Miles Davis – Bitches Brew (1970)

Like I said in my previous Miles Davis post a couple of days ago, I listened to jazz quite a lot 15 years ago when I was taking bass lessons at Ebeli in Finland. Back then, however, I wasn't quite hardcore with jazz enough to get into jazz fusion. It was way too strange to me. I normally enjoy quite simple and clear melodies. More recently, I feel like my taste in music has evolved to be much more inclusive and I've started enjoying music I wasn't too keen on before. This broadening of the mind has resulted in me actually starting to quite enjoy some jazz fusion albums. Bitches Brew can be called one of the first such albums. By the end of the 60's, Miles Davis found himself in a situation where he wasn't popular with youngsters anymore. He decided to do something about it and invented a whole new musical genre while he was at it.



At the time, Davis was dating a young musician, who also knew Jimi Hendrix. Davis became somewhat jealous of their relationship even though it wasn't ever proofed to be romantic. However, this resulted in Davis drawing influences from Hendrix's music. The most apparent reference to Hendrix on this album is Miles Runs the Voodoo Down, where Davis plays themes of Hendrix's Voodoo Chile.

As some of you who follow my Instagram, may have noticed, I only just bought this album a couple of days ago. This was probably the first time ever I thought I must buy an album before it's place in the blog order is passed. I felt like this is a classic album that I just must own. And I wanted to do it before this album's turn passed in this blog. So, while writing this post now, I've only owned this album for two days. I got it on a beautiful gatefold vinyl record. The album cover of this album is magnificent when you get to inspect all of it's features closer.

This is a double LP with very long experimental songs. The first record only has one song on each side. Both of those are over 20 minutes long. The second record has altogether five songs, but there are some long ones in there as well. This type of music is not really even supposed to be about individual songs. This kind of music is about hypnotic grooves and strange sound experiments. The keys on this album are quite something. It's of course explained by the fact that most of them are played by the amazing Chick Corea!

I really like 1950's and 1960's jazz the most and Bitches Brew may still be a bit too experimental to my taste in some ways to make it one of my favourite albums, but it is a very important record and I feel like it's a record that has changed the world in some ways. It has escaped all the shackles of traditional music making and roams entirely free. It's like a shamanistic experience while on some unknown hallucinogenic drugs (not that I really know what that's like). This is what music sounds like when you don't really have to think of any rules of music making as a given thing.

Listen to the album on Spotify.