Pete Cosey
Encyclopedia
Pete Cosey is an African-American guitarist most famous for playing with Miles Davis
' band between 1973 and 1975. His fiercely flanged and distorted guitar bore comparisons to Jimi Hendrix
. Cosey has kept a low profile for much of his career (he has released no solo recorded works), though he remains an active player.
Prior to joining the Miles Davis band in 1973, Cosey was a busy session guitarist with Chess Records
, playing on records by Etta James
, Rotary Connection
, Howlin' Wolf
(The Howlin' Wolf Album
) and Muddy Waters
(Electric Mud
).
Cosey was also an early member of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
(AACM). He was an early member of The Pharaohs and a group with drummer Maurice White
and bassist Louis Satterfield that eventually evolved into Earth, Wind & Fire
. Some of his pre-Miles jazz playing is available on albums by Phil Cohran
's Artistic Heritage Ensemble.
After joining Miles, Cosey performed on the albums Get Up with It
, Dark Magus
, Agharta
and Pangaea
. By 1975, Cosey had developed a remarkably advanced guitar approach — involving numerous alternate tunings, guitars restrung in unusual patterns and a post-Hendrix palette of distortion, wah-wah and guitar synth effects — that has influenced many adventurous guitarists, including Henry Kaiser
and Vernon Reid
.
Following the 1975 break-up of the Miles Davis Band, Cosey largely disappeared from public view. He played on the title track of Herbie Hancock
's Future Shock album, but did not appear on record again until Akira Sakata
's album Fisherman's.com (with Sakata, Bill Laswell
and Hamid Drake
) in 2000. Throughout the '80s, he was involved in a number of Chicago- and New York-based groups with various musicians, but no recordings have been released. In 1987, he replaced Bill Frisell
in the trio Power Tools with bassist Melvin Gibbs
and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson
(a live recording is available through RSJ's website).
In 2001, he started a group called The Children of Agharta to explore the electric Miles Davis repertoire. The first line-up was Cosey, Gary Bartz
, John Stubblefield
, Matt Rubano, J. T. Lewis, and DJ Johnny "Juice" Rosado (studio DJ for Public Enemy). The group's booking agency was recently listing the band as a quartet of Cosey, Bartz, Melvin Gibbs and Doni Hagen.
In 2003, Cosey appeared on an episode of American television's The People's Court
, successfully suing a promoter for failing to pay fully for a Children of Agharta gig.
Cosey has also been a featured soloist with the group Burnt Sugar
on their album The Rites.
In 2004, Cosey appeared in the Godfathers and Sons episode of Martin Scorsese
's documentary series The Blues
. The episode followed Marshall Chess and Chuck D
(of Public Enemy) reuniting the musicians from Muddy Waters' Electric Mud album to record a new track.
In July 2006, Cosey was fleetingly glimpsed during the finale of Bill Laswell's PBS Soundstage concert (his performance having been edited out of the broadcast).
In 2003, Cosey scored a short film, directed by Eli Mavros, entitled Alone Together. Cosey and Mavros had met the previous year during production of Mark Levin's episode for the PBS Blues series. After appearing on Eli's college blues radio show, Shake Em On Down, on New York University's radio station, 89.1 FM WNYU, he agreed to score the film. In the spirit of jazz and spontaneity, the soundtrack to the film was improvised by Cosey in real time over several takes, with several different instruments; no two takes were the same. He played guitar (using several distortion pedals, often bowing the strings like a violin), African thumb piano, and a zither
given to him by Miles Davis. The film went on to show at several small film festivals.
From September through October 2007, Pete Cosey briefly appeared playing his guitar (no sound, due to narrative voiceover) in two scenes of a national thirty-second television commercial for AARP
's Senior Advantage Complete Care Healthcare Insurance.
In 2007-08, Cosey contributed to the CD Miles from India, which celebrates the music of Miles Davis. It features many former Miles sidemen and Indian musicians, with Cosey playing on five tracks: "Ife (Fast)", "It's About That Time", "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down", "Great Expectations", and "Ife (Slow)".
Miles Davis
Miles Dewey Davis III was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including bebop, cool jazz,...
' band between 1973 and 1975. His fiercely flanged and distorted guitar bore comparisons to Jimi Hendrix
Jimi Hendrix
James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix was an American guitarist and singer-songwriter...
. Cosey has kept a low profile for much of his career (he has released no solo recorded works), though he remains an active player.
Prior to joining the Miles Davis band in 1973, Cosey was a busy session guitarist with Chess Records
Chess Records
Chess Records was an American record label based in Chicago, Illinois. It specialized in blues, R&B, soul, gospel music, early rock and roll, and occasional jazz releases....
, playing on records by Etta James
Etta James
Etta James is an American blues, soul, rhythm and blues , rock and roll, gospel and jazz singer. In the 1950s and 1960s, she had her biggest success as a blues and R&B singer...
