40th Anniversary of Bitches Brew
I felt in love with Bitches Brew even before I started getting into Miles Davis’s electric music. Something about the double album that pulls me in every time I listen to it. I still struggle to define what that is despite the countless number of time I had spent with it. When it comes to experiencing the music, all I can do is letting the “Bitches Brew” me and Miles mind-fucks me. Miles knows damn well how to fuck with your mind because he doesn’t just give it straight to your ears. On Bitches Brew in particular, you have to wait patiently to hear Miles. He only plays when he has something to say and when he does he blows your fucking mind. There is no escape route when “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down.”
In celebrating the 40th anniversary of its release, I would like to share my favorite passage from Greg Tate’s “The Electric Miles Part 1” discussing Bitches Brew. Tate writes:
On musical terms though, Bitches Brew is an orchestral marvel because it fuses James Brown’s antiphonal riffing against a metaphoric bass drone with Sly’s minimalist polyrhythmic melodies and electronic sounds. Bitches Brew can also be heard as a devilishly Milesish takeoff on John Coltrane’s spiritual energy music and that music’s saxaphone, percussion, and bass batteries, modal improvs, tone clusters, and yearnings, thus making the double-set rank as an act of comic blasphemy with Richard Pryor’s Preacher routines or with certain African genesis myths in playing prankster with God’s tongue by dragging the heavens back into the province of the vernacular—namely the streets—and the language of the streets, the dozens, sermons made scatologies which find their musical parallel in what funk did to gospel. The streets though aren’t just a funky run of avenues where mom-and-pop stores front for numbers runners and storefront churches pimp for jackleg preachers. They’re also a place of mystery and romance, and given that Miles knows them and their music inside out, it’s not surprising that the melodies on Bitches Brew croon, sway, and reveal themselves like those of such balladeers as Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, and Stevie Wonder—all of those gorgeous melodies and harmonies have yet to overcome the precious corn of Tin Pan Alley in the ears of other improvising composers—excepting Zawinul, Cecil Taylor, and Bennie Maupin, whose overlooked The Jewel in the Lotus ranks beside Miles’s Great Expectations, Weather Report’s Mysterious Traveller, and Cecil’s Solo in channeling the charm of exotic musics into forms which are as tightly knit, free-flowing, and fetchsome as Stevie’s, Smokey’s, Curtis’s, and Marvin’s vocal arrangements.