by Marshall Bowden
Whatever the surprise that greeted In A Silent Way, it was nothing compared to that which greeted the release of the double LP Bitches Brew in 1970. Those who carped about the album being a rock sellout were clearly not listening to what was going on at the time.
A cursory listen to the recording Live at Fillmore East: It’s About That Time, a concert from March 7, 1970 which Columbia Records first issued in 2001 as part of a celebration of Miles’ 75th birthday, reveals that the audience, who was primed to hear Crazy Horse and Steve Miller, had no idea what to make of this dense, rather freeform music. In his autobiography, Davis recounts how he purposely showed up late both nights of the engagement in order to force the “sorry-ass” Miller to play first. The band roars through a selection of tracks from In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and a few other sources, with the oldest number being “Masquelero”, which the second quintet had recorded in 1962. Meanwhile, Bitches Brew sat at the record pressing plant, ready to strike at the heart of American popular music.
Miles had booked an impressive array of musicians for these sessions, and it is clear, as it would be time and time again, that he was especially able to hire the right musicians for the particular job he had in mind. Wayne Shorter was the sole remaining musician from the second quintet. He was respected as a consummate musician and an accomplished composer; no doubt Miles realized that his contribution as a player and as a musician with the ability to hear what was being done would lend considerable guidance to the sessions.
Joe Zawinul had played on In A Silent Way as well as contributing his compositions and understanding of the electric piano. Dave Holland had likewise played on Silent Way and could both anchor the rhythm section and contribute to the more “outside” aspects of the music that Davis planned. Chick Corea was a consummate pianist who had also demonstrated his ability on the electric piano and who enjoyed playing in a free and abstract manner.
Bennie Maupin was an accomplished woodwind multi-instrumentalist who was instructed to play only bass clarinet. The bass clarinet has a limited history in jazz, but it has been used in a number of recordings and performances. Jelly Roll Morton had made use of the instrument, played by Omer Simeon, on his Red Hot Peppers sessions in Chicago. At the time Bitches Brew was being recorded, the best-known musician who had played bass clarinet was Eric Dolphy. Dolphy had played for a year with John Coltrane’s classic quartet comprised of Coltrane, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones. The dark, low, wood sound of the instrument adds a great deal to what is generally termed the “dark” sound of Bitches Brew, though the instrument is never really in the foreground.
Larry Young, the third keyboard player on the sessions, was a soul-jazz organist who fell under the spell of John Coltrane, recording his album Unity with Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw, and Elvin Jones. Besides his work with Davis, Young went on to form the group Lifetime with John McLaughlin and Tony Williams, the second Davis quintet’s drummer. He’s continued to contribute to recordings by Lenny White, McLaughlin and his Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Jimi Hendrix. Young had played on the Silent Way sessions as well. The use of three keyboard players on “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Spanish Key” is a stroke of genius by Miles: Zawinul played funky and made great use of the instrument, Corea played “outside”, and Young contributed a soul and rock-oriented perspective.
For drummers, Davis used Jack DeJohnette, who had already played the Fillmore circuit a few years prior with the Charles Lloyd Quintet, a very popular band that was one of the first jazz groups to make inroads into the rock music audience. That group also featured Keith Jarrett, and Jarrett and DeJohnette have worked together on and off for much of the following decades, including Jarrett’s most recent trio work. At the same time, DeJohnette has continued to challenge himself by working with a wide array of musicians in a variety of settings. A recent recording found him in live performance with European woodwind improviser John Surman, with both artists providing washes of synthesized sound over which each contributed free improvisational work. Lenny White, on the other hand, was just nineteen, a fierce young drummer not unlike Tony Williams who had been recommended by Jackie McLean.
Each of these musicians contributed something to the mix of Miles’ music during this period, and most found specific areas that they were interested in exploring further. Where Miles could accommodate the musicians he did, but he would not lose sight of his own vision, and if a musician wanted to explore a certain part of the music more completely than Miles was willing to, it generally signaled that it was time for that musician to form his own group.
This certainly was the case with Chick Corea and Dave Holland, who decided to explore the more abstract and avant-garde side of Miles’ music that was inherent in the rhythm section, but which Davis reigned in. They formed the group Circle with Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul. Joe Zawinul and perhaps Wayne Shorter were interested in the ideas and concepts that emerged during the recording of “In A Silent Way”; Zawinul told Davis he was not all that happy with the music the group was creating during the Bitches Brew sessions. When Weather Report first emerged in a series of live performances and an album release they were clearly experimenting with the same lighter sound and “everyone solos/no one solos” feel of In A Silent Way.
