Bitches Brew

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Bitches Brew
Studio album by Miles Davis

Publication
(s)

March 30, 1970

admission

19. – 21. August 1969

Label (s) Columbia Records

Format (s)

LP , CD , MC , SACD

Genre (s)

Fusion jazz

Title (number)

6th

running time

94:11

occupation
  • Khalil Balakrishna - sitar

production

Teo Macero

Studio (s)

Columbia Recording Studio, New York City

chronology
In a Silent Way
(1969) 		Bitches Brew Jack Johnson
(1971)

Bitches Brew is a studio album by American jazz musician Miles Davis , recorded in August 1969 and released in March 1970 by Columbia Records . The double album became famous because it combined jazz with rock elements even more consistently than the previous album In a Silent Way (1969), which was later referred to as fusion . It is considered to be the initial spark of fusion music and thus has an outstanding position not only in the work of Miles Davis, but also in the development of jazz. The title of the album is a play on words from Witches' Brew (German magic potion, witch brew, devil's stuff) and bitch (German bitch, slut), which sounded quite provocative in 1970.

Prehistory of the album

Bitches Brew is not - as is often wrongly assumed - the first ever jazz rock record. In addition to the previous album In a Silent Way , the LP Emergency! by Tony Williams . Also appeared in 1969, the album Hot Rats by Frank Zappa , often referred to as the first jazz-rock album is considered.

Miles was inspired for this album by the Woodstock Festival . The first session took place just a few days after this. Miles Davis cited James Brown , Sly Stone and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen as the main influences on his music at this time .

Economic aspects

The profound stylistic changes in Davis' musical concept towards the fusion of jazz and rock took place initially only in relation to the work in the recording studio; in his live performances until 1969 Miles preferred the numbers that had been part of his repertoire since the mid-1960s. Clive Davis , the then president of his record company Columbia , was finally able to persuade him to perform in front of a rock audience instead of in small clubs in larger venues such as New York's Fillmore East . On March 6, 1969, there was a bizarre performance there; the program compilation included the band of Miles Davis, the Steve Miller Band and Neil Young's group Crazy Horse . Davis recalled this phase in his autobiography: “(…) jazz music seemed to dry up like grapes on a cane - at least in terms of record sales and live performances. For the first time in a long time I stopped playing in front of full houses. My concerts in Europe were always sold out, but in 1969 we often played in half-empty clubs in the United States. For me that was a sign. ” Ekkehard Jost came to the conclusion in his social history of jazz in the USA that the bosses at Columbia advised the trumpeter to change the style, because his music in recent years with its“ advanced free tonality "Would have reached a" too high degree of complexity "for a large audience.

The music of the album

“Then I thought of something bigger, a whole frame for one piece. I wrote a chord on two beats and the musicians left out two beats, so one, two, three, da-dum, you see? The accent was on the fourth beat. In any case, I explained to the musicians that they had every freedom to play what they heard, only the whole thing had to come as a chord. "

- Miles Davis
John McLaughlin (2008)

Miles Davis and his musicians played in the rehearsals in the manner described; finally, in August 1969, they went to the Columbia studio on New York's 52nd Street for three days. Miles let Teo Macero record all of the material without interrupting the band and asking questions. Miles Davis in his autobiography contradicts the legend that Bitches Brew is the product of Clive Davis and Teo Macero; “We started and I led the musicians - like a conductor. Sometimes I would write a little passage for someone or explain to them that I heard their voice differently and the music grew, got better and better. It was airy and dense at the same time. (...) So this recording session was the development of a creative process, a living composition. ”Nisenson calls it“ the creation of an improvising orchestra through the use of electronics. Bennie Maupin's bass clarinet was not just a solo instrument, but an additional color in the brew, McLaughlin not only played lead guitar , but also played in the ensemble. Collective improvisation had been attempted by many avant-garde musicians , including Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane , but Miles used it in such a way that each instrument contributed and all together created sound kaleidoscopes à la Gil Evans . "Peter Wießmüller wrote:" The music of Bitches Brew is melodically very abstract and chromatically designed, while rhythmically it is based on a dynamic and multi-layered rock beat. The old idea of ​​the chain-like soloist has been finally replaced by a 'new' basic element; Miles' trumpet voice stands alone against the rest of the ensemble. The main axis of musical interaction runs between these two factors. "

The album's first track, the nearly 20-minute Pharaoh's Dance by Joe Zawinul, which made up the entire first page of the album, continues the “flat beat and structure of the concept of In a Silent Way , enriched by the freely designed and dark colored bass clarinet playing "Bennie Maupins; Miles Davis designs his solo by playing a new variant of the call and response principle.

