Pete Cosey passed away.
He was the missing link between guitarists like Sonny Sharrock and Jimi Hendrix on one hand and Muddy Waters, Curtis Mayfield and Elmore James on the other. You can also hear in his work sounds and styles that would later be picked up by people like Sonic Youth and Pink Floyd.
My favorite Cosey work was when he was with the Miles Davis group of the early seventies. This is an acquired taste. Many jazz purists hated that music then and now but I like that time and sound. He also did a lot of "spiritual" jazz and improvisational music with other mostly Chicago based musicians.
He was brought in by Chess records to give a modern updating to classic Muddy Waters/Howling Wolf songs. Although those records sold well, neither Wolf not Muddy was fond of them sonically or artistically. Typically blunt, Wolf said the record "sounded like dogs***".
Cosey had a fond story about Wolf. Wolf told the bearded Cosey , "Why don't you take all those amps and pedals and wah-wah s*** and throw them into the river on your way to get a haircut?"
Pete Cosey died Pete Cosey, a guitarist who played on many blues and R&B records in the 1960s but who became best known for his work in Miles Davis’s electric band of 1973-75, contributing a sound drenched in distortion and punctuated by the wah-wah pedal, died on May 30 in Chicago. He was 68. The cause was complications of surgery, said his daughter Mariama Cosey.
Mr. Cosey was working in Chicago nightclubs in the mid-1960s when he was hired by Chess Records, which was trying to emulate Motown by forming a studio band of its own. As a member of that ensemble, Mr. Cosey played on Fontella Bass’s Top 10 hit “Rescue Me” and on Chess sessions by Etta James, Little Milton and others. He also played on Motown records by the Four Tops and the Marvelettes. Mr. Cosey’s best-known work for Chess was on Muddy Waters’s album “Electric Mud” (1968) and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Howlin’ Wolf Album” (1969).
Both records were released on a Chess subsidiary, Cadet Concept, founded to focus on heavier and more psychedelic sounds. They put two of the greatest blues voices into a harder blues-rock context, including long, vivid solos by Mr. Cosey. Both Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf disliked the results, but the records made their point: over time they were defended and eventually celebrated.
Meanwhile, Mr. Cosey was working widely. He was a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the cooperative Chicago organization devoted to experimental improvisation; he toured with Aretha Franklin and the jazz saxophonists Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt; he played with Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble in 1968, on the album “The Malcolm X Memorial,” a cult classic of soul jazz.
In the spring of 1973, Mr. Cosey joined Miles Davis on tour. At the time, Davis was looking for “a deep African-American grove, with a lot of emphasis on drums and rhythm,” as he put it in his autobiography. Mr. Cosey, he wrote, “gave me that Jimi Hendrix and Muddy Waters sound that I wanted.”
