A compilation of tracks recorded between 1972 and 1974, Get Up With It is a mixed bag, but a couple of the pieces are so astonishingly beautiful they make it a must-own. The best of those is the sprawling album opener, “He Loved Him Madly,” a half-hour tribute to Duke Ellington, who’d died less than a month before it was recorded. An elegiac, effectively drumless piece where Davis’ trumpet and Dave Liebman’s flute keen and flutter, as guitars and keyboards hum and murmur, it’s almost ambient music, never seeming to move from one point to another yet somehow building up a crushing emotional power over its extended running time. The quiet at its heart gives it more impact than any more aggressive piece ever could — it’s like Davis, famous for his devotion to the space between notes, was attempting to diagram the hole in the world left by Ellington’s passing.

The rest of the album is a patchwork, with each track having its own unique mood. “Maiysha,” turned into a raucous blowout on the live Agharta, is a mellow, almost Brazilian groove excursion until it shifts gears at the 10-minute mark (out of 15), becoming a thick blues-rock stew. “Rated X” is a potent exercise in shock, Davis leaning on the organ with his whole forearm at times and the band bouncing in and out like producer Teo Macero had been listening to Lee “Scratch” Perry. “Honky Tonk” and “Red China Blues” are the most out of place, even amongst this grab-bag; the former dates back to 1970, and has the same rock sound as A Tribute To Jack Johnson, while the latter sounds like Davis dubbed himself over a soul-jazz track he found lying around somewhere. There’s one more side-long exploration, the pulsating and psychedelic “Calypso Frelimo,” and two more funk jams, “Mtume” (named for the band’s percussionist) and “Billy Preston” (named for the R&B singer), which are good, because nothing Davis was doing in this period was bad, but they’re mostly there to get GUWI to double album length. Had he simply released the two side-long epics, “He Loved Him Madly” and “Calypso Frelimo,” that would have been more than enough.