In the late sixties, trumpeter Miles Davis began to feel out of date.
He watched music fans flock to the electric grind of Jimi Hendrix and Sly & the Family Stone. Davis sensed his acoustic jazz was becoming irrelevant.
“I wasn’t prepared to be a memory yet,” Davis wrote of the time in his autobiography. Out of Davis’ hunger for significance came his most transformative album: 1970’s Bitches Brew.
Commemorating the album’s 40th anniversary this year, Sony has released an expanded Legacy edition of Bitches Brew along with a comprehensive box set.
For younger generations, it’s hard to imagine the controversy that Bitches Brew elicited upon release.
“[Miles Davis] is a music guy, right?” said junior Rebecca Kiszkiel. In his heyday, Miles Davis was the music guy.
Previous masterpieces such as The Birth of the Cool and Kind of Blue were among the most innovative albums in jazz history, single-handedly inventing the cool jazz and modal jazz genres.
With Bitches Brew, a debate would ensue among jazz fans. To some Davis had spearheaded yet another jazz movement, to others the album signaled the end of jazz altogether.
Either way, a new genre that blended jazz with rock’n’roll emerged: fusion.
The controversy was in the electricity.Bringing electric instrumentation into jazz was controversial in itself, but Davis pushed the idea even further, experimenting with multiple drummers, electric guitars, basses, and pianos, and rhythms inspired by Jimi Hendrix.
“What Miles Davis achieved with Bitches Brew,” said junior Conner McDonough, “was a complete reworking of jazz.”
Bitches Brew put Miles Davis back into the mainstream, selling 400,000 copies in its first year, on its way to becoming one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time.
The surge in popularity culminated in Davis’ performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival.
According to estimates, 600,000 music fans, a crowd larger than Woodstock, saw Davis perform his fusion alongside Jimi Hendrix, Sly & the Family Stone, The Who, and others.
As Davis left the stage that day, the festival’s filming crew asked what to call the new jazz/rock hybrid.
Davis replied, “Call it anything.” The concert was released on DVD in 2004 as Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue.
Jazz purists felt betrayed, accusing Miles Davis of “selling out.”
But one listen to Bitches Brew confirms that the album is one of the most challenging recordings ever accused of selling out.
Bitches Brew is filled with shapeless songs that rely on mood rather than melody.
Opening tracks “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Bitches Brew” last over twenty minutes each. Melancholy and abrasive, the album is every bit as hectic as modern life.
Emerging jazz stars Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, and Wayne Shorter contribute to the album’s futuristic tone, though none would recreate such sounds later in their careers.
Bitches Brew is the ultimate example of Miles Davis’ greatest strength as an artist: putting musicians together under his own vision and succeeding in pushing them to create what he visualized.
Forty years after its original release, Bitches Brew plays like a soundtrack to a futuristic world.
Unlike many artistic attempts to peer into the future, the album hasn’t aged.
If anything, as the modern world becomes more surreal, it feels prescient.
Sony’s Legacy edition of Bitches Brew compiles the original tracks with alternate takes over 2-CD’s and includes a DVD of Davis’ transformative 1969 performance in Copenhagen.
For audiophiles, the Bitches Brew 40th Anniversary Collector’s Set includes a high quality vinyl pressing with a 48-page 12×12 collector’s book.
Micheal Angelo Rumore can be reached at mrumore@spartans.ut.edu.