I got up this morning and checked the chord progression for ESP from the CD notes. It involves lots of sidestepping - up and down - and mainly 7 sharp 9 chords and major sevenths. Its a good sequence with a hidden cadential logic to it.

It reminded me that one of the many points where Miles felt outdone by J Hendrix was on the use of 7 sharp 9 chords - see Purple Haze. Miles had been using them in turnarounds since the early fifties. There is an especially strong use in the turnaround to On Green Dolphin Street in the classic Sextet version. I hadn't realised that ESP used this chord as well - in early 1965.

One of the reasons it interests jazzers - besides the obvious blues overtones - is the stacked fourth element - g# d g. The bottom fourth is augmented but in many ways that makes it more interesting. It also has interesting links to the tritone substition. So if you look at those three notes - you can put either an "e" or a "b flat" underneath.

With the bflat the chord becomes a dominant 13th - but it will resolve neatly into the same chords as the e version would.

In ESP the first chord is this E 7 sharp 9 th and the second is a Fmaj7. But that F chord, in that style of jazz, can easily take a 6th and 9th. So that gives another stacked fourth - a d g. In fact the pianist can shift from the E chord to the F chord simply by lifting the g# in his right hand by a semitone.

The effect in ESP is a set of fourth chords floating around - similar to what McCoy Tyner did in the great Coltrane quartet but also with a subtle shift in rationale.

The ESP chords are also very similar to the kind of progression that Jobim was writting - look at the incredible bridge to The Girl From Ipanema. Miles was strongly drawn to bossa nova but felt that the bourgeois atmosphere of the music was not right for his cool image.

Wayne Shorter wrote ESP. Miles selected him as the Coltrane replacement after trying out several other tenor players - none of them anything but good. But Wayne Shorter had got closer to the source. Porter quotes him as follows: When I was at (Coltrane's house) there was a lot of cooking going on...And there were so many musicians there. Maybe like myself Freddie Hubbard would come by and Cedar Walton stayed a little while... and Trane would sit and play those Giant Steps changes all the time - before he even recorded it. You know just over and over like that.

I can remember flying into Philadelphia on my second trip to the USA and looking at the city as the plane landed thinking about all the amazing musical ideas that had come out. It was Coltrane's base - but there's also the contribution to soul made by Gamble and Huff. I am very attached to a Prince triple CD from the mid 1990s where he pays hommage to the Philly sound. Miles of course thought that Prince was the new Duke Ellington.

Strange to see more Easter reflections in the Guardian today - good stuff from Giles Fraser who lectures in Philosophy at Oxford. It made me get out "The Wound of Knowledge" by Rowan Williams - one of the candidates for archbish of C. If he gets the job - hold on to your hats. In fact I started the day by reading the last chapter of a book very much on the same wavelength by Peter Harvey. A couple of sentences gives you the angle of attack:

On the donkey Jesus brings nothing but himself to the city - no strategy of control, no secret messianic trump-card waiting to be played. His kingship is of surrender to the worst that can happen.

I also had a look at Alistair MacIntyre's Marxism and Christianity - the Chapter on Hegel. I impulse bought a commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind last week. I have one from the same series on Heidegger's Being and Time which makes a lot of sense of another very difficult text.

Anyway I had been reading the commentary on Hegel's Dialectic of Master and Slave which is one of the most awesome passages in all philsophy. MacIntyre takes the view that Hegel writes political thought coming out of a theological background - but that the direction is from theology to politics. Me, I am not so sure about that - you can see the passion narrative as putting the theology into politics.

Last night there was another stupendous installment in the BBC2 series on the history of politics and consciousness in the 20th century. Crudely speaking the thesis was that the human development movement of the 60s and 70s was highjacked by smart market reseachers and particularly as Stanford U who developed ways of measuring values across society. This technology was picked up the Reagan and Thatcher entourage to market right wing political ideas. Heady stuff.