Dave Holland (2008)

Bitches Brew , the longest track on the album at 27 minutes, begins with a well- composed prologue designed as a call and response , while the rest of the track is more like a session. The prologue begins with the “call” of the bass guitar, which the ensemble answers in free collective play. At the beginning of the third exclamation, Miles Davis blows a trumpet tone that swings over the Echoplex up to twenty times at the same height. Wießmüller sees an “almost hypnotic atmosphere” emerge in the two-fold repetition of this passage, which the trumpeter “then weakens again in melodramatic downward phrasing with sustained, floating intonation.” The piece ends again with the hypnotic exclamations of the bass guitar.

Spanish Key , the first track on the third record side, is dominated by a fast, rather rocking beat; Davis uses the title to refer to the tonal basis of his composition, namely a scale found in Spanish folklore. Miles introduces the thematic motif; later the soloists develop their improvisations with a lot of freedom in the individual areas, each linked by Miles Davis' thematic phrasing. Wayne Shorter first plays relaxed lines on the soprano saxophone , followed by funky McLaughlin guitar abbreviations. In the last third of the piece, the ensemble sound condenses into a “percussive ornamentation carried by Bennie Maupin's ghostly bass clarinet solo.” In the subsequent track, “John McLaughlin”, the shortest piece on the album, the trumpeter and Wayne Shorter paused. The piece is driven by an ostinato figure on the electric piano; John McLaughlin puts his solo abbreviations above it.

One of the highlights of the album is Miles Runs the Voodoo Down , with which the fourth page of the album begins. The piece is based on a simple bass riff and a rather slow vamp . “Miles blows a few phrases in middle registers, whose alternation between major and minor reveals his entire blues tradition ,” says his biographer Peter Wießmüller. “Miles' technical skills reach a new, unusual level of maturity here: In the lower registers he conjures up the whole ritual power of his African heritage in lively play with drawn notes, shouts, grunts and screams in long, linear, but also in short, choppy phrasing. “After Miles' solo the musical action relaxes, after McLaughlin's solo the soprano sounds of Wayne Shorter, accompanied by Bennie Maupin's background play on the bass clarinet and the fuzz sounds of Chick Corea, which finally turns into a simultaneous play with the second electric pianist Larry Young flows out.

The album ends with a version of Sanctuary , which Miles Davis has mastered with broad and descending phrasing; then he sets rhythmic accents to which the ensemble reacts with drive .

The use of electrical instruments , the excessive post-processing of the recordings in the studio, the dissolution of the song structures in favor of free improvisation and the long duration of the individual pieces of music characterize the album: According to Davis, the music on Bitches Brew “could never have been written for an orchestra. I only wrote down fragments, but not because I didn't know what I wanted; rather, it was clear to me that my ideas had to grow out of a process and not out of some pre-arranged shit. This session was pure improvisation, and that's what makes jazz so exciting. "

The cover of the album

According to the assessment of musicologists such as Ekkehard Jost, the aesthetic “style change (also) in the poppy-surrealistic record cover” was expressed.

The cover of Mati Klarwein was celebrated euphorically by rock journalists: “There are poppies burning next to foamy surf waves, African royal children embrace each other, and the bald faces of a black and white woman that grow out of the fingers of crossed hands are covered with drops of dew and blood “, Said Siegfried Schmidt-Joos and Barry Graves at the time .

