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Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book Forthcoming in the series:

Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts Psychocandy by Paula Mejia Hi, How Are You by Benjamin Shapiro Me Out by Jovana Babovic´ Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork Donny Hathaway Live by Emily Lordi The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod

and many more … Bitches Brew

George Grella, Jr.

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK

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Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2015

© George Grella, Jr., 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: PB: 978-1-6289-2943-0 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2944-7 ePub: 978-1-6289-2945-4

1 Series: 33 3

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk, NR21 8NN Track Listing

LP 1, Side 1 “Pharaoh’s Dance” (20:07) LP 1, Side 2 “Bitches Brew” (27:00) LP 2, Side 1 “Spanish Key” (17:30) “John McLaughlin” (4:23) LP 2, Side 2 “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” (14:03) “Sanctuary” (10:54)

To Rashid, who got it all started, to Chris, Keely, and Ben, who saw me through the years, to Keif (still the best writer in the family) and the Pea for making everything matter, to Norman, for his impossible amount of help, to Dad, who set the example, and to Mom, who never got to see it, and would have been proud.

Contents

Introduction xi

Miles Davis Doesn’t Care What You Think 1 Directions in Music by 10 Gramophone, , Razor Blade 38 Bitches Brew, CS 9995 64 Bitches Brew, CS 9996 78 It’s About That Time 94

Selected & Annotated Bitches Brew Discography 110 Selected Bibliography 118 Notes 120

• ix •

Introduction

Imagine without Miles Davis. Take away all the records he made or played on—the great quintets, the collaborations with Gil Evans, playing trumpet with Charlie “Bird” Parker; , Relaxin’, Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants, Milestones, , and More, Porgy and Bess, , E.S.P., Nefertiti, , Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, Live-Evil, , the live sets from the Blackhawk and the Plugged Nickel, even Aura—and the musical experience of the twentieth century would be deeply impoverished. Not only would you never have the fulfilling pleasure of those records, but the course of jazz, rock, and pop music would have been extraordinarily different. As Miles once said, “I have to change, it’s like a curse,”1 and if that was an exaggeration, it was only a slight one. Miles Dewey Davis III, teenager bebopper, became “Miles,” the iconoclast and icon, birthing cool jazz, founding modal jazz and jazz-rock fusion—and in between the last two styles, the creator of the fundamental template for the direction of post-avant-garde modern jazz, and even ambient music. While those terms can misdirect

• xi • BITCHES BREW attention from the actual qualities and importance of the music he made, they do give a useful shorthand for the number of his transformations; and with each, he led other musicians, and music as a whole, into new worlds. No style of art can remain static: irrelevance is just as much a risk as the inevitable decadence that comes from a style developing to its last measure. But fans, including critics, of particular movements of artists, tend to want what they love to stay the same, the regression is not to the mean but to an Edenic past that never actually existed. This is reinforced by the path of the vast majority of artists, including the greatest ones: setting out on a stylistic path and honing and refining it through the years. Change in styles tends to be seen as apostasy. It is a uniquely twentieth-century phenomenon for an artist to be a major practitioner of one style and concept in his particular medium, then to create a new style that changes the history and direction of that medium, then do it yet again, and, even more, to lead each new style, to create enduring, exemplary masterpieces in it. Picasso did it. Stravinsky did it. Miles did it. His achievement as an artist is equal in stature to theirs, the only real impediment to acknowledging this has been that Miles’s medium, jazz, was for decades seen as low-class, pedes- trian, vulgar in all the wrong ways by the cultural powers-that-be. Miles cared about that, but also didn’t give a shit, because, like Picasso and Stravinsky, his art reached a broad audience, one far outside that typical of his genre. But then, his genre was music. Modern painting, classical music and jazz are actually impossible to imagine without Picasso, Stravinsky or Miles. No painter had to work with cubism, no composer

• xii • Introduction had to write in the neo-classical style, no jazz musician had to abandon bebop or hard bop for modal harmonies. But cubism, neo-classicism and modal jazz were all in the vanguard of their respective mediums: keeping their traditions moving forward, adding to the accumulation of knowledge, and the continued vitality and relevance that was the direct effect of these three artists was a boon to every other painter, composer and musician around them. Another commonality for these three men was that they found their ideas and made their breakthroughs not via theory but praxis, through the constant discipline and effort of paring away the superfluous to discover their own purest sense of beauty. As intelligently as each could express their artistic values, none were philosophers or conceptualists. They were working artists, selling and gigging. Stravinsky described a process that was true for each, eschewing the idea of inspiration and instead explaining that being a composer meant spending the time and energy writing music. Through that very process of work, he not only honed his craft, but ended up producing music he never intended to write, discov- ering its value and using it to create masterpieces, all of which was the residue of the design of work. It is also easy to discern consistent techniques and aesthetic values through their careers, through each change in style: a basic love of figurative painting for Picasso, powerful rhythms and short, repetitive units for Stravinsky, linear development and a constant search for the simplest means possible for Miles. The history and cultural position of jazz, however, is entirely different than that of painting and classical

• xiii • BITCHES BREW music. It was born in the twentieth century, built its own traditions on the fly, and came of age as a modern art along with Modernism. Jazz also began and thrived as an essentially commercial genre—there was an art and an artistry to it, and it has always demanded extraordinary musicianship, but it worked by entertaining the public and by making them dance, and for good or ill, the music was made in dance halls, restaurants, speakeasies and whore houses—that underwent a startling metamor- phosis into an art music, as abstract in form, structure and intention as any string quartet by Haydn. Nothing else has achieved this. There are advantages and disadvantages to that historical/cultural position. One advantage is that Miles, like other jazz musicians, was inherently (at first) devel- oping and expanding his art and his values while working with the lingua franca of popular music culture, songs (and by playing songs like “Someday My Prince Will Come” and “Bye Bye Blackbird,” which were dismissed at the time, he played a substantial part in collating what is the de facto Great American Songbook). He could do something that listeners did not quite understand at first, like Birth of the Cool, or take something that people knew and loved and rework it into quasi-abstraction, like Porgy and Bess—and still there was sufficient familiarity and comfort with the context and outlines of what he was doing that listeners stuck with him. Meanwhile, Picasso’s shifts confused and disturbed many art lovers, and although it was not Stravinsky’s music that started the riot at the premiere of The Rite of Spring, not a few of his peers and listeners found that composition distasteful, and chauvinists like Adorno (in Philosophy of

• xiv • Introduction

New Music) managed, for decades, to convince critics and interested listeners that the reactionary Schoenberg was somehow the future, while Stravinsky’s complete renewal of the classical tradition for the twentieth century was somehow revanchist, even socially and politically suspect. An important disadvantage is that, when one is an apostle (the Jesus figure being Bird), then one finds oneself in the midst of burgeoning, sectarian, schismatic arguments. The church splits, each side asserts it is the keeper of the true faith, the relics are squirreled away, Lucifer contends for the throne. Miles, by consistently going against the prevailing flow, was not just demon- strating that he was his own man, he was marking himself as an apostate. Not that he cared: he was agnostic. But jazz cared. Miles also made music in the midst of mass, consumer culture—playing in an idiom made popular via commercial radio and record companies. Long before the rise of materialistic hipsterism (a faux-­oppositional consumerist subculture that aspired to monetary enrichment through buying things with a culturally accepted brand) in the twenty-first century, Americans identified their socio-economic status and affiliations, racial and otherwise, by what they acquired—it’s the American way. The tendency for those who find things they like in pop culture—James Bond movies, vintage lunch boxes, barware, vinyl, taxidermy—is to want to keep acquiring those things as long as they stay true to the same formula. Variation breeds contempt. Being an artist in pop culture, and one who changes his work as age, experience, and hopefully maturity and wisdom accumulate, means losing fans, who want all subsequent

• xv • BITCHES BREW work to be the same as what they fell in love with, whenever that was. This is especially true in pop music, which is frequently heard when young, and attaches itself to acute memories that are deeply embedded in the still- developing brain. Music only exists in time and only lasts in memory, and the immaterial quality of the musical experience can leave a desperate need for a repeat of the same stimulus, a hope that a duplicate of that same, sweet memory will form. The hit machine, even in jazz, is always looking to give you another, real, hit. Miles managed to balance an acute sensitivity to this—he wanted his music to sell, and he wanted to make money, what artist doesn’t?—without debasing himself to it, until perhaps his brief, bittersweet comeback. He managed to make not just some of the greatest music of the twentieth century, but some of the most profound and complex, while consistently selling records. He had an ideal personality for the task: a brilliant mind, confidence that is made arrogant by self-doubt, a critical ear and mind for not only the work of others but his own, a disdain for the opinion of others, while still being concerned enough to know what they thought. He had the personal charisma to lead many bands made up of many different, difficult personalities, and give direction to some of the greatest names in the history of jazz—John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Tony Williams, , Herbie Hancock, , , , John McLaughlin, Jack DeJohnette, —and he had the ear to hear what musicians were capable of, even when they could not hear it themselves. He was also always looking into the future. The last

• xvi • Introduction gig, the last record, the last style, the music that other musicians were playing, that was all yesterday. He had done that, it didn’t make sense to do it again. There was so much else to do, so many places to go. There was the constant journey toward the unadorned essence of his music, that quality that was just one more record, or sound away, the music that all the hours of practicing, all the gigs, all the miles on the road, was leading him toward. Imagine an oyster with many layers of shell nested inside each other, like a Russian doll, with a gleaming pearl at the center. Over twenty-five years of music making, Miles cracked open those shells, one after another. The pearl that was waiting for him at the end was Bitches Brew.

• xvii •

Miles Davis Doesn’t Care What You Think

In an era awash in commodified violence and gore—death metal and dark industrial, serial killer studies, Headline News Network, embedded war reporters—the opening seconds of Miles Davis’s album, Bitches Brew, remain the single most ominous thing in the infinite man-years of experience and consumption that pop culture has produced. LP 1, Side A, Track 1: “Pharaoh’s Dance.” The first sound is Jack DeJohnette, one of two drummers, coming out of the right channel, keeping a quiet, insistent beat with quarter-notes on the snare and eighth-notes on the hi-hat. A quick bass drum rhythm—still quiet—near the end of two bars announces Chick Corea’s entrance on the electric piano. Also in the right channel, Chick is one of three keyboard players on the track (still waiting to enter are Larry Young in the middle and Joe Zawinul in the left channel). He’s playing a short, repeated fragment that might turn into a longer melody if the music were given enough time to develop. But that doesn’t happen. Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet and the electric guitar of John McLaughlin quickly join

• 1 • BITCHES BREW in with their own insistent repetitions. Lenny White taps his hi-hat in the left channel. Zawinul picks up the theme, such as it is. Young fills in a chord. There’s no climax, no building to something greater and more developed. Almost immediately, the music comes to a halt, collapsing. Dave Holland answers with a rising arpeggiated octave on the acoustic bass. If this were all louder, the music might be representing an argument. The watchword, though, is quiet—the voices are all at a murmur, yet they carry a weight of intensity, as if the thing they are trying to articulate is just past the edge of language. There’s no identifiable hint of a song, the music sounds ritualistic. The way it whispers, the way it seems to follow the rules of a trance, the way it does not reach, or even seek, finality, make it existential. I was probably fifteen when I first heard the record, down in the basement at my friend R’s house, after high school. It might have been his record, or it might have been his parents’ (they had a decent jazz collection). We played together in the school band (he played trumpet and I flute, and later baritone and tenor saxophones), and we were getting into jazz. For us, that path started with the contemporary leaders of fusion: Corea and his Return to Forever band, Stanley Clarke and his tremendous School Days album (one early, memorable concert we saw was Clarke, with Tower of Power as the opening act, but our very first concert was Jack Bruce and Friends in 1980), Chameleon and Thrust from Herbie Hancock. Working backwards, we had found our way to a little bebop, but mainly to the first great , with John Coltrane on tenor, Red Garland at the piano

• 2 • Miles Davis Doesn’t Care What You Think and the incomparable rhythm section of Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, bass and drums. We were aston- ished that Birth of the Cool came from the same man. Miles’s restlessness confused us. We listened to a lot of great musicians who lit a fire when they were young, then stoked those same embers successfully for decades. We heard Sonny Rollins take apart his own playing and put it back together again in a new way, but no one else did what Miles did, shed one style after another—and not just styles but revolutions! He had a seeming discontent with success, and when other musicians began to follow his lead, he had to do something different. Somehow, we stepped sideways and forward, and found ourselves listening to Bitches Brew, and that knocked us into another dimension. It’s no exaggeration to say those opening bars disori- ented us. We had trouble comprehending them. R would pick up the needle after those several seconds, put it back at the beginning, and we would try to listen again. After a few more times, we would stop and sit and talk and think. What disturbed us was not just the ominous tone the music carries with it like a bulldozing, inexorable force, but that we didn’t understand what was happening, how the music was made, how people could play that way, how they could think that way. Excavating my memory and imagination retrospectively, the sensation was like what the first encounter with a living alien civilization might be like, recognizably sentient beings communi- cating in a language that can express the most advanced concepts via what appear to be atavistic materials. Bitches Brew challenged the neat certainties of our youthful outlook.

• 3 • BITCHES BREW

We were playing jazz halfway decently already, and we understood tunes and chord changes and fitting a solo into that context. We knew how to organize our shit. But Bitches Brew, we could not understand how it was organized; we could not understand how each note determined the next one. It wasn’t haphazard, it made sense, and the fact that two bassists, two drummers and three keyboardists could play simultaneously, making the same music and keeping every note clear, was proof. It was the sound of a brilliant, profoundly restless musician, tired of his past and dissatisfied with the direction of the music he heard around him, using more than a little violence to force open a new path. We were fifteen, so what did we do? We turned our sunglasses upside down and talked about the record among our friends while we made sure that we did so in crowds, so that our peers could overhear how cool we were. And we listened, because the dark beauty of the music and the unlimited possibilities it promised were irresistible.

Bitches Brew is a great work of abstract music inside the sounds, beats, and riffs of commercial music, and one of the most unique documents of the recorded era. The effect the album had on jazz and rock was shattering, disruptive in ways that make an abject mockery of the contemporary vainglorious use of that word by people who only wish to make money. Bitches Brew is like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Le Sacre du Printemps, works of craft and imagination that slammed the coffin lid on an old way of doing things and opened up an entirely new universe of aesthetic and technical possibilities. Like

• 4 • Miles Davis Doesn’t Care What You Think those works, it is both carefully organized and roughly made, it borrows from materials and methods that came both before and from outside the tradition in which it appears. The album, the picture, and the ballet compo- sition stand alone as masterpieces while also eliding important transitions in cultural history. Each of these works is made with a confident mastery that juxtaposes fixed result with unsettled form: Picasso’s painting is literally unfinished, Stravinsky’s virgin returns with the cycle of the seasons to dance herself to death, Bitches Brew, like a baseball field, never comes to an organic end, it is arbitrarily limited to the physical side of an LP. In defiance of every prescribed notion of how pop, rock and jazz were (and are) supposed to go, Bitches Brew resolutely rejects musical resolution. There are tracks, but there are no songs, no double-bar lines, nothing to neatly round off the end of a stretch of music. There are only two tracks on the entire first LP of the set, “Pharaoh’s Dance,” at twenty minutes, takes up the whole of side A, and the B side is packed with the twenty- seven minutes’ duration of the title track, twenty-seven minutes of music far darker and more threatening than what’s heard on the obverse. Aesthetically there had been nothing like it before, and little like it after (Miles’s own fecund electric period would produce music that touched on concepts from Bitches Brew, but nothing that was as revolutionary). One reason is that the record accomplishes something that is supposed to be impossible in the era of late- capitalism, where anything that is not yet monetized and commodified strives to be branded and sold:Bitches Brew is some of the most experimental, avant-garde art

• 5 • BITCHES BREW music made in the history of Western culture—and the record was a broad commercial success. One of the best selling Miles Davis ever made, and thus one of the best selling jazz albums ever made, it sold around a half million copies in 1970, when it was released, and had sold 1,000,000 copies—platinum, baby—as of 2003 (not counting the continued reissues of various archival packages, nor the number of plays through streaming services). Bitches Brew has been a sub rosa presence in rock and jazz ever since, seething, spreading slowly. Forty years after, the ideas and possibilities that it tossed out into the world are still rippling out along the surface. For a work with such an immediate, even physical, effect, that’s an unexpectedly long gestation. One reason for that, correct though superficial, is the music is rock, not jazz, and therefore, as the more reflex- ively reactionary critics like Stanley Crouch suggest, it is shallow, vulgar, cheap, a sell-out with no aesthetic value. True enough, the music is rock, and it sold; even mediocre records by mildly popular rock groups sell better than jazz, and did in the 1960s. Even taking into account Davis’s relative superstardom, he wasn’t making money like rockstars were. Davis, like every other highly skilled professional musician (and like Mozart and Beethoven) wanted to get paid, and he envied the financial rewards that went to the likes of Jimi Hendrix. So he made a rock record. He sold out. But of course he didn’t sell out, and he didn’t make a rock record. If rock is just a 4/4 beat and an electric guitar, those are all over the album. But music is defined not by instruments, but by how they are played and used,

• 6 • Miles Davis Doesn’t Care What You Think what is made with them. Bitches Brew is resolutely experi- mental music making, exhilarating and discomfiting, depending on the listener. By 1969, the jazz world had found some way toward accommodation with “The New Thing,” ten years after Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, but much of that music was still based in tunes, though the playing extrapolated freely from them. Structural avant-gardists like Cecil Taylor weren’t laying down the pulse, beat and groove that Miles was. Soulful, funky jazz like Lee Morgan’s records (many made with a commercial formula), or the music Cannonball Adderley (who had been in Miles’s previous groups and had hired Zawinul for his own band) was putting out were firmly inside song-structure. Hendrix, as soaringly creative as he was, worked within the limits of the blues, soul and . Tony Williams’s contemporaneous Lifetime band was playing rock—they were the first fusion band—along with jazz (Williams swings heavily on their debut album, Emergency!), but Miles wasn’t making rock, even with Lifetime guitarist McLaughlin, an essential part of the Bitches Brew sessions, second only to the leader himself. Or, second to the leaders. Bitches Brew would have been impossible without the contributions of producer , Miles’s longtime, essential collaborator in the recording studio from the time the trumpeter signed with Columbia records. Macero made the record with Miles. Miles played and guided the band, while Macero composed the album by fitting together stretches of the tape recordings into—what? Some kind of finished form. Razor blade, splicing block, tape: basic tools at any recording studio of the time, but normally used to fit the

• 7 • BITCHES BREW best sections of different takes of a song together into the ideal version to go on a record. Anathema in the jazz recording session, which valued the live take, the band playing together from start to finish. Play a few versions and choose the best one at playback to put in the can. Bitches Brew was recorded in Columbia’s studios on 30th street in Manhattan. Travel a few miles uptown from there to the West Side, and you reach the Columbia- Princeton Electronic Music Studio. In 1969, you would find razor blade, splicing block and tape there too. They were used to literally shape a piece of finished music out of physical material, pieces of recording tape with the magnetic particles arranged to hold captured sounds of any kind. A solid music, a musique concrète, composed at the very edge of experimental classical music. Macero made Bitches Brew the same way. There were no real charts for the producer to follow, just a few sketches from Miles, his own reworking of Zawinul’s “Pharaoh’s Dance,” recorded fragments that were sorted by quality and combined to make something that the musicians never heard but that Miles and Macero imagined in their heads. The three-day session was just the band playing while Miles, in his inimitable style, prodded them and intimidated them into giving him something interesting, something new. The reels of tape rolled, the music was captured as raw material, cut and spliced into an album. What came out was the avant-garde with soul and a beat, musique concrète you could dance to, rock that blew away the complacency of jazz, and jazz that mocked the limita- tions of rock. Hated by those who love it, loved by those who hate it, all of these, none of these, more than these. There is literally no other recording anything like Bitches

• 8 • Miles Davis Doesn’t Care What You Think

Brew, and there is little in our outside music like it: an absolute document of a moment in culture that sharply, even brutally, separates what had come before from what might still come after.

