Listening to music is a series of adjustments made by the ear, and we might say that the best musicians cause us to recalibrate the most. They do this in the framework of a composition, a bar, a modulation, from recording session to recording session, album to album, era to era. They are what I think of as the Melvilliean musicians: artists who shape-shift, but whom one can instantly identify, no matter the guise they take.
Miles Davis, attending some gala awards function in the 1980s, was once asked by a wealthy white woman what he happened to do in life. Davis—an angry man on his most subdued days—snapped back that he had only reinvented music about half a dozen times.
It’s a boast, for certain, but a boast that smacks of truth. Davis didn’t invent bebop in the mid-1940s—in fact, he hardly had the technical chops at the time to navigate the 300 beats-per-minute tempos—but he was there with Charlie Parker as the Yardbird stepped on the gas. And when bebop proved too hot, Davis launched his cool jazz style, giving French art-song music American style and flair. From there it was on to a form of hard bop more sophisticated than everything else in that greasy, funky, church-y sub-genre, a populist chamber music that came to be known as modal jazz.
His Second Great Quintet of the mid-1960s was more sophisticated still, with greater brawn and power than even the band a decade earlier with John Coltrane had possessed. Miles Davis did not monkey around with standing still, which was clearly not for him—feet had to beat upon new streets. So, he ditched his finest band, plugged in, à la Dylan, experimenting with electronic jazz on In a Silent Way in 1969, then cut a series of sessions in August of that year which officially became, in March 1970, the record that the world knew as Bitches Brew.
Laurence Sterne, when he was writing Tristram Shandy in the mid-1700s, made the statement that his interests in doing so were purely financial. If you’ve read Tristram Shandy, that might make you chuckle, but it’s also heartening, because why shouldn’t it have sold? It was ribald, funny, audacious, pure prose groove—which is also how I view Bitches Brew, in music form.
Davis would borrow against his royalties with his record label, Columbia, which by the end of the 1960s honcho Clive Davis found discomfiting. He didn’t think Miles sold enough to merit the megawatt star treatment. Having never seen a red light that he didn’t take as a personal affront—or, just as often, a racial slight—Davis threatened to walk on over to Motown, a label he maintained better shared his style of thinking. At which point Clive Davis advised the trumpeter to lose the suits and the jazz clubs that had been his métier for so long, don some Indian threads, and take up residence in the rock clubs of the land, notably the Fillmore East in New York and the Fillmore West in San Francisco.
Resistant at first, Davis realized two things: First, most rock musicians were inept as performers, and second, he could do what they did far better—and make a veritable mint in the process. As an added perk, he might just reinvent music for time number—what are we up to at this point?—five or six.
In a Silent Way is a beautiful album. Its electricity is understated, like the hum of energy through a wire. Tony Williams, the drummer wunderkind and holdover from the just-departed Second Great Quintet, plays with a level of control that can itself impart how to be a more disciplined person, thinker, partner. Were this a Beethoven work, it would be the Missa solemnis, rather than the Ninth. Call it enriching.
But it couldn’t prepare audiences for Bitches Brew, Davis’s next electrical statement—a violent, churning cauldron of molten sound. Davis wasn’t just going to get the white rock and roll-buying audience—he was going to shock, floor, and galvanize them. This was tantamount to a form of risk-taking that we hardly ever see in the arts these days. Davis was far too smart and talented to believe in retreads. The art that mattered, he knew, and the art that sold, was the art that went where others artists dared not. Age and era don’t really matter—we love the mold-breakers.
Bitches Brew was a mold-detonator. Recorded between August 19-21 in summer 1969, Davis had a simple directive for producer Teo Macero: Stay the hell out of the way, man, just get down the sound. Don’t talk, don’t offer feedback, let me navigate my lane.
What Davis wanted that lane to be was twofold: a throwback to the famous, bebop-birthing jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in the 1940s, and a scaling back of chord-dominated music—all that sheets of sound stuff—to the root of the chord and extemporizations around it. The scaling back he likened to Stravinsky, while the Minton’s jam sessions were to be channeled by way of Kind of Blue, his modality-based celebration of the chord from 1959. His musicians could do anything they wanted, so long as they worked from the root of the chord that Davis provided them. The resulting record was made up of six compositions, all of them but one over ten minutes long, the title track bubbling right under half an hour.
