Bitches Brew: 50 years on and still intoxicating
• Jazz trumpeter and band leader Miles Davis’s musical gift for the ages is as controversial and brilliant today as it was on its release half a century ago
It’s crazy. It’s profound. It’s irritating. It’s hypnotising. It’s chaotically harmonious. And yes, let’s just say it in today’s language: simply an “unmesswithable” music album.
We’re talking about Miles Davis’s album Bitches Brew. It is still as controversial today as it was when it first hit the airwaves in March 1970 —
which makes it 50 years ago this month.
There are at least three elements that made Bitches Brew a remarkable work of art. First, there is the cover: it’ sa loud, brash painting of a naked black couple looking out at the ocean — something that would have shaken the establishment back in 1970. The painter is Mati Klarwein.
Then there is the title. Note, there’s no apostrophe in bitches. The brew in the title becomes a verb, not a noun. So the bitches are brewing something. But what are they brewing? The answer to that question brings us to the third element in the album: the music itself.
Miles Davis had a successful career as a jazz trumpeter dating back to the late 1940s when, as a student at Juilliard school of music, he did his apprenticeship in a band led by alto saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker.
While with Parker, he was at the centre of the new jazz sound called bebop. Hungry, but also a quick learner Miles developed his own voice and, at the age of 23, left to launch a solo career.
It was then that he released his ground-breaking Birth of the Cool. Through this album, he brought back the big-band orchestral sound that was the antidote to the frenetic sound of bebop. Most bands soon dropped bebop in preference of this new cool sound.
But by the late 1950s, clubs were no longer interested in booking big bands — it was costly. So Miles, an artist and a business-person, cut back on the huge orchestral band he had formed for Birth of the Cool.
Perhaps it’s putting it crudely to say he was driven by commercial considerations, but he was smart enough to be at the head of the pack by repackaging his sound into a small band.
His quintet of the mid-1950s featured John Coltrane on saxophone, Philly Joe Jones on drums, Paul Chambers on bass, Red Garland on piano and Miles on trumpet. After this, all of a sudden everyone was forming quintets.
Then there was Kind of Blue,
the seminal 1959 album that saw Miles doing modal jazz. You’ve probably heard All Blues,
one of the songs from the album. Melodic, joyful, and hummable it has been used in a number of commercials and movies including In the Line of Fire, featuring Clint Eastwood.
Again Miles’s favourite tenor player Coltrane was in the band that recorded Kind of Blue,
alongside Cannonball Adderley.
When Trane moved on to pursue his own solo career, Miles launched another quintet, this time featuring Herbie Hancock on piano, Wayne Shorter saxophone, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums. This is the band that gave us such albums as Filles de Kilimanjaro.
However, by 1968, the quintet was dissolving. Band members were not happy with the direction Miles was heading. He was experimenting with electric sounds, and bassist Ron Carter was not happy. Indeed on Filles de Kilimanjaro
he plays electric bass, at Miles’s insistence. After this, it was byebye Miles.
Miles was in his forties now. The Beatles, as part of what came to be called the British Invasion of America, had changed musical tastes. The emergence of Motown had put new black musicians in the limelight, ahead of Miles, who had been the face of black music for a while. The dance floors rocked to the sounds of James Brown, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Sly Stone, and so on. Miles was nervous. He wanted change. He wanted his name back at the top.
With the release of yet another orchestral experimentation called Sketches of Spain in 1967, he realised he’d made inroads into the white audience. He wanted to capture more white listeners with future releases.
His biographer Quincy Troupe writes in the liner notes to the trumpeter’s Bitches Brew
box set: “During the 1960s, Miles had listened to, and absorbed many different musical styles, and in 1969, he regurgitated them back to us as
Bitches Brew.”
In 1968 Miles met and married colourful R&B singer Betty Mabry who was fashionable and moved in the right circles. She introduced Miles to Jimi Hendrix. The two agreed to collaborate, but Hendrix messed it up by dying.
In addition to influencing Miles’s musical direction, his new wife even changed his wardrobe. For a long time, he had been performing in suits. But after meeting Betty, he started rocking kaleidoscopic shirts, screamingly bright pants, wild chiffons around his neck and platform shoes. And, yes, funky hairstyles.
On August 19, 1969, Miles with his band of 11 musicians, producer Teo Macero and engineer Stan Tonkel converged on Columbia Studio B for the first day of recordings. Over the next two days, they would record what would result in the double-album called
Bitches Brew.
Miles didn’t provide his musicians with the complete score. He’d simply give them a rough sketch of what it was that he wanted them to play. The rest was improvisation.
He would later explain in his autobiography: “I would direct, like a conductor, once we started to play, and I would either write down some music for somebody or would tell him to play different things I was hearing, as the music was growing, coming together.”
What was unusual about the band was that it had two drummers, two bass players, two keyboard players — not just any keyboards, but Fender Rhodes. Yes, Miles had used Fender Rhodes for both Filles de Kilimanjaro and In A Silent Way — but in a tentative, walking on eggshells way, as critics said.