Impact history

Jack DeJohnette 2006

While none of his last albums had sold more than 25,000 copies before, Bitches Brew reached half a million copies within a few months and "caused a chain reaction that was not yet complete in the mid-1970s," according to jazz historian Arrigo Polillo . For Bitches Brew , Davis received a gold record for the first time in the USA for 400,000 albums sold. This makes it his best-selling work at this point in time. In 1971 the album was awarded a Grammy for the best jazz instrumental album .

After precursors such as the Jeremy Steig- led group Jeremy & the Satyrs , Larry Coryell's The Free Spirits and the Gary Burton Quartet with Larry Coryell and the Soft Machine formation in England, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew is considered the first artistic and commercial high point of the fusion movement , even if the concept of a dense orchestral, spontaneous collective playing was not later adopted by many fusion musicians. The impact the album had on the music world after 1970 is underscored by a quote from the guitarist Carlos Santana , quoted by Martin Kunzler , who feels the music "as if a year in New York were compressed to 25 minutes!"

Wayne Shorter took the next step in new musical directions from the crowd of musicians involved with his albums Super Nova and Odyssey of Iska ; In 1970/71 he founded the Weather Report formation with Joe Zawinul and Miroslav Vitouš ; Herbie Hancock recorded the album Crossings in 1972 , in which he interwoven electronic instruments and wind instruments. McLaughlin founded the Mahavishnu Orchestra in 1970 and Jack DeJohnette founded the Compost formation .

Rating of the album

source rating
Allmusic
Pitchfork Media
All about jazz
The Guardian
Laut.de
Jazzwise
Billy Cobham 1974

Eric Nisenson quotes the perplexity of the established jazz critics at the time; The Down Beat gave the album five stars but found it difficult to describe this new music. In 1970, it won both Down Beat's Readers and Critics Polls for Record of the Year. The jazz magazine critic wrote at the time: “The music in this double album is, to put it mildly, a captivating experience. But when electronic effects play a big role, so dominated the art ( sic .) And not any antics, and the music dominates everything "Even the music journalist Ralph J. Gleason came at the beginning of his - strikingly vague held - liner notes to the sobering observation: “There is so much to say about this music. I don't intend to explain much because that's stupid, the music speaks for itself ... "

Ekkehard Jost came to a critical assessment in the early 1980s: “Instead of spontaneously occurring tempo changes and polyrhythmic superimpositions, as were typical for previous Davis recordings, there is a stereotypically sustained 8/8 beat that is off-beat The accents used are enlivened, but never endangered. Free modality with changing reference tones is replaced by sticking to a scale whose harmonic interpretation is often limited to one chord. Melodic development is reduced to clichéd motifs with a signal character. ” Joachim-Ernst Berendt, however, refutes the accusation of some critics such as Jost that Davis only joined a fashionable trend in 1969/70 with Bitches Brew , in view of the caution and caution with which the trumpet player from 1967 carried out the transition from "acoustic" to "electric jazz".

Critics Richard Cook and Brian Morton, on the other hand, call Bitches Brew “one of the most remarkable creative statements of the last 50 years, in every form. At the same time it is profoundly incomplete; it's a gigantic torso of bursting, noisy music that completely refuses to provide a formal solution. ”Cook / Morton allude to the anecdotes surrounding the conflict-free collaboration between Teo Macero and Davis after the sessions when they wrote the material put together for the present album. In view of the now complete edition The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, Cook and Morton underline the enormous achievement of Teo Macero as producer of the present album (“an intuitive genius”).

Davis in Rio de Janeiro (1974)

Even Ian Carr raises Bitches Brew as one of the most important albums in Davis' extensive discography forth; Carr describes it in the Jazz - Rough Guide as a "stormy, massive album; the large ensemble bucks and rises like a living being under Miles' direction. The mood is often gloomy and seething, and an atmosphere of barely suppressed passion runs through the sessions. (…) More important to Bitches Brew is the process of creating the music than the end product. However, even with its weaknesses, it is a heroic, extremely exciting document. "