• 9 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis

First there was jazz. “And then came the fall.”2 That phrase comes from Stanley Crouch’s notorious article “Play The Right Thing,” from the February 12, 1990 issue of the New Republic. Crouch, using a review of the recently published Miles: The Autobiography, written with Quincy Troupe, produced a bizarre essay, one half qualified praise, the other, petty and insulting. The dividing line between the two is the point where Miles Davis, in Crouch’s view, sullies the purity of jazz with his 1969 album In a Silent Way. Miles’s particular crime was infecting jazz with the virus of rock, and for the puritans of jazz—and there’s no puritan like a jazz puritan, of which Crouch is the leading contemporary spokesman— there is no greater sin. Miles more than doubled-down on In a Silent Way with Bitches Brew, recorded six months after and released in April of 1970. For those who managed to stick with him through the initial transition to an electric sound in the late ’60s, this was the great divide. Bitches Brew seemed to go out of the way to be difficult, with unprecedented

• 10 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis duration, weird sounds, no form, and an I-don’t-give-a- shit-about-jazz attitude that deliberately set Miles apart from the culture that claimed ownership of him. Miles was the premier iconoclast of the twentieth-century secular religion of jazz. Jazz makes an unlikely religion because it began as music for dancing, drinking, getting high, and getting down. Despite the cult-like catechism that it sprang, Athena-like, from the imagination of the legendary (and never recorded) New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden, jazz was synthesized by many musicians discovering, through playing and listening, that they had found a new style by mixing ideas from ragtime, the blues, marches, dance music like the cake-walk, French chansons, and the habañera rhythm from Spain via Cuba. New Orleans was the main place where people, of all races, from all these cultures, mixed, and even Creole pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton, who long claimed to have “invented” jazz, pointed out the international influences that came together with American styles to make the music. Jazz was never pure, one of the best things about it, but jazz fans and critics have endlessly longed for some imaginary prelapsarian era, even if just a sliver of time, where the music was perfect and pristine. But then the dixieland players bit the apple of swing, the music was cast out to beget new monstrosities or delights. Louis Armstrong hated bop. The boppers were too hip for swing and trad players. They and the hard boppers thought cool jazz was too pale. The modal players thought everyone else was behind the times or lost in existential chaos … Miles, from the bebop era on, was either a central figure in all these movements or the musician who

• 11 • BITCHES BREW created and drove the changes, a one-man reformation and counter-reformation in modern music. When asked by a patronizing guest at a White House dinner what he had done to deserve an invitation, he replied that he had “changed music five or six times … what have you done of any importance other than be white?”3 He was being unusually modest. Miles Davis, one of the greatest and most important individuals in the history of modern music, was, throughout his career, the subject of much critical resistance, misapprehension and puritanism. He had supporters, of course, including writers Leonard Feather and Ralph J. Gleason, and every move, change and record elicited some wise, appreciative responses. He was the best-selling jazz musician with the public for more than a decade, including and especially from 1960–70, when jazz was being edged into a niche by rock on one side and soul on the other. When other musicians were suffering in the ’60s, he was still playing as much as his health would allow, and not just playing but disas- sembling jazz and putting it back together in new ways, exploring with arguably a greater sense of adventure and purpose than the free players—rather than consoli- dating his style and clinging to steady, safe situations, he was more driven and uncompromising than ever. He almost single-handedly kept jazz alive, not just economi- cally but aesthetically, and he culminated the decade by making jazz more relevant than ever, and through that reseeding the economic possibilities for the music and the musicians ever since. As a figure in the cultural mind—a musician, a man, an icon of cool and of racial pride—Miles was compelling,

• 12 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis more so because of an underlying but substantial ambiguity to everything about him, a quality that rightly would be called quicksilver if not for the dark-hued diffi- dence that was such an essential part of the man and his art. Start with his name, Miles Davis, and how musicians, jazz fans and this book reflexively call him “Miles,” as if we all know him intimately. But we only know the music he made, and listening to Miles the musical thinker, we imagine we know Miles, the man, the one we see wearing the sharp suits and staring out at the public with an acute wariness. Miles is the mystery behind the oversized shades and underneath the funky clothes,4 and we think the poise, tenderness, thoughtfulness and swagger in his music—qualities we admire—make him our companion. That is the enduring fallacy of assuming that how music sounds to us is a direct and transparent reflection of the musician’s personal qualities, rather than a complicated blend of practice, habit, aesthetic choices, and expressive artifice and subterfuge. Say “Miles” in our heads, and the spark of familiarity is undercut by the unbridgeable distance between him and us, the intellectually incisive, plangent and soulful music-making contradicted by his contemptible treatment of women, his spite, his manipu- lative way with many who had reason to call him a friend. We know Miles not just through the sound of his music but through the sound of his trumpet. Music, propagated through waves, is touch at a distance, and Miles’s sound mediates our relationship with him. Writer Barry Ulanov famously described the sound as “like a man walking on eggshells.” This was so evocative that it was already a critical commonplace in the early 1950s.5 Listen to Miles playing up through the mid-1960s, and

• 13 • BITCHES BREW this feels right, but it misleads from a more exact idea of his sound, and never explains why his playing might be so delicate and careful. Miles certainly took care where he placed his notes, but his tread was never as light, hesitant or deliberate as that phrase implies. Through the years, while other musicians were filling time with a plethora of notes—and most listeners were seeking that—he was filling time with his ideas. But eggshells were never the right metaphor. The palpable shape and weight of his sound would have crushed the shell of even a hard-boiled egg, but Miles’s playing wasn’t aggressive or destructive. It’s the sound of a man who wanted to be heard, who took care to be understood, a painter choosing colors and making shapes with precision. Depending on the tune, mood or time of day, Miles might have a lot to say or a little, but when he was at his best, his improvising was absolutely clear. The diffidence and impatience he often had for critics came out of what he felt was their obtuseness: he had said everything he meant to say, in exact terms, and if they didn’t understand then there was nothing else he could say. His sound was that of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, sharply observant of his milieu, but one step removed from its confluence. It is self-possessed. Miles’s sound and the ideas it expressed were always a window through which listeners could see the complex, unsettled ambiguity of jazz itself. His ambiguous place inside jazz and his musical and extra-musical presence in American culture, and his expressive and critical ambiva- lence in music—the depths and importance of which equal Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, with added physical

• 14 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis power and appeal—made him a forceful embodiment of the essential nature of jazz and America, the conflicts and contradictions that are inconvenient footnotes to the neat, pleasing illusions America likes to tell itself. America is unique in that it was not created out of tribal roots, linguistic and religious homogeneity, or by geographical borders, but as a common story and set of values that people told about and to each other. Jazz is a story, as American as it gets, with the music not only demanding the musicians say something when they play, but the genre as a whole defining and explaining itself through the autobiography and annotation of records and criticism. The stories are part of the secular myths and legends about America, impressions that mostly have little to do with fact. The fundamental contradiction is that America, supposedly the culmination of modern thinking about society, should be so beholden to the oral tradition of storytelling. And there is no art in America that is more reliant on and involved in the oral tradition than jazz. The oral and written (classical) traditions of music and culture meet head on in jazz, the point of conflict between the conservatism of ancestor worship and the aesthetic progressivism of abstraction. Bebop could not have happened without notation, musicians had to train themselves in the new harmonic language by working out, and writing out, the extended, complex chords (that they used the piano, which Dizzy Gillespie himself pointed out was essential to apprehend bebop harmony, advances notation, as for this purpose it is an extension of the manuscript paper). And bebop placed jazz, with the firmest ambiguity, in between pop entertainment and

• 15 • BITCHES BREW abstract art, the oral tradition and the written tradition, where it has been ever since, with some musicians and critics content to repeat what their masters had played, others interested in what the future might hold. It is a meaningless cliché that jazz is America’s “classical” music—jazz does not need that patronizing seal of approval. Its stature as a complete art form within itself is clear, considerable and as essential to music in civilization as America’s own strain of composed music is to the Western classical tradition. Another cliché about jazz, that it is a quintessential American art form, is true, but understates the matter. Jazz is perhaps the pluperfect American form: from the time it grew up, to the cusp of maturity (nearing thirty years in the accelerated pace of modern life, if we go from the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s 1917 recording of “Livery Stable Blues” to Dizzy Gillespie leading Bird, pianist Al Haig, bassist Curly Russell, and drummer Sidney “Big Sid” Catlett in “Shaw Nuff,” Dizzy’s reworking of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”), it was expressing the troubled soul of this country. As Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, Edward Baptist and others have shown, America was built economically by African-American slavery; and without African- American slavery there is vanishingly little American popular culture. Yet American society treats its own black citizens with, at best, indifference and, at worst, violence; America worships at the secular altar of individuality while expecting, demanding, and rewarding conformity; America assumes an exceptional position in the world while living in self-perpetuating, almost seductive fear. In the middle of all this is Miles Davis, musically, socially, culturally. The random accident of birth, in

• 16 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis

1926, put him in New York City, at Juilliard, in 1944. He came, with tuition paid and a weekly allowance from his father, because he had seen Gillespie and Parker play in St. Louis with Billy Eckstine’s big band and, as he told Quincy Troupe, “that shit was all up in my body.”6 New York was the place to find that music, to play it and chase after that feeling, “always looking for it, listening and feeling for it … trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day.”7 Miles was studying the accepted art music in a city where a new art music was being born (bebop was in full ferment, that Gillespie’s recording is the first of its kind is another accident of history, that of the recording ban that the musician’s union had instituted). His personal history, the color of his skin, and his own values make for one of the most powerfully ambiguous figures in all of art. As Richard Cook and Brian Morton encapsulate him in The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, “One of the pivotal artists of the 20th century, Miles was a shapeshifting imp of the perverse, capable of extraordinary beauty and a kind of self-negating ugliness almost by turns. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Alton, Illinois [and East St. Louis], and never once, even at the zenith of the Black Power movement, affected any plantation or ghetto poses.”8 His career became so essential to the history of jazz that “it would be possible to write a convincing version of the story [of jazz] from 1945 to 1990 merely by reference to Miles’ part in it.”9 America is on view in Miles’s career: equal amounts of respect and disdain for earlier traditions; pride of place in the world of jazz with insecurity about his status; the restless need to reinvent and explore new territory;

• 17 • BITCHES BREW the collapse of high culture and vernacular appeal into a single and powerful package; a facile view of racial character in musicians that was contradicted by the quality and production of the bands he put together; an aesthete and a materialist; a great artist and a shrewd businessman. Miles played that evocative ambivalence in every live and recorded moment, with a sound that could be beautiful in so many different ways to so many different listeners, expressing cold logic, warm blues, intimacy, diffidence, masculine and feminine qualities. His sound was reflected back to him by the jazz world and the culture at large, which held comple- mentary ambivalent feelings about him long before Bitches Brew shattered old illusions and built new ones. Miles’s general popularity and economic success were both admired and distrusted within jazz: he was just as well known for the clothes he wore and the cars he drove as for the music he made. A sharp-eared, discerning and harsh critic, he praised the music he admired—Sly and the Family Stone, the Fifth Dimension and The Electric Flag—and eviscerated the music he didn’t— including records by Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk, the Jazz Crusaders, Duke Ellington’s / Charles Mingus’s / Max Roach’s collaboration Money Jungle, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra—while learning as much, if not more, from music by John Cage, Harry Partch, Krystof Penderecki, Aram Khachaturian, and Stravinsky, as he did from anything by Louis Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, and Gillespie. Miles embodied qualities that are those of the mythical American that so many aspire to be, as long as it comes with no sacrifice to their social position or material

• 18 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis ease. He was neither conformist nor mindlessly noncon- formist. He was as insolent to authority as Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe. He was physically strong and mentally tough. He enjoyed the pleasures of bourgeois life while ignoring, in Whitman’s words, “the received models of the parlors.” He was a black man from an upper-middle-class African-American family with roots, like those of so many African-Americans, that went far deeper into the soil of the North American continent than did those of most of the whites running government and society. Long before Barack Obama was born, Miles was facing the same atavistic, inarticulate rage that has been in opposition to Obama since 2008. Captured perfectly in the nonsensical accusation that democratically elected Obama is a “usurper,” this is the attitude that has prevailed in the reactionary quarters of society: that it is fine, and even praiseworthy, for a black man to aspire to leading middle-class status in black society, and even to some prominence in white society, as long as he is not too successful or prominent in terms of white society. A black man or woman could run the army, have a position in the cabinet, but to be President, the highest executive office of any kind in the country, is terrifying: it places Obama above every other white person. Miles thrived in American society, on white America’s own terms: he was prominent, important, and he made good money. He enjoyed his status, and there is the unmistakable hint of glee in how he liked to antagonize white society. He was not just well dressed, but a fashion icon. He didn’t just drive sports cars: he drove Ferraris and Lamborghinis. He didn’t just sleep with beautiful

• 19 • BITCHES BREW women: he slept with beautiful women of all races, ethnicities and nationalities. And he disdained anyone who didn’t like that. Miles was clear that his social role models were men like Jack Johnson and Sugar Ray Robinson, champion boxers who cared nothing at all for the social codes by which white society demanded they live. He demanded performance fees above what venue owners, almost entirely white, normally paid their performers, and this benefited not only his band but all other jazz musicians (and the economic disparity he saw between his status at Columbia and those of the new, young, white rock bands in the mid to late ’60s was important fuel that went into Bitches Brew and his entire electric period). Miles was more astute about musical quality, and more aware of social context, than most critics, whom he chided for being lazy, and in whom he early on identified the still common cultural phenomenon of automatic praise for whatever is new: “People are so gullible … they go for something they don’t know about. … Because they feel it’s not hip not to go for it. But if something sounds terrible, man, a person should have enough respect for his own mind to say it doesn’t sound good. … It’s just notes that come out, and every note he plays, he looks serious about it, and people will go for it—especially white people. They go for anything. They want to be hipper than any other race10 …” Because his iconoclasm produced such extraordinary musical accomplishments—the dozens of magnificent albums, the bands that he formed and led that were among the greatest in the history of jazz—that insightful critical thinking seemed superfluous. Because his unique,

• 20 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis broad-based popular success produced economic reward and public recognition that, for a jazz musician, has been exceedingly rare in American culture, his career could be easily dismissed by critics who preferred music that reinforced the sense of their own hipness. Because Miles debased jazz by playing pop music. Long before Miles recorded “Time After Time” and Stanley Crouch excoriated him for having the vulgarity to praise Prince, Miles was recording his own versions of pop tunes. His first classic quintet played “Surrey With the Fringe on Top,” and “If I Were a Bell,” and by doing so transformed them into jazz standards. He played those songs because he liked them and could do something with them, and because jazz has always used contem- porary pop music for its own purposes, in part because the musicians had their ears open to what everyone was listening to, and also because many of them have earned a living, or something like it, by playing pop music in other bands and situations. That this is so unremarkable, and such an unsupportable angle of criticism, can be seen in both the critical reaction to Charlie Parker With Strings (commercialism!) and to Brad Mehldau playing Radiohead songs (hip!). Miles played pop, not to have pop appeal, but to make music. He had appeal because of the inherent brilliance and depth of his playing. And Miles didn’t just play trumpet and write tunes and make records and lead bands, he was a paragon of cool at a time when cool became something to aspire to, a priceless social and cultural cachet. People who weren’t much inter- ested in jazz in general had one or two of his records in their collection—probably Kind of Blue or Sketches of

• 21 • BITCHES BREW

Spain—and admired his me-against-the-world stance. This kind of popularity can be dangerous to critical opinion, to the hoarding of information and special knowledge that can be used as a tool to mark one’s own social prominence. Popularity just won’t do—it dilutes purity. This is, of course, nonsense when music is reproducible, and each copy serves to spread cultural information, not to diminish it; and it is particularly nonsensical in the case of Miles Davis. If his public presence ended up selling one more copy of one of his records, if one more person heard the brilliant music he made, that was one more unit of benefit to the world. The idea that Miles might be selling a lot of records was the reflexive point of contention for critics when Bitches Brew was released, but that complaint, and unthinking criticism of Miles, was common a decade and more before that. The doubt and puzzlement about Miles was best articulated by Michael Ullman, who wrote that Miles “has managed to make a limited instrumental technique suggest infinite possibilities”:11 a common opinion. This went all the way back to bebop, one of the greatest (and in a few critical ways, one of the worst) things to happen to jazz. Bebop was a uniquely revolutionary, modernist movement that not only hauled jazz out of the swing era, but changed the commercial into the abstract (by rewriting pop tunes, natch), away from the romantic narrative of song into an aesthetic where what mattered was how the harmonies were made and how the soloists worked inside that context of harmonic rhythm. The hallmark of a bebop musician was virtuosity; and Miles— who enjoyed the longest tenure of any trumpet player in

• 22 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis the Charlie Parker Quintet—was not an obvious virtuoso like Dizzy Gillespie, the yardstick. At the historic November 26, 1945 recording session for Charlie Parker’s Reboppers—Parker’s first as a leader—Miles, nineteen years old, sounds rhythmically and harmonically stiff compared to Bird, and bowed out to Gillespie on “Ko-Ko,” one of the essential recordings in jazz. Miles admittedly did not have the chops to handle the tempo. Gillespie could always play fast and could always play high, obvious measures of virtuosity. They are also misleading. “When I first went with Bird’s band,” Miles admitted, “I knew everything that Dizzy was playing on the trumpet with Bird. I had studied that shit up and down, backwards and forward. I couldn’t play it high, but I knew what he was playing. I just couldn’t play it high like Dizzy could because my chops weren’t that developed and I didn’t hear the music up in that high register. I always heard the music better and clearer coming from me in the middle registers. “Bird wanted something different after Dizzy quit the band. He wanted a different trumpet approach, another concept and sound. He wanted just the opposite of what Dizzy had done, somebody to complement his sound, set if off. That’s why he chose me.”12 Miles was still a teenager, and he developed fast, to the point where Gillespie heard a new strength in his playing. For people who want the flash and fire of speed and high notes, Miles could provide. On Christmas Day in 1949, WMCA radio broadcast a “Stars of Modern Jazz” concert. The headliner was Parker’s Quintet, and the concert opened with Bud Powell’s Trio, joined after one

• 23 • BITCHES BREW tune by what hipster announcer Symphony Sid Torin called the “stars of jazz,” Miles Davis (Torin condescend- ingly called him “little Miles Davis”), trombonist Benny Green, altoist Sonny Stitt and baritone sax player Serge Chaloff. The group takes Denzel Best’s “Move” at an insane tempo, and Miles cuts everybody with some of the fleetest, most cleanly articulated trumpet playing ever caught on record. And because it’s Miles, his solo is also thoughtful, builds a musical logic—it says something. Miles had a brilliant, supple mind that could work clearly even at extreme tempos. Four years of practice made a difference in turning Miles into a virtuoso of technique and sound. Miles had ideas, and he wanted them to come out of his horn exactly as he felt and heard them in his imagination. “I learned a lot about phrasing back then listening to the way Frank [Sinatra], Nat ‘King’ Cole, and even Orson Welles phrased. … the way they shape a musical line or sentence or phrase with their voice.”13 Miles wanted to speak, he didn’t feel his ideas needed to be fast, or loud, or high, but he needed his playing to be immediately responsive to them. That he made so much beautiful, powerful music that stood out for being full of clearly articulated, multilayered ideas is testament to his virtuosic musicianship. Maybe you wanted different. Miles didn’t care what you wanted.

Miles was not only one of the greats, he was also one of the great apostates of jazz, working from a unique position of artistic prominence within the idiomatic context of the music. Miles left Parker’s group for good around Christmas, 1948, but already in the late

• 24 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis summer and early fall of that same year, he had taken an enormous, and decisive, step on the path into his own, unique future. Miles and arranger and composer Gil Evans (who was to be Miles’s greatest, enduring friend) had met the previous year. Evans’s midtown basement apartment was famous as a place where musicians hung out and talked about their art. Evans came to prominence as an arranger with Claude Thornhill’s self-consciously arty swing band, where Evans and baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan honed their skills and imaginations. With pianist John Lewis (later of the Modern Jazz Quartet) joining the conversation, the foursome created what at the time of its appearance was billed as the Miles Davis Nonet, and is now famous in retrospect as the Birth of the Cool band.14 Their total recorded legacy is just under two dozen tracks, but their influence has been enormous. Miles, Evans, Mulligan and Lewis did not invent the cool style in jazz—that was created by Lester Young, playing in his own personal style, which was light-toned, lyrical, and with a relaxed relationship to the beat. But the nonet did codify the style as a new, alternative, compositional path. Cool was a reaction to the amphetamine rush of bebop, a different presentation and a different idea of structure. No style of art can remain static, irrelevance is just as much a risk as the inevitable decadence that comes from a style developing to its last measure. The cool music that came out of the nonet—and was propagated and developed by Mulligan and nonet alto player Lee Konitz—has been associated with the West Coast and white musicians, the assumption being that white players

• 25 • BITCHES BREW and those from California couldn’t swing, couldn’t play the blues, couldn’t play bebop. None of this was true, but somehow it was all bad, all wrong. Crouch describes the nonet’s recordings as “little more than primers for television writing,” which he seems to consider an insult. He goes on to write, “Davis, like other jazzmen, was not above the academic tempta- tions of Western music. Davis turns out to have been overly impressed by the lessons he received at Juilliard … The pursuit of a soft sound, the uses of polyphony that were far from idiomatic, the nearly coy understatement, the lines that had little internal propulsion: all amount to a failed attempt to marry jazz to European devices.”15 Those few, simple lines reveal the enormous gap between taste and criticism, between propaganda and reality, and the ouroboros of jazz puritanism. Jazz, a product of African-American and European music, is by origin and definition Western. Parker, Gillespie, and other beboppers were fans of Debussy, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, so not immune to “academic tempta- tions,” but somehow immune from Crouch’s criticism. The complaint about polyphony is nonsensical, as polyphony was the key structural element at the very start of jazz. Crouch also has an underlying obsession with a clichéd and infantile virility, and is troubled by Miles’s “soft sound,” certain that he picked it up in the one year he spent at Juilliard. Miles was perhaps emasculated and made too white by European devices. It’s an idea that could only be suggested by a man who never heard the music of white, European composers like Bruckner, Mahler, and yes, Debussy, Stravinsky and Shostakovich.

