A LOOK BACK AT
BITCHES BREW

May 15, 2018 | by Rusty Aceves

With both Miles Electric (feat. trumpeter Christian Scott) and Miles From India carrying on the electric "directions in music by Miles Davis" at SFJAZZ in the Miles Davis Festival on May 24-27, we take a look back at Miles' landmark album, Bitches Brew.

Recordings that fundamentally change the direction of a genre or that stand as landmarks of a pivotal time in its development are rare, and over his five-decade career, Miles Davis was responsible for more of them than any artist in jazz history. From the late 40s sessions that marked the beginnings of the Cool jazz movement and the innovative orchestral jazz collaboration with Gil Evans of the late 50s to the rise of modal jazz with 1959’s Kind of Blue and post-bop expansions of his 1960s “second great quintet,” Davis altered his trajectory steadily, telling the Washington Post in a 1969 interview, “I have to change. It’s like a curse.”

Of all of the trumpeter’s releases, none has elicited the lasting controversy of 1970’s double album Bitches Brew – a session that helped usher in a revolutionary period in jazz’s development, or as some saw it, signified its imminent demise.

Recorded over three days in late August, 1969 with a large and varying lineup including saxophonist Wayne Shorter, electric pianists Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul, bassist Dave Holland, and the exciting young English guitarist John McLaughlin, Bitches Brew is widely considered the progenitor of the “fusion” movement that established itself in the early 70s, with its open-ended improvisatory approach that integrated the electric instruments, amplification, effects, and rhythms culled from the rock scene. In reality, the album was certainly not the first to explore this territory – 1968’s transitional Filles de Kilimanjaro and especially 1969’s In a Silent Way were decisive moves in this fertile new direction – but Bitches Brew stands alone as a definitive statement of purpose, one that inspired Davis enough to subtitle the album “Directions in Music by Miles Davis.” Never before had the use of the recording studio as an instrument of composition and arrangement been so fully explored by a jazz artist, with entire sections of music edited, copied, and repeated to create the final form and sequence. For all its looseness and imperfections, the record is infused with a vital energy that is undeniable, and despite its easily misunderstood hybrid nature, it is neither “jazz” nor “rock.” This lack of categorical identity made the record hotly debated among critics of the time, and as a testament to its lasting influence, it remains a divisive recording to this day. While arguments still rage about its musical legitimacy and whether it is or isn’t “jazz,” it’s clear from the opening notes of “Pharoah’s Dance” that Davis was not, as has been cynically suggested by conservative critics, abandoning his roots in “serious music” for a lucrative commercial endeavor. Bitches Brew is far too heady, abstract and daunting in scope – with each of the first two album sides consisting of a single 20+ minute track ­– to be anything approaching a pandering cash-in.

Looking at the album now nearly 50 years from its release, Bitches Brew is not only a snapshot in time, but a prescient look at jazz in the 21st century in which walls separating genre, race, and nationality continue to be broken down. Drummer Lenny White, famed for his later work with Chick Corea’s Return To Forever, was only 19 when he shared drum duties on the sessions with Jack DeJohnette and Billy Cobham. In his recollections of the recording, he placed Bitches Brew in a historical context, telling milesdavis.com:

"To understand Bitches Brew you have to understand that the first notes we made in the studio happened twenty-four hours after the last note Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock. There were a lot of different kinds of music being made at the same time. You had Jimi Hendrix; you still had the Beatles, Igor Stravinsky, James Brown. You had Santana, the Rolling Stones—all this different music at the same time. You could hear that jazz was cross-pollinating—things being borrowed from here, from there. Everybody was listening to everybody else." 

Originally posted on August 14, 2017