It’s no slight understatement to declare Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew (released 3/30/70) a paradigm-shifting work. Not that its groundbreaking likes were any more or less profound than Birth of The Cool from 1957, the trumpeter/composer/bandleader hard bop efforts on Prestige Records in the same decade, or the innovative work with his second great quintet in the mid-to-late Sixties.
But fifty-five years after the release of the followup to the modal explorations of 1969’s In A Silent Way, the double Columbia album from the very next year launched another profound stylistic innovation, thereby begging the question of how often a single artist more than once embarks on such distinct change for himself and the genre within which he works?
Tellingly, the adventurous approach wasn’t just using a large ensemble, ‘The Man With The Horn’ explicitly assembled for the three days of recording in August 1969. Bitches Brew also pioneered the application of the studio as a musical instrument, featuring edits and studio effects that were an integral part of the music. Clearly, however, Miles and his long-time producer Teo Macero had much to work with during their post-production labors.
As on this title track, these kindred innovative spirits incorporated sonic accents into the spontaneity of the musicianship. As a result, the variety of sounds fills the breadth of the stereo spectrum, nurturing the music’s alternately bracing and hypnotic sensation: the musicians fluently created streams of instrumentation that conjure up a deeply eerie mood.
Such is the haunting, all-encompassing atmosphere of tracks like “Miles Runs The Voodoo Down” and “Sanctuary,” the cuts ultimately generate as much visceral as cerebral impact. The similarly edgy instrumental density of “Spanish Key” on side three finds the participants simultaneously riding and propelling the cumulative momentum of their playing begun almost an hour prior during the opening of “Pharaoh’s Dance.”
In a continuing effort to emphasize rhythm as an essential component of the music, percussionists Don Alias and Juma Santos played alongside a veritable who’s who of that jazz era’s rapidly developing hierarchy. Highly esteemed (and subsequently iconic) contributors like keyboardist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin went on to form the standard bearers of the jazz-rock fusion movement in the form of Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, respectively. And it’s well to point out too, that they were interacting with future members of Return to Forever (drummer Lenny White) and Headhunters (reed player Bennie Maupin), among others, including members of Miles’s touring band at the time, saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s and bassist Dave Holland.
Marketing ploys surrounding Bitches Brew, such as the 45 rpm singles edited from longer tracks designed for radio play, are indicative of the collision of commerce and creativity that engendered such furor around the original issue of Bitches Brew (as did German painter Mati Klarwein’s striking cover art). Yet the prevailing reality is that this half-century-plus record is one of those titles that not only survives on its terms but with its abiding reputation intact and thoroughly deserved.
The passage of the years has hardly mitigated the influence of Miles Davis’s landmark effort, but it has instead enhanced it through the ensuing reverberations within rap, hip-hop, and modern R&B (not to mention rock culture in the form of Santana’s latter work, like Caravanserai).
Above all, however, Bitches Brew remains a paragon of fusion, retaining its hallowed position to a great degree because it does not sound dated like so much of that hybrid genre.
