bitches brew – miles davis’ ultimate statement of defiance

There’s an eternal battle nearly every underground artist fights. In theory, achieving mainstream cultural acceptance and ubiquity for the art you create without having to change a note of it should be a major victory. But the taste is often bittersweet. You can’t help but wonder what you’ve lost in becoming successful. Think of that little emocore trio from Seattle who’s second album went on to become one of the most significant albums (and best selling) of all time despite being every bit as abrasive and-let’s say-grungy as their first. But no originally revolutionary musical movement has gone so completely from the home of rebels to the toast of high society as the “Great American Art Form” known as jazz.

Contributor: Nathan Leigh

Jazz was originally the respite of absurdly talented musicians not welcomed by the white establishment in traditional orchestras. By the mid-60’s the variant of jazz which emphasized small combos and long solos known as bebop wasn’t just accepted by the establishment. It was the establishment. Codified in the “Real Book” and the “Fake Book;” two enormous volumes of simplified sheet music for the entire collection of traditionally accepted jazz standards. What in classical music and traditional theatre they call “the Canon.”
I often wonder what the heroin addicted rebel genius Charlie Parker would have thought had he lived long enough to see doctorate programs in jazz composition and performance and major universities, with his own music held up as the golden ideal. Though Parker may have lived fast and died young, one of his frequent collaborators, and another of the great innovators of bebop, Miles Davis survived to see his cultural victory was a Pyrrhic one. Witnessing the utter co-option of his art form at the hands of the mainstream Davis drew a line in the sand in 1970 when he released the landmark Bitches Brew.
He had been moving away from bop at that point for a decade at least, but his previous recordings (even the heavily electric In A Silent Way from 1969) still maintained a tenuous connection to the past. In A Silent Way, despite it’s electric and free jazz leanings even borrowed the Sonata Form from classical music. Bitches Brew was a complete break from all this. It was an ugly, confrontational, emotionally brutal, noisy mess of an album.

With two drummers, two keyboardists, and two bass players, two percussionists, and an electric guitar, this was not your mothers’ bebop combo. There are no standards. Barely any melodies at all. Sanctuary, the albums’ sole ballad, only makes it about halfway through its running time before devolving back into the frenzied chaos of previous tracks. The guitars are slightly overdriven and recall hippie icons Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish. The drums play straight rock rhythms rather than the ride shuffle that has come to define jazz in the minds of most listeners. The songs don’t so much begin as much as happen, and rather than come to a satisfying conclusion, they simply end; crumbling back into the chaos from whence they came.

The term most often used to define the music is “jazz-rock fusion” or simply fusion. But the fusion which achieved success with bands like Weather Report (founded by one of the keyboardists and the soprano sax player from the Bitches Brew era band) still had melodies. What Davis was doing here was an act of defiance. With a 20-year legacy of classic recordings, and a band featuring some of the most talented jazz musicians to ever record, Miles Davis was declaring war on the jazz establishment.
What makes his rebellion all the more striking is the fact that this was not an album from a young upstart, eager to prove himself. Bitches Brew was the 34th full length album from an extremely successful 44-year-old man. Davis was as much a part of the world of jazz over cocktails at Lincoln Center as he was waging war against it.

Listening to the opening strands of chaos from album opener Pharaoh’s Dance, it’s clear that this is a revolution. 40 years later and the album’s carefully sculpted noise is still ahead of its’ time. Devin Ocampo from Faraquet and Medications may have borrowed from the instrumentation in Medications’ latest album (seriously, who uses a bass clarinet? Amazing.), but even he still marries the sound to semi-traditional songwriting. Davis is going for nothing but total reinvention. Solos and melodies burble up from the primordial sonic soup and dissipate just as effortlessly.
Perhaps what is most amazing is the beauty of it all. The music walks a steady line between total noise and melody. If the players were any less talented, and it would devolve into an unlistenable jumble. Any more traditionally oriented and it would lose that excitement. That “we’re doing something new” energy which every artist since the first caveman drew his lunch on a wall has sought but only about 500 or so have ever successfully achieved.

As a child raised in the 90’s listening mostly to music made before I was born, I’ve often wondered what it was like to hear David Johansen first declare “When I say I’m in love you best believe I mean love L-U-V” and know you were hearing something truly new enter the world for the first time. In an era where Katy Perry samples Garry Glitter and no-one bats an eye, where post-hardcore bands appear on the Billboard charts, and every underground music scene is only one Jay-Z mash-up or TV soundtrack away from cultural ubiquity, hearing Bitches Brew is still a revolution. In Davis’ quest to evade the popular co-option of bebop, he created something truly remarkable, an album that by its’ very nature can never be co-opted by the mainstream.