History lessons Miles and Wynton do Jack Johnson BY JON GARELICK

To judge by the way Columbia Records is marketing the reissue of A Tribute to Jack Johnson, you’d think it was the best rock record ever made. Producer Bob Belden is quoted as saying, "This is the album that will get Miles Davis into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame." And liner-note writer Bill Milkowski refers to the album’s guitar work by John McLaughlin as "proto-punk." What else? If Miles — or for that matter Duke Ellington — didn’t have "punk attitude," would he be worth listening to today? Hey, you gotta make this stuff relevant somehow, and what better way is there to sell a record that features loud guitar?

But my question isn’t whether A Tribute to Jack Johnson, originally released in February 1971 as a soundtrack to a documentary on the black heavyweight champion, is great rock but whether it’s great music. In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew were swell, all right, Milkowski’s argument goes, but Jack Johnson "was coming from an entirely different place." The playing of McLaughlin, drummer Billy Cobham, and Miles himself amounts to "a clarion call that bridges the great divide between the jazz and rock worlds" and "crosses that bridge with brazen authority."

Personally, I prefer the sustained lyricism of In a Silent Way and the sonic density and rhythmic variety of Bitches Brew and any number of Miles discs from the early ’70s, like Live Evil and Get Up with It — some of which is available on last year’s five-CD The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions. That said, A Tribute to Jack Johnson does have McLaughlin, and it’s his continual, uh, sparring with Miles that gives the recording its value.

Whether McLaughlin’s playing is "proto-punk" is another question. It seems to me his balls-out extravagance here has as much to do with fellow blues-loving Brit guitar players of the time like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, or for that matter Jimi Hendrix, as with later minimalist punk guitarists like Robert Quine or the Clash’s Mick Jones (whose two-note guitar solo on "Tommy Gun" is probably definitive).

In other McLaughlin/Miles collaborations, the guitar is more laid back in the mix. On Jack Johnson, it’s hot, buzzing, and up front right from the get-go. As on the original vinyl release, the reissue of Jack Johnson is divided into two long pieces, the 26:54 "Right Off" and the 25:36 "Yesternow." If there’s a "clarion call" on the CD, it’s McLaughlin’s entrance on the "side one" "Right Off" over Cobham’s rock shuffle with a big power-chord cadence; that’s followed by some single-note bluesy phrases and more big dirty chords. There’s a decrease in volume, McLaughlin drops out entirely, leaving Cobham and bassist Michael Henderson, then McLaughlin re-enters with spare chords, and at 2:20 Miles steps on stage with a hard-blown mid-range half-sour bent note followed by some staccato repeated notes, longer phrases, a high held note, and runs up and down the register. All the while, Miles is at the center of the mix while McLaughlin chords at full volume at hard left. It’s all Miles and McLaughlin for the next five minutes or so, Miles mixing up those staccato bursts with breathless long-lined runs and arching phrases and, at the nine-minute mark, positively fierce trills. You could call what McLaughlin’s doing "comping" (laying down chords as a harmonic framework), but it’s more like call-and response between him and Miles, especially at the five-minute mark, when their interplay becomes downright ecstatic, Miles blasting a single note repeatedly while McLaughlin lays back on the beat with more widely spaced wah-wah distorted chords, each chord like a big smile.

There are other highlights in "Right Off" — then-19-year-old saxophonist Steve Grossman’s fine soprano work, Herbie Hancock’s appropriately cheesy Farfisa organ sequences. Producer Teo Macero signals dynamic shifts in the piece with edits of echoey ambient overlays or repetitions of McLaughlin’s big power-chord cadence. At the 18-minute mark, McLaughlin begins a series of variations on a blues riff. As he plays his own game of cat-and-mouse with the riff — dropping, adding, and altering notes, giving a gloriously sloppy skid to some of the phrasing — it’s easy to believe the instructions it’s said that Miles gave him: "Play guitar like you don’t know how to play." In other words: let your mind alone.

"Yesternow" meanders a bit more than "Right Off." Miles gives Henderson a halting, asymmetrical bass figure to set the low-key introduction. There’s more great interplay between Miles and McLaughlin, even a bit of Sonny Sharrock as a second guitarist, but ultimately it’s more of a mishmash of Macero overlays (including passages cribbed from In a Silent Way). There’s better slow-tempo Miles in just about any of his different eras. But with what Miles and McLaughlin achieved on "Right Off," it doesn’t matter that A Tribute to Jack Johnson isn’t the Miles electric album — for punks or anyone else.

THE 90-MINUTE DOCUMENTARY by director William Cayton for which Miles Davis recorded A Tribute to Jack Johnson is now hard to find, but the re-release of the music coincides with the broadcast of Ken Burns’s new four-hour epic, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. (Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s review is on page 27 of the Arts & Entertainment section.) The latter comes with its own original soundtrack by another trumpeter/composer/bandleader, Wynton Marsalis.

If a Jack Johnson project — with Miles’s favorite sport as a topic and the politics of black self-determination a major subtext — was an incentive for Miles to leap head-first into the unknown, Unforgivable Blackness is an opportunity for Wynton once again to visit the past. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily. As you might guess, the playing is idiomatically perfect. It would be hard to distinguish Marsalis originals like the parade-ground "High Society" or the dancehall "Jack Johnson Two-Step" from the many ancient jazz and American pop and blues numbers here if you didn’t have a credit sheet. On the latter, Marsalis, using a plunger mute, deploys his wah-wah as effectively as McLaughlin. And the hallmarks of timbral beauty and ensemble cohesion are everywhere. Listen to Victor Goines’s deep, soulful bass clarinet on Marsalis’s "But Deep Down," or Goines’s bass clarinet with Wycliffe Gordon’s breathy trombone on the lovely "Trouble My Soul," Herlin Riley’s idiomatic choked cymbal crashes on Jelly Roll Morton’s "New Orleans Bump" and "Deep Creek," Eric Lewis’s Ellingtonian piano on the latter, or any of Doug Wamble’s acoustic-guitar playing.

"New Orleans Bump" is an example of the Marsalis group’s discipline — they play together, every rhythmic fillip, every shift in dynamics, the overall warm timbral and harmonic blend. With perfectly delineated syncopations and riffing melody, "New Orleans Bump" is the album’s hit single. Which says as much about Morton as it does about Wynton. There are "modern" touches in the harmonies of Wes Anderson’s alto solo on that one, and Marsalis’s "Fire in the Night" fits in with his standard post-bop style. The one piece that sounds completely modern is Marsalis’s "Rattlesnake Tail Swing," arranged here for six clarinets and piano. With its exquisite ambiguous voicings, it alludes to the past without re-creating it and doesn’t refer specifically to anything except itself.