My favorite Miles Davis anecdote—and he was a rainfall of great stories—was when he was recording in the studio one time and kept “cracking” notes, basically screwing up the ones he was playing, and the session’s producer finally said over the intercom, “Miles, you missed the coda,” and Miles replied, “Fuck the fucking motherfucking coda!”
I love that story, because he wasn’t missing his marks because he was incompetent. He was trying to find a new dimension, somewhere in the gap of a broken note, to play in. Everyone knows he was a great artist—I think the greatest jazz musician ever. But great art is not magic, like some precious, ethereal apparition conjured by Dumbledore’s wand. Great art isn’t perfection, it’s imperfection! It’s the product of something broken, not preserved whole.
I once wrote that Miles Davis made the sea rise as he poured his genius into it. He was the Picasso of jazz. You can imagine art without Picasso, but can you imagine it not being a little flatter, grayer, quieter? So with jazz without Miles, the trumpeter who found notes between the notes.
His trumpet was his Excalibur, more special, more magically imbued, creating sounds and winds of emotion possible only to him. He once famously said, “If you understood me, you’d be me,” which is almost Christ-like in its enigmatic proposition. He just made the deepest, most dimensional, most pure jazz of anyone. In Birth of the Cool and Kind of Blue he recorded two of the greatest albums of all time, of any genre. And Sketches of Spain is transcendent. You can hear him in the silence of your mind, like hearing the sound of the sea, or a distant train. As troubled and angry and self-destructive as he so often was, no one ever made the music he made.
And this spring marks the 50th anniversary of Bitches Brew, considered by many critics and musicians to be his masterpiece, one of the great musical accomplishments ever recorded. They froth over it, more so now than even then when it was released in March 1970.
Personally, I think it’s crap.
When Miles Davis set out to record Bitches Brew, he had no musical score, no compositions, no songs, and really no ideas. The musicians he brought together to make the album, a double LP, say that he had nothing for them to play, and just gave them vague directions like “play the space.” He told electric guitarist John McLaughlin, who, perhaps unconsciously, became one of the fathers of fusion rock and jazz, to play like he didn’t know how to play the guitar. And McLaughlin obliged! Oddly this has become confused for an act of genius.
In lieu of a musical outline for Bitches Brew, Miles had a pair of driving ambitions: He wanted to make jazz electric and he wanted to sell records in the kind of numbers rock acts were racking up. He saw the writing on the wall for jazz when he and his group were playing to half-filled clubs by the end of the ’60s. He was determined not to fade into the dusk of evaporating commercial viability.
For the recording, Davis surrounded himself with some of the best players of the day, including Chick Corea, Dave Holland, McLaughlin, Wayne Shorter, Larry Young, and drummers Billy Cobham and Lenny White. They could have done a musical version of the tax code and made it sound beautiful. But they didn’t. Good Lord above, they did not.
The first 20 seconds of the album are great! Lovely! Interesting, ear-attention getting. It falls off after that. About a minute later—and there's an hour and three quarters more of this to come—it is already sliding into its coffee percolating next to a crotchety air conditioning unit precariously balanced in the window sound. With what seems like the guy down the hall practicing on his trumpet wafting over the drone of the air conditioner and the gurgling coffee pot. And he hits some harsh notes, if we’re being honest.
I get why so many critics love this record. Or say they do. It was bold! It was in your face and experimental—instead of the album being the product of the best recording of each track, it is a musical quilt sewn together by arranger Gil Evans and Miles cutting snippets of recordings and taping them together with snippets of different recordings! Why wouldn't that sound great? They were doing mashups before the mashup generation was born! The critics had to show they got that.
Of course it sounds like crap! It’s discordant and cacophonous. It screeches, without drama, or the redemptive promise of drama. It’s a sonic night sweat. Ninety seconds in, the record is unlistenable. And it never, ever gets better.
So yes, it's bold—but it never takes off! It's the Spruce Goose of records! It's an idea unfurling itself unpleasantly, and an hour and 46 minutes later the last piece of material unspools from the center roll and drops limply to the ground, a ribbon of purposelessness.
That’s just the unglamorous truth. Miles’ desire to be experimental, different, break every mold was admirable. But as a piece of music to listen to, it out and out fails.
Two of the tracks are entire sides of an LP. Of the four sides to the double album (I'm ignoring the transition to CD and sticking with the original vinyl configuration) the first two contain one track each. This is relevant because in the old days, before CDs and the mercy killing apparatus of the remote control, you had to listen to the whole side before the next side fell onto the turntable and replaced it. Or you had to get up and physically remove the disc, but you likely wouldn't because you'd be sure that something was going to change, to justify the cacophony, to soar into the rare Heavens Miles Davis normally commuted from.
Therefore, cruelly, you just keep listening to this dribble of opposing and uninteresting sounds grating against one another, a timid piano somewhere in there, a guitar riffing with the excitement of a mechanic doing an oil change, then, later, another guitar, for no reason whatever—at least no musical reason—suddenly plinks away, one note, plink, plink, plink. And intermittently, winding its way through this awful noise is Miles Davis’ distinct although not, by his standards, spectacular trumpet. And, most strangely, it has nothing to do with the rest of the music going on, anymore than if he had turned up and played at a kindergarten’s music hour.
The second side of disc one is the title track, "Bitches Brew," and you'd be forgiven for expecting something clever for the twist on Macbeth's gnarly busybodies standing by their portentive cauldron. Or, for that matter, less grand witches, even the commonest, Salem gift shop variety would do. But you don't get it. You get, and I had to hear it again to be sure my memory was accurate—it is—an even wimpier version of the first side! Percussive sounds keep starting, but never actually arrive anywhere, maybe like a nervous high school marching band blowing a few trumpets, spanking their drums a bit as they wait to take the field, And again Miles's virtuoso trumpet renderings are laid in like a streak of mustard down the middle of an unappetizing chili dog.
The album is torturous and if I can do a slight public service here, let me implore you not to listen to it. There are other ways to spend your time. Even lockdown isn't enough to make this palatable or justify not listening to something else.
I am just trying to warn you. I'm not saying, as Easter approaches, that I have died for your sins, or anything like that. I wouldn’t go that far. But I will say that, listening to this record again, I have suffered, for some of my sins at least.
