Miles Davis - Bitches Brew
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Miles DavisBrand: Davis
Edition: Music CD
Format: Extra tracks, Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 1999-06-08
Music Label: Sony
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
- Pharaoh's Dance
- Bitches Brew
- Spanish Key
- John McLaughlin
- Miles Runs The Voodoo Down
- Sanctuary
- Feio
Free Music Notes for Bitches Brew
Free Music Review: Call It Anything
Hit: 5 Stars
It's hard to know what is possibly left to say about this album, other than to attempt to verbalize my own impressions. In the largely formless spirit of Bitches Brew, I'll start somewhere in the middle and raise an outright objection to all those who have claimed that Miles Davis 'sold out' or 'commercialized' his music. It may have been the best-selling jazz album ever at the time, but in no way whatsoever does this resemble anything remotely commercial. Whatever else it is, it is purely interpretive, visionary, experimental, and uncompromised music. It is music that sounds like nothing else ever recorded before or since. It is music that burrows in and buries itself, permanently, in the consciousness of the listener. It is confrontational, urgent, primal, intense, and mostly brilliant music. It is not, like its electric predecessor In A Silent Way, founded on subtlety and beauty. There is beauty in a sense to be found within the truth and sheer creativity and energy disseminated by the many great musicians it features, but Bitches Brew is more about being a unmitigated reflection of the time in which it was realized. Probably nothing speaks more serviceably for the anguished chaos that was 1969 than its contents. It is at times a jarring, violent, frightening experience. I can't imagine anything more unsettling on record.
I'll go to the beginning for now and posit that the first three minutes of the leading track, "Pharoah's Dance", contains the best the album has to offer. It sounds at first like a miraculous extension of Silent Way, a whirlpooling aggregate of instruments somehow working in perfect sync with each other, playing differently heard elements based on a single mode, so dark and yet iridescent at once. Miles' trumpet then comes in and it seems to throw the precision a little out of whack; in fact, the cohesiveness does not really resume for another ten or so minutes, when Miles finally states the central, repeating theme of the piece around which the others build a hair-raising crescendo. But it turns out that was nothing: the horn-echoed introduction (and ending) of the following track, "Bitches Brew", will make that hair stand all the way on end. Every single time you hear it. Very few moments in the history of contemporary music are as thrilling, as ominous, and as indelibly powerful as these sections, which more or less bookend a heavy-grooved onslaught of ferocity that scarcely manages to float above the threshold of 'free' - achieving an amazing balance by retaining just enough control in the face of so much apparent dissonance. When Miles lets loose with a forceful, clarion note that extends through Dave Holland's snaking, descending bass line and the surrounding, menacing cacophony feeding from it, it's as though you're on a rollercoaster, nudged over the top and plummeting into depths of sound and feeling not usually encountered.
The second side is more of a mixed bag. 'Spanish Key' has its moments, but overall sounds less focused. The brief track named for its chief protagonist, "John McLaughlin", on the other hand, is markedly more engaging in its concentration, built around a couple of nifty keyboard riffs. Although Miles himself is strangely absent from the song, it's probably the most effective way to introduce outsiders to the concept of the album without fear of freaking them out; it's easily the most accessible portion of the album, one of the few areas that can be cited for going with a more rock-oriented approach (though even here it is hardly straightforwardly rock; the only time Davis really covered that ground was in his next album, Tribute to Jack Johnson). Meanwhile, the longest track of them all, "Miles Runs The Voodoo Down", is also the least of them. After a few minutes at the outset that seem to hone in on a funkier element, the music becomes plodding and aimless. It may be said that some of the other works similarly lack direction for extended periods, but they are played with such captivating vitality and communicate so much that one hardly cares where they're 'going', so long as they're going at all. Not so here. "Sanctuary", however, ends the monumental record on a strong note. It's Wayne Shorter's last great moment playing with Davis, and unless you're a fan of Weather Report, one of his last great moments to date, period. It's also Miles' greatest performing contribution to the album, as the inherent space of the composition plays to his strength: immaculately selective phrasing conveyed with breathtaking sensitivity. Although there are a few emotional outbursts from the rest of the band in places (which I suppose keeps with the general essence of the sessions, but I prefer the version of this song included on Circle In The Round, which excludes the superfluous fury of the multiple percussionists in favor of letting the high-pitched horn culmination - an unmistakable cry of the spirit - speak for itself), the song leaves a more contemplative imprint upon the listener after all the reactionary sound and fury that came before.