The first recording session was held on August 19, 1969. When one considers that this was barely six months after the In A Silent Way sessions, there can be little doubt about the relationship that exists between the two albums. Columbia Records released the sessions from Filles de Kilimanjaro as part of the Miles Davis Quintet box, and it does belong there in as much as it is the last album to feature the quintet intact.
Both In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew have their own box sets, but the Complete Bitches Brew Sessions set contains recordings that were done after the Bitches Brew sessions and which clearly start to explore some new directions. So, the true “first phase” of Miles’ electronic period is that which begins with Filles de Kilimanjaro and ends with Bitches Brew. It is true that much of the live material recorded over the next year utilized the repertoire from In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, but from the first post-Brew sessions through the recording of Jack Johnson and on to On the Corner, Miles was clearly trying some new things.
Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way share several attributes. First, the music on both albums was created in the studio as a hodgepodge of material as the tapes were kept rolling the entire time, which was Miles’ new way of working.
Second, both albums were very clearly dominated by the electric piano sound that had caught Davis’ attention in the first place and which energized him because they allowed him to hear things differently than the chordal sound of the acoustic piano. Both also made bold use of electric guitar in a way that was different than jazz listeners were used to.
Finally, both albums were crafted with post-production editing that helped to shape the music made in the studio into a finished composition. But there are clear differences as well, the most obvious being the size of the ensemble Davis had collected for the second album. It’s natural to think that the addition of several musicians inevitably led to the increased density of the music, but that isn’t necessarily so. It was the way the musicians were deployed and the way the music was conceived and put together that made this so. In other words, Bitches Brew is denser precisely because Miles wanted it to sound that way.
At the first session, the group recorded the title track, or more precisely the various pieces that wound up becoming the title track. Everything was done in segments, and there were the usual false starts and rehearsing of certain sections, playing them over. At the end of the session, there was some rehearsal of the Joe Zawinul composition “Pharaoh’s Dance”, which would become the opening track (and side) of the album. These two pieces are the longest on the album (clocking in at 20’05” and 26’58” respectively) and also the two pieces that rely most heavily on post-production assembly. They are also the tracks that were not played heavily by the live quintet prior to the sessions, those being “Spanish Key”, “Sanctuary”, and “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down.”
“Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Bitches Brew” are clearly the main statements of the album and they very purposefully set the tone of the recording. In addition, they are the most radical tracks in terms of the editing done to shape the pieces and that’s certainly one of the reasons they draw so much attention. Together with the album’s cover art and the song titles, there is little doubt that Davis went about putting this program of music together the way a rock musician might have, and that is a key element in the mystique of Bitches Brew.
One of the problems with the critiques of Bitches Brew as well as of Miles’ live performances in the wake of the album’s release is that the writers involved are always approaching the album from the perspective of jazz, viewing it as a jazz album. It is a jazz album in many, many ways, but Davis deliberately put it together the way rock albums of the day were being put together. It is not a haphazard collection of tunes the way that an album like Walkin’ or Steamin’ were. Jazz albums were not crafted with a specific programmatic end in mind, they were simply a collection of standard tunes that generally followed the theme/solos/theme structure that had been part of the jazz tradition since the advent of bebop.
The same had been true of rock albums at one time, but The Beatles had challenged that. Starting with albums like Rubber Soul and Revolver, The Beatles had been working at creating an album that was somehow thematically organized and created a specific mood or told a story. They finally hit on what they were looking for with Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Other groups began to attempt to do the same. While Sgt. Peppers is a unique song cycle that creates a certain mood and tells a series of stories, taking the listener on an imaginary “trip” that spins out from the magical sounds of the Lonely Hearts Club Band itself, it does not tell a story from beginning to end. The Who began to do that with the advent of the “rock opera” on their album Tommy (though they had already laid the groundwork earlier with their mini-opera “A Quick One”).
Bitches Brew trades on an exotic, fantastical framework, from its distinctive cover art by German artist Mati Klarwein to the song titles themselves. “Pharaoh’s Dance” is inspired by the image of the Egyptian civilization as being a lost black civilization and conjures images of dancing, pyramids, and some kind of awakening power.
“Bitches Brew” is an interesting title that could refer to women in general or some kind of matriarchal society. Carlos Santana thought that it referred to the circle of women who were influencing Miles at the time in terms of his style, mode of dress, and thought. It could also refer to a group of witches summoning power from some type of strange concoction. Given the African overtones of the cover, it might refer to the brewing of a strange potion that could help one achieve possession by voodoo powers or the powder that is used to create zombies.
