Wikipedia
Agharta is a 1975 live double album by American jazz musician Miles Davis. By the time he recorded the album, Davis was 48 years old and had alienated many in the jazz community while attracting younger rock audiences with his radical electric fusion music. After experimenting with different line-ups, he established a stable live band in 1973 and toured constantly for the next two years, despite physical pain from worsening health issues and emotional instability brought on by substance abuse. During a three-week tour of Japan in 1975, Davis performed two concerts at the Festival Hall in Osaka on February 1; the afternoon show produced Agharta and the evening show was released as Pangaea the following year.
Davis led a septet at the concert; saxophonist Sonny Fortune, bassist Michael Henderson, and guitarist Pete Cosey were given space to improvise against a dense backdrop of riffs, electronic effects, cross-beats, and funk grooves from the rhythm section—drummer Al Foster, guitarist Reggie Lucas, and percussionist James Mtume. Davis controlled their rhythmic and musical direction with hand and head gestures, phrases played on his wah-wah processed trumpet, and drones from an accompanying electric organ. The evolving nature of the performance led to the widespread misunderstanding that Aghartas music had no compositional basis.
Agharta was first released in Japan by CBS/Sony in August 1975 just before Davis retired due to increasingly poor health and exhaustion. At the record label's suggestion, it was titled after the legendary subterranean city. Davis enlisted Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo to design its artwork, which depicted the cityscape of an advanced civilization with elements inspired by Eastern subterranean myths and Afrofuturism. An alternate cover was produced for the album's 1976 release in North America by Columbia Records.
A highly divisive record, Agharta further challenged Davis' jazz audience and was widely panned by contemporary critics; reviewers found the music discordant, and complained of Cosey's loud guitar sounds and Davis' sparse trumpet playing. It was reevaluated positively in subsequent years, while a generation of younger musicians was influenced by the band's abrasive music and cathartic playing, particularly Cosey's effects-laden free improvisations. Agharta became viewed as an important jazz-rock record, a dramatically dynamic group performance, and the culmination of Davis' electric period spanning the late 1960s and mid-1970s.
is a manga series written and illustrated by Takaharu Matsumoto, published in Shueisha's Ultra Jump magazine since 1997.