, heavily distorted Rhodes keyboards, even electric trumpet. This new "jazz-rock fusion" caught hell from both sides, but Davis was used to that. His music had more previous incarnations than Shirley MacLaine; every time he'd gotten grief, and every time he'd eventually been vindicated.

Now, more than 25 years after the fact, Davis's controversial initial electric period (1969-1974) has finally come into vogue, in part because the music is a distant but direct precursor to trip-hop, drum 'n' bass, and much cutting-edge jazz, in part because it's taken that long for people's ears to catch up. Recorded live at two weekend shows at the Fillmore East in March of 1970, the previously unissued double-CD set It's About That Time is a potent reminder of just how far ahead of his time Davis was.

After several refined acoustic quintet albums in the mid '60s, he wanted to try something new. Filles de Kilimanjaro and the elegant In a Silent Way (both 1969) featured electric instruments and rock-influenced rhythms. But they were scant warning for the onslaught that was loosed when Davis brought his band to the Fillmore East that weekend in 1970. He'd moved light-years from the minimalism of his late-'50s work. If 1959's Kind of Blue was, as pianist Bill Evans put it, like Japanese zen painting, this music was as sprawling, dense, and vehement as a de Kooning. It had progressed beyond Bitches Brew, which hadn't even come out yet. This was a hectic, distorted roar. Pieces jettisoned the standard head/improv/head structure; arrangements expanded and contracted on Davis's spontaneous musical cues and segued into one another almost non-stop.

Legendary Fillmore promoter Bill Graham often found room for non-rock musicians, and that night Davis and his band were supposed to open for the Steve Miller Band and Neil Young & Crazy Horse. "Steve Miller didn't have shit going for him," Davis recalled in his autobiography, "so I'm pissed I got to open for this non-playing motherfucker just because he had one or two sorry-ass records out. So I would come late and he would have to go on first, and then when we got there, we just smoked the motherfucking place. . . . "

Smoke it they did. This isn't the jazz fusion of meaninglessly complex changes played in freakish meters by performers who don't know the meaning of taste or passion -- this is brain-frying rivers of red-hot musical magma played by freaky dudes with big Afros and dilated pupils. Drummer Jack DeJohnette's rollin' and tumblin' style, all dense flourishes and oceanic cymbal wash, is (barely) anchored by bassist Dave Holland's driving, repetitive lines. Keyboardist Chick Corea funnels his instrument through a ring modulator, the effect that old science-fiction movies used to use to make robot voices. In his last performances with the band, Wayne Shorter connects this new music with its antecedents via blistering Coltranesque runs that look forward and back at the same time. And the usually cool Davis plays each note as if it were a revolutionary screed.

The turbulent sound may well have sprung from Davis's roiling personal life or the violent, fractious times -- Martin Luther King was gone, righteousness had given way to rage, and black militancy was reaching a peak. Davis's music announced that the '60s were over and a new era had begun -- dark, defiant, indulgent, electronic.

"Directions" opens the Friday show with thrashy abandon. Davis's spectral trumpet bobs and weaves amid the polyrhythmic riot; Airto Moreira's whimpering quica drum provides comic relief. Toward the end of the set, Corea has a scrabbling keyboard breakdown punctuated by Holland's own conniptions; when the band then drop down for Davis's plaintive trumpet stabs, the spaces in the music are deafening.

The second night, "Directions" hits a frantic peak and evolves into "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" -- which gets reworked into a lowdown blues that gradates into a more elegant version of the hectic vamping elsewhere in the set. There's also a muscular if foreshortened "Spanish Key" and a contemplative "Bitches Brew." About the only thing the set-closing "It's About That Time" has in common with the original from In a Silent Way is the title.

This music sounds exotic now; back then, the audience must have been nonplussed. Still, at the end of the second show, a guy in the audience hollers, "Encore!" That man knew the future of music when he heard it.

Issue Date: September 7 - 13, 2001