Cashbox : 05/09/1970

This is a remarkable two record set featuring the man who is probably the finest trumpet player around. Subtitled “Directions In Music,” the double decker should become an instant jazz classic and interest many pop fans. It features some of the classier musicians (Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette) doing the kind of first rate material, most of it composed by Miles, that they can really get their teeth into. Watch for this to generate lots of excitement in both pop and jazz circles, Bitches Brew is a bitch!

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Appleton Post-Crescent
David F. Wagner : 06/07/1970

In any musical category, staying power is the rarest quality an artist possesses. Even genuine talent can run thin, or people can get tired of it. Shallow talent runs out quickly. So when you see a person who is contributing important music for many years, there is a true great.

In jazz, one of the best is Miles Davis. He has been a leader in modern jazz for over 15 years. The most surprising thing is he’s avoided becoming part of jazz’s Establishment, because just by his familiarity he runs the risk of being taken for granted.

Why does he still do new, important things; or, perhaps, how can he? Obviously, he is an active, open-minded, free-floating artist; he isn’t afraid to look bad on the chance he’ll come up with something new and vital. That helps. Also, over the years, Miles has had a fantastic ear for genius. His sidemen have been among my favorites. People like Coltrane, Adderley, Hancock, Wayne Shorter and many others have been utilized to their fullest by Davis.

But Miles was with Trane and Cannonball in the fifties. This is 1970. Trane is dead, Cannonball is diluted beyond bearing and Miles keeps trucking. Listen to Bitches Brew and you’ll see why. A warning: you will hear Davis at less than his best on this two-record set. The title track, for example, and a rambling Spanish Key might have been omitted for all I care and we would have had a beautiful single recording. But as I mentioned, Miles isn’t afraid to bomb and there will be some who don’t find those two tracks the redundant, pointless exercises I do.

If they fail, Pharaoh’s Dance makes up for a thousand shortcomings. It is the most exquisitely developed long (20:07) jazz cut in recent years. I find it more exciting than even Pharoah Sanders‘ Karma and more listenable than latter Trane. A sign of its power is the feeling you want to hear more even after 20 minutes. Miles’ trumpet punctuates passages and has a beautiful extended riff midway, but Davis – and this is another of his strengths – stays in the background for many minutes and allows brilliant artists like Shorter (this time on soprano sax) to blow incredible passages. Miles is into the duplicating instruments thing at the moment. He has two drummers, two bassists and even two electric pianos. He uses them well and avoids getting too cluttered.

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Asbury Park Press
Don Lass : 05/24/1970

Jazz, the only original American music, is dead. That’s what record producers, critics, teens, and musicologists have been saying for a half-decade now. They base their epitaph on sales of jazz albums, which dwindled badly in the last decade, the fact that few clubs feature jazz, and on the dominant position of a popular music we call rock. But jazz is far from dead. In fact, this diversified music is beginning a renaissance that could very well see it become the dominant music of America, as it once was. The evidence lies in rock itself, which is moving more swiftly every day toward jazz and its improvisational base. It lies in the new directions being taken by jazz musicians themselves, who finally have bowed to tradition and incorporated elements from popular musics into their work. Even Miles Davis, once a purist of jazz, shows no shame in borrowing from rock and electronic music. It has broadened his scope and his audience, which in turn has broadened his acceptance by those outside the jazz audience.

It might be more accurate to say that the future of jazz as we once knew it is dim. The pure jazz that was developed in the ’40s and ’50s still will find an audience, but it will be small and insignificant on the total music scene. The future of the idiom lies in broadening its scope, demonstrating to musicians in other more popular forms that it can be meshed successfully into their music, and encouraging the jazz musician himself to look in new directions for inspiration, as Davis has done so successfully without sacrificing his artistic personality.

What follows below is a discussion of some of the current jazz releases that covers jazz of a pure kind, and jazz of a new kind, jazz that reaches into the popular music of today and presents it in an even more stimulating fashion.

Bitches Brew – Miles Davis (Columbia GP-26) – Davis is the dominant force in jazz today, the man to whom all others look for inspiration. With a masterful stroke of genius, he has changed the concept of jazz to meet the times, and his influence is being felt like a shock wave from a nuclear explosion. He has moved jazz into a new era, one that is seeing the music shift from its traditional base to a revitalized form that incorporates the most sophisticated elements from other idioms. The move has been gradual, but it has taken form most noticeably in Davis’ two most recent works, In a Silent Way released late last year, and this fascinating two-word masterpiece. What Davis has done can’t be explained simply. The most striking aspect of his effort is his incorporation of electronic music, rock, and the work of contemporary composers into his own brand of jazz. He does it while still remaining himself. The passionate beauty of his trumpet is still with us; his alternate moments of anger still strike us with a slashing fury; he has retained his appreciation of the roots of this music. But Davis is exploring new territory here, once virgin land that only men of his genius would dare penetrate. That he is doing it successfully has already been an inspiration to others. A movement is beginning, a movement toward a jazz that will appeal to the most sophisticated members of the rock and classical audiences. They have something to relate to in Davis’ new music. The rhythms of rock, the reverberating sounds of an electronic age, the contemporary sound of the electric piano and guitar are all in Davis’ music – Pharoah’s Dance, Spanish Key, Bitches Brew, Miles Runs the Voodoo Down, Sanctuary.” For some, it will be too heavy, too cerebral. But give it a chance. It’s the vanguard of the ’70s.