The British trumpeter Dylan Jones compared the album for GQ - Gentlemen's Quarterly in 2020 with the Davis classic Kind of Blue , which in the words of music critic Richard Williams was the "sound of isolation"; on the other hand, Bitches Brew , although it is now 50 years old, "is still as challenging as ever - the sound of chaos." Because Bitches Brew is by no means a perfect album. Davis himself compared the album to a long jam session “where the only real goal was to fly the freak flag. The results were alternately chaotic and spacey, frenetic and funky. Perhaps the album's most redeeming legacy is its influence, because while Miles' passion and intensity can be heard throughout the record, the album's sludge and inaccuracy wasn't the kind of thing to repeat on a regular basis. ” Bitches Brew stands out a “strange mixture of complexity and sloppiness” which makes it both a forbidden thing “and difficult to repeat. Which for many was the worst of both worlds. As one reviewer said, the making process was more important than the end product. It may have sounded like the future, but it may not have been the kind of future we're all looking forward to. "

Reinhard Kager says in retrospect of the Arte series “50 Century Recordings of Jazz” on the album: “As much as the sound and rhythm of Bitches Brew are shaped by rock music, the groundbreaking album cannot be identified with it. Thanks to their open gesture, their surprising thematic and harmonic twists and their often highly complex polyrhythms, Bitches Brew's pieces are miles away from commercial pop and much closer to jazz than traditionalists wanted to perceive in the early 1970s. "

"Since then, various labels have been coined for the music of Miles Davis in the 1970s: Whether rock jazz or jazz rock, whether fusion jazz or electric jazz - with Bitches Brew and the following albums that are still far more harmonious than" Live at Fillmore East "and Live Evil “Miles Davis succeeded in making jazz prick up its ears for other creative currents of his time. And with that he laid the foundation for the stylistic openness and diversity that is still so important for improvised music today. "

- Reinhard Kager

The music magazine Jazzwise ranks the album in the selection of 100 Jazz Albums That Shook the World in 9th place. Stuart Nicholson wrote:

"Yes, there had been albums before Bitches Brew that did just that, but Miles Davis' position in the jazz world sanctioned the union between two seemingly opposed bedfellows. With Bitches Brew the jazz-rock message was handed down from the mount on tablets of stone. From the title track with Davis, Shorter and Maupin emerging from the matrix of the mix before being swallowed up by this swirling electrical brew, to 'Miles Runs the Voodoo Down' with the trumpeter on the heels of Hendrix, the sound of jazz was changed forever. "

- Stuart Nicholson

The music magazine Rolling Stone selected the album in 2013 in its list The 100 best jazz albums at number 12. It also ranks 95th of the 500 best albums of all time . The magazine Time took Bitches Brew on the compilation of the 100 most important albums.

Title of the original album

Wayne Shorter
  1. Pharaoh's Dance (Joe Zawinul) (19:58)
  2. Bitches Brew (Miles Davis) (27:00)
  3. Spanish Key (Miles Davis) (17:27)
  4. John McLaughlin (Miles Davis) (4:24)
  5. Miles Runs The Voodoo Down (Miles Davis) (14:02)
  6. Sanctuary (Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis) (10:54)

Depending on the release of the album, the title "Feio" is added.

"The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions" - Other titles

Joe Zawinul
The Zawinul Syndicate , Freiburg , 2007

In 1998 The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions were published, which contain 14 other recordings in addition to the original pieces, which have been reworked. The pieces were recorded on just three days in August 1969 and in two other sessions in November 1969, January and February 1970.

  • Great Expectations
  • Orange Lady
  • Yaphet
  • Corrado
  • Treverse
  • The Big Green Serpent
  • The Little Blue Frog (old)
  • The Little Blue Frog (mst)
  • Lonely Fire
  • Guinnevere
  • Feio
  • Double image
  • Recollections
  • Take It Or Leave It
  • Double image