, Rotary Connection
Rotary Connection
Rotary Connection was an American psychedelic soul band, formed in Chicago in 1966. The highly experimental band was the idea of Marshall Chess, son of Chess Records founder Leonard Chess. Marshall was the director behind a start-up label, Cadet Concept Records, and wanted to focus on music outside...
, Howlin' Wolf
Howlin' Wolf
Chester Arthur Burnett , known as Howlin' Wolf, was an influential American blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player....
(The Howlin' Wolf Album
The Howlin' Wolf Album
-Personnel:*Howlin' Wolf – guitar, harmonica, vocals*Gene Barge – horn, electric sax*Pete Cosey – guitar, bowed guitar*Hubert Sumlin – guitar*Roland Faulkner – guitar*Morris Jennings – drums*Don Myrick – flute*Louis Satterfield – bass...
) and Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters
McKinley Morganfield , known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician, generally considered the "father of modern Chicago blues"...
(Electric Mud
Electric Mud
Electric Mud is a studio album by Muddy Waters. Released in 1968, it is a concept album which imagines Muddy Waters as a psychedelic musician...
).
Cosey was also an early member of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is a non-profit organization, founded in Chicago, Illinois, United States, by pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall, and composer Phil Cohran....
(AACM). He was an early member of The Pharaohs and a group with drummer Maurice White
Maurice White
Maurice White is a Grammy Award–winning American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, arranger. He is the older brother of Verdine White and Fred White and the leader and founder of the band Earth, Wind & Fire...
and bassist Louis Satterfield that eventually evolved into Earth, Wind & Fire
Earth, Wind & Fire
Earth, Wind & Fire is an American soul and R&B band formed in Chicago, Illinois, in 1969 by Verdine and Maurice White. Also known as EWF, the band has won six Grammy Awards and four American Music Awards. They have been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Vocal Group Hall of...
. Some of his pre-Miles jazz playing is available on albums by Phil Cohran
Phil Cohran
Kelan Phil Cohran is a jazz musician. He is known most for his trumpet contributions in the Sun Ra Arkestra in Chicago during 1959-1961 and for his involvement in the foundation of the AACM.-Biography:...
's Artistic Heritage Ensemble.
After joining Miles, Cosey performed on the albums Get Up with It
Get Up with It
Get Up with It is an album collecting tracks recorded between 1970 and 1974 by Miles Davis. Released on November 22, 1974 as a double LP, it was Davis' last studio album before five years of retirement from music....
, Dark Magus
Dark Magus
Dark Magus is a live album by jazz artist Miles Davis recorded at Carnegie Hall in New York City on March 30, 1974. The album was released in 1977 in Japan as a double-LP by Columbia Records, and released in 1997 in the United States in a double-CD format...
, Agharta
Agharta (album)
Agharta is an album recorded by jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in 1975. Both Agharta and Pangaea were recorded on the same day in Osaka, Japan...
and Pangaea
Pangaea (album)
Pangaea is a double album recorded by jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in 1975. Both Pangaea and Agharta were recorded on the same day in Osaka, Japan...
. By 1975, Cosey had developed a remarkably advanced guitar approach — involving numerous alternate tunings, guitars restrung in unusual patterns and a post-Hendrix palette of distortion, wah-wah and guitar synth effects — that has influenced many adventurous guitarists, including Henry Kaiser
Henry Kaiser (musician)
Henry Kaiser is an American guitarist and composer.Recording and performing prolifically in many styles of music, Kaiser is a fixture on the San Francisco Bay Area music scene. He is considered a member of the "first generation" of American free improvisers.-Biography:His grandfather was the...
and Vernon Reid
Vernon Reid
Vernon Reid is an English-born American guitarist, songwriter, composer, and bandleader. Best known as the founder and primary songwriter of the heavy metal band Living Colour, Reid was named #66 on Rolling Stone magazine's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.Critic Steve Huey writes, "[Reid's]...
.
Following the 1975 break-up of the Miles Davis Band, Cosey largely disappeared from public view. He played on the title track of Herbie Hancock
Herbie Hancock
Herbert Jeffrey "Herbie" Hancock is an American pianist, bandleader and composer. As part of Miles Davis's "second great quintet," Hancock helped to redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section and was one of the primary architects of the "post-bop" sound...
's Future Shock album, but did not appear on record again until Akira Sakata
Akira Sakata
Akira Sakata is a Japanese free jazz saxophonist.He trained as a marine biologist. He joined the Yamashita Yosuke Trio from 1972 till 1979 and toured internationally with them. In 1986, he performed with Last Exit with Bill Laswell. This performance was released as 1987's Noise of Trouble: Last...
's album Fisherman's.com (with Sakata, Bill Laswell
Bill Laswell
Bill Laswell is an American bassist, producer and record label owner....
and Hamid Drake
Hamid Drake
Hamid Drake is an American jazz drummer and percussionist. He lives in Chicago, IL but spends much of his time traveling around the world for concerts and studio dates....
