Influential Blues + Jazz Guitarist Pete Cosey Dead at 68
Pete Cosey, who played guitar on some of the most controversial albums ever made by Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, has died at age 68 of unknown causes.
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 Pharoahs 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.
According to the Chicago Reader, the news of Cosey’s passing was posted on Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid’s private Facebook page. Cosey was a session musician at blues label Chess Records during the late ’60s, before helping Miles Davis explore jazz-rock fusion in the early ’70s with his pioneering work on landmark albums such as ‘Agharta’ and ‘Get Up With It.’
While at Chess, Cosey contributed to Waters’ controversial late ’60s psychedelic blues albums ‘Electric Mud’ and ‘After the Rain,’ as well as Wolf’s similarly targeted ‘The Howlin’ Wolf Album.’ In an attempt to cross over to a modern rock audience, the albums featured heavy Jimi Hendrix-style production. As AllMusic humorously describes it, some critics considered the effect “as ill-advised as putting Dustin Hoffman into a Star Wars epic.” Regardless, Cosey’s innovative and creative playing was singled out from any blame. The albums also won more than their fair share of love from fans and peers, including Hendrix and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, who reportedly stated that ‘Electric Mud’ influenced the creation of his band’s song ‘Black Dog.’ That album has also been cited as an early influence on the rhythms of hip-hop music.
In later years, Cosey participated in a wide variety of projects, including work with Reid and Public Enemy frontman Chuck D. He appeared briefly in Martin Scorsese’s 2004 documentary ‘The Blues,’ appropriately enough reuniting with the ‘Electric Mud’ band to record a new song.