literature

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Following the recordings for In a Silent Way, he founded the formation Lifetime with John McLaughlin and Larry Young , whose first record Emergency was recorded at the end of May 1969 and influenced Bitches Brew in its sound aesthetic . Trevor MacLaren: review of the record
  2. ↑ on this, the remarks under Miles Davis # The development towards Bitches Brew 1968-1970
  3. ↑ The recordings from the Fillmore East were released on Columbia as a double CD in the early 1970s ( Live at the Fillmore East, March 6 1970: It's About that Time , C2K 85191); Davis played with Shorter, Corea, Holland, DeJohnette and Airto Moreira a program of old tracks like Directions as well as new numbers like "Bitches Brew" and "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down".
  4. ^ Nisenson, p. 166.
  5. ↑ Quoted from M. Davis, p. 401.
  6. ↑ Jost, p. 232, who here cites Franz Kerschbaumer's dissertation .
  7. ↑ Quoted from Miles Davis, p. 403.
  8. ↑ Quoted from M. Davis, p. 404.
  9. ↑ Quoted from Nisenson, p. 167 f.
  10. ↑ a b c d e Wießmüller, p. 156.
  11. ↑ Note: What is meant here is the exclusive play on the cymbals at the beginning of the piece .
  12. ↑ Quoted from Wießmüller, p. 157.
  13. ↑ Wießmüller, p. 157 f.
  14. ↑ The first version of the title was recorded by Davis with Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams and George Benson in February 1968 together with Side Car ; the title then appeared in 1979 on the compilation Circle in the Round .
  15. ↑ Quoted from Miles Davis, p. 405.
  16. ↑ Quoted from Jost, p. 232; Ekkehard Jost, who was critical of the album, sees a "compared to the instrumental effort (...) a remarkable reduction in musical resources."
  17. ^ Cit. Schmidt-Joos / Graves, p. 110.
  18. ↑ Polillo, p. 594.
  19. ^ JE Berendt: Das Jazzbuch , 1975 edition, chapter Electric Jazz .
  20. ↑ Peter Niklas Wilson, p. 344.
  21. ↑ Quoted from M. Kunzler, p. 281.
  22. ↑ Review by Thom Jurek (1970 album) on Allmusic.com (accessed September 11, 2017)
  23. ↑ Review by Mark Richardson (2010 Legacy Edition) on pitchfork.com (accessed September 11, 2017)
  24. ↑ Review by Doug Collette (2010 Anniversary Edition) on allaboutjazz.com (accessed September 11, 2017)
  25. ↑ Review by John Fordham (2010 Anniversary Edition) on theguardian.com (accessed May 20, 2018)
  26. ↑ Review by Ulf Kubanke (2010 Anniversary Edition) on laut.de (accessed on September 11, 2017)
  27. ↑ Review by Stuart Nicholson (2010 Anniversary Edition) on jazzwisemagazine.com (accessed May 20, 2018)
  28. ↑ Quoted from E. Nisenson, p. 168.
  29. ^ "There is so much to say about this music. I don't mean so much to explain about it because that's stupid, the music speaks for itself (...) "according to Ralph J. Gleason, original liner notes. The consistent lower case in the original text has been adopted.
  30. ↑ E. Jost, p. 233. Jost sees Columbia’s endeavors to standardize Miles Davis’s music as a feature of industrial mass culture. Jost regards it as indicative that in the aftermath of Bitches Brew , Columbia of all places sponsored the numerous jazz rock bands such as Weather Report or John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra .
  31. ↑ Berendt / Huesmann, p. 145.
  32. ↑ Quoted from Cook & Morton, 6th edition. S., 379 f.
  33. ↑ Quoted from Ian Carr, p. 161.
  34. ^ A b c Dylan Jones: Why Miles Davis' Bitches Brew is such an extraordinary record. GQ - Gentlemen's Quarterly 2020, accessed May 10, 2020 .
  35. ↑ Quotation from Kager Arte - 50 recordings of the century of jazz ( Memento from February 28, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  36. ^ The 100 Jazz Albums That Shook The World
  37. ↑ Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Jazz Albums . Retrieved November 16, 2016.
  38. ↑ 500 Greatest Albums of All Time on rollingstone.com (accessed May 20, 2018)
  39. ↑ All-TIME 100 Albums on time.com (accessed May 20, 2018)
  40. ↑ The Edition u. a. by Seth Rothstein .
  41. ^ Review of the album ( Memento from May 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) at All About Jazz, 2011