• 26 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis

As Miles himself told interviewer Pat Harris16 in the late ’40s, “I don’t like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there’s no music but bop are just stupid. It shows how much they don’t know.” Miles didn’t need to sense any immanent decadence in bebop to want to move onto something different. He was merely taking his prerogative as a musician to play what he wanted to play. Miles was deeply curious about music outside of jazz (it was Evans who introduced him to the work of John Cage and Harry Partch), and he held values that were subtler than those the fans and critics went for, but were no less important and, in the long run, far more fruitful musically. Start with his sound, the most personal and essential tool for a jazz musician. Miles’s trumpet sound came out of the players that he was always upfront about admiring, Roy Eldridge, Harry James, Freddie Webster and Bobby Hackett. He developed a full sound, like those musicians. He placed a shadowy penumbra around it, which lazy ears might hear as soft, but the core was firm. He also inflected a slight vocalized touch that came out of the throat. This accounts for the most common adjective that describes his sound and playing, “lyrical,” which is true enough. One layer under that word is the impli- cation of song, and, along with wanting to play inside chords, rather than above them, the middle register is musically logical, the range where the singing would come out of his throat. That sound was the result of hard thinking and practicing. Particularly on the trumpet, that sound is the direct product and manifestation of technique. It is easy to watch the fingers fly on the valves, hear a fast

• 27 • BITCHES BREW run of notes coming out of the speakers. What makes those notes happen is the long, challenging training of a trumpeter’s embouchure. With only three valves, all those notes come from the ability to use the muscles of the mouth and control of the air column to navigate the overtone series, as a bugler does. And on top of that, to produce a sound that is not only immediately distinctive, but consistent in all registers, and full at all tempos, whether the phrasing is staccato or legato … There have been many trumpet players in the history of jazz who could play fast, there have been fewer who have had an absolutely beautiful sound, and a handful who combined both with the musicianship and intelligence to say so many profound, affecting things through their horns. Miles’s playing, even at its most intense and aggressive moments, was beautiful. The term implies a relationship not only to song but to words, and Miles gave the illusion of playing solo lines made up of words, not just notes, through the thoughtfulness of his playing. His was the sound of a man who has a storehouse of ideas, and is producing them in complete sentences and paragraphs. Miles always played honestly, he was an intensely, eroti- cally, intimate soloist: you overheard his thoughts, and he was “telling it like it is.” The beboppers were often bent on demonstrating their harmonic thinking, the most obvious marker of academic musical sophistication in both classical music and the new jazz. Miles’s way of playing was horizontal, a narrative rather than a repeating vertical climb. His Birth of the Cool Nonet, with its emphasis on counterpoint, made this kind of music. It also created a certain kind of sound, and Miles was endlessly sensitive not only to how

• 28 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis he wanted to sound but to how he wanted his bands to sound. The band was the first step in that direction, with that at the time unusual instrumentation of trumpet, alto sax, baritone sax, trombone, French horn, tuba, piano, bass and drums. The arrangers took care to work with the timbres, mixing Konitz’s feathery alto with a rich bottom end, Miles coloring the middle. Miles was sensitive to group orchestration in a way that is still uncommon in jazz. His first great Quintet, with John Coltrane playing tenor sax, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones was constantly carving out space in the registers so that everything could be heard the way he envisioned it: tune, arrangement, solos, accompaniment, rhythm, bass. The series of records the group made all sound marvelous, even if Miles’s disdain for repeated takes meant that some of the recorded playing was slapdash. Miles had Garland emphasize block chords—tightly spaced within a confined range—so that the harmonies would be clear but not overlap overly much with the horns or bass. He also preferred a dry ensemble sound to open up space for rhythms and the placement of notes by the soloists. He was following the example of pianist Ahmad Jamal, one of his personal idols, an excellent and unique musician whose emphasis on clarity and economy was for many years misapprehended by critics who thought complicated meant complex, and that simple music was cocktail lounge entertainment. Where the mainstream of jazz in the 1950s was extro- verted, brawny, and bluesy, tracks like “Oleo,” on Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, stood out—and still do—for the way Miles created sharp, swinging, exciting jazz with

• 29 • BITCHES BREW what at the time was minimal means, and a cavernous sense of space. “Oleo” opens with Miles playing Sonny Rollins’s melody on muted trumpet, solo. He’s then joined by bass and piano on the repeat of the opening theme. After the bridge, Coltrane picks up the final phrase, under a spare set rhythm in the accompaniment, and on the downbeat of the first repeat of the entire form, Garland hits and holds a single chord, with Paul Chambers’s bass walking along underneath. Miles plays the first eight bars of his first solo chorus, then the first sixteen of his second chorus, accompanied by nothing other than the bass. This type of design gave Miles the room to place his thoughts, and gave the unexceptional thirty-two bar song form a substantial amount of added tension and release, the fundamental goal of tonal music. Even after hearing the track dozens of times, you still wait with excited anticipation for the moment that Philly Joe Jones’s tight press roll brings in the groove, and for Miles and Chambers to find that final tonic that brings his suspended solo flight down for a safe arrival.

Jazz culture and criticism has had, and continues to have, a fraught relationship with the idea of compositional sophistication. The business of aesthetic prestige in America has petrified roots in European culture, where the “classical” music was classical music, and critics, insti- tutions and musicians alike sought that same imprimatur of quality by variously arguing that jazz compositions fulfilled the same formal and structural demands as those of European composers. This, even in Ellington’s various Suites and Sacred music, was never true. The special

• 30 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis pleading does a disservice to the music by not taking it on its own, wonderful terms. Jazz is its own idiom, with its own forms and structures. Those forms are rooted in pop song form, which has its own limitations, but songs are no less sophisticated than sonatas, and it is just as hard, if not harder, to write a good song as a good sonata. There have been great composers in jazz who worked to take apart and remake song form into something new. Monk is one of them; reducing song to small units he could shift around through time, enhancing the harmonic satisfaction of the final double bar with an intense rhythmic resolution. Charles Mingus was another, crucially teaching his musicians their parts from the piano (the oral tradition), and using counterpoint, elegantly complex functional harmony, and large-scale form to produce brilliant compositions by any criteria that are also jazz, and nothing but. Miles made complex, multivalent music through as limited means as he could, and the reduction of his material was a constant from 1959 to 1969. This went against the prevailing aesthetic wisdom, that the denser and more complicated the harmony, the greater the sophistication. But those are Western classical, not jazz, criteria. After bebop and Birth of the Cool, modern jazz compo- sition became a serious concern. Up through 1957, the year that Gunther Schuller coined the term “Third Stream,” Neal Hefti arranged his own “Repetition” for Charlie Parker and orchestra, quoting The Rite of Spring; Stan Kenton’s big band recorded Bob Graettinger’s pretentious, dissonant music for the City of Glass LP; Mingus was consciously, publicly pushing the uses of

• 31 • BITCHES BREW non-standard forms; and John Lewis wrote material for the Modern Jazz Quartet in the form of fugues. Third Stream jazz, including that made avant la lettre, was concept-driven music, an often didactic attempt to make idiomatic jazz using the forms and structures from the classical tradition.17 There was an implicit search for legitimacy, but it was the legitimacy of European art, or of academic musicologists, the Pulitzer Prize committee, or high culture in general. It left a litter of curious albums and a small number of musical successes.18 From the opposite side, boiling forth from the end of the 1950s, was the “New Thing,” free jazz and non-jazz free improvisation that began with Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor and was picked up by Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and a substantial community of European jazz musicians. Where Third Stream argued for institutional and historical relevance, the New Thing argued for social, political and cultural relevance, specifically as the expression of African- American art and culture inside a larger, racist society. While Miles is fairly seen as an inspiration to Third Stream, that was never his bag.19 Despite their orchestral sound, the three tremendous albums he made with Gil Evans, Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain, are in no way Third Stream; the first two are brilliant orchestrations and recompositions of music from the American songbook, the last is Miles’s exploration of the Spanish cultural concept of duende, a deep, earthy and intense expression of song. As far as free playing went, he found it occasionally interesting, often “sad.” And while he contributed his stature and fees to political causes— most famously a 1964 concert in Lincoln Center to raise

• 32 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis money for the NAACP, the Congress on Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where Miles not only donated his fee but that of the band (his transitional quintet of tenor player George Coleman, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and teenager drummer Tony Williams), without the other musicians’ prior approval. When they threatened not to play, he countered that he would fire them all. They went out, played the gig, and the outcome can be heard on two 1965 albums, My Funny Valentine and Four & More, two of the finest albums from his career—Miles stood apart from the institutions of African-American society just as he did from white society. He was not so much in between the parallel and competing streams of compositional thinking and the emotional, existential search for a meaningful place in America as outside of them. He had changed music again, with ramifications that are still spreading through jazz like inexorably shifting tectonic plates, moving away from the standard chords of vertical harmonies and organizing music around the ancient modes. He ended the 1950s with Kind of Blue, the best selling and probably the most beloved jazz album ever made, an essential record for every music collection Modal harmony is a drastic simplification on bebop’s vertical concept, and it demanded the utmost in invention from the soloists. Rather than a slew of chords and an array of scales to choose to fit into them, modal harmony, roughly put, organizes the music around a central pitch, and uses scales (which are horizontal where chords are vertical). They had to use their entire expressive range as a musician—rhythm, articulation, timbre, and

• 33 • BITCHES BREW dynamics—and they had a good deal of space inside of which to play. Kind of Blue was an immediate success, and launched Miles into the new decade. The year it was recorded and released, 1959, was an annus mirabilis, with Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um, and Ornette’s The Shape of Jazz to Come recorded in just the first five months. Four different albums—four different ideas about jazz—that together covered virtually every practice and possibility of the day. And then the ’60s began. It has been common over the past half-century to see that jazz is in economic difficulty, or read that jazz is dead (as a business). These troubles began in the ’60s. Up until that time, jazz was economically viable. It has never been easy for a musician to make a living, but musicians were working at least, playing gigs and making records. Rickey Vincent describes the situation in the introduction to his 2013 book Party Music: “At the dawn of the 1960s, black popular music was established in three fairly self-contained, self-defined, and self-segregating formats: rhythm and blues, jazz, and gospel. Rhythm and blues was the most popular form of dance entertainment … Some of the strongest yet most mysterious sounds of discontent were coming from the avant-garde jazz community … musing upon ideas of what radical change is all about. “When the 1960s began, rock and roll as pop phenomenon was defined by Elvis Presley gyrating his hips on national television in an imitation of the Memphis soul brothers he had learned from. When the sixties ended, rock was defined by Jimi Hendrix abusing

• 34 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Woodstock concert in August, 1969. When the sixties began, jazz was defined by John Coltrane’s soaring spirituality … When the decade ended, jazz was defined by Miles Davis’s electronic swamp dirge at the Bitches Brew sessions. Black dance music began the sixties with the joyous, rowdy rocking of Ray Charles and ended with James Brown … righteously ripping into the souls of [his] audience.”20 The decade also began with Elvis, and then later The Beatles, making rock (which, when blacks played it, was known as rhythm and blues) safe for white audiences, especially for white girls and their parents. The first wave of Baby Boomers, coming through adolescence, put their money down for rock and roll. On the other side of the tracks, soul music was growing ever more popular with black audiences. Jazz was getting squeezed out at the record stores, and so therefore also in the venues and on the radio. During a decade of political assassinations, racial conflicts, seemingly endless war, a decade where progressive ideals and nihilism fought it out in every possible medium and setting, popular music gathered a previously unprecedented power to create and cement social relationships between people who were otherwise complete strangers. Except for jazz. For listeners, jazz seemed to be going in the wrong direction, if it was going anywhere at all. Free jazz was something of a cult within a niche, the standard jazz concept of a head-solos-head arrangement on a song form sounded stale (nothing sounds dated faster than songs) while rock boasted songwriters like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

• 35 • BITCHES BREW

Miles did what he always did: kept moving, kept exploring. He sold fewer records too, 50,000–60,000 at a time when previously his sales were in the six figures, but that sustained him and his new quintet, with Wayne Shorter now playing tenor sax. The music this group made from 1965 to 1968 is the finest small group jazz in history, elusive, structurally and formally radical, dynamic, intense, compelling. The language is jazz, but the vocabulary, grammar and syntax have advanced beyond the post-graduate level; the music is saying something clearly and sincerely, and it sounds so great that it’s no drawback that the message often goes over the head. On this series of albums—E.S.P., , Sorcerer, Nefertiti, —Miles started with modal jazz and ended up in a place not far off from the free players, and arguably beyond them. The unswerving directive to simplify the musical material (all the band members wrote tunes, and Miles pared those down to a bare minimum) meant that the entire group, not just the soloist, had to invent much of the music. The forms are skeletal, abandoning the inevitable regularity of songs, the chords don’t define structure so much as set up rotating sequences of tonality through and over which the soloists play, and the melodies are really just riffs. The rhythm section drives everything, especially Carter’s unerring bottom and Williams’s astonishing drumming. Miles told Arthur Taylor, “A lot of musicians can’t play with [Williams] because they’re used to playing on the first beat and he accents on the second and third beats if you’re in 4/4 time. Sometimes he might accent on any beat. And he might play 3/4 time for a while, and you’ve

• 36 • Directions in Music by Miles Davis got to have that. … If you don’t have any knowledge of time and different time changes, he’ll lose you.”21 The music swings with the sharpness of a razor, but pulse is supplanting rhythm in importance. With few chords to work with, Hancock invents his own on the fly, with evanescent colors and modulations. Everyone in the band is playing freely, together, building the structural elements of music on the fly, showing up Ornette’s vague “harmolodic” concept with praxis. The slow and medium tempo pieces seems to be suspended in air, the up-tempo tunes sound like the group is running, blindfolded, toward a cliff, expecting to take flight when they have reached the edge. The music is deeply exciting and beautiful, some of the most avant-garde jazz ever made, and a logical culmination of all the ambivalent strands of the music— polyphonic, improvised—makes abstract art out of still-recognizable fragments of vernacular music. If there were any other name on the records than Miles Davis, it would be out of the mainstream, but Miles was the mainstream. He carved the channel and knew the musicians behind would fill it with water. His next step, though, left much of the jazz world behind, never to catch up.

• 37 • Gramophone, Trumpet, Razor Blade

You cannot listen to Bitches Brew without considering the way in which it was made. The bulk of the music on the record is a result of deliberate, process-driven music making, and that music can only be heard as it is on the album itself. Apart from the entirety of jazz practice before, and since, most of the music on Bitches Brew, and all of the most important music on the album, was separated, by the studio and the process, from the music Miles and his quintet were playing in the concert halls and clubs. It is an album of music, and the album itself is an object, a piece of sound art. “Album” is a generic word that obscures both its own origins and its implications. Before the era of sound recording, an album was (and still is) a collection of something bound together in book format; pressed flowers, family pictures, sheet music. The flat disc format of sound recordings became the predominant medium during the second decade of the twentieth century. These varied in playback speed and diameter for years, until the 10-inch (and occasional 12-inch) 78 rpm record

• 38 • Gramophone, Trumpet, Razor Blade album became the de facto standard in the mid-1920s. The duration of 78s was no more than about three minutes of music per side: and that duration defined the popular music single and the modern attention span. For some musicians, like Duke Ellington, the format became intrinsic to their genius—they could be expansive playing live, but were able to distill their music into gleaming miniatures—and this expanded their popular appeal. The 78s came in paper sleeves, but singles were by definition only one disc. Musicians making and playing songs in the new, recorded era knew the limits, and tailored the music to fit. They didn’t conceive the recordings in terms of albums. Classical music though, with a historical body of music of extended duration, made before anyone even imagined recordings, could preserve the listening experience. It was imperative to create a new package—recording classical music in the cylinder and 78 era was easily as big a business as recording pop music, if not bigger. And so the record album was created, a binder that held as many discs as needed to reproduce a large-scale work. The famous first recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, made in concert from the Vienna Philharmonic with conductor Bruno Walter, was issued in an album of twenty 78s, even though, at seventy-one minutes, Walter’s tempos were much faster than the norm.22 An album collected music, and also completely changed the experience of listening to music. As Brian Eno has pointed out, albums made “repeatable what was otherwise ephemeral … The effect of recording is that it takes music out of the time dimension and puts it into the space dimension. … you’re in a position … to listen

• 39 • BITCHES BREW again and again … to become familiar with the details you had most certainly missed the first time through, and to become very fond of the details that weren’t intended by the composer or the musicians.”23 Music becomes an object—the album—and so a possession. It’s important to clarify Eno’s idea, though, because while the object makes for a repeatable experience, that experience itself remains ephemeral, the album releases the music but doesn’t add physical substance to it. That, and the way recordings were predominantly made even after the advent of magnetic audio tape and multitrack recording technology, preserved the illusion that what you heard from the Victrola, radio or even stereo speakers, was a live event. The music excited airwaves exactly as it did in the studio when it was first played, or as it would at a concert (or did so near enough). This illusion of live performance was, and remains, a fundamental part of the jazz aesthetic. People heard jazz, or at least proto-jazz, in live settings before the first jazz recording, but the international culture of jazz knows the music primarily from recordings, and has since 1917. The music grew along with the recording era.24 The good fortune for America and the world is that jazz came into being alongside, and along with, the recording technology and the record business—preserved on cylinders and wax, this new oral tradition could be spread far afield at the pace of modern commerce and communications. Record production was intrinsic to building and selling cylinder, and later, gramophone players. These sound reproduction devices were essen- tially pieces of living room furniture, and many of the companies that manufactured and sold them also

• 40 • Gramophone, Trumpet, Razor Blade recorded music and pressed records, the content that justified the machine’s purchase. Since no one, especially prior to the spread of commercial radio, starting in the 1920s, knew what music would sell, a lot of records made by black musicians—so-called “race records” that were meant to be sold to African-Americans, but that were also popular with whites—and poor, rural musicians, black and white, were made. Columbia, Miles Davis’s for twenty years, and the one that issued Bitches Brew, was there at the start, recording Louis Armstrong and Ellington. And so modern popular music was born through a cabinet in living rooms all across America. The way Ellington and Armstrong made their records—the musicians assembled together in the studio, playing the same song a few times—was the way that jazz records were made, almost without exception, for about fifty years.25 The biggest change in jazz recording came 1 in 1948 when Columbia introduced the 33 ⁄3 rpm micro- groove LP, which allowed the musicians to extend their playing past the duration of the 78 single. This produced an important, practical and wide separation between jazz and the pop music to which it had, up to this point, been closely related. Although still based on song form, the point of jazz became the collection of individual solo excursions rather than the quick arrangement of the tune and brief solo statement. The expansion of jazz’s temporal dimension on record gave time for the art in the music to develop, and made jazz studio recordings a more exact mirror of the live experience, one caught in amber (this was a subtle but important factor in the change in styles from the frenetic, concentrated pace of

• 41 • BITCHES BREW bebop to the more relaxed hard bop, where the extended duration opened up the style to stronger influences of the blues, soul, and ). Even multitrack recording did little to change jazz recordings. Miles’s own approach to the recording studio was at first the epitome of the “live” illusion. Once he was in control of his own group and had a leader’s privileges in the recording studio, he eschewed, as much as possible, alternate takes. The first thought was not only the best thought, but often the only thought. His famous marathon session at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio on May 11, 1956 that produced the classic albums Workin’, Steamin’, and Relaxin’ is full of details that are still rare on record albums—false starts, Miles’s inimitable studio chatter26—and make the live illusion particularly vivid. These albums represent virtual nightclub sets. Miles called the tunes during the session as if they were playing on the bandstand, and the arrangements reflect the group’s regular repertoire. There were no second takes, no repeats (the multiple versions of “The Theme” across these LPs are merely the tag the band played to conclude each set at a nightclub), and if the playing was at times routine, or if Coltrane’s reed squeaked, as it does in his solo on “Diane,” so be it. Miles was supremely confident as a musician and a band leader. He was one of the few jazz musicians who were making the life work economically and things were going well for him. He was being paid to play, and for the records, he just played, nothing more. As Miles told Ralph J. Gleason in the liner notes for the In Person at the Blackhawk albums, “When they make records with all the mistakes in, as well as the rest, then they’ll really

