Who better to lead us into the weird world of Miles Davis than his biographer, Ian Carr? We heard his electric Miles-inspired jazz-rock on ‘Torrid Zone’, and Bitches Brew (1970) is more or less fusion ground zero. Influenced by the music of Jimi Hendrix – and pissed off that rock stars were making more money than him without the musical ability – Davis mixed the aggression of rock with the most experimental aspects of jazz to create an album that sounded like neither genre, producing something closer to alien funk.
There’s a story about Miles attending a White House dinner where he was asked what he’d done to deserve an invitation. “I’ve changed music five or six times,” he replied. “What have you done of any importance other than be white?” This constant need for change defines Miles Davis (and arguably jazz in general), who once said: “I have to change, it’s like a curse.” Where his earlier records strive for as “live” a sound as possible (as Ollie mentioned, all but one of the tracks on Kind of Blue (1959) were recorded in a single take), he and producer Teo Macero later pioneered production techniques to make music from whatever was played in the studio.
For the Bitches Brew sessions he told his 12 musicians to improvise (you can hear him raspily directing them on the record) and didn’t let them hear any of it back in case it affected their playing. When bass clarinetist Bennie Maupin later heard the album on his car radio he didn’t even recognise it; “It was like being in a dream where you’re hearing music but you can’t figure it out and it’s just driving you crazy because you want to know what it is.”
The title track on Bitches Brew is a perfect example of this tape splicing technique, a 27-minute odyssey made up of 22 edits (this jam also produced the separate track ‘John McLaughlin’). It starts with crashing drums and descending keys, before eventually (un)settling into an evil-sounding groove. Miles echoes powerfully over the top, worlds away from his famous ballad playing; worlds away from anything heard before or since.
Critic George Grella Jr. describes these opening tracks as “wielding power that is more chthonic than any musician or band that tries to narrate a mythos… Bitches Brew revels in the mess of America.” The album remains a frightening and exhilarating listening experience (I have a friend whose wife won’t even let it be played in the house), as wildly experimental and sonically perfect as music gets; African American rhythms and non-Western circularity, James Brown and Stravinsky, not so much brewed as boiled alive.
For more funky fusion from Miles and co, check out our ‘Fusion Intrusion’ playlist or try our ‘Brass With Class’ playlist for music from some of the best players to ever blow their own trumpet.
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