Conclusion: New York City (’66 – ’68)

“All the albums recorded in New York are interconnected: We’re Only in It for the Money, Lumpy Gravy, Uncle Meat and Ruben and the Jets,” explains Miles and quotes Zappa as having once said “It’s all one album. All the material in the albums is organically related and if I had all the master tapes and I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a different order it still would make one piece of music you can listen to.” [Miles p. 160]

As Miles explains, this was not a one time occurrence: “This way of working was the ‘project/object’ concept: each project is part of a larger object [...] this new part could be a film, a record or even, as he once claimed, an interview. He reinforced this ‘conceptual continuity’ the re-use of identifiable themes from one album to next by snatches of monologue, which refer back to a previous album, by repeating themes on his album sleeves, and most of all by reworking earlier melodies or subject matter.” [Miles p. 160]