Miles Davis – Bitches Brew (40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) [Columbia]
5/5
By: Tim Dellow
Bitches Brew is inarguably one of the most important recordings of music ever. And as such, a review of such an important text, on which entire books have been written is a daunting task: how does one encapsulate the personal and historical contexts of this piece, and indeed the emotive power of the music itself within a short article?
The answer, I fear, is that one doesn’t, one simply attempts to outline signposts of interest so that existing fans can re-engage and re-interpret and those lucky enough to have the thrill of feeling this glorious noise for the first time ahead of them, be directed and inspired to listen and experience it.
There are a million angles to take as to why Columbia deigns it necessary to prioritise a re-release of this record 40 years after its release, and the first that spring to mind is historical import.
In 1969 Jazz was hitting some flat notes, or perhaps, not enough flat notes – starting to look inwards and return to safer aesthetic realms. With Bitches Brew, Miles led a band a real band rather than a collection of random session musicians, to embrace modern rock, smashing entirely pretentious barriers restricting the development of popular music. Turned on to Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gaye by his then wife Betty Davis, and encouraged by studio bosses to deliver “a commercial hit” Miles augmented his group “The Miles Davis Quintet” with a number of rhythmic players and hit the studio with Teo Macero producing a masterpiece.
I recall an interview in which Brian Eno bemoaned modern classical musicians (including his favourite Steve Reich) for recording in a flatly accurate fashion, rather than embracing the possibilities of a modern studio. In this work, Miles and Teo pioneered the studio as an instrument. The musical genius kept in its pure verité style, but Teo undertaking an extensive editing process (‘Pharaoh’s Dance’ alone requiring 19 edits, and all on real tape cuts) along with pioneering use of reverb chambers, echoes and delays and looping to create a 6 track double 12” set.
It’s hard to imagine the cultural impact of this piece at the time. Miles Davis had already revolutionised Jazz twice with The Birth of Cool and A Kind of Blue (Dr.Dre, if you’re reading this, there are parallels in what you’ve done for Hip Hop, but maybe get a move on with your Bitches Brew please…) and crafted brilliant albums such as Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain and Miles in The Sky which today seems like a potential sketch for Bitches Brew with its rudimentary tape editing and focussing of larger pieces.
Following directly on from the brilliantly acclaimed In a Silent Way, those prophets of what Miles could achieve must have sounded like incoherent babblers at the time; one critic Larry Kart writing of a performance the Quintet at the Plugged Nickel, Chicago that “one aspect of Jazz has been brought to a degree of ripeness that has few parallels in the history of music”. This musical “ripeness” was clear to him as a visionary, and would only create the evolutionary leap within the studio in the sessions for this classic album, but even the label were unsure, only issuing an official recording of that concert edited down for the Japanese market in 1976 instantly making it a classic bootleg for the rest of the world until its full release in 1995.
However, you can understand the label’s fears, Miles was, at the time a hard drug addict who was unreliable and capable of wild quality swings. However, from sewing these seeds, Miles transcended his human failings and a worldwide lament at the death of the 60s to create a piece that exists outside of time, as an eternal spark of brilliance.
As the original liner notes of the record suggest “I started to ask Teo how the horn echo was made and then I thought how silly what difference does it make?” and indeed, the first time that horn hits you with the rally on the song ‘Bitches Brew’ before melting into an offset sea of reverb YOU WILL NOT GIVE A SHIT. You’ll be swirling in a witch’s pot of blooded gumbo, rolling your eyes back into your skull and smelling the sweet insides of your own cranium as you entropy into a forgiving little death.
This music is bigger than the people that made it, it’s unreal to believe that such a thing ever came from humans at all, and that’s how it should be enjoyed – with a childlike sense of wonderment and over sensory explosion that will have you shivering all over in a kind of post coital warmth, intensified by a fear and confusion, a thrilling danger absent from most modern music.
Naturally, though while this thrilling material remains, it would be seen as improper to let it exist by itself as a perfect piece, and therefore the re-issues are combined with bonus material of varying quality which will certainly excite the collectors and is worthy of dissection.
The most interesting are the ‘45 Jukebox single versions of ‘Miles Runs The Voodoo Down’ and ‘Spanish Key’ which demonstrate Teo’s insane production skills as he deftly edits down hours of edits not only to their 15min+ album versions, but to focussed, memorable and tuneful single versions of under 3 minutes apiece. These long out of print, extortionately priced collectables are thrilling demonstrations of how focus in even the freest of musical styles can bear fruits if correctly applied, and are complimented with equal single edits of ‘Great Expectations’ and ‘Little Blue Frog’ – themselves rarities from around 1965 which appeared in full versions on the 1974 outtakes collection Big Fun (in fact, if we’re being pedantic, the latter only on the re-issue of that collection).
Aside from this are some alternate takes of ‘Spanish Key’ and ‘John McLaughlin’ for the die-hards and the obligatory re-master of the original album, a practice which does reveal some depth of field back to back with the last release of the record, but suffers slightly from a compressed tendency for all modern mastering engineers to want to make a record AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE which inevitably compromises some of the dynamics of the original and, following a full “brighter” remix of the album and “20-Bit Digital Remaster” only a few years back, seems a trifle unnecessary.
The third disk, in the Deluxe version only (the Legacy edition is “just” the two CDS) is a previously unissued concert of the full septet line up from Tanglewood in August 1970. With the availability of brilliant recordings of similar line ups that all open with Directions (I’m counting the 2xcd set Live at The Fillmore East (March 7, 1970) It’s About That Time, the 2xcd set Black Beauty – Miles Davis At Fillmore West, the 2xcd set At Fillmore and the more concise Isle of Wight as well as countless bootlegs) one could question how essential it is, or what new light it sheds on the recording. The answer to the former is moot but for the latter, or in fact if you haven’t heard the album outside of its studio version, is integral as it demonstrates the sheer genius of the band “stripped bare” playing in an exhilaratingly vital fashion to rapturous effect – and without the studio trickery a demonstration that the actual album itself would have still been an important piece if it were recorded with all of the flourishes of Steve Albini, or in fact, a couple of radio mikes.
This edition also includes a 5000 word booklet by Greg Tate which was unavailable to review, and a DVD with another unissued performance in Copenhagen just before he would have taken these experimental tunes to a rock audience.
Frustratingly, neither of these supposedly complete works of the period include the track ‘Feio’. Recorded in January 1970, it’s a bluesy loop-centric stone-out, which has aged exceptionally, yet could not prepare you for the cult classic studio follow up (and a personal favourite) ‘A Tribute to Jack Johnson’, which you can get on the cheap £5 version of Bitches Brew most commonly in issue.
Altogether, whether you plump for either of these legacy editions, or a second hand version of the original recordings, this exceptional music will remain with you, in your heart and soul for your life, and through its mystic nature, through eternity. A perfect gift from a higher plane.
01 - Spanish Key - Miles Davis from Bitches Brew by almax
Artists in this article: Miles Davis
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