In musician parlance, this was a mother of a band. It’s a big band, we might say, but big bands didn’t usually play high-decibel avant-garde populist groove rock-jazz. Consider the brace of electric pianists who took their turns throughout the three-day session: Larry Young, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul. That is, frankly, nuts. Their resounding note clusters out Deep Purple-d Deep Purple, rattling your rib cage as the likes of John McLaughlin—who was a Hendrix-level player—strafed away on guitar.
Wayne Shorter swapped out his tenor sax for a soprano, sounding like a beefier version of the more lyrical John Coltrane on the instrument. There were a lot of drummers and percussionists, because Davis wanted a new kind of Wall of Sound, borrowing some of Phil Spector’s thinking, but with more grit and hoodoo. Jack DeJohnette immediately became to fusion drumming what Tony Williams had been to Davis a few years before—the keeper of the skins who freed the artist within, granting Davis a certain courage to come screaming in, to paraphrase what John Lennon said to Ringo Starr before a take of “Don’t Let Me Down.”
Along with James Brown and Sly Stone, Davis comprises the holy trinity of groove of this era, and yet, neither of those other masters of rhythmic form ever had something so snaking, so gargantuanly basilisk-like, as “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” which kicks off side four of this double album set. Macero was a felicitous producer, and he adopted Davis’s less-is-more command. The unedited master takes are like a jungle of sound. It’s wild, teeming, passionately verdurous. On the finished album, overgrowth has been hacked away, the sound is elemental, something that both seeps from and sustains the Earth.
Davis said he wished the sessions were filmed so he could have seen what they looked like after, with him running around, conducting, holding up the charts he wrote which pinpointed the chords and their roots from which he wished the latest vamp to flow. Davis was at his best as a trumpet player, ironically, when he was in conductor-mode; there seemed to be this release that came with being an active auteur that helped him tap into pockets of his playing he might have otherwise left dormant. He was thinking less as a player, and more as a shaper of sound, which only made him a better player, one who now used the wah-wah to searing effect.
What Davis left out of his many remarks on race was that it wasn’t just white hippie kids buying the rock and roll of the time, it was black youth, and, frankly, black people of all ages, because the music of James Brown, Sly Stone, Hendrix, and Sam Cooke possessed a sophistication that the Bach of Art of Fugue would have understood. A unit like Led Zeppelin was de rigueur—a group of needlessly loud ham-fisters compared to these people. With Bitches Brew, Davis was bringing rock and roll home again. But whereas Big Joe Turner and Chuck Berry had done that in the early and mid-1950s with rhythm and blues, Davis did it with jazz. And in doing so, he burned away color lines with this form of molten music that could also cool you down, take away your post-dance sweats without giving you the chills.
There is a remarkable in-person document of this time in Davis’s latest rebirth, from the Fillmore East on March 7, 1970, a few weeks before the release of the album. He was supposed to be opening for Steve Miller, whom he hated as a musician, and rather than prostrate himself to the Man—and Davis always excelled at giving it to the Man—Davis showed up late for the gigs so that Miller had to go on first. The promoter Bill Graham chewed him out, which essentially led to Davis telling him to suck eggs, did he hear what Davis’s band was doing on stage?
Any time I hear this music—captured on Live at the Fillmore East March 7, 1970: It’s About That Time—I wonder what the hell the people there must have been thinking.
It’s spring 1970, you’re at the East Coast’s premiere rock venue, you’re probably used to heady sounds, and have likely had more than your fair share of what Cream, Hendrix, the Stones, the Who, the Beatles, and Byrds had been up to. But I don’t know what might have prepared you for this. It must have felt disorienting, but happily so—not so much a drug trip but a rhythm trip. When you think another layer of groove cannot be added, that we are groove-saturated, Davis has the boys reach for another coat of pure groove. A new electric piano riff is overlaid, another ambulating wall of percussion, a further tower of wah-wah trumpet.
As for the record label: Davis had made his point and, further, he got his sales. Reviews were mixed at first, which is usually how it goes with envelope-pushing art. It’s often the formulaic works with ready “comparables” which get the clean-sheets of glowing reviews. Davis instead hogtied your ears and said, “Behold, this is new!” I would imagine that the next time he wanted to borrow against his royalties for another fancy car or a beach house, he pretty much could just say, “Bitches Brew, boys, Bitches Brew.” But by that point he would have been on to something else anyway.