• 42 • Gramophone, Trumpet, Razor Blade make jazz records. If the mistakes aren’t there, too, it ain’t none of you.” His attitude toward and practice of recording remained broadly consistent through his next few transformations. The decade of his music that ends in 1965 includes multiple changes of personnel—adding Cannonball Adderley, replacing Coltrane with a long run of tenor players (Jimmy Heath, Sonny Stitt, Hank Mobley, Rocky Boyd, Frank Strozier, George Coleman, Sam Rivers), losing Garland for Wynton Kelly, Bill Evans, and Victor Feldman, going through Jimmy Cobb and Frank Butler, before finally picking up teenage drummer Tony Williams from Jackie MacLean’s group and filling out his second great rhythm section that also included bassist Ron Carter and Herbie Hancock at the piano. He maintained an expansive but fairly standard repertoire that the new musicians were expected to know already, or in a pinch to master before they went on the bandstand or into the recording studio with him. Both Friday and Saturday night sets from the Blackhawk albums (1961) are not only consistent with each other but also with the 1955 and 1956 recordings. Miles barely rehearsed his bands, in or out of the studio. This was true even, amazingly enough, for the Kind of Blue recording session. Pianist Bill Evans, an essential figure on that album, wrote liner notes for the release, where he pointed out “Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I

• 43 • BITCHES BREW think without exception the first complete performance of each was a ‘take’.” Even though Kind of Blue was preconceived to create a new style of music, Miles still approached the recording as just another opportunity to preserve a moment in time for his working ensemble. The pattern continued in 1965, with the second quintet, partly because Miles was in and out of the hospital with painful, difficult ailments—hip replacement in the spring of 1965, liver inflammation, aggravated by alcohol and likely sickle cell anemia in January, 1966. The casual, one-and-done view of recording began to change, though, session by session, until the recording process was completely transformed on Bitches Brew into the means to produce raw material that would be assembled, outside of real time, into a piece of music that had not actually been played in the studio. Miles Smiles would still have the trumpeter’s false entrance on “Freedom Jazz Dance,” but as The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet 1965-68 (another indispensable document of modern music) shows, Miles warmed to the idea of second takes, which as the recordings show are indeed thoughts. The group was essentially doing things that had never been done before, every time they played, and there was no critical context in which to judge the success of the recordings. Miles had to do them again in part to hear exactly what it was they were discovering. A prime example is the languid, alternate take of “Pinocchio,” from the Nefertiti album, which is lugubrious compared to the easy flow of the album version. Sometime in early 1967, Miles began cutting out even the breaks between songs in his live sets and

• 44 • Gramophone, Trumpet, Razor Blade began playing them as one long medley, connected formally by nothing other than his taste. It was up to the musicians to pick up the cues he played that let them know when one song had finished (which often meant he felt the band was finished improvising on the material, there were few returns to the head) and when they had to segue immediately into another. The nightclub sets became one long, nearly free, improvi- sation, held together by the thinnest structure, liable to end up anywhere, and reflecting the musical values of the studio recordings. From the vast amount of archival recordings that were never intended for release, but that Columbia compiled and put out up through all the way into the 1980s—in order to recoup at least some of the advances they had shelled out—it is clear that Miles found the recording studio to be an ideal venue for these free explorations of form. It was there that he added experimentation to his music making, trying out concepts, as well as new musicians, getting it all on tape. On December 4, 1967, he went into the studio with the quintet, and guitarist Joe Beck. The session produced two tracks, “” and “Water Babies”: the latter came out on the 1981 collection Directions, while the former appeared on a double album of the same title, another collection of scraps and outtakes, in 1979. “Circle in the Round” is not great, but it is important. There are two different versions of it on record, the one on the 1979 album which runs for 26:10, and another on the 1965-68 collection that is a stunning 33:30. These are not two different takes, but two different masters edited together from the same studio session. This was

• 45 • BITCHES BREW the first step toward Miles’s final stylistic and conceptual change on Bitches Brew. “Circle in the Round” is a piece of drone music, held down by Beck’s repeated single note pattern and Hancock’s tremolos on the celeste. Under, around and through this, Tony Williams plays solos that rise out of the group texture; Miles and Shorter go in and out with a mournful melody in a minor tonality. The main changes through time are sections when the music thins out, at 4:47 in the long version, for instance, where the drums drop away for a statement of the theme. On the track as a whole, Williams is often inventive but at times sounds like he’s desperate to try anything new, while Miles and Shorter each have multiple solo passages, and Hancock and Carter have their turns at improvising. While “Circle in the Round” is structured around the drone, it is formless, even though it was composed after the fact of recording, in post-production, by Teo Macero. Whatever the original tapes sound like, and whatever their length, Macero tried to shape the material into a working whole, but one that Miles and/or Columbia apparently never found satisfactory. There are plenty of obvious edits and numerous subtle ones—Enrico Merlin identifies twenty-eight of them on the long version27—and the longest stretch of unedited music is just under three minutes. The constant interspersing of Miles’s, Shorter’s, and Williams’s solos (about fifteen in all) points to the negative example of an extraordinarily long, dull, single take that Macero tried to make more formally involving. This was the first step in the post-production process that was as important to the creation of Bitches Brew as was the playing by the musicians. Miles could not have found

• 46 • Gramophone, Trumpet, Razor Blade a more sympathetic, capable collaborator in Macero. One year older than Miles, Macero had also gone to Juilliard, where he graduated in 1953. Macero was a saxophonist, sounding a little like Warne Marsh with an edgier tone, and a composer in, and out, of jazz, inter- ested in atonality and the Third Stream concept. He was a colleague of Charles Mingus’s at the Jazz Composers Workshop, and his extremely eccentric Explorations was released on Mingus’s Debut label. He also wrote some effective big band charts, modern classical music and film scores. Macero joined Columbia records as a producer in 1957 and was on the staff there until 1975, but continued to freelance for Columbia for many years after that. He produced albums for the label from Mingus, Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Simon and Garfunkel, and for other labels he worked with the likes of Geri Allen, Vernon Reid and the Lounge Lizards. Some of his most notable production credits include Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, Monk’s Monk’s Dream, and Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um. Macero’s most famous associ- ation was with Miles, producing the trumpeter’s albums from Porgy and Bess on,28 and then again after Miles’s comeback. Though their relationship was fraught with conflict—both were strong-willed and hot-headed— each knew their importance to the other. Macero’s skills and knowledge spanned playing, composing, and audio and electronic technology. At Juilliard, he worked in the engineering department, and became close to composer Edgard Varèse. He saw Varèse construct his important musique concrète work, Poème electronique, from the inside. Macero was also on top

• 47 • BITCHES BREW of what Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky were doing uptown at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio. He knew how to make music, and he knew how to shape it with technology. Before “Circle in the Round,” Macero showed his skill and taste on Mingus Ah Um, one of the greatest albums in the history of jazz recordings. Macero’s post-production work was modest, but nonetheless vital: he took his razor blade to tape and cut out bits of the original tape to produce an improved master. Partly this was out of necessity, as the original recordings put together were too long for each side of an LP. But the extra minute and ten seconds you can hear on the 50th Anniversary Edition tells the most important story, in that the longer, first recording is decidedly inferior to the edited version heard on the original album issue. Booker Ervin’s “Better Git It In Your Soul” tenor solo begins as a frustrating search for something to say, until he warms up and cooks his way through his choruses. The edited version is tighter and hotter, as is the complete track. This type of editing was not uncommon in recorded music in general, but was, and remains, rare in jazz, where it goes against the culture of live playing. Classical studio recordings, in contrast, have made use of the possibilities of magnetic tape almost since the beginning. Leonard Bernstein’s and the New York Philharmonic’s classic recording of Aaron Copland’s rhythmically complex Billy The Kid is the product of editing together numerous takes, and Glenn Gould made famous use of the editing capabilities available to him in the recording studio. He retired from live performance in 1964 because he found that the recording process suited his art. Even live

• 48 • Gramophone, Trumpet, Razor Blade classical recordings are often a compilation of edits made from performances that fell across several concerts. Pop music took to the recording process so whole-heartedly that it became intrinsic to how the music was conceived and heard. Pet Sounds (1966) and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) are icons of how pop music should be made. Studio technique might have seemed as anathema personally to Miles as it was to jazz in general, especially so considering what he had told Gleason. But time moves on, ideas develop and change. Miles began to see that what the recording studio and post-production techniques offered him were a way to realize the compo- sitional, aesthetic, formal and structural ideas that he was developing with his quintet. Just as the music he was making with the new quintet was different from what he had done before, so his playing was changing. Despite his health problems, especially the pain he endured, his playing through the ’60s kept gaining a physical force he had rarely shown before. He played some memorably powerful notes on Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain, but where those might be thought of as throwing a baseball a distance, now he was putting the shot, reaching just as far. His notes were more massive than ever, and he was playing with such muscularity that they never sounded heavy. He was also playing dense, rapid runs of notes, as if his thinking had become even more agile and abstract. The medleys were a way to think in a longer form than individual tunes could allow, and the new recording method was to let the tape keep rolling and keep the music going until there was nothing else to play. After that, Macero was on hand to use his critical judgment

• 49 • BITCHES BREW and prepare the tapes for pressing. The editing was frequent, producing the nearly seventeen minute “Stuff” on Miles in the Sky, “Water on the Pond” and “Fun,” collected on Directions, and “Teo’s Bag,” which ended up on Circle in the Round. These were gradual shifts in a flowing process. A more abrupt transition happened when Hancock and Carter left the band in the middle of 1968, part of the way through recording Les . They were replaced by pianist Chick Corea and the English bassist Dave Holland (Hancock was still available in New York and appeared at sessions in November 1968—the music from these dates, often heavily edited, was not released until the 1976 ex post facto Water Babies album, with other tracks filling out Circle in the Round and Directions). Les Filles is a knotty, slightly uncomfortable, transitional album, the first complete document of the beginning of Miles’s electric period, but one that uneasily mixes a new sound with a stiff sense of structure and form. There’s nothing audible in terms of post-production, instead the sound is clearly that of the band working straight from prepared material, the sections and endings marked off ahead of time and commonly understood. The step from Les Filles, recorded in summer and fall of 1968 and released in 1969, to the next Miles Davis album, In a Silent Way, is like entering a new and previ- ously unimagined dimension. Hancock again joined the quintet in the recording studio, February 18, 1969. There were some new faces as well, keyboardist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin. Both men were as integral to the making of In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew as Miles himself was to jazz.

• 50 • Gramophone, Trumpet, Razor Blade

McLaughlin was, and still is, an astonishing guitarist with a powerful, individual solo voice yet the musical skill and personality to fit comfortably inside of many different ensembles, preceding Eric Clapton in Graham Bond’s group, recording with the Rolling Stones and David Bowie, producing his own exceptional modern jazz L P, Extrapolation. Williams had McLaughlin come from England to join his own nascent Lifetime29 trio, with organist Larry Young, and Miles first heard the guitarist playing with Williams on the night of February 16, 1969. Miles knew Zawinul’s musicianship well from the keyboardist’s playing and composing in Cannonball Adderley’s jazz-soul-funk-rock band. Zawinul, of course, went on to fame as one of the founders, and the de facto leader, of Weather Report, but at the time was known not only as a fine player, but as the composer of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” one of the most soulful songs ever written. Miles asked him to join the session at the last minute, and to bring some music. The album title comes from the tune Zawinul brought, “In a Silent Way,” which Miles simplified drasti- cally (or brutally, as Zawinul seemed to have thought), by removing all the chords and leaving the spacious, intervallic lilt of the melody over a pedal tone. Miles had been doing that with material for years, the only novelty was in the extremity. What was truly new was how Miles and Macero organized the session and the recording process, using the time in the studio to produce the material that would later be made into the album. Miles directed the ensemble to play short stretches of the music, altering the manner and style with each successive run-through,

• 51 • BITCHES BREW until the tapes held stretches of the music making that Miles wanted. Macero told Ian Carr, “… now there’s no ‘take one’ etc. The recording machine doesn’t stop at the sessions, they never stop, except only to make the playback. As soon as he gets in there, we start the machines rolling. Everything that’s done in the studio is recorded, so you’ve got a fantastic collection of everything done in the studio. There isn’t one thing missed. Probably, he’s the only artist in this whole world, since I’ve handled him, where everything is intact. … I just pull out what I want and copy what I want, and then the original goes back into the vaults untouched. So whoever doesn’t like what I did, twenty years from now they can go back and redo it.” Miles recorded this way for the rest of his life.30 The album is a beautiful, controlled work of art. It is polished, seamless where it wants to be, showing its own process where that serves an expressive purpose. Each side constitutes a single track, “Shhh/Peaceful” and “In a Silent Way.” The editing was obvious at the time—when Martin Williams wrote a review of it in the January 18, 1970 issue of the New York Times, he thought “the editing, annotating … are horrendous. Through faulty tape splicing, a portion of the music event gets inadvert- ently repeated at one point!”—but that was the point. Miles and Macero were constructing a piece of studio art, working together, splicing tape, the album meant to be something other than live and assertive about its own artifice. As radically as this went against the grain of jazz culture, it was in a sense merely part of the zeitgeist running through creative music at the time, the things

• 52 • Gramophone, Trumpet, Razor Blade outside jazz that Miles was always keen on hearing. By the time of the session, Steve Reich had produced his tape phase pieces It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, written Piano Phase, Violin Phase, and created the conceptual Pendulum Music. That was not underground music: Irmin Schmidt had already been to New York and returned to Germany to found Can, his ears full of Reich, LaMonte Young and Terry Riley, whose seminal In C had been released on Columbia, of course, in 1968. Different listeners recognized what was going on. Lester Bangs, for example, wrote in the November 15, 1969 Rolling Stone that In a Silent Way was “neither jazz nor rock … there is a new music in the air … which knows no boundaries or categories”: but then, Lester Bangs had been listening to The Beatles and the Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. Listeners who never held, or easily dropped, the illusion that a record album in their hands was somehow a live musical event, rather than music made and manipulated at one moment in time, pressed and packaged in another, and on their turntables at a third moment, heard it as something new and just as vital. In 2004, Sony released The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions. This is not a great collection of music but an important document. Listen through the music recorded that February day, and it’s immediately clear how superior the original album is. The unedited material expands the duration of the experience and impoverishes it. There is a weird, calypso style rehearsal of “In a Silent Way” which affirms Miles’s final arrangement. The complete take of “Shhh/Peaceful” is only one minute longer than the edited version, but played through, it’s full of fussy

• 53 • BITCHES BREW riffs and mediocre transitional passages that Macero cut out and replaced with tape loops. The quietly funky “It’s About That Time” is more concentrated for being spliced into the middle of “In a Silent Way.” In a Silent Way is more neatly formed than what was about to come, and sits at a unique place in Miles’s musical and discographical history. It sounds settled, final, like the culmination of his long, personal process to find the ultimate means with which to express himself, and to get away from identifiable blues and jazz idioms, which he found increasingly tired. It’s also the first complete version of a recording method that he had been experimenting with for only a little more than a year, but the skill with which it’s made, the fantastic balance and proportions, and the entirely intuitive form (like Debussy’s Jeux, it has no identifiable form other than what it itself defines through time) make it sound like Miles; and Macero had been making records like it for years, even decades. It is a gem, mounted in a setting of the finest architecture. In retrospect, considering Miles’s aesthetic values and creative restlessness, it is clear that it never was a last word, a point at which he could settle down and repeat the formula. In a Silent Way turns out to be a penultimate step to another substantial transformation, a record that shows the mastery of concept and technique that, like the mastery of a method through instrumental practice, would become a tool to express something altogether rougher, unsettling, uncompromising, uglier and more profound. While In a Silent Way is an enormous step away from the head-solos-head form in jazz, it is still fundamentally

• 54 • Gramophone, Trumpet, Razor Blade a linear album. Even with the new recording and production ideas, the original tapes show that the music was conceived and made end-to-end, with a start and a finish, and the final, edited tracks have an unremarkable, horizontal organization. The conception and organi- zation for the Bitches Brew sessions were a step beyond, or better said, a step away from the previous means. The gap between the two sessions was almost exactly six months—February 18 to August 19. In between, Miles set the personnel for his final great quintet, with Jack DeJohnette replacing Tony Williams. For decades, this band was known as the “lost” quintet, because they were more frequently talked about than heard, with no studio recordings and barely any documentation of their live playing. They were amplified and loud, dressed in the grooviest threads of the day, and were legendary for the exhilarating intensity and creativity of their playing, which was like a heavy, dazzling object spun with increasing speed and force at the end of a long, impervious chain. Miles called it “a really bad mother- fucker.”31 Thanks to the combination of archival work and the desire to make money, a substantial number of recordings of this band are now available, live sets that span the summer (less than a month before the Bitches Brew session) to fall of 1969.32 The music, as John Szwed puts it so well, is volatile,33 centered around Miles’s changes of direction and intuitive sense of form. The contrast between the cool, ordered surface of In a Silent Way and the live playing is violent. They belong to two entirely different aesthetic universes. This group was at the center of the recordings in August, augmented again with Zawinul, McLaughlin, Young (on

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August 21, the last day), bass clarinetist Bennie Maupin, electric bassist (and Columbia staff producer) Harvey Brooks, drummer Lenny White (on 19 and 21 August), and two additional percussionists, Don Alias and Jim Riley (aka Jumma Santos). Zawinul again brought some music, “Pharaoh’s Dance,” which, again, Miles ruthlessly reduced to what the trumpeter felt was its essential qualities. He did the same with “Sanctuary,” Shorter’s composition, one the quintet had been playing that summer at Antibes and at the Newport Jazz Festival. Miles wrote all the rest of the music, though sketched is probably a better term. He had a clear idea in his mind what he wanted, but had come to prefer working with minimal material. He had known “from when I had brought in the music that nobody had ever head for Kind of Blue that if you’ve got some great musicians— and we did, both then and now—they will deal with the situation and play beyond what is there and above where they can.”34 Bennie Maupin, who played bass clarinet on the session, had never played with Miles before that first August morning. Miles had heard him play in clubs, and Maupin had also been recommended by DeJohnette. He told George Cole, “One morning I’ll never forget. We had started something with the rhythm section and he looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t you play? I can’t think of everything.’ I was thinking ‘I can’t believe he just said that to me! … this is Miles Davis. I know Miles can think of something!’ That was his way of really saying ‘I trust you. …’ The kind of inspiration and what came out of me is just there! He gave me total freedom to be myself.”35

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He had rehearsed the musicians ahead of time, but had not shown them any of the music he actually wanted to record. Instead, he “brought in these musical sketches that nobody had seen.”36 The musicians were arranged in a circle, facing each other, and miked separately. Macero set the tapes rolling again, but instead of leading the band through the entire form of a medley, or even a single tune, Miles worked with fragments of the material, asking for different things and adding material in response to what the musicians were playing. He added and subtracted players. He can frequently, though not always clearly, be heard on the album giving direc- tions in real time to the musicians. Dave Holland described his experience, telling Paul Tingen:

Miles always gave the minimum amount of instruc- tions. Usually he’d let you try and find something that you thought worked, and if it did, then that would be the end of it. His approach was that if he needed to tell someone what to do, he had the wrong musician. If we used any notation it was often a collage-type thing with a bass line and some chord movements, and maybe a melody related to that. But it was never something long or extended. It was always a fairly compact section, and then we’d move to another section. The recording of Bitches Brew was therefore often very fragmented. We’d have these sketches of ideas, and we’d play each for ten minutes or so, and then we’d sort of stop, come to an ending of sorts … Often I didn’t know if we were rehearsing or recording, but Miles had a policy of recording everything.37

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I think everybody realized subconsciously that something important was taking place because of the cast of the characters and the nature of the music once it started to unfold.

Maupin told Cole:

It was like ‘Wow! What is that?’ Because we didn’t listen to as we recorded it. Miles had definitely had moments with Zawinul and Chick, where they had looked at the forms and some of the chord structures and rhythmic ideas, but for myself, I had no idea of what was going to happen! I think that was the same for everybody else. It was just an amazing feeling in there. Miles would set up these rhythm patterns and conduct. He’d use hand gestures and facial gestures and he walked around while the tape was rolling and motion for certain people to play and they would play for a moment and then he would wave them out … I had never been in a recording situation where anyone had done that, plus the music was just really basically totally improvised in most cases. There were charts but they were sketches at most. I realized after the second day that what he wanted is whatever the guys played. There were some melodies that he wanted that we played together … but there were never any chord structures or any discussion of what he wanted. It was really left up to musicians to play and just be in that moment and that was a challenge for everybody.

