Miles Davis’ Epic ‘Bitches Brew’ Turns 50 and It Still Sucks
The restless jazz giant experimented with electric instruments and long jams, the better to court a bigger rock audience. Critics have swooned ever since. They shouldn’t.
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.