Bitches Brew
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| Bitches Brew | ||
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| Double album by Miles Davis | ||
| Released | April 1970 | |
| Recorded | August 19–August 21, 1969 | |
| Genre | Jazz-Rock | |
| Length | 94:11 | |
| Label | Columbia Records | |
| Producer(s) | Teo Macero | |
| Professional reviews | ||
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| Miles Davis chronology | ||
| In a Silent Way (1969) |
Bitches Brew (1970) |
Live-Evil (1970) |
Bitches Brew is an album recorded by American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in 1969 and released in 1970.
Recorded during three days (August 19–August 21, 1969), immediately after the end of the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York, Bitches Brew incorporated electric instruments, such as electric piano and guitar, and mostly rejected traditional jazz rhythms in favor of a looser, funk-influenced improvisational style.
The two-LP/CD set contains mostly very long tracks, improvisations on pieces that were largely written on the spot. Instead of the mostly diatonic style of cool jazz, Bitches Brew often favored dissonance.
The term 'voodoo music' has been applied to describe this new sound.
Some jazz fans and musicians felt the album was crossing the limits, or was not jazz at all. One critic writes that "Davis drew a line in the sand that some jazz fans have never crossed, or even forgiven Davis for drawing." [1]
On the other hand, many fans, critics, and musicians see the records as an important, vital release. In a 1997 interview, drummer Bobby Previte sums up his feelings about Bitches Brew thusly: "Well, it was groundbreaking, for one. How much groundbreaking music do you hear now? It was music that you had that feeling you never heard quite before. It came from another place. How much music do you hear now like that?" [2]
Bitches Brew is often called the best-selling jazz record. Such sales figures have been disputed, but it was Davis's first gold record, selling more than half a million copies. However, 11 years earlier Davis had released Kind of Blue, another groundbreaking record that has been cited as perhaps the best-selling jazz release.
In 1998, Columbia Legacy/Sony Music released The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, a four-disc box set that included Bitches Brew as well as ensuing studio sessions through February 1970.
Contents |
[edit] Overview
Bitches Brew was a turning point in modern jazz. Davis had already spearheaded two major jazz movements – cool and modal jazz – and was about to initiate another major change (the album's cover also sports the phrase "Directions In Music By Miles Davis" above the title.)
It is perhaps difficult for today's audience to realize how astonishing it was in 1970 to have a major label – Columbia Records – release a major album by an important jazz artist with the term "bitches" in its title. The use of the word on the album cover may be a factor in certain fans' and critics' dismissive or even hostile responses to the record. It is all the more remarkable given the uncompromising, ferocious tone of the music within.
The Mati Klarwein painting featured on the cover is striking and memorable, evocative of the gripping, strange aural contents within.
The "Who's Who" level of musicianship among the participants involved in the Bitches Brew recording is indicative of the excellence demanded and the collaborative organizational abilities of Miles Davis. Some critics at the time characterized this music as simply obtuse and "outside", which recalls Duke Ellington's description of Davis as "the Picasso of jazz."
[edit] Recording sessions
As was Davis's practice, he called musicians to the recording studio on very short notice. A few songs on Bitches Brew were rehearsed before the recording sessions, but other times the musicians had little or no idea what they were to record.
Once in the recording studio, the players were typically given only a few instructions: a tempo count, a few chords or a hint of melody, and suggestions as to mood or tone.
Davis liked to work this way; he thought it forced musicians to pay close attention to one another, to their own performances, or to Davis's cues, which could change at any moment. On the quieter moments of "Bitches Brew", for example, Davis's voice is audible, giving instructions to the musicians: snapping his fingers to indicate tempo, or, in his distinctive whisper, saying, "Keep it tight" or telling individuals when to solo.
Davis composed most of the music on the album. The two important exceptions were the complex "Pharaoh's Dance" (composed by Joe Zawinul) and the ballad "Sanctuary" (composed by Wayne Shorter). The latter had been recorded as a fairly straightforward ballad early in 1968, but was given a radically different interpretation on Bitches Brew. It begins with Davis and Chick Corea improvising on the standard "I Fall in Love too Easily" before Davis plays the "Sanctuary" theme. Then, not unlike Davis's recording of Shorter's "Nefertiti" two years earlier, the horns repeat the melody over and over while the rhythm section builds up the intensity. Oddly enough, the issued "Sanctuary" is actually two consecutive takes of the song.