Maupin, who went on to play with Herbie Hancock and is the horn player on the Head Hunters album, also

• 58 • Gramophone, Trumpet, Razor Blade points out that the sessions were short, going from about ten in the morning to one in the afternoon the three consecutive days, and confirms Holland’s recollection: “it was totally cloaked in secrecy! Miles never let us hear anything, because he already knew that if a group of young musicians like us were to hear ourselves, we would cease to be in the moment and we would try and remember whatever we played and imitate ourselves. So he avoided that by never letting us hear anything. Young guys hear something and go ‘yeah I like that—I’ll play that on the next take.’ But you never knew what the next take was going to be!” Miles saw the session as a destination along his overall musical path, and especially the deep, willful changes that had begun with “Circle in the Round.” He says in his autobiography:

That recording was a development of the creative process, a living composition. It was like a figure, or motif, that we all bounced off of. What we did on Bitches Brew you couldn’t ever write down for an orchestra to play. That’s why I didn’t write it all out, not because I didn’t know what I wanted: I knew that what I wanted would come out of a process and not some prearranged shit. This session was about improvisation, and that’s what makes jazz so fabulous.38

In Miles: The Definitive Biography,Ian Carr relates John McLaughlin’s experience of the sessions:

The moment where I began to feel that something really extraordinary was happening—that something was really

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breaking open, was Bitches Brew. But the thing about Miles is that everybody loves him, and so everybody had this very powerful motivation to do something to make him happy. Everybody would be in a big circle in the studio, but nobody really knew what he was looking for. I don’t think even Miles knew what he was looking for, but he had an idea, as he always has had, and he, like everybody else, was just experimenting with other ways of perceiving music, which of course is his unique approach—this knack of pulling things out of musicians that they might not normally be aware of. He certainly did that to me …

Miles’s and Macero’s process, especially the use of the studio as a sketch pad for raw material and compo- sition, was notably different than what Brian Wilson and George Martin were doing. Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s were studio productions—not coincidentally ones that, like bebop before, pulled rock out of dance-based rhythm and blues and into a more abstract pop art—with salient use of multitrack recording, signal processing, orchestral arrangements and the use of non-musical sounds as collage. Their form was still beholden to songs, though, and they were edited to produce the best possible finished music, not to create the music itself and divine its form and structure. The studio recording design of Bitches Brew was also unique, not only for how it allowed Miles to conduct the music, but for how it allowed Macero to add his own signal processing and mixing to produce a remarkable, influential sound. It had a great influence on Brian Eno, who told an interviewer:

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I read an interview with Teo Macero, and it was very very interesting, because I was so fascinated by these records. I really wanted to know how they were made. … Which is that Miles Davis would put together a group of people often, who hadn’t played together before, take them into the studio, and there was just playing for a day, for hours and hours on end. And then off they go, and Teo Macero would then be left with hours of tapes, and he would go through and find little pieces, often repeat little pieces, which is very radical in jazz to use the same section a couple of times over. I mean, I don’t think anybody had ever thought of doing that before. And it’s a very inter- esting idea, to take something that is all accidents and chance events, and then make it all happen again. So suddenly you think ‘Hold on—we’ve been here before.’ It’s like a strange déjà-vu thing. But what really interested me in those things: he did something that was extremely modern, something you can only do on records, which is, he took the perfor- mance to pieces, spatially. Now, those things were done by a group of musicians in a room, all sitting quite close to another, like we are. But they were all close-miked, which meant that their sounds were quite separate from one another. And when Teo Macero mixed the record, he put them miles apart. So this is very very interesting to listen to a music, where you have the conga player three streets down the road here, you have the trumpet player on a mountain over there, the guitar player—you have to look through binoculars to see him, you know! Everybody is far away, and so the impression that you have immediately, is not that you are in a little place with a group of people playing, but that you’re on a huge

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plateau, and all of these things are going on sort of almost on the horizon, I think. And there’s no attempt made by Teo Macero to make them connect with one another. In fact he deliberately disconnects them from one another.39

The tapes, of course, had to be edited before that process culminated in the actual album. “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” and “Spanish Key,” like “Sanctuary,” were already in the quintet’s repertoire, and were edited with nothing more than the lightest standard touch, if at all, to conform to a duration that would fit on the album side, or to combine more than one take into a superior whole. The bulk of the album, like In a Silent Way, was constructed after the recordings ended, with Miles and Macero listening to the tapes and building something out of short sections of material. The end result was mostly unimaginable for the musicians that day. As Joe Zawinul related to Carr: “When we left the studio after recording Bitches Brew, I said, ‘I don’t like that stuff at all, Miles.’ And he was very disappointed. ‘I just don’t like it,’ I said, ‘it’s too much noodling around, you know.’ And then, much later on, I go to CBS and the lady working there was playing this incredible music in her office. I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ She said, ‘What do you mean, what the hell is this? This is you and Miles and John and everybody on Bitches Brew.’ And the way it was put together then, it was really, really nice, you know.”40 Maupin later saw Miles at the Filmore West, and after visiting with him, Maupin got back in his car. “We turn on the car radio on and I hear this music. I pulled the car over because it was a nice night and the Bay Area is so beautiful. So I’m listening to the music and

• 62 • Gramophone, Trumpet, Razor Blade thinking ‘Damn, what is that?’ It sounds familiar but I don’t know what it is. It was like being in a dream where you’re hearing music but you can’t figure it out and it’s just driving you crazy because you want to know what it is. After maybe ten minutes the host for the show announced that it was the new Miles Davis recording Bitches Brew! I was like ‘Wow—that’s what it sounded like!’ For the next hour and half, two hours, they played the entire recording. It was quite a shock. That’s where I heard it, in San Francisco, sitting in a car on the radio. I was blown away by it.”

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Trivial and titillating details adhere to the history of pop music, seemingly solid objects to hold onto in the ephemeral stream of time. Bitches Brew has some of its own. In a November 3, 1969 memo from Teo Macero to Columbia executives, the album title is noted as Listen to This, and it’s a single LP,41 with only “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Bitches Brew.” Production was still on-going in early November. Then, on the 14th of the same month, Macero sent out another memo, managing to express a substantial amount of uncertainty and anxiety in little over a dozen words:

Miles just called and said he wants this album to be titled:

BITCHES BREW

Please advise.

Apparently, no one was overly shocked. Nor were they by Mati Klarwein’s striking and mysterious cover art, full of ambiguous (or indecipherable) symbols and allegories. On the front, a man and woman, apparently African,

• 64 • BITCHES BREW, CS 9995 embrace while looking out to sea at a looming storm. A tendril of cloud connects the storm to the woman’s hair. Behind her, at the left edge, is part of a red flower that spreads to the back cover, surrounded by yellow rays that might be flames. Above that is a black face: androgynous, beaded with sweat (or jewels), staring impassively toward the right edge of the cover. Flip the album over, and that face turns out to be like the Janus, with a mirror image white half, the sweat appearing as drops of blood. A pair of white and black hands twist up to connect, via the ring fingers, to the visages. The backdrop is a night sky, a field of stars, and it is filled out with two more images: that of a tribal woman standing and glaring fiercely, surrounded by a black penumbra, while below there is another woman, in profile, her head covered, five hoops piercing her left ear, her eyes closed in what might be contemplation. Miles knew Klarwein and played tapes of the album for him before the artist created the cover. It stands apart from its time, including Klarwein’s previous covers— Eric Dolphy’s Iron Man, one for a recording of Leonard Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety—and from pop art and psychedelic trends. It is full of solid images in dream-like juxtapositions. It has a narrative feel. It is as stimulatingly unknowable as the music inside. Klarwein’s work is the first thing anyone experiences with the album. The second is the two photographs inside—Miles shirtless and smiling in the sun to the left, and a smaller one of Miles and Macero in the studio on the right, set into the track listings, credits and Ralph J. Gleason’s liner notes. Gleason’s writing inside the album is still gently mocked for the lack of

• 65 • BITCHES BREW capital letters, including for the personal pronoun— except for “BITCHES BREW”—but what he expresses is insightful and still meaningful, and you were already glancing at them as you sat back and waited for the stylus to hit the first microgroove on the first LP, Side 1:

… and sometimes i think maybe what we need is to tell people that this is here because somehow in this plasticized world they have the automatic reflex that if something is labeled one way then that is all there is in it and we are always finding out to our surprise that there is more to blake or more to ginsberg or more to ’trane or more to stravinsky than whatever it was we thought was there in the first place. so be it with the music we have called jazz and which i never knew what it was because it was so many different things to so many different people each apparently contradicting the other and one day i flashed that it was music. that’s all, and when it was great music it was great art and it didn’t have anything at all to do with labels and who says mozart is by definition better than sonny rollins and to whom.

The hip, cosmopolitan packaging comes right off the streets and tries to capture the image of young people digging each other, and each other’s music, across racial and social lines. Klarwein’s illustration and Gleason’s writing are aesthetically integral to the album package, embracing a spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness response to a set of music that carries astonishing force and weight of expression, and also didn’t relate

• 66 • BITCHES BREW, CS 9995 to anything else of the time (very little since bears any relation to the album). Bitches Brew was unprecedented.

One of the fascinating things about the session is how three straight days of music making with the same group of musicians produced two albums that are so different: almost opposed to each other. The first LP is the great exercise in abstract composition, funk musique concrète, full of spooky space and haunting magic, seeming to gather concentrated meaning out of pure chaos (such is the quality of Miles’s music and Macero’s composing/ editing). The second LP is dense, hard-hitting, still on the abstract side but with a discernible popular appeal. It goes for the hips and the groin where its predecessor reaches for the mind. The common thread is the playing. There’s some jazz phrasing and articulation, but most every note is stripped down to the basics of funk, rock and the blues. This is music from and for the streets, with strut and swagger, arrogant sex appeal and casual lack of concern for bourgeois taste and values. The sound belies both the artificiality of the recording studio and the abstract, compositional techniques that produced the album. At times the musicians sound like they’re drifting, and bassist Harvey Brooks is nowhere near the level of everyone else: but when it is good, which is the bulk of the time, it is tremendous. The Bitches Brew session gathered some of the finest musicians on the planet in Columbia Studio B, and the imagination they brought to the recordings, and the excitement they clearly held playing with each other and with Miles, reaches aston- ishing levels, over and over again.

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And this is what you heard:

“Pharaoh’s Dance” 20:07 The seamlessness of modern recordings hides the fact that they are almost always the result of a process far closer to sausage making than that of musicians merely playing in front of microphones, especially in our sample/loop/DAW era. Most listeners find this both unremarkable and unnoticeable, although in classical and jazz music this is still something few want to talk about or even acknowledge. Something about acoustic music, including the miked guitar amp, makes our brains want to think that there is nothing synthetic on recordings. It might be as simple as the expectation that listening to a jazz group or an orchestra play on a record means hearing music that you implicitly expect was made in real time: the illusion is that you are experiencing a live perfor- mance. A Beethoven symphony on a recording is one you could also hear live, and a tune a jazz group plays on their latest release is something they most likely would play in a club or a hall—completely recognizable and repeatable, save for the solos. This is especially true for jazz culture, which is about the spontaneity of the moment, and surely that spontaneity was captured in the recording studio. Recorded on the last day of the session, “Pharaoh’s Dance” immediately upends this notion. Within a minute of the opening material, there is an obvious edit, a splice that repeats music first heard at 0:14 in (itself spliced in from some different stretch of tape). It would be obtrusive if it weren’t so clearly intentional—a statement of musical

• 68 • BITCHES BREW, CS 9995 purpose if not overt philosophy. You know instantly, even if you can’t articulate it, that as vivid as the playing sounds, it wasn’t captured in real time, the illusion of live playing is confounded by the cinematic jump cuts. The music is hushed, and it seems to spin away from the listener, downwards to rich soil in which, while still quiet, it swells in breadth and mass. The most insistent feature is the rhythm, with Jack DeJohnette tapping out eighth-notes on his hi-hat, Lennie White in the left channel playing quiet rolls on his snare and hitting his own cymbal on the downbeats. DeJohnette pushes along this two bar pattern with syncopated bass drum thumps on the upbeat of three and four in the last bar. Chick Corea plays an arpeggiated E minor phrase, and bass clarinetist Bennie Maupin answers with a contrapuntal figure that pushes the tonality toward B. Maupin’s line, and a tiny antiphonal phrase from guitarist John McLaughlin, both sound, when separated from the mix, uncannily like fragments plucked from The Rite of Spring. Jim Riley’s shaker is a whisper in the left channel. Dave Holland’s plangent bass entrance at 0:15 cements a B pedal tone by spelling the rising figure B-E-F#-B. His sustained note lasts until 0:19, where the instruments start to spiral around each other. Those first twenty seconds contain an enormous amount of musical information: medium-fast tempo; slower, grooving pulse; rhythm patterns; a simple but firm tonality; and a mood of dark mystery, as if the musicians were playing while in some kind of trance- like state. The stretch also establishes the disorienting combination of reality and artificiality, the music that was clearly played in the moment dropped into a sequence of

• 69 • BITCHES BREW time that didn’t come to be. If you hadn’t put the stylus on the album, the music might never have been heard. It’s also the first hint at structure in music that appears formless. The band plays straight through from 0:15 to 0:46, where there is another edit that extends the music ten more seconds. At the 0:56 mark, the bass arpeggio is dropped in again (Holland’s not playing it again, the tape is repeated), then at 1:29 the ten second stretch of material returns, followed by a repeat of the tape that first led up to Holland’s statement. Through the first two and a half minutes of the track, there are seven distinct edits (out of a total of nineteen), all before Miles’s trumpet is ever heard. The order of the repeats is in the sequence ABCBCABC, a clear structure that Macero made with his razor blade. The clarity of his design stands out from the formlessness of the music. Paul Buckmaster, an English composer who was an important collaborator with Miles during his post-Bitches Brew electric period, makes the case that this is an identifiable sonata form from the Classical era (e.g. the late eighteenth-century style of Haydn and Mozart) of the Western classical tradition.42 This is true only in the broadest and most tenuous sense that the sonata form repeats specific material in a certain order, and it is that which defines the form (itself non-existent until it was “identified” after the fact by musicologists in the late nineteenth century), but there is no secondary theme—there’s no theme at all, just some harmony—and thus there’s nothing to develop. But the argument is also another misguided—though sincere—attempt to place aesthetic justification and values from one culture and tradition onto something

• 70 • BITCHES BREW, CS 9995 that could not care less about it, and which stands on its own terms. It also sounds wrong. The repeated sections and the order in which Macero places them create music that sounds like it is moving around the perimeter of a circle, a finite area with no end. There is a huge amount of tension in these first two, structured minutes. Having heard so much clear formal design in the bulk of music across all genres, the repetition implies some teleology— the raison d’être of sonata form—and the tension comes from the underlying, but unmistakable feeling that there will be no teleology forthcoming. At least not from the musicians. “Pharaoh’s Dance,” even with the edits, was not made to fulfill a particular purpose, even an abstract one like start at the beginning and play through to the end. The music starts and stops, but has no precon- ceived beginning and end. Macero gives the track some simple formal shape, and it works, but the playing has no expression of form. That is a crucial difference, and a profound one. The music just exists from the moment the needle hits it until it slides off, twenty minutes later, and reaches the lock groove. Davis’s first entrance is at 2:33, and he sounds uncertain and pensive, like he’s testing the waters. He drops out at 2:54, and the ensemble, while rhythmically centered, drifts a bit, seeming to wait for something to happen. What happens is Miles re-enters at 3:30, playing with a full sound, forceful attack, and utter confidence. It sounds like he’s playing a solo, but he’s starting with a loose version of the theme of “Pharaoh’s

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Dance”—recognizable in retrospect when he repeats it later in the track—and he gradually develops a solo directly out of it, which is just a riff on the B dominant seventh chord with a flatted ninth that is essentially the only harmony. The physical power of his playing on the entire album cannot be overstated. The muscles in his legs and gut are pushing the sound out with majestic strength. Behind him, the band is galvanized, picks up on his attitude and builds matching weight and momentum, like a semi-trailer getting in gear. Working within the spare harmonic framework, Miles plays a very hip blues line at 4:46. Bennie Maupin follows, at 5:41, with a bass clarinet solo, dogged by McLaughlin’s sharp-edged responses. This is one of two relatively long stretches of straight playing from the band that makes up the track. But it’s not really straight. While Miles is prominent in the mix, the other instruments are at or near a common plane. Solos are not only difficult to separate from ensemble playing, but there is usually more than one solo going on. Maupin plays with Corea and Larry Young, then with McLaughlin and Joe Zawinul, then Corea tosses his opening arpeggio back in, a cue for the band to cool down. There is another series of edits starting at 7:55, leading to a static interlude based around Miles playing a slow, descending phrase—the edit point of the loop is marked by someone in the background of the right channel (not Miles) saying “Hey, Jim.” The interlude is made with eight edits, and when the music comes out of it at the 9:00 mark, Miles is blowing up a storm, and the band is responding. This is a six minute plus stretch of uninterrupted, unedited music—the band cooking.

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This ebb and flow of tumult and repose is the consistent overall design of the album, and it comes after the fact. The fluidity of the playing, the constant forward motion, come out of the way Miles had the musicians play, encouraging them to find and organize themselves around the strongest ideas—they are always building to something. Macero’s editing follows the pure music-making organically, shaping great arches, waves, of musical events. The cuts are obvious, but the musical results make them sound natural, logical. Miles’s solo is followed by another from Maupin, playing with the three keyboardists, then Wayne Shorter comes in on soprano sax, with Maupin underneath. McLaughlin chops out his own solo, with Joe Zawinul improvising on electric piano in the left channel. Throughout, Harvey Brooks is playing a repetitive pulse on electric bass,43 while Holland comes in and out with free obligatos, and there are still two drummers and two percussionists. This constant elision of solo and accom- paniment, ensemble dialogue, and rhythmic power is what Zawinul and Shorter’s band Weather Report would thrive on for almost twenty years. The groove is complex and almost atavistic, and the ear can’t keep track of all the instruments at once, but the sound is so clear that you can find anything you want to focus on. That’s the mark of superior engineering and mixing of course, but even more it indicates how closely the musicians listened to each other under Miles’s direction. We can hear them because they could hear and respond to each other. Macero’s splice at the 15:19 mark, a point where the previous jam winds down, makes for a distinct coda,

• 73 • BITCHES BREW almost Beethovenian. Holland leads the ensemble with a new vamp, this time on a steady quarter note, while on top the three electric pianos have a discussion. Maupin and Brooks return, and the weight and power build once again to a point of tension that is relieved when Miles, playing with mordant expression, delivers the theme, more or less straight. There’s a sense of nobility to the sound of his trumpet above the roiling ensemble. Both volume and a sense of impending chaos grow: then the music thins out again. Miles repeats the theme, and this time, with McLaughlin’s slashing chords, the playing is swaggering funk. Miles drops out. Corea repeats a series of downward moving chords, and after crashing over you like a massive wave, it leaves you washed up on the shore.

“Bitches Brew” 27:01 On the flip side of the first LP, the title track is made up of the first music recorded at the session on August 19. “Bitches Brew” is Miles’s own tune, and there is more structure, though fewer parts, to the music itself, while Macero used twenty-two edits to form the track. This is the darkest music on the album. It opens with an incantatory, ritualistic prelude: the bass plays low C, alternating on the beat and syncopated attacks, and the keyboards answer with tone cluster in the fourth measure of the phrase. Meanwhile, the drums thrash and chatter. When Miles comes in, he aggressively attacks repeated Cs, before ripping up to A flat, then a slow arpeggio down to E flat. His trumpet is heavily echo-plexed and the notes hint at the keys of C major, C minor and A-flat major.