At which point one is left with no words - for a little while. So much has rained down on you, grabbed you by the throat, forced you to see what and how these musicians saw and thought, to change the way you think about music, about expression, about form, about life itself. Not even Kind of Blue could do all that. You don't know where to start, what to begin to think, but take a moment for now to thank the stars for Miles Davis, for his discerning ability to employ so many incredible people who could bring his conceptions to life, for his commitment to bold and pure artistry, for daring to offend a vast percentage of his fan base and critics stuck behind illusory walls of genre. Miles Davis played a 38-minute, continuous, wholly improvised set at the Isle of Wight months after Bitches Brew was released. Someone asked him what it was that he and his band had played. He said, "Call it anything." Who cared, except people that didn't get it, what exactly it was? The best of his music from this period is dynamic enough to be anything and everything. Few people in any form of art or walk of life have achieved this; perhaps it is the best in the rest of us to at least recognize and respond to it.
Bitches Brew Poster
2008 Japanese Blu-Spec CD pressing of this classic album. The Blue Spec format takes Blu-ray disc technology to create CD's which are compatible with normal CD players but provides ultra high quality sound. Sony.The revolution was recorded: in 1969 Bitches Brew sent a shiver through a country already quaking. It was a recording whose very sound, production methods, album-cover art, and two-LP length all signaled that jazz could never be the same. Over three days anger, confusion, and exhilaration had reigned in the studio, and the sonic themes, scraps, grooves, and sheer will and emotion that resulted were percolated and edited into an astonishingly organic work. This Miles Davis wasn't merely presenting a simple hybrid like jazz-rock, but a new way of thinking about improvisation and the studio. And with this two-CD reissue (actually, this set is a reissue of the original set plus one track, perfect for the fan who's not so overwhelmed as to need the four-CD Complete Bitches Brew box), the murk of the original recording is lifted. The instruments newly defined and brightened, the dark energy of the original comes through as if it were all fresh. Joe Zawinul and Bennie Maupin's roles in the mix have been especially clarified. With a bonus track of "Feio"--a Wayne Shorter composition recorded five months later that serves both as a warm-down for Bitches Brew and a promise of Weather Report to come--this is crucial listening. --John F. Szwed
Bitches Brew was a shot across the bow of jazz insularity, and, much like the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper before it, it drew upon elements both inside and outside the mainstream to fashion an avant-garde, yet extremely influential, take on popular music's relation to modernism, and vice versa. As such, Miles Davis became a lightning rod for jazz's transformation (or corruption as some diehards insist), and by mixing the fundamental elements of collective improvisation with fulminating dance rhythms, psychedelic electric textures, polytonal harmonies and a freely inflected brand of blues phrasing (as reflected in his own Kind of Blue-brand of modalism and the parallel directions of Hendrix, Cream, Sly Stone, James Brown, and Marvin Gaye), Davis signaled a sea-change in jazz. However, producer Teo Macero's spooky, compressed mix tends to suck all the air out of the room, emphasizing the often static nature of Harvey Brooks's bedrock Fender bass heartbeats, while obscuring the complex polytonal/polyrhythmic web of volatile harmonies, colliding cross-rhythms and contrasting melodic lines. Bitches Brew is a modern jazz masterpiece screaming for a critical reassessment (and a re-mix), but nothing can obscure the crafty tension and release of Davis's turn over a "Sex Machine"-styled ostinato on "Spanish Key," nor the spatial collective "&mysterioso" and epic breadth of the title tune. --Chip Stern
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