) in 2000. Throughout the '80s, he was involved in a number of Chicago- and New York-based groups with various musicians, but no recordings have been released. In 1987, he replaced Bill Frisell
Bill Frisell
William Richard "Bill" Frisell is an American guitarist and composer.One of the leading guitarists in jazz since the late 1980s, Frisell's eclectic music touches on progressive folk, classical music, country music, noise and more...
in the trio Power Tools with bassist Melvin Gibbs
Melvin Gibbs
Melvin Gibbs is an American bass guitarist, composer, and producer who has appeared on close to 200 albums in diverse genres of music. Gibbs has been called "the best bassist in the world" by Time Out New York magazine....
and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson
Ronald Shannon Jackson
Ronald Shannon Jackson is an American jazz drummer. He was born in Fort Worth, Texas.Jackson is notable for his unusual approach to his instrument, which draws as much inspiration from military and parade bands as from traditional jazz drumming.He is the only person to have recorded and performed...
(a live recording is available through RSJ's website).
In 2001, he started a group called The Children of Agharta to explore the electric Miles Davis repertoire. The first line-up was Cosey, Gary Bartz
Gary Bartz
Gary Bartz is an American alto and soprano saxophonist and clarinetist.Bartz graduated from the Baltimore City College high school and The Juilliard School...
, John Stubblefield
John Stubblefield
John Stubblefield was an American jazz saxophonist, flautist, and oboist.Stubblefield was an adaptable musician; he was stationed with the World Saxophone Quartet , Reggie Workman , McCoy Tyner , Freddie Hubbard , and George Russell .-As leader:* Prelude with Onaje Allan Gumbs, Cecil McBee, Joe...
, Matt Rubano, J. T. Lewis, and DJ Johnny "Juice" Rosado (studio DJ for Public Enemy). The group's booking agency was recently listing the band as a quartet of Cosey, Bartz, Melvin Gibbs and Doni Hagen.
In 2003, Cosey appeared on an episode of American television's The People's Court
The People's Court
The People's Court is a US television court show in which small claims court cases are heard, though what is shown is actually a binding arbitration....
, successfully suing a promoter for failing to pay fully for a Children of Agharta gig.
Cosey has also been a featured soloist with the group Burnt Sugar
Burnt Sugar
Burnt Sugar, also known as Burnt Sugar, The Arkestra Chamber, is an American improvisational band. The band's music combines the influences of funk, jazz, rock, reggae, soul, hip hop, heavy metal, and 20th century classical music. It has been described by one critic as a...
on their album The Rites.
In 2004, Cosey appeared in the Godfathers and Sons episode of Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
's documentary series The Blues
The Blues (film)
The Blues is a 2003 documentary film series produced by Martin Scorsese, dedicated to the history of blues music. In each of the seven episodes, a different director explores a stage in the development of the blues...
. The episode followed Marshall Chess and Chuck D
Chuck D
Carlton Douglas Ridenhour , better known by his stage name, Chuck D, is an American rapper, author, and producer. He helped create politically and socially conscious rap music in the mid-1980s as the leader of the rap group Public Enemy.- Early life :Ridenhour was born in Queens, New York...
(of Public Enemy) reuniting the musicians from Muddy Waters' Electric Mud album to record a new track.
In July 2006, Cosey was fleetingly glimpsed during the finale of Bill Laswell's PBS Soundstage concert (his performance having been edited out of the broadcast).
In 2003, Cosey scored a short film, directed by Eli Mavros, entitled Alone Together. Cosey and Mavros had met the previous year during production of Mark Levin's episode for the PBS Blues series. After appearing on Eli's college blues radio show, Shake Em On Down, on New York University's radio station, 89.1 FM WNYU, he agreed to score the film. In the spirit of jazz and spontaneity, the soundtrack to the film was improvised by Cosey in real time over several takes, with several different instruments; no two takes were the same. He played guitar (using several distortion pedals, often bowing the strings like a violin), African thumb piano, and a zither
Zither
The zither is a musical string instrument, most commonly found in Slovenia, Austria, Hungary citera, northwestern Croatia, the southern regions of Germany, alpine Europe and East Asian cultures, including China...
given to him by Miles Davis. The film went on to show at several small film festivals.
From September through October 2007, Pete Cosey briefly appeared playing his guitar (no sound, due to narrative voiceover) in two scenes of a national thirty-second television commercial for AARP
AARP
AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, is the United States-based non-governmental organization and interest group, founded in 1958 by Ethel Percy Andrus, PhD, a retired educator from California, and based in Washington, D.C. According to its mission statement, it is "a...
's Senior Advantage Complete Care Healthcare Insurance.
In 2007-08, Cosey contributed to the CD Miles from India, which celebrates the music of Miles Davis. It features many former Miles sidemen and Indian musicians, with Cosey playing on five tracks: "Ife (Fast)", "It's About That Time", "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down", "Great Expectations", and "Ife (Slow)".