Despite his reputation as a "cool", melodic improviser, much of Davis's playing on this album is aggressive and explosive, often playing fast runs and venturing into the upper register of the trumpet. His closing solo on "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" is particularly noteworthy in this regard.
Davis does not perform on the short song "John McLaughlin".
[edit] Post-production
Some might argue Teo Macero deserves much of the credit for Bitches Brew. His contributions were sometimes controversial, certainly important, and perhaps invaluable. His impact on the arranging and post-performance re-mixing of Davis' work validates the analogy: Teo Macero is to Miles Davis, as George Martin was to The Beatles.
There was significant editing done to the recorded music. Short sections were spliced together to create longer pieces, and various effects were applied to the recordings. One source worth quoting at length reports:
Bitches Brew also pioneered the application of the studio as a musical instrument, featuring stacks of edits and studio effects that were an integral part of the music. Even though it sounded like an old-style studio registration of a bunch of guys playing some amazing stuff, large sections of it relied heavily on studio technology to create a fantasy that never was. Miles and his producer, the legendary Teo Macero, used the recording studio in radical new ways, especially in the title track and the opening track, "Pharaoh's Dance". There were many special effects, like tape loops, tape delays, reverb chambers and echo effects. And, through intensive tape editing, Macero concocted many totally new musical structures that were later imitated by the band in live concerts. Macero, who has a classical education and was most likely inspired by the 1930s and 1940s musique concrete experiments, used tape editing as a form of arranging and composition.
"Pharaoh's Dance" contains 19 edits – its famous stop-start opening is entirely constructed in the studio, using repeat loops of certain sections. Later on in the track there are several micro-edits: for example, a one-second-long fragment that first appears at 8:39 is repeated five times between 8:54 and 8:59. The title track contains 15 edits, again with several short tape loops of, in this case, five seconds (at 3:01, 3:07 and 3:12). Therefore, Bitches Brew not only became a controversial classic of musical innovation, it also became renowned for its pioneering use of studio technology. [3]
This extensive editing was sometimes controversial in jazz circles as purists and detractors argued that jazz should be "spontaneous". But decades earlier trumpeter Louis Armstrong had quickly perceived the photographic nature of the audio recording, becoming the first musician to assemble a band solely for the purpose of recording it live in the studio.
[edit] A new type of jazz
Though Bitches Brew was in many ways revolutionary, perhaps its most important innovation was rhythmic.
In fact, the innovative harmonic and melodic explorations heard on Bitches Brew, coupled with the absence of familiar and accepted bossa nova, swing or jazz-waltz rhythmic templates seems to be a source of much of the malevolence directed toward the album on the part of its critics.
There were no jazz standards on Bitches Brew; there were no "walking bass lines" – a traditional, old-school "swing" reference benchmark – there was, in fact, no swing in the traditional sense at all on Bitches Brew. The essential jazz element referred to as "swing" had been basically unchallenged for years before the widely used Latin rhythms employed by Dizzy Gillespie in the bop era. Bitches Brew ignored both swing and the then recently absorbed "Latin" grooves of bossa nova, drawing heavily instead on the nascent funk music of James Brown, Sly Stone, and rock-solid backbeats heard in R&B. Davis didn't simply borrow Brown or Stone's riffs, rather, he incorporated funk and related beats into an expanded vocabulary within the rhythm section as a vital element of his music.
Previous large jazz ensembles – such as the big bands – had featured several trumpets or woodwind ensembles playing as "sections" supported by an anchoring platform rhythm section often composed of piano, double bass and drums.
Bitches Brew, however, diverged from traditional jazz instrumentation and featured several "rhythm section" instruments forming currents of live counter-rhythms atop which the soloist navigated. For example, two basses, two or even three drummers, or two piano players, all playing at the same time is in many ways the foundation of the entire ensemble recorded on Bitches Brew.