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The rest of the musical structure is a bass line that resolves to C. At 2:51 the main vamp starts, with Brooks playing the bass. After the first statement of the vamp, Maupin enters, playing a weird, quizzical antiphonal arpeggio. Miles repeatedly snaps his fingers during the first repeats, making sure Brooks, who tends to lag, stays at the right tempo. The vamp is looped through five edits, and though seamless, it’s clear Brooks was strug- gling with his part, not getting the feel. At 3:32, Corea and the drumers—mixing a modified march beat and snare drum roll—enter, and the groove is on, colored by Zawinul’s chords in the left channel. Miles simply ... plays. “Bitches Brew” is for getting down and getting it on. At 4:51, he starts spitting out a satirical version of the melody from Blood, Sweat & Tears’s contemporary hit, “Spinning Wheel.” His playing comes strongly out of his body, and noticeably stokes the ensemble’s fire. This is some of the most exciting music on the entire album. Miles cuts out at 6:21 and McLaughlin solos, accom- panied prominently by Corea and Holland. This is cut short by a subtle edit at 7:21 that leaves Holland with a brief statement high up on his instrument. The music almost entirely drops away at 7:28, and you can hear Miles saying, “Keep it like that [garbled].” Another edit at 7:30 is marked by his voice directing, “Keep it tight.” The band vamps a bit. Then, the music stops for a moment at 7:49. It seems spontaneous, but Miles wants to keep going, and after the briefest silence, says, “John,” and the guitarist instantly cuts into a one-minute solo, full of bent notes. At 8:55, Miles is back for another solo, more relaxed and swinging, still full of the physical strength and

• 75 • BITCHES BREW expression that permeates everything he plays on the album—it is exhilarating to hear him not walk on eggshells but stride over mountains. From this point, for several minutes, “Bitches Brew” is a series of solos over the same vamp, which becomes something of a drone. Shorter follows Davis, sounding unsure, then Holland has a brief statement, followed by Corea. There is a key edit at 14:36, apparently to cut back some ensemble playing, because the musicians return to the ritualistic prelude (they are playing it again; it’s not a repeat made via tape editing). When the groove returns at 17:20, Holland plays a great, extended solo, funky and inventive. Maupin adds a subdued improvised counterpoint about one minute in, then the solos cycle again. First it’s Miles, at 19:33, then Zawinul, Corea and McLaughlin briefly at 20:33. The groove threatens to dissipate, but picks up again, more waves. Miles insinuates his way in with a quiet, snaking line at 21:00, some soft repeated Cs, some louder phrases. He seems unhurried, with nothing to prove, speaking in aphorism. A minute later, a key change starts the groove back up, and Zawinul takes a solo that is inside the texture of the music but full of his inimitable, funky, stabbing lines. He’s surrounded by Maupin and McLaughlin, who sound like they’re having a separate conversation. Again, things don’t end—they stop. At 24:04, Macero splices a loop of the opening music back in. “Bitches Brew,” an announcement, and then a groove, comes full circle. The music stops, and Miles whispers something made indecipherable by echo on his channel. “Bitches Brew” was something of a proving ground for the entire session, especially with all the new musicians

• 76 • BITCHES BREW, CS 9995 working in a new way with only the slightest bit of material and the most enigmatic direction. The ferocious playing is a testament to how fine these musicians were, and are, and to their complete belief in what Miles was doing. They may not have understood it, but they made it happen for him. The track is unusual in that it is the only new music made for the album that Miles would later play live. It’s in each set from his June 17 to 20, 1970 Filmore sets. Live, it’s stentorian, strangely thudding and heavy: a rock beat without much groove. “Bitches Brew” also produced “John McLaughlin” on the second LP. When Bob Belden produced the Complete Bitches Brew Sessions for Sony, he went through the original tapes and discovered that Miles and Macero originally thought “Bitches Brew” would be a five-part suite, and the third part, which featured the guitarist, was cut out and made its own track.44 The construction of the album is, in its way, full of the same spontaneity and sense of discovery as the playing.

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The second LP, Side 1:

One disc to blow you away, another to readjust your head.

“Spanish Key” 17:35 In the score for his Symphony No. 2, composer Gustav Mahler added a note after the final double bar of the cataclysmic first movement, asking for the conductor to observe a five-minute pause before continuing on to the next movement. Mahler felt that the emotional and sonic power of the music would be so great that listeners, and even the musicians, would need some time to recover their equilibrium. Something of the same experience was built into the original double album, one that is lost in the transfer to CD and digital. “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Bitches Brew” each took up their own entire side of the first LP in the set, and the listener had to flip over that LP, then change completely to the second LP, side 1—or wait for the

• 78 • BITCHES BREW, CS 9996 automatic changer—and that necessary pause afforded some time for the music to sink in. The LP 1 listening experience traverses abstract expression, group improvisation with a free feel to it, some dark sentiments and unexpected, open-ended form and duration. Beyond the sensual impact of the music, there is the still disorienting sensation of the tracks simply stopping without coming to a formal end or resolution of any kind. Repeated exposure to Bitches Brew, and the cultural accumulation of sensibility- altering musical styles like ambient, black-metal, drone and psychedelia, make it easier to navigate the album, though the music will always touch on something in the lizard brain that stimulates the feeling of contemplating a great, unnameable power and Miles, at his deepest Prince of Darkness musical moments, wields power that is more chthonic than any musician or band that tries to narrate a mythos. So the needle drops on “Spanish Key,” the first track of Side 1 of the second LP, and hears something relatively more expected, accessible, closer to a standard groove. Relatively, but not quite the exact thing. It starts with a slightly staggered 4/4 beat from the drums, as if DeJohnette and White both tried to pass through the same door and were momentarily jammed together. The bass plays a simple, syncopated rhythm that establishes an E pedal, and for a moment seems to clarify the placement of the downbeat, with further reinforcement from McLaughlin’s wicked, slashing chords—the groove is on but the feeling is still unsettled, with Corea’s electric piano colorations adding mystery. Miles’s first entrance comes at the 0:35, with a six-note

• 79 • BITCHES BREW phrase that moves upwards from E to a sustained D—a straight blues. His first note is on the fourth beat, further clouding the rhythm, and amplifying the tension. Clarity delivers resolution: Miles’s first phrase is played quietly, the second starts on a clear downbeat, subtly bringing new drive and direction to the band. Miles’s playing grows in force. Maupin, who had been shadowing the trumpet on bass clarinet, drops away. The pedal tone shifts down to D, and Miles begins a full- fledged solo. The rhythms are driving, and the percussionists, who are hard to hear on the first LP, are clearly helping things along. DeJohnette and White play with a stone-faced strength that obscures the intent. McLaughlin plays some of the most slashing rhythm guitar on record. The whole band cooks. “Spanish Key” is one of the tunes they had been playing on the road over the summer, and everyone’s cruising. Along with the basic theme, the tune is structured for open-ended improvi- sations using either a D Phrygian, an E Phrygian, or a G Mixolydian mode, each lasting as long as the soloist desires. There is a good deal of interplay, with Maupin a constant shadowy presence, and hints of a standard jazz arrangement. The soloists lead, and give Corea some cue that tells him it’s time to play a dramatic, cadential figure that modulates everyone specifically to a new key. At about 1:30 into the tune, Miles seems to choke off a quick, downward riff that sounds half like something from a soul-funk horn section. He immediately hits the upward theme again, with Maupin moaning underneath, and the moment is forgotten.

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Except, that is, if you happen to have the Bitches Brew 40th Anniversary Edition, released in 2010, which contains two previously unheard alternate takes, the other being “John McLaughlin.” The alternate take is seven minutes shorter, and in terms of playing and structure sounds much more like a preliminary run-through, the rehearsal of an idea rather than an attempt to execute it fully— which is curious considering how well the core band knew the music already. There are some interesting technical differences about the alternate: the drums are miked much closer, with a much flatter sound; McLaughlin and Holland sound like they’re standing right in between DeJohnette and White; the keyboards are upfront—likely that this take was never mixed. The music is different in some dramatic ways as well: the beat is sluggish. The drummers are still looking for a crisp mesh. The accompanying parts are thicker and, with less space and no mix, they’re lacking in atmos- phere. McLaughlin in particular is subdued. There’s little of his stiletto chording until just near the end of the take. The arrangement makes this much more a head-solos- head jazz tune, with a brief introductory vamp leading directly into Miles’s solo (there’s less of Maupin haunting him around the edges—instead Shorter doubles the melody on soprano), and far less of the tight rhythm/ relaxed ensemble playing that makes the music on the album so physically irresistible. Miles and Shorter play the cadence to G via a phrase missing on the master take, a tight little horn hit that would have sounded right at home on a Sly and The Family Stone track, an identi- fiably commercial bit of music that was discarded from

• 81 • BITCHES BREW the final album, disputing the impulse to cry “sell out!” It’s weak in the context, and it’s what Miles chokes off on the master take. The playing on the alternate is not particularly distin- guished, with Shorter in particular tossing out one idea after another, none of which seems to interest him. The keyboard accompaniment is messy and either too conventional or too abstract, and without McLaughlin slicing through the mix, the entire rhythmic feel is of a band spinning in place. The casual feeling falls on the side of languorous, rather than loose: the band doesn’t respond to the keyboard cadences—one of the most propulsive features of the master take—and the music just ambles through until it peters out at the end, right at the point where Holland is opening up a bass solo. As the last notes fade, Miles says, “Hey Teo, I want to hear some of that back.”45 Alternate takes are usually curiosities, material that gives some context to the better version to come, and that might offer some insight into the creative or recording process, or both. What is most valuable about having any alternate takes from the Bitches Brew session is that they reveal, through negative example, the way the record was made once the playing stopped. The band plays far better on the master take, with a more cogent arrangement and musical purpose and direction, as expected, and time and care have been put into the mix. After hearing the playback, Miles knew what he wanted. This peak under the surface also confirms what is obvious from the original tracks: Bitches Brew eschews high concept for the fundamental value of playing the shit out of the music, and of Miles’s search for complexity via

• 82 • BITCHES BREW, CS 9996 the simplest means. His music had been moving towards an absolute, the idea of a group creating something with the fewest but firmest limits, and beginnings and endings seemed to become inconvenient necessities— the music had to start sometime and eventually end. Even for young musicians working near the cutting edge, what Miles was doing was new, and the first thought on unfamiliar ideas was no longer the freshest and the best, familiarization was a necessity. Back to the master, the intensity builds gradually, then bursts into what still feels like a life-ring on a stormy sea, a dramatic and conclusive cadence that modulates the music to G major, at 3:12. The textures clear out, the groove gets brighter, with a danceable swagger. McLaughlin plays something almost like a solo, more like a dialogue with the keyboards. He spits out ideas, a generous handful of attractive, funky notions, without stitching together any kind of development. There is an edit at the 4:13 mark that seems to indicate that Macero felt there was too much aimless playing, because McLaughlin’s fragmented lines continue across and through it. Miles re-enters with a single statement of the theme, at the 5:21 mark, the type of cue that he had been playing for years, one which calls for a specific response from the band. McLaughlin drops out. The rhythm section returns to E, and there is a quick set of edits, at the 5:34 and 5:35 mark, some vamp reduced to the briefest, quiet interlude of drums, bass and keyboards. This is where Macero joined two separate takes (though not the alternate) together to make the master, and there are no more edits on the finished track. This is also where Shorter comes in on the soprano.

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Shorter sounds alternately purposeful and aimless. At 6:46, he uses the theme as his own cue, and the band follows him by modulating back to G. Shorter lets loose with an energetic flurry of notes, and he and the band move with free-form logic back to D, then to E. The saxophonist’s phrases here, and the keyboards’ responses, especially that of Corea—who is tremendously energetic throughout the track—eerily presage music that he and Zawinul will make together on Weather Report albums like Sweetnighter and Live in Tokyo, starting with their debut album in 1971. Another cadence at 8:42 plants the music firmly back in G; by now it’s clear that G is the key for jamming, the other tonal centers are there to create harmonic tension and to suspend the feeling of time. Miles’s re-entry with the theme at 9:18 is a signal for the harmony to drift back to E, then to D for a dialogue between McLaughlin and Corea. Miles cuts it short at 10:46, with a solo that starts aggressively, then turns inward. It’s fascinating to hear the musicians step back and give him space to play; to hear them listen with heightened awareness to what he’s playing, and respond sympathetically. Of all the stretches of utter freedom on Bitches Brew, this is one of the most mysterious, coming as it does within the context of the music on the album closest to the vernacular mainstream. The music grows increasingly, and spontaneously, atmospheric, as if the spirit of the first LP still lingered in Columbia’s Studio B. Miles starts a pianissimo trill at 13:25, in response to the keyboard playing, and McLaughlin follows with his own. The mood continues to darken until Miles brings back the theme, telling the

• 84 • BITCHES BREW, CS 9996 band that it’s another cue, but tacking on a short run that prepares the scale. Back in G, there is rollicking three-way playing from the keyboards, then the music once again returns to E, and the keyboards quiet down for a solo from Maupin, the key colorist on the album. The transition sounds like Miles was directing the action. Quietly, the trumpeter slips back in at 16:51, with the theme. Maupin shadows him, again, and the return of music that sounds so much like the opening is a clear coda, if not conclusion, because the musicians just play until they stop, at 17:35, the music done without formal or gestural ceremony. Not musique concrète, just music that uses funky, vernacular language as a means to find freedom. High art of its own kind. Miles asks, “Play some of that Teo.” He knew what he had on this take.

“John McLaughlin” 4:23 The shortest track on the album at just under four and a half minutes: it’s an obvious showcase for the guitarist and a sign of how important he was to Miles. As Columbia’s session sheet shows, this was a vamp from the original “Bitches Brew” conception over which McLaughlin was given free rein. Grounded in C minor, it fits into the tonal structure of the larger piece. The drumming on the alternate take is, while not exactly jazz, much closer to the sound of the idiom in the late 1960s, with a touch of swing on the ride cymbal at the start, and simmering as an undercurrent through the 6:41 duration. McLaughlin’s playing is as furious on the alternate as on the final version, and just after the first minute and half,

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Zawinul starts a rolling bass line, doubled in the right hand, that hangs the central pitch on an F and threatens to plow through the entire building. Brooks is mixed down on the album to a slightly more than subliminal presence. He makes the pulse, which is vital, but the bass lines on Bitches Brew are most prominent in the keyboards. Bass lines had been growing more important to Miles’s conception over the years, moving away from the steady, swinging time keeping in mainstream jazz to a modern cantus firmus idea, a repetitive, literal ground and source of gravity that allowed for all sorts of spontaneous invention and free playing on top while shielding the music from existential angst, and making Miles’s music an increasingly close cousin of James Brown’s explosive, almost experimental, late 1960s’ band. As a connoisseur of bass lines, Miles was a fan of Zawinul, who wrote some of the hippest ones in modern music. Miles had already recorded Zawinul’s “Directions” in November 1967, and although that wasn’t released until the 1981 compilation of the same title, Miles had been playing the tune, with its driving bass line, to open his live sets in the months that preceded the August session. This second bass line in “John McLaughlin” is a slight modification and transposition of the one from “Directions,” as is the opening keyboard line from “Pharaoh’s Dance.” Despite some imprecise ensemble playing, the alternate take is tremendous. Why it wasn’t used on the album is a puzzle. One reason is that Miles plays on this alternate (he’s not on the master of “John McLaughlin”), and he’s strong as always. But his phrases connect directly

• 86 • BITCHES BREW, CS 9996 to “Bitches Brew” even though “John McLaughlin” would fit only awkwardly into the title track, not even considering the already daunting duration. Not right for “Bitches Brew,” but too close to that music to sound like a discrete, independent track, it was a compositional decision, a matter of cutting out a stretch of music to make “Bitches Brew” work, and then leaving it off the album altogether because it would have undermined the compositional goals for the first LP. The master is slightly slower, less furious, but with a much tougher sense of swagger and groove (it is also not one take but two, taped together with a quick but discernible edit just before 2:09). There’s not a hint of swing, and Brooks does his strongest playing on the album. After the briefest drum roll, the keyboard vamp starts, a repeated figure that McLaughlin answers on each iteration with his incredible playing. Rather than stitch together a long solo, McLaughlin counterpunches in a way that Miles must have admired: jabbing and moving and jabbing again, surround the target, always landing his shots. McLaughlin created a beautiful sound on his guitar, and then articulated it with astonishingly aggressive attacks and phrasing. The master take has a more complex structure, with a secondary musical idea that creeps in on Maupin’s bass clarinet. Under this, Zawinul plays his bass line. There’s less of the astonishing power, but more organization, a stronger sense that the musicians are playing what Miles wanted to hear. The music gently drifts apart in the end, with Holland seemingly lost just a bit longer in the music.

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“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” 14:04 “John McLaughlin,” because it came out of “Bitches Brew,” is the only music on the second LP that the core quintet had not been playing as part of their performing repertoire. But the group had been playing “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” the first track on Side 2 of the second LP, for a few months. At Newport on July 5, as heard on Bitches Brew Live, it’s a rugged blues, a mix of funk and rock, both countrified. Like the music from the mid-1960s, it’s a slender structure meant as a vehicle for the group to find something new and hopefully remarkable through ensemble improvisation. Medium up-tempo at Newport, in the studio on the second day (this is the only track recorded during the second session), the pace is a slow amble. Don Alias is one of the drummers—he brought a New Orleans- style slow march rhythm that Miles liked—and he and DeJohnette play a thinner texture than is heard live, while McLaughlin adds a punchy blues-rock flavor. “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” also shows how important Maupin was to the album. He’s doing what Miles asked him to do, inventing something under- neath the lead line, and his playing is great. The range of his instrument doesn’t thicken the bass because his playing is so vocalized and inventive, and he’s clearly listening to the other musicians so sharply that he can always be heard and never gets in anyone’s way. Holland frequently picks up on Maupin’s phrases and repeats them in a kind of improvised pas de deux behind the main soloist. It’s a consummate example of group interplay.

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On the album, “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” is a slow, swaggering, masculine blues. Brooks handles the main baseline, as usual, and he’s good-natured but stolid, the weakest musician on the album (he seems to be on the sessions because he just happened to be around and Miles wanted the sound of the electric bass). He does an approximation of what James Brown was doing with base lines, laying down a steady, repetitive line and using drums and guitar to build the groove on top of and around it. And groove they do, but do they ever play. “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” is the only track on the album where the master take is an entire, start-to-finish, unedited take (the ninth).46 The James Brown analogy and lesson runs deep throughout the music. Put Miles in place of the singer, and his trumpet statement and solo is Brown singing and getting down. Then, over a steady groove, the rest of the band gets to step forward, first McLaughlin, then Shorter, then Corea, whose solo grows increasingly restive and free. But because this is Bitches Brew, there’s the constant dialogue between the instruments, a barely suppressed tumult as the musicians pick up what Miles is laying down and run with it as fast and as far as they can— Corea has Holland tagging along with him—and the track, like all the previous ones, builds to points of hellacious intensity. Yet the pulse is never anything but easy and funky. It’s arguably the most conventional music on the album, starting with the theme, a series of solos, then a return to the theme, and a second solo from Miles, before, like everything else, it simply winds down.

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“Sanctuary” 10:59 Bitches Brew’s final track, and the sequencing, is enticing. The nearest to a ballad on the entire album, this is a Wayne Shorter composition that was recorded the first day of the session. This is the only concession to the public figure of Miles Davis, the musician. Miles was a consummate ballad player, the eloquence of his playing seeming to reveal some real intimacies. He always had a ballad on his albums, often opening with one, up through 1968, and played one almost every set. Even an artist so apparently disdainful of his audience still has them in mind in some way, and Miles was never above pleasing his listeners, they just had to come to him. Bitches Brew concludes with the illusion that the music has settled down in a spot where the listener can catch up. “Sanctuary” is the oldest musical material on the entire album. The quintet had played it live a handful of times in 1969, if not before. The previous quintet, augmented with guitarist George Benson, had recorded it in the studio March 15, 1968, though the track was not released until it was collected on the Circle in the Round album. An adventure in compositional ambiguity, the melody is so spare as to be barely there, nothing more than a series of descending intervals—perfect fourths, major and minor thirds, a whole step. The melody implies various keys, like C minor, E flat, F, suspended over shifting modal scales based on D. Tonal, but with no real resolution, structurally it’s an ideal example of the music Miles was making: centered around one organizing idea that is open to myriad valid interpretations. The music

• 90 • BITCHES BREW, CS 9996 succeeds or fails depending on the disciplined, responsive invention of the musicians. Shorter wrote a seven-note introduction for the tune, but by the time it had reached the studio on August 19, Miles was adding his own, deeply personal touches. It starts with two bongo hits, Alias, in the left channel, and a barely there note from Brooks. Miles starts playing almost immediately, and he’s paraphrasing a ballad he had been playing for years, Sammy Cahn’s and Jules Steyn’s “I Fall in Love Too Easily.” After the intensity and frequent darkness of the previous hour and twenty-four minutes of music, this is an oasis of calm. Miles improvises in his classic ballad manner, carefully setting out a phrase, then, after a pause, playing a response, like a man arguing with himself over what he really thinks and feels. Corea’s accompaniment shifts back and forth from encouragement to rumination. Alias and Riley add some unobtrusive color, but this track is the core quintet playing together. Shorter joins Miles on the theme, and the music builds up to a high point of energy without any lead solos. The volume and activity drop down, and it seems just about over, then at 5:13 the playing begins again. This is actually the edit of another take attached to the first one, which gives the track a mirror image shape. Miles eschews “I Fall in Love Too Easily” on the intro of this other take, but the direction and the form of the playing are the same, with Miles taking the theme up an octave to another peak. The tune finishes off with a repeat of the introductory phrase. “Sanctuary” can come off as idiosyncratic, old- fashioned, or a long-delayed and much-needed resolution,

• 91 • BITCHES BREW depending on your viewpoint, mood or experience. The depth of familiarity that the musicians have with the tune gives this track, despite the consistent feeling of funk and freedom it shares with the rest of the album, a refreshing assurance and polish. It also gives a strong impression that the musicians welcomed it as a change to loosen up and take a breather—though with no loss of concen- tration—after the mysterious process of recording the fragments of “Bitches Brew.” Teo Macero’s edit here is not compositional but utilitarian; given the choice between two equally fine takes, he and Miles decided to use both. There was just a bit more to the album, or better, from the album. Once Columbia’s promotional department had a chance to listen to it, they asked Macero to prepare two singles for release, listing the suggestions “Spanish Key,” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” “Bitches Brew” and “Sanctuary.”47 Macero picked the first two titles and edited out singles from them. This amounted to just under three minutes of music from each master, from the start of each track to the point where it will no longer fit on the side of a 45. They make for a decent dose of concentrated electric Miles, but are not much of a teaser for the depths of the album itself. They could only have left an odd and compelling impression when punched up on the jukebox. This is Bitches Brew, and Miles’s last note just hangs in the air, unsettling to the end. The aesthetic of the music is so consistent and unified across the album that it can take many hearings before the ear can differentiate between the tracks. That doesn’t mean it is two discs and ninety minutes of saying the same thing over and

• 92 • BITCHES BREW, CS 9996 over. The music has a clearly articulated framework and purpose, one that, with the fantastic band, produces an expansive musical expression. Bitches Brew doesn’t repeat the same idea: it shows how one idea can produce such abundant results, in real time and off the splicing block. What is brewing is its own, thrilling fecundity.

