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.