A musician who is really hot, a master of his or her instrument, is also traditionally referred to as a “bitch”, and Miles often referred to himself this way. Certainly “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” encourages a voodoo perspective. “Spanish Key” is a more open title, but again the reference seems to be to the exotic, the mysterious. Miles was into the Moorish influence in the interior decoration of his home, so this is a possible explanation of the title, which is a slightly older piece anyway. Wayne Shorter’s “Sanctuary” is again open to many interpretations, but the idea of sanctuary means that there is a threat that one seeks protection from. “John McLaughlin” is really a section of “Bitches Brew” that was broken out into a separate piece.
The artwork of Mati Klarwein is well-known to listeners of psychedelic music, as his work has graced such album covers as Sanatana’s Abraxas, Hooteroll? By Jerry Garcia and Howard Wales, Reuben Wilson’s Blue Mode, Mark Egan’s Mosaic, and Miles Davis’ Live-Evil. With the exception of the Abraxas cover, none is more widely recognized than the painting used for the Bitches Brew album cover.
In his original liner notes to Bitches Brew Ralph J. Gleason points the way to an interesting truth:
“this music is new music and it hits me like an electric shock and the word ‘electric’ is interesting because the music is to some degree electric music either by virtue of what you can do with tapes and by the process by which it is preserved on tape or by the use of electricity in the actual making of the sounds themselves. Electric music is the music of this culture and in the breaking away (not the breaking down) from previously assumed forms a new kind of music is emerging.”
The phrase “what you can do with tapes” is interesting. Davis and producer Teo Macero had really just begun to explore what could be done with tape manipulation on Silent Way and Bitches Brew. But no jazz musician had ever used tape editing and manipulation the way it was used on these two recordings.
Miles was on the cutting edge in this respect, because really rock musicians had only begun to experiment in this way a few years prior. The process was still a laborious and difficult one, indeed many things possible with today’s digital technology were not at all possible back then. What Macero accomplished was nothing short of amazing, though. Macero points out that the original tapes all went into the vaults as they were: “Whoever doesn’t like what I did, 20 years from now they can go back and redo it.”
An intriguing idea, and one that few have taken him up on. In 1998, though, producer Bill Laswell performed a “mix translation and reconstruction in sound” on the album Panthalassa at the behest of Columbia Records. “I definitely grew up listening to that music and I’ve had a tremendous amount of experience with the musicians who played on those albums since that time, a lot of them in fact,” remarks Laswell. “So, I’m familiar and that helps, instead of just coming in as another album to remix. That’s absolutely not the case with this project.”
Subtitled “the music of Miles Davis 1969-1974”, Panthalassa demonstrates that Laswell realized the unique nature of the music Davis made during those years and its impact on music made afterward. Columbia gave Laswell access to the original multi-track tapes from the sessions for In A Silent Way, On the Corner, and Get Up With It.
Laswell makes the implicit connection between Miles’ electric music and the trance, ambient, and techno music of the 1990s and 2000s explicit by setting Davis’ trumpet against ambient washes of sound. He also heightens certain elements, putting the focus on the ensemble work and layering textures in ways that were not readily apparent on the original releases. The final result, a seamless hour or so of music divided into four separate suites, is definitely a collaborative effort, but it could be the Miles Davis we’d be hearing today if he had hired Laswell to produce him. After all, Teo Macero used to be given carte blanche with session tapes, with Miles merely giving a thumbs up or down when the final result was presented to him.
Laswell instinctively understands that the music of Miles’ electric period is outside the purview of jazz, and doesn’t feel that it should be thought of by the standards of that genre:
“This work was determined by tape manipulation, splicing, editing, repeating, removing, moving around, flipping over, inside out. It’s no different than how we’re making records today with samples. These records have nothing to do with jazz; they have nothing to do with that tradition. They broke from that tradition and they have everything to do with just being creative, combining sounds, instruments, players, characters, presence and personality.”
Ultimately that may be what has continued to bother jazz musicians, writers, and critics about Davis’ work from around 1969 on: he broke free from the traditions of jazz, but the music he made continued to have the elements that he had learned from jazz—his unique instrumental voice, total control of his instrument, an ability to play in the moment and to find just the right environment over which his trumpet playing could flower. But I disagree with Laswell’s assertion that “these records have nothing to do with jazz.” They grew directly, organically out of jazz, the result of taking jazz as far into the abstract as seemed possible at the time and then finding a way, step by step, to go still farther.