• 93 • It’s About That Time

Bitches Brew’s influence is everywhere and nowhere. Miles never made another record like it, although his final series of live double albums from just before his 1975 retirement—, Agharta and Pangea— take the avant-garde funk of the record to a lapidary, abstract extreme. The only musicians who would effec- tively develop its balance of open form, sinewy harmonic discipline and funk, were Zawinul and Shorter in their band, Weather Report. But the proof that you could make abstract, avant-garde music with a compelling style and a deep groove has been reverberating through modern music since 1970, and not only in jazz: Carlos Santana, Bill Laswell, Talking Heads, Jon Hassell, and even Thom Yorke, have acknowledged the album’s permanent effect. The “Downtown” music scene, where improvising musicians and avant-garde composers from every genre meet to make new music, exploded in Bitches Brew. The idea of Downtown music—improvising but not playing jazz, composing but not writing in the classical tradition, making conceptual music that you can dance to, populist music that’s not rock—is that music should

• 94 • It’s About That Time be high (especially experimental and abstract) art with pop appeal. The realization of that in music by John Zorn, Defunkt, Arthur Russell, Swans, Liquid Liquid and Sonic Youth, post-dates Bitches Brew, yet never reaches the same level of fluid musicality and earthy profundity that Miles’s album does. Bitches Brew is deep thinking without high concept, high art with the low appeal of abstract funk, and it seals the artificial division between jazz as popular entertainment and jazz as art music, and makes an abstract art music with the sounds of the streets. Immediate reaction often reopened that fissure. Bitches Brew was unprecedented and difficult to understand— experience was no guide. The Rolling Stone review of May 28, 1970, by Langdon Winner, was perceptive about the freedom and quality of “magnificence” of the music, and saw it clearly as another step in Miles’s constant evolution.48 Robert Christgau gave it an A-minus in his “Consumer Guide” format, and in his Jazz Annual the year the album was released, pointed out that Miles “happen[s] to play good music that’s very much like jazz and something like rock.”49 Carman Moore in the August 9, 1970 New York Times wrote:

Bitches Brew must be considered a landmark of recorded music. Instances of subtlety and formal improvisational master come thick and fast. It is all so strange and new and yet so comfortable. … Anyone who has listened to much jazz, popular and new classical music over the last decade will sense the roots of all that occurs here. But the Miles Davis synthesis is so ingenious and profound as to transform virtually each minute.50

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Downbeat magazine gave the album five stars, and Jim Szantor’s review reveals what a gut reaction that was, his head still trying to explain what his heart and body felt:

Listening to this double album is, to say the least, an intriguing experience. … my liking for recorded Miles came to an abrupt halt with Nefertiti. I didn’t think I could go beyond that with him. I’m still uncertain, but this recording will surely demand more of my attention … It must be fully investigated.51

Other gut reactions were sour, and even ten, twenty years after the album’s release it still could draw degrees of condescension, obtuseness, and even anger from prominent critics, not only from Crouch but from John Litweiler, Martin Williams and Amiri Baraka. The only explanation for music with a beat that didn’t have a predictable form was that Miles was selling out. Crouch’s personal animus in “Play The Right Thing” is notable:

Desperate to maintain his position at the forefront of modern music, to sustain his financial position, to be admired for the hipness of his purported innovations, Davis turned butt to the beautiful in order to genuflect to the commercial. … Davis has also become the most remarkable licker of moneyed boots in the music business.52

Litweiler not only assumed Miles was selling out, but invented a story to explain it:

As Miles Davis’s music declined in the late 1960s, the sales of his records declined, too, and this was during

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the period when the new management of Columbia Records was raising sales quotas. Davis’s bosses ordered him to make a hit record or else; Bitches Brew was his response53 …

Musicologist Gary Tomlinson read their reactions as the “stark inability to hear Davis’s fusion music except against the background of what jazz was before,” and saw it as evidence of “The coercive power of the institution- alized jazz canon.”54 For Crouch, Litweiler, Williams, Baraka, and others, fusion is a slur, a shorthand for music that is self-evidently commercial, debased, dull, square, probably damaging to the African-American tradition, and, because it is an outgrowth of what is just as self-evidently the hippest, most sophisticated music on the planet—jazz—is even less socially acceptable than progressive rock. Fusion stretches from the Tony Williams Lifetime through the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, the aural wallpaper of Spyro Gyra, Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time band, the Pat Metheny Group, the bulk of Steve Coleman’s music, some of James “Blood” Ulmer’s finest albums, and the Dave Holland Quintet, one of the strongest jazz ensembles at the turn of the twenty- first century. Fusion is as varied and broad as any other musical style, and like anything else can be done well or badly. If Bitches Brew is fusion, then it is among the company of some great musicians and albums. Fusion, accepted as capacious, is a fair label for the music: the album is responsible for all those groups that came after it, in one way or another. But as the first fusion album, Bitches Brew is protean beyond any and all

• 97 • BITCHES BREW definitions of that, or any other, genre. It is not just the first of one thing, it is a possibility for many things. The album’s influence is due to the power and quality of the thinking that went into it and the music that came out of it. It is so free of any formula that Miles himself never repeated it. Call it fusion. Call it something else, and then again. But first, call it fusion: but of what elements? The label jazz-rock fusion came after the fact, certainly inspired by Bitches Brew. Unpack the label and apply it to the album, though, and it’s like saying a female opera singer is a man because she plays trouser roles. The first problem with the term is rock. In practice, electric instrumental music, with improvisation, played over some kind of rock beat, by musicians whose names can be identified with some form of jazz, is called fusion. That same music played by musicians collected in the rock bins is called, to no one’s surprise, rock. There is so little rock beat on the album that when it appears, it’s accidental. The only consistent backbeat comes inside the title track, and it is more a matter of accent than emphasis; Miles has the rhythm section create a pulse through repetitive rhythms that have a rolling, quasi-march quality to them, they reach back to New Orleans and proto-jazz. Also, though there are moments in “Sanctuary” when DeJohnette hints at swing, there’s no jazz beat either. Compared to jazz before and since, the album is loud and aggressive, it sort of sounds like rock, so it must be rock, right? But no one on the album is playing rock, other than some fragments from McLaughlin, and even that music is deep in the tradition of jazz and blues,

• 98 • It’s About That Time though clothed with a force more common in the bluesy side of rock. Nor does the form have anything to do with rock. Nothing dates music faster than song form, which has always captured the public concerns of an era in words and music. Bitches Brew stands outside of time. There are artifacts of the recording process, like the echo effect used on Miles’s trumpet, and the abrupt edits, that will point the technologically concerned listener toward the techniques of a certain era and production style, but the music floats free of the stylistic consensus of 1969. Of all the music Miles was listening to in the late ’60s, what comes through the most—although only subliminally— is the combination of James Brown and Penderecki’s excoriating Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.55 What about the other element in the equation, jazz? The definition of jazz has been a matter of debate since the beginnings of the music—it took classical music several hundred years to realize that it was “classical,” surely jazz needs more experience with itself—but there are certain elements so common to every serious definition that they are, at least in the early twenty-first century, essential features. Jazz swings, jazz is an improvisatory art, and jazz has immovable roots in African-American music, particularly the blues. There is another layer to peel away: what is swing? Easier to hear and feel than to describe, it’s a syncopated subdivision of the beat that builds tension by holding the downbeat a little longer, and making the upbeat a little quicker. Swing is most commonly heard from drummers, who have the instrument that can mark and subdivide the beat, but everybody swings: bass players, horn players,

• 99 • BITCHES BREW pianists. Swing is a way of phrasing, of accenting notes and connecting others with legato inside the beat and rhythm of a tune. Swing was a constant in jazz from about 1925 to the mid-1960s. In 1965, saxophonist Eddie Harris released The In Sound which had his “Freedom Jazz Dance,” which Miles used to open Miles Smiles (released in January, 1967). The eighth note melody is supposed to be played straight, like rock, and while Harris’s original version is heavy with soul-jazz feel, Miles, famously and impor- tantly, has Tony Williams playing a rolling, rat-a-tat march. Miles’s second quintet was already moving far away from swing—Hancock has the most consistent swing phrasing—and Bitches Brew doesn’t swing at all. Nor does a huge amount of clearly identifiable jazz since. Swing is still around, but swing as a determining characteristic of jazz lasted about forty years, and, while still relevant, has not been a requirement during the last fifty. So who needs to swing? Improvisation still matters, and so does some connection to jazz’s African-American roots (the European roots are a given). Along with those details, I would also add what I think is the most essential criterion, that jazz is a common practice. Whether musicians get together to play standards at a jazz brunch, or gather at rehearsal to experiment with rhythms and forms, jazz is a constantly changing and growing body of work that everyone who plays the music depends on, directly or indirectly. Musicians have played, for better and worse, the same hundreds of tunes for decades, and they’ve also played each other’s material, and they’ve added pop music to the jazz repertoire. The jazz tradition, for it to

• 100 • It’s About That Time have any worth other than as artifact, has to constantly move forward. One of the clearest, but perhaps most unexpected, facets of the album is how it follows the practice of the earliest jazz: ensemble interplay that combines improvi- sation and accompaniment. When Miles solos, he is always featured in the mix, but he is absent for long stretches of music, just as he was in the recording studio, where he spent substantial time just listening to what the band was playing. The other soloists take a half step out of the textures, but are still frequently interacting not just with the group but with another musician. This collective, cooperative improvisation around basic music material is as traditional as it gets in jazz, and Miles renewed it by making the style and aesthetic ultra-contemporary. If your work is art, not commerce, then tradition means what T. S. Eliot defined it as, in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate gener- ation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. … what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art

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among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the super- vention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, propor- tions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.56

Jazz claims the same laurel of high, abstract culture as does poetry, and has an analogous relationship to its own tradition. To set a date based on the arbitrariness of personal taste and say that what comes after is not jazz, is not love for the music, but a hoarding possessiveness. There’s a spot for Bitches Brew in the living jazz tradition, one the album carved for itself. Miles Davis was that living tradition from 1945 to 1991, and that his post- Bitches Brew electric period covered twenty LPs at the time and forty or so CDs in the collections issued after his death says something about the vitality of his music and his never-ending creative search. What confounds both supporters and detractors of Bitches Brew is the album’s commercial success, abstract, formless, resolutely non-commercial music that has substantial popular appeal. That is rare, to be sure, but improbability and impossibility are not the same thing. The album’s economic ramifications cannot be overstated. At a time when rock and soul were on the verge of pushing jazz out of economic existence, the album’s sales were vital. In the month of its release it

• 102 • It’s About That Time sold 70,000 copies, and reached at least 400,000 by the end of that year.57 That is impressive in any genre, in any era, and in the context of Miles’s mid-decade sales of around 60,000 units per album stunned Clive Davis and Columbia into something like delirium. Whatever the music on the album was called, Miles was seen by the public as a jazz artist, and here was a jazz artist selling at levels that Columbia had been seeing with its rock artists. He was also selling to the young, white, album-buying public that all the record companies were pursuing. Miles single-handedly made jazz economically viable again, and that made Columbia invest in jazz again. Through the ’70s and into the early ’80s, Columbia issued exceptional, important albums from greats like Dexter Gordon (his return to America album Homecoming: Live at the Village Vanguard and Manhattan Symphonie), Woody Shaw (Rosewood), Lenox Avenue Breakdown and Illusions from Arthur Blythe, and Free Lancing, Black Rock, and Odyssey from James “Blood” Ulmer. Another important jazz artist debuted on Columbia and continued on the label for twenty years: trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. As a trumpet player, Marsalis is one of Miles’s primary descendants, with an attack and a way of coloring notes and shaping solos that clearly came out of deep study of his predecessor’s music. His debut CD, Wynton Marsalis (1982), even features an accomplished rendition of “R.J.,” a Ron Carter tune from E.S.P. Marsalis built his career as a hard-bop revivalist, playing strongly while either recreating the past or composing his own facsimile of the same. From the public and economic platform that Columbia afforded him, Marsalis claimed ownership of the tradition,

• 103 • BITCHES BREW bad-mouthed Miles’s playing58 (and even clothing) so often that Miles, when he finally encountered the young man, said, “So here’s the police.”59 The jazz, the rock, the money, those are easy to grasp. But listening to the album creates expectations that are never fulfilled, because underneath what it seems to sound like, and how many units it moved, there’s so much more. The album regards the idea of musical resolution—reaching a final point—as irrelevant. Read about Bitches Brew, and you will inevitably see the statement that the music is organized around rhythm, and often that the rhythmic ideas are African. This feels right but is uninformative. Miles was, among other things, specifically making funk:60 he wanted the rhythms to drive everything. The melodies and harmonies are not determined by rhythm, so much as rhythm is unusually prominent, while melody and harmony seem secondary—which is actually an illusion. Bitches Brew places everything on the same sonic level, and Western music of almost every kind, especially popular music, is made almost entirely with a hierarchy of values between soloist (or lead voice of some kind) and ensemble that came to be seen as a de facto requirement. The rhythms also have no explicit relationship to African music: they are the sound of African-American rhythms mediated through history and geography by Cuba, the West Indies, New Orleans, the Midwest, and New York City. However, the group concept is closer to African music, with the rhythms built by adding beats on top of each other rather than subdividing in the Western manner.61

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What is more subtle, but profound, is that by using rhythm, pulse, and harmonies—and tape composition— that by design did not resolve, Miles was organizing time: and both form and time are conjoined in the music. Miles’s push to move form away from the demands of resolution and finality was a push into a different, and, for American listeners, unfamiliar concept about time. Music only exists in the dimension of time, it only has duration, and the way music fills up time is bound to the different views of time that exist in cultures all over the globe. One of the great changes in the West was the development of a pervasive view of linear time, complete with the belief in constant, even inevitable, measurable progress, and ultimately the idea of Modernism, in which the time of the past could be remade and renewed in the time of the present. This was a monumental cultural and intellectual shift, intrinsic to perspective in the visual arts and polyphony in music. And while rhythm is a means to count time as it passed, the way to define musical duration is through harmony, the structure or chords that establish a key, modulations, and create a final cadence that both brings aesthetic satisfaction and marks the end of time in the piece. The linear progression of chords through time moves in only one direction and makes the experience of listening to music one of listening to time as well; the ear hears the chords move, expects the tonic to return at predictable moments, the ear marks a change to minor tonality or another key as a further element of linear progress through time, and even experiences the dramatic rise of tension when the music teases the return of the tonic, or the final double bar, and withholds it

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(this is how Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 works, and how “”, from Kind of Blue, works, with its final two bars of A-flat dominant seven—in a B-flat blues—deliciously delaying the turnaround). This is what the composer Robert Ashley called “timeline” music.62 Ashley wrote:

At some point more than three hundred years ago composers started writing music organized around the timeline, and this was notated in what we know as the score ... The principal of the timeline is that musical events succeed one another linearly in a technique organized by the composer. … This music must, by definition, be “linear.” The composer thinks about timeline music as a continuous, linear succession of events. This manner of thinking precludes any possibility that the music will be ... “timeless” (outside of the timeline, outside of “eventfulness” as the most important element) or just unpredictable. That is, that something will occur that is not in the succession of what happened just previously.

Outside of the West, a circular view of time is more common and prominent, even in societies that have undergone Western-style industrialization—there is no assumption of linear progress. Time does not fly off into the future: it marks cyclical events. Much of non-Western music has a ritual or social aspect: it’s meant for specific occasions. Non-Western harmonies change through the duration of a piece of music, but they are not made to function as a device that gets the piece

• 106 • It’s About That Time from the beginning to the end. Instead they stay steady— drone—or cycle until the event is finished. Non-Western music is by definition non-timeline music. The experience of non-timeline music is that of timelessness. Time is passing, as always, but the music is not marking that passage. It moves in a circle, returning to the same point over and over again. There is no implicit logic that what you are hearing in the moment will, structurally and inevitably, lead to something else. The listener’s experience of passing time is separate from the music’s measured duration. The way for Western musicians to get away from the timeline is to use drones, either a constant pitch inflected with changing timbres, or extreme repetition. That’s one way of looking at the blues. The blues can, and often does, exist away from the timeline, in a way that jazz hadn’t until Miles’s electric period, except for some free improvisation. This is absolutely the case for “Pharaoh’s Dance,” “Bitches Brew,” and “John McLaughlin,” which were consciously made that way (and the musique concrète approach is inherently outside of the timeline), and also for the set list pieces, “Spanish Key,” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” and “Sanctuary.” The harmonies are repetitive not functional: movement to a different tonal center is about a ritual gesture. Even in his live sets, Miles turned the different songs into one long stream-of-consciousness exploration of moods by cueing. He would end the set when he and the band had played long enough to fulfill their fees, but the music just stopped, it didn’t finish. The blues never had to finish either. Through the blues, Bitches Brew reaches so far down into the

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African-American tradition that it is like a fist reaching into one’s own heart. What that fist squeezed out was music that, in its sound, is like the earliest blues, not the formalized and middle-class blues that W. C. Handy codified,63 but the blues from Blind Willie Davis, Charley Patton, Booker White, Skip James—so many musicians whose music was recorded for no other reason than historical accident and benign ignorance. Their playing and singing channeled the earlier roots of the blues into the twentieth century, a way of making music that had an immediate connection to work songs, chain-gang songs, slave songs, songs meant to distract from the crushing need to endure labor through time. The circularity of the form, spinning around a central idea and repeating it until there was nothing more to say, and the expressive way with tonality, rhythm and a beat, either audible or implied, are the sound of Bitches Brew. They are the direct product of how Miles sketched the music, commu- nicated with and directed the musicians. The non-Western sense of time and harmony on the album is something that sounded primitive, or simplistic, to those expecting progress. Anyone looking for the blues would have found it, but talk about the blues can often serve as cover for a sense of artificial sophistication that looks down on anything that seems primitive, or emanating from the wrong sort of person. That is the emotional yet aesthetically and socially bankrupt argument about the lost purity of jazz, the forgotten Edenic moment when the music was both protean and ideal, when everyone wore suits, no one said a foul word, and middle-class values were all the rage—a time that never, ever existed. Things were always more uncertain,

• 108 • It’s About That Time more unsettled, ambiguous, difficult—that’s the place where jazz has always fit in America. America is not a melting pot, it is a vast conglom- eration of colors and attitudes and values, trying to get along—most of us, at least—and make it inside a massive commercial enterprise. This country is a mess, it has always been a mess, it’s supposed to be a mess. Music that claims a cultural superiority as high art, no matter its quality, is not going to fly as the sound of the country in anything other than a ceremonial sense. America wants music with deep popular appeal that can also, for many of us, be free and improvised. That music would have to be a synthesis of other fundamental American styles, something that reaches out to people all across the globe. That music is funk, and Bitches Brew is an album of gloriously dirty, messy, funky music. Bitches Brew fills up and amplifies the ambiguous spaces and ambivalent attitudes in American culture and history. While music commonly seeks to make neat order out of time, and thus dates itself by expressing each era’s idea of just what constitutes neatness and order, Bitches Brew revels in the mess of America. It still sounds like it was made yesterday. It is the music that takes American culture up through the Summer of Love and carries it to the post-Dog Soldiers society we have; it’s the soundtrack for the Beats, the Hippies, the Black Panthers, and beyond the loss of ideals and the fictions we tell about ourselves. Miles stews blues, jazz, rock, and more together to make the messy funk that is at America’s heart.

Brooklyn January, 2015

• 109 • Selected & Annotated Bitches Brew Discography

Until the dawn of the CD era, there was only one Bitches Brew release you could buy, the original double LP. Since 1991, when Columbia pressed it onto CD for the first time, there have been numerous reissues and re-reissues, along with several editions that vary in contents as well as quality (Japanese audiophile edition, SACD, etc.). Below is a selection of the most common editions in print as of the winter of 2015, showing their comparative contents.

