Happy 55th Anniversary to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, originally released March 30, 1970.
In Questlove’s recent documentary Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius), he brings Sly Stone’s legendary musical career to life. But, as the subtitle makes obvious, he also examines the impact of being a musical genius as a Black man in a ferociously racist and capitalistic society. Almost inevitably, the desire to self-medicate became a way to cope for Stone (and countless others) and it wreaked havoc on his life and career.
As amazing as it was to see Stone’s impact celebrated and to watch the thrilling footage of the Family Stone in their pomp, I longed for more exploration of that concept. The momentary flash of unmistakable sorrow that ran across D’Angelo’s face when reflecting on the notion, damn near broke my heart and made me want to delve deeper into this idea.
If we start imagining a list of great Black artists to study and explore this path with, close to the top of that list is Miles Dewey Davis III, a man who changed the course of jazz more than any other artist. There were of course years lost to substance abuse in the late 1940s and 70s but his genius demanded that he be in a state of perpetual forward motion. When I wrote about In A Silent Way (1969) last year, I recounted the advice Davis gave James Mtume. He told Mtume that every time he crossed a bridge, he burned it down so he could never go backwards.
That relentless forward momentum didn’t please everyone, even his own musical heroes. The seismic shift in jazz from being an accompaniment to dance, to a music to be listened to came courtesy of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and the earth-shattering sound of bebop. In 3 Shades Of Blue: Mile Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and The Lost Empire Of Cool by James Kaplan, Davis’ feelings for the ground breaking Gillespie are clear as day. Kaplan recounts that in 1945, Davis returned to New York and together with Freddie Webster, would run to hear Gillespie redefine what jazz trumpet playing could be.
Fast forward to the aftermath of Bitches Brew being released in 1970 and Gillespie would talk about Davis’ work with befuddlement, but also with the unwavering faith that one genius has for another, as outlined in Ian Carr’s definitive biography of Davis. “The guy is such a fantastic musician that I know he has something in mind, whatever it is,” Gillespie explains. “I know he knows what he’s doing, so he must be doing something that I can’t get to yet. He played some of it for me . . . I said, ‘what is it?’ and he said ‘You know what it is; same shit you’ve been playing all the time!’”
That an artist of Gillespie’s stature had to grapple with what Davis was doing speaks volumes as to the seismic shift he ushered in with Bitches Brew. The move forward Davis took with In A Silent Way accelerated further with his follow-up. The numbers involved show Davis’ foot firmly put down on the accelerator.
For In A Silent Way, eight musicians gathered for one, solitary session. On Bitches Brew, though, thirteen musicians took part over three days of sessions. Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul and John McLaughlin survived from the previous album and were joined by Jack DeJohnette, Larry Young, Benny White, Don Alias, Juma Santos, Harvey Brooks and Bernie Maupin. Accompanied by that phalanx of musicians, the importance of rhythm is more than apparent—with two bassists, two or three drummers and two or three pianists, the ideas he explored on In A Silent Way went stratospheric on Bitches Brew.
Listen to the Album:
And stratospheric is the word. For all that Davis’ work shocked or disgusted jazz purists, Ian Carr points out that some people did get it. He quotes Leonard Feather as saying Davis was “creating a new and more complex form, drawing from the avant-garde, atonalism, modality, rock, jazz and the universe. It has no name, but some listeners have called it ‘Space Music’”. In fact, a lot of people got it—it charted at #35 on the Billboard chart, his highest chart position, and by 1976 the album had gone gold, before going platinum in 2003.
For those not usually acquainted with jazz, there was a key component that resulted in Davis playing rock festivals and venues like the Fillmore in San Francisco. The shades of Latin and funk polyrhythms offered a way into the work for those of a more Sly Stone or James Brown persuasion. Furthermore, the electronic sound of the group and “clear rock pulses” (as Carr calls them) created “a continuum familiar to young audiences.”
The album continued the approach that had begun on In A Silent Way. The group amassed in Columbia Studio B in New York and Davis gave them sketches and the instruction to play what they felt as long as it sprang from the chords he’d given them. In a Guardian piece from 2020, John McLaughlin said that Davis wanted it rough and ready and that Davis wasn’t sure what he wanted but was completely sure what he didn’t want—improvisation was the lifeblood coursing through the veins of the studio.
McLaughlin also relayed the inscrutable instructions Davis would give. Ideas like “play the space” baffled and bewildered but prompted the musicians to think in entirely new ways. If there was one thing Davis was going to do, it was to leave his bandmates more developed than when they started working with him. Cast a glance down the list of those who have played with him and see what happens to many of them afterwards—often they became innovators too.
Once those sessions were complete, Teo Macero, Davis’ long-time producer and Davis, took sections of the recordings and spliced them together like a patchwork quilt, resulting in the finished article. In doing so, the pair took jazz from being a live affair to one that could be the product of studio wizardry, pre-empting the use of taped loops and samples that became commonplace in electronic and hip-hop music. And a mighty hefty article it is, clocking it at just shy of 94 minutes. I remember seeing it for the first time on the shelf of HMV on Oxford Street and picking up the gigantic double CD case to see just 7 tracks on it. My mind was blown.
And it was similarly blown, when I pressed play on the album. I had come to Miles (as so many had) via Kind Of Blue (1959) and had explored tentatively from there. This, though, was entirely different. On most albums I’d heard of his, his trumpet playing was pretty like a summer’s day. Where others may have been frantic, he sat above it all and played in his own sweet time. But here, there is something different—his playing is urgent and more explosive at times and that allied with the power of the two bassists and the copious amounts of percussion makes it a strange, unsettling listen at times. There are moments when it feels like the soundtrack to a dense, claustrophobic espionage movie—malevolent silences, eerie keyboard lines and sharp angular blasts of horns all help create, what was at that point, a unique atmosphere.
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I had the great pleasure of writing about Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Going On (1971) last year and in many ways Bitches Brew has the same touchstones. It is also an abrupt turn to something darker and perhaps even more influential in retuning or redefining a genre of music. But in the same way as There’s A Riot, it is also an album that I don’t play as much as other Miles Davis albums—it’s a huge album of indelible influence but it only calls to me seldomly.
Perhaps the best reflection on the album comes from a participant—John McLaughlin. He described it in the aforementioned Guardian piece as “Picasso in music.” Both Picasso and Davis were able to maintain the character of their medium while transforming it so radically at the same time. And in transforming jazz’s character, Davis and the group of insanely talented musicians birthed a whole new sub-genre of music, as easily as you or I ate breakfast this morning. Davis didn’t just burn bridges, he broke down barriers between genres and made a mockery of the artificial boundaries that confined others. Jazz fusion was born.
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