George Grella Jr. - Bitches Brew

BITCHES BREW

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Forthcoming in the series:

Workingmans Dead by Buzz Poole

The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts

Psychocandy by Paula Mejia

Hi, How Are You by Benjamin Shapiro

Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic

Hangin Tough by Rebecca Wallwork

Donny Hathaway Live by Emily Lordi

The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly

Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod

and many more

Track Listing

LP 1, Side 1 Pharaohs Dance (20:07)

LP 1, Side 2 Bitches Brew (27:00)

LP 2, Side 1 Spanish Key (17:30)

John McLaughlin (4:23)

LP 2, Side 2 Miles Runs the Voodoo Down (14:03)

Sanctuary (10:54)

Bitches Brew

George Grella, Jr.

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

To Rashid, who got it all started, to Chris, Keely, and Ben,

who saw me through the years, to Keif (still the best writer

in the family) and the Pea for making everything matter, to

Norman, for his impossible amount of help, to Dad, who set

the example, and to Mom, who never got to see it, and would

have been proud.

Contents

Imagine jazz without Miles Davis. Take away all the records he made or played onthe great quintets, the collaborations with Gil Evans, playing trumpet with Charlie Bird Parker; Birth of the Cool, Relaxin, Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants, Milestones, Kind of Blue, Four and More, Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain, E.S.P., Nefertiti, In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, Live-Evil, On the Corner, the live sets from the Blackhawk and the Plugged Nickel, even Aura and the musical experience of the twentieth century would be deeply impoverished.

Not only would you never have the fulfilling pleasure of those records, but the course of jazz, rock, and pop music would have been extraordinarily different. As Miles once said, I have to change, its like a curse, and if that was an exaggeration, it was only a slight one. Miles Dewey Davis III, teenager bebopper, became Miles, the iconoclast and icon, birthing cool jazz, founding modal jazz and jazz-rock fusionand in between the last two styles, the creator of the fundamental template for the direction of post-avant-garde modern jazz, and even ambient music. While those terms can misdirect attention from the actual qualities and importance of the music he made, they do give a useful shorthand for the number of his transformations; and with each, he led other musicians, and music as a whole, into new worlds.

No style of art can remain static: irrelevance is just as much a risk as the inevitable decadence that comes from a style developing to its last measure. But fans, including critics, of particular movements of artists, tend to want what they love to stay the same, the regression is not to the mean but to an Edenic past that never actually existed. This is reinforced by the path of the vast majority of artists, including the greatest ones: setting out on a stylistic path and honing and refining it through the years. Change in styles tends to be seen as apostasy.

It is a uniquely twentieth-century phenomenon for an artist to be a major practitioner of one style and concept in his particular medium, then to create a new style that changes the history and direction of that medium, then do it yet again, and, even more, to lead each new style, to create enduring, exemplary masterpieces in it. Picasso did it. Stravinsky did it. Miles did it. His achievement as an artist is equal in stature to theirs, the only real impediment to acknowledging this has been that Miless medium, jazz, was for decades seen as low-class, pedestrian, vulgar in all the wrong ways by the cultural powers-that-be. Miles cared about that, but also didnt give a shit, because, like Picasso and Stravinsky, his art reached a broad audience, one far outside that typical of his genre. But then, his genre was music.

Modern painting, classical music and jazz are actually impossible to imagine without Picasso, Stravinsky or Miles. No painter had to work with cubism, no composer had to write in the neo-classical style, no jazz musician had to abandon bebop or hard bop for modal harmonies. But cubism, neo-classicism and modal jazz were all in the vanguard of their respective mediums: keeping their traditions moving forward, adding to the accumulation of knowledge, and the continued vitality and relevance that was the direct effect of these three artists was a boon to every other painter, composer and musician around them.

Another commonality for these three men was that they found their ideas and made their breakthroughs not via theory but praxis, through the constant discipline and effort of paring away the superfluous to discover their own purest sense of beauty. As intelligently as each could express their artistic values, none were philosophers or conceptualists. They were working artists, selling and gigging. Stravinsky described a process that was true for each, eschewing the idea of inspiration and instead explaining that being a composer meant spending the time and energy writing music. Through that very process of work, he not only honed his craft, but ended up producing music he never intended to write, discovering its value and using it to create masterpieces, all of which was the residue of the design of work. It is also easy to discern consistent techniques and aesthetic values through their careers, through each change in style: a basic love of figurative painting for Picasso, powerful rhythms and short, repetitive units for Stravinsky, linear development and a constant search for the simplest means possible for Miles.

The history and cultural position of jazz, however, is entirely different than that of painting and classical music. It was born in the twentieth century, built its own traditions on the fly, and came of age as a modern art along with Modernism. Jazz also began and thrived as an essentially commercial genrethere was an art and an artistry to it, and it has always demanded extraordinary musicianship, but it worked by entertaining the public and by making them dance, and for good or ill, the music was made in dance halls, restaurants, speakeasies and whore housesthat underwent a startling metamorphosis into an art music, as abstract in form, structure and intention as any string quartet by Haydn. Nothing else has achieved this.