"Bitch brew." How Miles Davis Revolutionized Jazz 50 Years Ago

Exactly half a century ago, on March 30, 1970, an album by Miles Davis called Bitches Brew was released. The album radically changed the whole picture of jazz, laid the foundations for new musical styles - jazz-rock, fusion, psychedelic jazz - and determined the development of improvised music for the coming decades.

The eternal revolutionary at the crossroads
By the late 1960s, Miles Davis was at a crossroads. On the one hand, it seemed that life and career have developed as well as possible. Barely over forty years old, he was already a recognized classic of jazz, and one of the coolest, most fashionable and popular stars of American culture and show business.

Three deaths and half a dozen lives: a quarter of a century without Miles Davis
A Love Supreme: 50th Anniversary of a Jazz Masterpiece
Jazz: expansion, fragmentation, evolution and… freedom
As a 19-year-old youth, he staked out his place in history by taking part in the revolutionary, laying the foundations of modern jazz - be-bop - Charlie Parker ensemble of the mid-1940s.

20-year-old Miles Davis in the ensemble of his idol Charlie Parker
PHOTOGRAPHER,GETTY IMAGES
photo caption,
20-year-old Miles Davis in the ensemble of his idol Charlie Parker

Just a few years later, his own ensemble recorded the album Birth of the Cool. Prophetically born from these recordings, cool jazz became not only one of the most important musical trends of the 1950s, but also the sonic equivalent of the era-defining relaxed, hipster beatnik culture.

And Davis's own cool style was greatly facilitated by the passionate romance that developed in Paris in those years with the famous French chansonnier Juliette Greco, and the recording of music for the cult film "Elevator to the scaffold" by the French new wave director Louis Malle.

Miles Davis and his lover Juliette Greco at the Saint-Germain Club in Paris. 1958
PHOTOGRAPHER,GETTY IMAGES
photo caption,
Miles Davis and his lover Juliette Greco at the Saint-Germain Club in Paris. 1958

In the late 50s, his first "great" quintet with John Coltrane and Bill Evans laid the foundations of "modal jazz" and recorded Kind of Blue, which is considered the greatest jazz album to this day.

In those same years, he remembered that behind him - not only wandering around jazz clubs, but also a solid classical education at Juilliard, one of the best conservatories in America, and, together with the orchestra of the composer and arranger Gil Evans, recorded several magnificent orchestral records that put the beginning and became classics of the "third trend", popular at the turn of the 1950s-60s, the idea of ​​synthesis of jazz and classical music.

PHOTOGRAPHER,GETTY IMAGES
photo caption,
With composer and arranger Gil Evans, Davis recorded at the turn of the 50s and 60s several magnificent orchestral albums that became classics of the "third current". The most famous of them is Sketches of Spain.