Miles Davis' Bitches Brew Reveals Something New With Each Listen

Nothing else Miles Davis ever did sounds quite like Bitches Brew, it's more avant-garde and abstract than is usually reviewed too.

There are funk and rock elements yes, but the music is its own thing in the Davis lexicon.

A lot of this has to do with Producer Teo Macero's cut and paste studio work.

At first listen Bitches Brew is very much in the vein of musique concrète, like The Beatles "Revolution #9", a similar cold and distant feeling is evoked.

Listen again to the title track and "Pharaoh's Dance" and tell me it doesn't have this vibe?

20 years ago, back in the mid 90's when I first heard the music, Brew seemed like an immovable monolith. Prior to my discovery of Davis, I was listening to mostly metal bands like Metallica and Megadeth.

These bands offered some very challenging and quite avant-garde progressive sounding music for the rock genre. Speed metal is a genre that one must acquire the taste for, after a while, the perception of speed slows down, and it doesn't seem as outrageous.

Metallica's ... and Justice For all comes to Mind as an album that had this cold and lonely mood, both in the production and in musical content. That is an album that sounds progressive 27 years later. Also Radiohead's OK Computer is very moody in this way.

I am struck how Bitches Brew remains alive to me all these years later, as if it changes somehow with each listen? Better than 20 years later I am amazed that I hear something new in it.



The 4 disc The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions is something that must be heard, one of the few times outtakes enhance the original and even leave clues to the origin of it. Those unreleased tracks also have this living breathing element to them as well, the album Big Fun is also this way in some respects.

The pair of 30 minute plus tracks on Get Up With It, "He Loved Him Madly" and "Calypso "Frelimo" are fantastic, but seem to be much more etched in stone. Both are not as open to interpretation by the listener as much as Bitches Brew is.

Bitches Brew was Not a Commercial Sell-Out

Take the Davis album 1969's In a Silent Way: That album was the polar opposite of Bitches Brew, the yin and yang twins so to speak. Silent Way was softer and smoother around the edges, contemporary and still palatable to the conservative jazz listener. Bitches Brew hammered the jazz coffin shut as far as Davis and jazz was concerned.

From here on, Miles Davis was not creating traditional jazz or jazz-related music. This music is a completely different thing.

I think people get carried away with the track "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" and sort of assign that as the general sound of the album. Voodoo certainly is the most commercial sounding track.

Other than perhaps the 4 minute track "John McLaughlin", a track named after the British guitarist present on the recording, who went onto perhaps guitar sainthood with his fusion band Mahavishnu Orchestra, Voodoo is the only track that remotely sounds like a commercial nod.

The title track, and "Pharaoh's Dance" which represents over half the album are not overtly rockish or funky. Even "Spanish Key" doesn't follow that style all the way. "Sanctuary" isn't funk or rock. Bitches Brew in its entirety is not classifiable.

Honestly, it created its own genre of music.... and there aren't too many albums that sound like it. Some do by accident, perhaps because they share some of the same influences, Stockhausen and or Sly and The Family Stone?

The "Sly" influence shouldn't be overplayed on Bitches Brew either, that would come later on A Tribute to Jack Johnson. Even the live music of this 69-70 time period, like the Cellar Door recordings, or the live tracks on Live Evil that also appear on the Cellar Door Box.

I can see why it was so hard to digest in its day, it doesn't sound anything like what came before it. At least In a Silent Way had a logical connection to tracks that came prior, like "Stuff" from Miles in the Sky, or the title track to Files de Kilimanjaro.

Remembering My First Bitches Brew Experience

The very first time I heard bitches brew was in cassette form, I had checked it out at my local library. I vividly remember walking around my neighborhood, because back then I preferred the Sony Walkman cassette player over any CD players at the time.

I fondly look back at those first days of discovery: This music was different, all of it from Miles, but Bitches Brew was the album where I fully understood that Miles Davis was not what I thought he was.

I thought he was the greatest jazz musician of all time, perhaps the greatest trumpeter, certainly in the top 5, and one of the greatest jazz band leader/composer for all-times like most would believe with the slightest understanding of Miles.

Bitches Brew raised the bar for me, and what my perception was of Davis. I began to look at The electric music as something beyond, and perhaps bigger than jazz?

I don't say that lightly, I realize the neo-conservative who romanticizes the Italian Suit wearing Muted trumpet playing Miles, could perceive things differently, but Bitches Brew from 1970, and then what came after it untill the end of 1975 is not jazz, but it is perhaps Miles greatest legacy? I know, sacrilege?

Try as I might, I have a hard time not putting this music on a peddle-stool, it's so ingenious and full of vibrancy. It's every bit as important as Kind of Blue, The Gil Evans Collaborations, and the second great quintet work Miles Smiles and Nefertiti.

Problem is, the so-called jazz establishment hasn't caught up with this fact. Rock aficionado's respect it though, and those who come from the electronic genres understand the electric music's significance.

Think about someone who could create the greatest selling modern jazz album of all time with Kind of Blue, 3 of the greatest orchestral albums in the history of music with Gil Evans, and then reinvent modern jazz with the second great quintet in the mid 60's, then do the unthinkable, dive right off a cliff as far as the jazz establishment was concerned with Bitches Brew?

Perhaps it was just dumb luck, but whatever you call it, it took a pair of grapefruits to do what Miles did, and it paid off for him, and us the listener.

I wish I could have experienced the outrage and excitement of the music when it was first released. It blew my mind 25 years after it was released.