On Bitches Brew he was unapologetically electric.
It was also the first time the bass clarinet was used in a jazz record. Overall, the sound was loud, brash and unconventional. It didn’t fit any existing musical category. There were strains of rock — influenced by newfound friend Jimi Hendrix; there were smidgens of classical music, there were intimations of modal jazz, there were lots of African modal inclinations. Which is to say, anyone listening to the album with an open mind is able to recognise something familiar in the music. It is at the confluence of so many cultures.
Drummer Lenny White, who was 19 when he was roped in for the recording sessions, said in an interview with music scholar Paul Tingen: “Bitches Brew was like a big pot and Miles was the sorcerer. He was hanging over it, saying, ‘I’m going to add a dash of Jack DeJohnette, and a little bit of John McLaughlin, and then I’m going to add a pinch of Lenny White. And here’s a teaspoonful of Bennie Maupin playing bass clarinet.’
“He made that work. He got people together who he thought would make an interesting combination. Harvey Brooks (who played electric bass) said he didn’t know why he got the call, but he made an interesting pairing with Dave Holland on acoustic bass. It was a big, controlled experiment, and Miles had vision that came true.”
Half the time, the musicians didn’t even know if what they were doing was a rehearsal, or if it was the real deal being captured on tape. Even engineers were confounded. During the recording of the track called Corrado, an engineer is heard asking, “OK, is this going to be part two?”
To which the shorttempered Miles retorts in his raspy voice: “It’s gonna be part NOW! What the devil does it matter what part?”
In the middle of the title track, you sense that the band is floundering, it’s about to drown, when Miles calls out “John!”. Then guitarist John McLaughlin launches into a wailing solo. The band comes jogging breathlessly after him. Crazy stuff.
When composers of classical music finish writing a song, that marks the end of the song. With jazz, even if the score is complete, the song is never complete. Every time it is performed it is imbued with a new life. That’s why jazz musicians hardly ever have sheet music at the band stand. It’s always improvisation. And Bitches Brew is the epitome of improvisation.
Not only does Miles do some deft footwork conducting the band, but he also plays his heart out. After the recording, more work took place in postproduction. Teo Macero would sometimes take two different pieces and splice them together into one song.
Joe Zawinul, who played one of the keyboards on this recording, was sitting at some offices one day when he heard this piece of music that he couldn’t relate to anything he’d heard before. So he asked the woman receptionist: “Who the hell is this?” And she replied, “It’s that Bitches Brew thing.” And Zawinul remembers thinking, damn, that’s great! Never before had the postproduction process played such a crucial role in a record.
In his autobiography, Miles records that the album’s title was originally “Witches’ Brew” (after Shakespeare), but his wife Betty said that title was lame. They needed something bold, something with an attitude. So, she told him to change it to Bitches Brew. And, it worked, oh, did it work!
In today’s world, where profanity is the order of the day in popular music, that title might sound blasé. But back in 1970, it made people gasp, raise their eyebrows. No-one could ignore the record. Jazz traditionalists and some old fans hated it with a passion. But Miles had changed the face of jazz once again. Bitches Brew marked the birth of jazz-rock fusion.
The album had crossover appeal, immediately gaining Miles hordes of new white fans who were drawn to his sound by the psychedelic rock riffs in this album.
Miles’s records generally sold 60,000 copies, which was a good figure for a jazz musician. But Bitches Brew sold 400,000 in its first year. It won him a Grammy award, best jazz performance, soloist with large group category.
The original liner notes to the album, written by Ralph J Gleason might have sounded over the top at the time: “This music will change the world.”
But years later these words proved to have been prescient. With the release of Bitches Brew on March 30, 1970, Miles was back at the top again. The release immediately brought huge changes in the music world, with jazz-orientated music back in favour.
Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters album sold 1-million records in 1974. George Benson’s 1976 release of Breezin’ had sold nearly 3-million copies by 1978. Both Hancock and Benson worked with Miles during his “electric years”.
In 1974, Downbeat magazine, the “bible” of popular music, voted Miles the most influential contemporary musician —
not just an influential jazz musician, but contemporary musician full-stop.
In 50 years Bitches Brew has lodged itself in the popular imagination through books, beverages and clothing lines which bear that name. The album has sold millions over the years.
In 2003 Rolling Stone listed it among the 500 greatest albums. It was also listed in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Pianist Nduduzo Makhathini, head of music at Fort Hare University, and a prolific bandleader and the first South African musician to be signed by the US-based jazz label Blue Note is one of those contemporary musicians grateful for the work Miles did for music in general, and jazz in particular.
Says Makhathini: “The lesson from Bitches Brew is that there is a need for a sort of openness in terms of how we walk into the future. We have to be looking beyond the limitations of what yesterday looks like.”
THE ALBUM’S TITLE WAS ORIGINALLY ‘WITCHES’ BREW’ (AFTER SHAKESPEARE), BUT HIS WIFE SAID THAT TITLE WAS LAME
Fred Khumalo is the author of the award-winning novel Bitches’ Brew, in addition to 10 other books