Bitches Brew original LP: Catalogue GP 26

LP 1, Side 1 “Pharaoh’s Dance” LP 1, Side 2 “Bitches Brew” LP 2, Side 1 “Spanish Key” “John McLaughlin” LP 2, Side 2 “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” “Sanctuary”

• 110 • SELECTED & ANNOTATED BITCHES BREW DISCOGRAPHY

CD editions: Bitches Brew—Catalogue C2K 65774

Disc 1 “Pharaoh’s Dance “Bitches Brew” Disc 2 “Spanish Key” “John McLaughlin” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” “Sanctuary” “Feio” (also on Big Fun)

Note: As Enrico Merlin points out in his detailed “Sessionography, 1967–1991,” in Paul Tingen’s Miles Beyond, The Electronic Exploration of Miles Davis, 1967-1991, the first CD reissue, CDCBS-66236, is the only one that identically matches the original LP. On the original LP and that first CD, there are four seconds of keyboard playing on “Pharaoh’s Dance,” from 8:29 to 8:33, that are not on the same track on any of the subse- quent CD reissues, including the Complete, Legacy and 40th anniversary editions. The reissues that have these four seconds missing make up for it with a longer final fade-out. The reason or explanation for this discrepancy is unknown. Further confusing the issue is that the same serial number, 66236, is the one that Columbia, CBS and finally Sony have always used for each European issue and re-issue of the album, on LP and CD. Based on serial number information, it appears that only the first CD reissue in Europe matched the original LP, second to second.

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Bitches Brew Legacy Edition (2010)— Catalog C3K 54579 Disc 1 “Pharaoh’s Dance “Bitches Brew” “Spanish Key” “John McLaughlin” Disc 2 “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” “Sanctuary” “Spanish Key” (alternate take) “John McLaughlin” (alternate take) “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” (single edit) “Spanish Key” (single edit) “Great Expectations” (single edit) “Little Blue Frog” (single edit) DVD “Directions” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” “Bitches Brew” “Agitation” “I Fall in Love Too Easily” “Sanctuary” “It’s About That Time/The Theme”

The DVD is Copenhagen Live 1969, with the quintet of Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette.

• 112 • SELECTED & ANNOTATED BITCHES BREW DISCOGRAPHY

The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions(1998, reissued 2004)—Catalog C4K 65570 Disc 1 “Pharaoh’s Dance” “Bitches Brew” “Spanish Key” “John McLaughlin” Disc 2 “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” “Sanctuary” “Great Expectations” (also on Big Fun C2K 63873) “Orange Lady” (also on Big Fun C2K 63873) “Yaphet” (also on Big Fun C2K 63873) “Corrado” (also on Big Fun C2K 63873) Disc 3 “Trevere” “The Big Green Serpent” “The Little Blue Frog” (alternate take) “The Little Blue Frog” (also on Big Fun C2K 63873) “Lonely Fire” (also on Big Fun C2K 63873) “Guinnevere” (also on Circle in the Round C2K 46862) Disc 4 “Feio” “Double Image” “Recollections” (also on Big Fun C2K 63873) “Take It or Leave It” “Double Image” (also on Live-Evil 64 C2K 65135)

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Bitches Brew: 40th Anniversary Collector’s Edition (2010)—Catalogue 88697702742-JK/88697702742-B1/88697702742-MC Disc 1 “Pharaoh’s Dance “Bitches Brew” “Spanish Key” “John McLaughlin” Disc 2 “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” “Sanctuary” “Spanish Key” (alternate take) “John McLaughlin” (alternate take) “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” (single edit) “Spanish Key” (single edit) “Great Expectations” (single edit) “Little Blue Frog” (single edit) Disc 3 Bill Graham Introduction “Directions” “Bitches Brew” “The Mask” “It’s About That Time” “Sanctuary” “Spanish Key/The Theme” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down/The Theme” Bill Graham outro DVD “Directions” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” “Bitches Brew” “Agitation”

• 114 • SELECTED & ANNOTATED BITCHES BREW DISCOGRAPHY

“I Fall in Love Too Easily” “Sanctuary” “It’s About That Time/The Theme” LP 1, Side 1 “Pharaoh’s Dance” LP 1, Side 2 “Bitches Brew” LP 2, Side 1 “Spanish Key” “John McLaughlin” LP 2, Side 2 “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” “Sanctuary”

This is a more extravagant but valuable set that combines the original LP with the alternate and archival material collected in other editions. The unusual item is CD 3, a live set from Tanglewood, August 18, 1970, with the septet of Miles Davis, , Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette and . It is absolutely blistering, but is also available separately, and at far less cost, through the Concert Vault subscription site (http://www.concertvault.com). From 1999 on, the CD reissues contained bonus material (with the exception of special productions like a Japanese only SACD version, and LP reissues), as seen in the lists above, that was not actually recorded at the August 19–21 sessions. Primarily this was Wayne Shorter’s piece “Feio,” laid down, along with part of “Double Image,” on January 28, 1970. The bonus material from The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions set was recorded on November 19, 1969 (“Great Expectations”, “Orange Lady,” “Yaphet,” and “Corrado”), November 28 (“Trevere,” “The Big Green Serpent,” “The Little Blue Frog”), January 27, 1970 (“Lonely Fire,” “Guinnevere”), and February 6 (“Double Image” again, and “Recollections,” “Take It Or Leave It”).

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The relationship of the bonus tracks to Bitches Brew can be tenuous, although no one is going to turn down the extra Miles. The band that played in the studio on January 27–8, 1970, is direct from the Bitches Brew sessions, although without Lenny White and Larry Young, and adding Khalil Balakrishna on sitar. The music from January 27 includes David Crosby’s “Guinnevere,” and the general idea is spare, moody textures that gradually cohere into a groove. The aesthetic of the music from the January 28 session is also close to that of Bitches Brew—spare, dark, floating atmospherically above a solid pulse—but without the intensity and sense of adventure from August. The music sounds like a consoli- dation of the musical ideas from the original album, and the playing is slightly tentative. The second recording of “Double Image,” from nine days later, is more exact, and also more abstract. “Recollections” is an odd reworking of “In a Silent Way,” with Corea using his ring modulator for spacey effects, and McLaughlin’s heavily wah-wahed guitar sounding out of place during the delicate, slow passages. “Take It Or Leave It” is two minutes of what seems like a fragment, the run-through of a head, not a complete piece of musical thinking. Miles telling Macero at the end that “I want to use this” indicates that it was meant for some more substantial context. The November 19 session is fascinating. “Great Expectations” is an unusually complete example of Miles in pure experimental mode, tossing out musical ideas and seeing what will happen. The band is appreciably different than on Bitches Brew, Zawinul and Young are replaced by Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Harvey

• 116 • SELECTED & ANNOTATED BITCHES BREW DISCOGRAPHY

Brooks are the bass players (this is the last month Carter and Hancock would play with Miles), Billy Cobham is the sole drummer, Balakrishna makes his first appearance, and Bihari Sharma plays tabla and tambura. This track is also one of the finest from Miles’s electric period, and one of the most unusual. An eerie, thudding groove mixed with the sitar’s drone, there is a theme that is repeated eighteen times across the 13:45 duration—it is a prime example of Robert Ashley’s idea about music that gets away from the timeline, and the combination of drone and repetition produces the sensation that the music is slowly turning in space, changing aspect and color, without ever bothering to go anywhere. There are intriguing moments in the rest of the music from November 19, though there is a lot of watered-down, Indian psychedelia and wan melodies. The session one week later marks the young saxophonist Steve Grossman’s first appearance with Miles, replacing Shorter, and Young is back, playing the organ and celeste. Holland is also back, Carter is gone and DeJohnette is the second drummer. A lot of the music is atmospheric but directionless, though the guitar-sitar-tabla funk of “The Little Blue Frog” is clearly, in retrospect, a spring- board for a lot of the music John McLaughlin was going to make over the next several years.

• 117 • Selected Bibliography

Alkyer, Frank. Down Beat Hall of Fame Series the Miles Davis Reader. Hal Leonard Corporation, 2007. Baraka, Amiri and Leroi Jones. Black Music (Akashiclassics: Renegade Reprint Series). Akashic Books, 2010. Belden, Bob, , Quincy Troupe, and Carlos Santana. “The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions.” Columbia Records/Legacy Records/Sony, 1998. Carner, Gary. The Miles Davis Companion: Four Decades of Commentary. Schirmer Trade Books, 1996. Carr, Ian. Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography. Da Capo Press, 2006. Chambers, Jack. Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis. Da Capo Press, 1998. Cook, Richard. It’s About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record. Oxford University Press, 2007. Cook, Richard and Brian Morton. The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD: 6th Edition (Penguin Reference Books). Penguin, 2002. Crouch, Stanley. Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz. Basic Civitas Books, 2007. Early, Gerald. Miles Davis and American Culture (Missouri Historical Society Press). Missouri History Museum Press, 2001. Freeman, Phil. Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis. Backbeat Books, 2005. Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. Oxford University Press, 2011.

• 118 • Selected Bibliography

Kirchner, Bill. Miles Davis Reader. Smithsonian, 1997. Lee, Lara. “Teo Macero Interview.” Perfect Sound Forever, http://www.furious.com/perfect/teomacero.html (accessed October 14, 2014). Macero, Teo. “The Teo Macero Collection, 1949-1972.” (2004): 76 boxes, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Music Division. Merlin, Enrico and Veniero Rizzardi. Bitches Brew. Genesi del capolavoro di Miles Davis. Il Saggiatore, 2009. Schuller, Gunther. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (History of Jazz). Oxford University Press, 1986. Szwed, John. So What: The Life of Miles Davis. Simon & Schuster, 2004. Taylor, Arthur. Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews. Da Capo Press, 1993. Tingen, Paul. Miles Beyond: Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991. Billboard Books, 2001. Troupe, Quincy and Miles Davis. Miles: The Autobiography. Picador, 2012. Waters, Keith. The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-68 (Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz). Oxford University Press, 2011.

• 119 • Notes

1. Hollie West, “Black Tune,” The Washington Post, March 13, 1969. 2. Stanley Crouch, “Play the Right Thing,” in The Miles Davis Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, ed. Gary Carner, (New York: Schirmer, 1996), 34. 3. Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography, (London: Picador, 2012), 371. 4. The indelible image of his minor 1970 arrest is that he was wearing a turban, a sheepskin coat and snakeskin pants, while sitting in a red Ferrari. 5. An anonymous 1953 Downbeat review refers to Miles’s “eggshell trumpet.” 6. Davis with Troupe, Miles, v. 7. Ibid, viii. 8. Richard Cook & Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, Sixth Edition, (London: Penguin, 2002), 371. 9. Ibid, 378. 10. Downbeat “Blindfold Test” with Leonard Feather, June 13, 1968: Miles was responding to “The Funeral,” from Archie Shepp in Europe. 11. Michael Ullman, “Miles Davis in Retrospect,” in A Miles Davis Reader, ed. Bill Kirchner, (Washington: Smithsonian, 1997), 8.

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12. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 60–1. 13. Ibid, 60. 14. Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool, Capitol T-762, 1957, LP 15. Crouch, Miles Davis Companion, 25. 16. Pat Harris, “Nothing but Bop? ‘Stupid,’ Says Miles,” Miles Davis Reader, 16. 17. Later in his life, Schuller argued that Third Stream did not mean writing jazz fugues or adapting Ravel or Schoenberg, but by then it was too late. 18. Notable examples are Focus, Stan Getz with Eddie Sauter; John Lewis Presents Contemporary Music Jazz Abstractions; and Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto, written for Woody Herman. 19. He played on some early sessions of Third Stream music from his future producer and collaborator Teo Macero and Charles Mingus, and found the music “sad.” 20. Rickey Vincent, Party Music, (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2013), 6–7. 21. Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones, (New York: Da Capo, 1993), 11–12. 22. Spreading an extended work out across multiple 78s also meant that there was a fade-out to end each side, with a fade-in to start the following disc, in order to try give the illusion of continuity during a disc change. This technique lasted, out of necessity, through the LP era for long, through-composed works. A late example is the 1974 Deutsche Grammaphon recording of Steve Reich’s Drumming, a 3 LP box that, when transferred to CD, still had the fade-out and -in from Part III to IV (CD 1 to 2). Bizarrely, the fade-out remains in the digital files. 23. Brian Eno, “The Studio as Compositional Tool,” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, Christopher Cox, ed., (London: Continuum, 2004), 127.

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24. Making music into a commodity gave rise to the music collector and the discographer, and there is surely a direct relationship between the distance time makes from what are now precious artifacts and the illusion of a jazz Eden. 25. Sidney Bechet produced two, overdubbed, one-man band singles in 1941, “The Sheik of Araby” and “Blues of Bechet.” He did this by recording one part on one disc, then playing along with that and recording the output on another disc, etc. 26. After the take on “Woody’n You,” producer Bob Weinstock jokingly asks Miles to do it over, and Miles responds: “Why?” 27. Enrico Merlin, “Sessionography, 1967–1991,” in Paul Tingen, Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991, (New York: Billboard, 2001), 305. 28. There is some unresolved dispute over how much he was involved in Kind of Blue, which was supervised in part, if not in whole, by Lee Townsend. 29. The first Tony Williams Lifetime album,Emergency! , is generally considered the first fusion record. But it wasn’t recorded until May 26 and 28, 1969, three months after the In A Silent Way session. 30. Ian Carr, Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography, 243–4 31. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 287. 32. Miles Davis: Bitches Brew Live, tracks 1–3; Miles Davis Quintet: Live in Europe, 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 2, both on Sony, and Miles Davis Quintet: Live in Rome & Copenhagen 1969 and Miles Davis Quintet: Live in Berlin 1969, most recently issue by Gambit Records 33. John Szwed, So What: The Life of Miles Davis, 289 34. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 286. 35. Interview by George Cole, http://www.thelastmiles.com/ interviews-bennie-maupin.php, accessed January 18, 2015

• 122 • Notes

36. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 289. 37. Tingen, Miles Beyond, 65. 38. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 290. 39. Brian Eno interviewed by Michael Engelbrecht, http:// music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/ me_intr4.html#Madly, accessed July 13, 2014. In the interview, Eno specifically describes “He Loved Him Madly,” collected on the 1974 double LP , as the first piece of ambient music, although an argument can also be made for In a Silent Way. 40. Carr, Miles Davis, 264. 41. Bitches Brew was finalized as a double LP, for which Miles eagerly demanded an additional advance, in January, 1970. 42. Tingen, Miles Beyond, 68. 43. Often lost in the mix, he’s first clearly audible at about the 3:40 mark. 44. Bob Belden, “Session-By-Session Analysis,” booklet for The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, Sony, 121. 45. During Miles first solo on the master, someone in the right channel, close to a mike, says something at 2:03, then repeats it a few seconds later. It’s impossible to tell what he’s saying or who it is, the voice is just a detail in the rhythm section. 46. Enrico Merlin, Bitches Brew: Genesi del capolavoro di Miles Davis, (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2009), 153. 47. Columbia Records memo. 48. Langdon Winner, “Bitches Brew,” in Rolling Stone, May 28, 1970. 49. Robert Christgau, “Jazz Annual,” in The Village Voice, May 21, 1970. 50. Carman Moore, “The New Thing Meets Rock,” The New York Times, August 9, 1970.

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51. Jim Szantor, “Miles Davis, Bitches Brew,” in Downbeat, June 11, 1970. 52. Crouch, The Miles Davis Companion, 22. 53. John Litweiler, The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958, (New York: Da Capo, 1984), 223, 227. 54. Gary Tomlinson, “Miles Davis, Musical Dialogician,” in Miles Davis Reader, 236. 55. Stockhausen is the contemporary composer most frequently linked to Miles’s music, and the two went into the studio in 1980, the results of which remain in Sony’s archives. According to Ian Carr, Miles’s exposure to Stockhausen began only in 1972, via Paul Buckmaster, the results of which are tracks like “On the Corner” and “Rated X.” 56. T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, (New York: Knopf, 1921), 28. 57. Bitches Brew was certified platinum, 1,000,000 copies sold, September 22, 2003. For sales figures up to the late 1980s, the records are murky: the RIAA was less than diligent and corporate accounting less than transparent. 58. He also hired Crouch to write the liner notes for his albums, which helped turn Crouch into the well-known critic he became. 59. Leslie Gourse, Wynton Marsalis: Skain’s Domain, A Biography, (New York: Schirmer Books, 1999), 89, cited by Szwed, So What, 379. 60. Don Alias plays drums on “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” because Lenny White couldn’t give Miles the funk he wanted. 61. Additive rhythm is also a feature of Medieval music. 62. Robert Ashley, “Variations on the Drone, a Non-Timeline Concept,” in Outside of Time, Edition MusikTexte, 2009, 114–24.

• 124 • Notes

63. The first blues recording was made by the Victor Military Band in 1914, playing Handy’s “Memphis Blues,” which puts the harmonic structure of blues into a Sousa-like march form. 64. On Live-Evil, the track title is “Medley: Gemini/Double Image”

• 125 • Also available in the series

1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren 22. Murmur by J. Niimi Zanes 23. Grace by Daphne Brooks 2. Forever Changes by Andrew 24. Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Hultkrans Wilder 3. Harvest by Sam Inglis 25. Kick Out the Jams by Don 4. The Kinks Are the Village Green McLeese Preservation Society by Andy 26. Low by Hugo Wilcken Miller 27. Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey 5. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice Himes 6. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn 28. Music from Big Pink by John by John Cavanagh Niven 7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth 29. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Vincentelli Kim Cooper 8. Electric Ladyland by John Perry 30. Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy 9. Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 31. Doolittle by Ben Sisario 10. Sign ‘O’ the Times by 32. There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Michaelangelo Matos Miles Marshall Lewis 11. The Velvet Underground and 33. The Stone Roses by Alex Green Nico by Joe Harvard 34. In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo 35. Highway 61 Revisited by Mark 13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas Polizzotti Wolk 36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal 14. Aqualung by Allan Moore 37. The Who Sell Out by John 15. OK Computer by Dai Griffiths Dougan 16. Let It Be by Colin Meloy 38. Bee Thousand by Marc 17. Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis Woodworth 18. Exile on Main Street by Bill 39. Daydream Nation by Matthew Janovitz Stearns 19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 40. Court and Spark by Sean 20. Ramones by Nicholas Rombes Nelson 21. Armed Forces by Franklin 41. Use Your Illusion, I and II by Bruno Eric Weisbard

• 126 • Also available in the series

42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth 66. One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Lundy Edwards 43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by 67. Another Green World by Geeta Ric Menck Dayal 44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin 68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson Courrier 69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. 45. Double Nickels on the Dime by Beghtol Michael T. Fournier 70. Facing Future by Dan Kois 46. Aja by Don Breithaupt 71. It Takes a Nation of Millions to 47. People’s Instinctive Travels and Hold Us Back by Christopher the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn R. Weingarten Taylor 72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 73. Highway to Hell by Joe 49. Achtung Baby by Stephen Bonomo Catanzarite 74. Song Cycle by Richard 50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Henderson Scott Plagenhoef 75. Spiderland by Scott Tennent 51. Pink Moon by Amanda 76. Kid A by Marvin Lin Petrusich 77. Tusk by Rob Trucks 52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl 78. Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Wilson Carr 53. Swordfishtrombones by David 79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Smay Shteamer 54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew 80. American Recordings by Tony Daniel Tost 55. Horses by Philip Shaw 81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 56. Master of Reality by John 82. You’re Living All Over Me by Darnielle Nick Attfield 57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris 83. Marquee Moon by Bryan 58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Waterman Childs 84. Amazing Grace by Aaron 59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron Cohen 60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by 85. Dummy by R. J. Wheaton Jeffery T. Roesgen 86. Fear of Music by Jonathan 61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Lethem Proehl 87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by 62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate Darran Anderson 63. XO by Matthew LeMay 88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed and 64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier Philip Sandifer 65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton 89. I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall

• 127 • BITCHES BREW

90. Selected Ambient Works Volume 100. Dangerous by Susan Fast II by Marc Weidenbaum 101. Tago Mago by Alan Warner 91. Entertainment! by Kevin J. H. 102. Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Dettmar Murtha 92. Blank Generation by Pete Astor 103. Live Through This by Anwen 93. Donuts by Jordan Ferguson Crawford 94. Smile by Luis Sanchez 104. Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 95. Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 105. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables 96. Exile in Guyville by Gina by Michael Stewart Foley Arnold 106. Super Mario Bros. by Andrew 97. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Schartmann Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 107. Beat Happening by Bryan C. 98. The Grey Album by Charles Parker Fairchild 108. Metallica by David Masciotra 99. ( ) by Ethan Hayden 109. A Live One by Walter Holland

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