Issued just before Miles Davis entered the dark years of his retirement in 1975, Get Up with It includes tracks recorded between 1970 and 1975, and offers a roster of stars from throughout that period: Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, Dave Liebman, Steve Grossman, Sonny Fortune, Pete Cosey, Billy Cobham, and Al Foster. Though something of a mixed bag, the disc does contain two of Davis's most important compositions. "He Loved Him Madly," dedicated to Duke Ellington, is a slow, almost novelistically developed meditation on Ellington's life and work, more than 30 minutes of music. "Rated X" is a buzzing, rattling essay on studio minimalism, and one that prophetically links world music and hip-hop, even before there was a name for such repetitive, incremental musics. Among the other tracks here, "Calypso Frelimo" offers some splendid Davis trumpet, a corrective for those who thought he had lost it by that time. Now digitally remastered, with a brighter sound, Get Up with It seems something of a summing up of Davis's great electrical period of 1970-1975. But it also hints at things to come when he made his comeback in the 1980s. --John F. Szwed