Bitches Brew

Wayne Shorter (soprano sax), Miles Davis (trumpet), Bennie Maupin (bass clarinet), John McLaughlin (electric guitar), Joe Zawinul, Larry Young and Chick Corea (electric piano), Dave Holland (double bass), Harvey Brooks (electric bass), Jack DeJohnette and Lenny White (drums), and Don Alias and Juma Santos (percussion). From the album Bitches Brew (1970).

Between 1949 and 1950 Miles Davis left behind the hectic feats of bebop and started cool jazz with his first group as a leader with short and ambiguous solos, tense sonorities and impressionistic forms in the recordings that in 1957 were published as Birth of the Cool; in the mid-1950s he was a major driver of hard bop with his first great quintet in albums such as ‘Round About Midnight (1956); he also combined jazz and classical music with composer and arranger Gil Evans, standing out his first work with him Miles Ahead (1957), and flamenco in Sketches of Spain (1960); and, above all, opened the doors to modal jazz in Kind of Blue (1959), expanding the possibilities of improvisation by freeing it from the slavery of chord changes.

However, perhaps his greatest contribution to jazz and music in general was his “electric period”, which marked his boldest adventure in unknown terrain. This time there was no more moderation or timid experiments: Bitches Brew was a pioneering and revolutionary album, from its striking and descriptive title to its suggestive cover of sensual forms and landscape background, with whose provocative music there was no turning back.

At that time Davis was influenced by rock, funk, Zawinul’s playing with alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and the works of English composer and arranger Paul Buckmaster, and to record his album he wanted to follow the free jam sessions that appeared in Electric Ladyland (1968) from The Jimmy Hendrix Experience, but with a mixture of modal jazz and free jazz. In August 1969, a week before the recording, Davis gathered the twelve musicians to rehearse, brought simple chord progressions for the three keyboards that later became the outline of a larger composition, and gave them some musical notes allowing them to play on them whatever they wanted. He hadn’t made any other arrangements because he didn’t know how the album would evolve, as it depended on the creative process.