Also expanding the enhanced rhythm section ensembles on Bitches Brew are electric guitar, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone, and additional percussionists. Bitches Brew also diverged from standard jazz practice by incorporating the Fender Rhodes electric piano and the electric bass, which were not yet recognized as legitimate jazz instruments at the time.
The solo voices heard most prominently on this album are the trumpet and the soprano saxophone, respectively of Miles and Wayne Shorter. Notable also is Bennie Maupin's ghostly bass clarinet, which was perhaps the first use of the instrument in jazz not heavily indebted to pioneer Eric Dolphy.
Also worth noting is the length of several pieces on Bitches Brew. Very few jazz musicians, excepting Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane – a former Davis associate – had released such long recordings, where a single song would be played for an entire side of an LP disc.
The technology of recording, analog tape, disc mastering and inherent recording time constraints (i.e., bandwidth) had in the late sixties expanded beyond previous limitations and sonic range for the stereo, vinyl album: Bitches Brew reflects this. In it are found long form performances which encompass entire improvised suites with rubato sections, tempo changes or the long, slow crescendo more common to a symphonic orchestral piece or Indian raga form than the three-minute rock song.
Starting in 1969, Davis' concerts included some of the material that would become Bitches Brew.
[edit] Aftermath
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Bitches Brew was an unusual, groundbreaking and controversial contribution to jazz; as a result, Davis' manager and booking agents — Jack Wittemore, Willie Ashwood Kavanna, and Bob Messenger — had difficulties booking Davis in traditional jazz venues. The album is now considered a seminal jazz fusion record, but at the time, it was considered "blasphemy" and a cop-out by many jazz aficionados. So, to create a new audience for Miles, Kavanna and Wittemore booked him on college rock shows as the opening act to Carlos Santana, who had a newly-released hit record, "Evil Ways." This tour (1969-70) only served to enrage traditional jazz fans even more. While the tour served its purpose of introducing Miles Davis to an entirely new audience of white college kids and Hispanics, he eventually fired these managers in 1972, blaming them for infuriating his withering jazz following. The jazz crowd eventually came back to him in even bigger numbers, and went on to laud Bitches Brew and the Santana concerts that publicized it as seminal breakthrough music industry events.
The album is also noted for launching the careers of future fusion artists of the seventies. Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul would later form Weather Report, Chick Corea would later form Return to Forever with a lineup that would later include drummer Lenny White. Guitarist John McLaughlin and Billy Cobham would later form Mahavishnu Orchestra.
[edit] Track listing
[edit] Original double album configuration
[edit] Side one
- "Pharaoh's Dance" (Joe Zawinul) – 20:06
[edit] Side two
- "Bitches Brew" (M. Davis) – 27:00
[edit] Side three
- "Spanish Key" (M. Davis) – 17:34
- "John McLaughlin" (M. Davis) – 4:26
[edit] Side four
- "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" (M. Davis) – 14:04
- "Sanctuary" (Wayne Shorter) – 11:01
[edit] CD configuration
[edit] Disc one
- "Pharaoh's Dance" (Joe Zawinul) – 20:06
- "Bitches Brew" (M. Davis) – 27:00
[edit] Disc two
- "Spanish Key" (M. Davis) – 17:34
- "John McLaughlin" (M. Davis) – 4:26
- "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" (M. Davis) – 14:04
- "Sanctuary" (Wayne Shorter) – 11:01
- "Feio" (Wayne Shorter, bonus track on the CD editions) – 11:51
[edit] Personnel
- Miles Davis - trumpet
- Wayne Shorter - soprano saxophone
- Bennie Maupin - bass clarinet
- Joe Zawinul - electric piano
- Larry Young - electric piano
- Chick Corea - electric piano
- John McLaughlin - guitar
- Dave Holland - bass
- Harvey Brooks - electric bass
- Lenny White - drum set
- Billy Cobham - drum set
- Jack DeJohnette - drum set
- Don Alias - congas, drum set only on "Miles Runs The Voodoo Down"
- Juma Santos - shaker, congas
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- A history of jazz fusion
- Miles Davis - The Electric Period
- Article about the making of the Complete Bitches Brew Sessions boxed set at the Miles Beyond site, which is dedicated to the electric music of Miles Davis
- Video of Miles and band playing Bitches Brew Live
