No. 94: Bitches Brew

Band: Miles Davis
Album: Bitches Brew
Why Rolling Stone gets it right: The most rock-ish of all Miles' records, "Bitches Brew" (another double!) has a grand total of seven tracks -- six on the original vinyl. It's the beginning of what is now called fusion and it features some fantastic playing from Miles' band. Organ, guitar, etc. It's all amazing and outside the realm of "normal" (whatever that means) jazz.
Why Rolling Stone gets it wrong: I send you back to my piece on "Kind of Blue." I'm just not sure jazz belongs here completely.
Best song: "John McLaughlin" features some amazing guitar work.
Worst song: "Bitches Brew" is 27 minute long and any song that long shouldn't be that long.
Is it awesome?: I don't know. I was listening to it today and I enjoyed it.

Because most jazz is over my head, so I'll turn this over to my friend (and co-blogger at our baseball site) Alex Taft. He was my jazz director in college.

(Full disclosure: I asked him to make it quick, but he did not do that. Blame him.)

Bitches Brew is one of the first rock-jazz fusion albums, and is almost certainly the most influential rock-jazz fusion album ever. The album probably did more to spark the rock-jazz fusion wave of the 1970's and 1980's than any other album, which featured the best work of artists such as Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea (one of three keyboardists featured on the album), and Weather Report, among others.

The instrumentation on "Bitches Brew" was very unique, as it was more like a rock band than that of a jazz band. Rocky drum beats, electric guitars, distorted basses, electric pianos (in some cases two or three electric pianos), and multiple percussionists (sometimes two full drum sets in addition to auxiliary percussion like congas) were prominently featured. A bass clarinet and a soprano sax (played by jazz great Wayne Shorter) are the only other winds featured alongside Davis, and they are almost entirely absent from some charts, including "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down." While the vamps and beats were heavily influenced by rock, the melodies are what give this album its true fusion feel - Davis' improvisational melodies carry a dissonant, mysterious, and distinctly avante-garde-jazz-y tone throughout the whole album. The album's improvisational melodic method was hugely influenced by the John Coltrane "A Love Supreme" tradition, integrating free jazz-style "horizontal" rather than "vertical" cord changes - i.e., jams and cord changes improvised and decided on the fly rather than predetermined in a prewritten chart.

Not unlike what Jimi Hendrix was doing at the time with his guitar, Miles Davis began experimenting with different effects on his horn on "Bitches Brew," hooking up echo and reverb pedals to his horn (especially on "Spanish Key"), which created sounds the likes of which had never been heard before in recorded jazz. These effects in particular set the stage for Davis' other groundbreaking jazz-funk fusion albums that followed "Bitches Brew," 1970's "Live Evil," and 1972's "On the Corner," both of which heavily feature Davis using a wah pedal with his trumpet. Considering how the album drastically changed the Davis' style and voice for the rest of his career, it is no wonder that "Bitches Brew" is widely considered Davis' most revolutionary (though not nearly his most important) album.

So, there you have it. Taft likes it.