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Calgary Herald
Canadian Press : 08/13/1970
‘Electronic Fol-De-Rol’ Unhappy Trend in Jazz

Jazz constantly refines and regenerates itself. Its very roots mirror turmoil and change.

But performers can be fickle. They do not, if they are sincere, consider themselves panderers to public taste. Nor are they content to reach a plateau and rest on it.

Driven by the relentless urgings of their personalities, their craving for a more perfect form, they explore.

Electronic keyboards are what’s happening on the latest rash of jazz albums brought into a market bulging at the seams.

Often, though they are interesting musical studies as a whole, the presence of gadgetry seems to dilute the integrity of the key musician or musicians in each group. Miles Davis‘ new double album, Bitches Brew, is a case in point.

Billed implicitly as an odyssey – it doesn’t say so but the cover art, protean symbols and advertisements for the album leave no doubt – it doesn’t fail but it confuses and, for some, disappoints. Why, Edgar Jones asks, “does America’s best jazz trumpeter have to play around with all this electronic fol-de-rol?”

Recalls Old Glory

Edgar, a gruff Yorkshire-man who runs Montreal’s main record-lending library, remembers with love and nostalgia such performances as Walkin’, the Gil Evans session, the Carnegie Hall performance and Milestones – records which made Davis “one of the few jazz artists I could take seriously.”

A lover of classical music – Jones formerly produced a classical program on radio – and occasionally rock “if it’s imaginative and well thought out,” he is a kind of legend to the hundreds who rent from him first before they decide to buy.

He rarely sells new records but instead rents a massive inventory of classical, jazz, traditional jazz, blues, folk and some rock records to members for a fixed weekly charge.

His advice is respected by members who spend afternoons browsing through the collection.

Edgar doesn’t like Bitches Brew because it whistles and screeches like a foggy night on the Staten Island ferry, and that’s not what put Miles Davis where he is today. He rarely solos on this album, preferring to leave the action to a platoon of sound engineers and endless keyboard consoles.

Davis cut his teeth as a sideman with some of the jazz world’s best-known performers. They included Gil Evans and the late John Coltrane.

Keeps Out of Sight

His clean, sharp trumpet playing sounded through smoky one-stop clubs from Harlem to Hackensack, from Montreal’s Black Bottom to Toronto and Los Angeles. Bitches Brew keeps Miles out of sight and treads warily into a musical swampland deriving from John Cage, the Mothers of Invention and three or four types of rock music.

On this album Miles experiments, composes and arranges but, with one exception, a more traditional ballad arrangement, he never really plays that silver horn. Chaos is evident but it is not always intentional.
Ralph J. Gleason, an American jazz critic, says in the album’s liner notes:

“Electronic music is the music of this culture and in the breaking away (not the breaking down) from previously assumed forms a new kind of music is emerging. The whole society is like that.”

Is it? Do enduring works of art actually emerge during periods of turmoil, or after they have passed?

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Columbia Daily Tribune
Unknown : 05/18/1970

After swing came bebop and after bebop came cool or progressive jazz, which became more and more intellectual and introverted, pursuing an ever-narrowing path that fewer and fewer listeners were interested in following. Jazz was said to be dead and cool jazz was said to have forced it beyond its endurance and killed it.

Some performers, of course, still played their old ways – Dixieland, big band, cool or whatever – and most of their followings ranged from modest to starvation size.

Herb Alpert used jazz horns in pop and people bought records, and Blood, Sweat & Tears used jazz horns in rock and people bought records.

Good jazz musicians found work as sidemen in recording studios and on TV talk shows. And some of them would never leave for the “golden days” of jazz again, because of the steady paychecks and being able to stay in one place.

But a lot of jazz people, in and outside the business, have been waiting for jazz to progress from progressive, to prove that cool did not cool the whole thing. And we may just be standing at that moment. Hopefully, thankfully, we are.

Columbia has just released a two-LP record set by Miles Davis called Bitches Brew that is terribly exciting.

It’s a new direction, an ongoing from the cool that sounds like a widening of the path. Those who liked the cool should love it and from the open, welcoming sound of it, a whole lot of new listeners should join in.

One of the troubles with progressive jazz was that numbers went on too long. Each person in a group had a solo that was some kind of variation on a long-ago stated tune, and the whole thing got boring. The problem, of course, wasn’t really the length; it was having something to say.

The title song of this album, Bitches Brew, which Davis wrote, is 27 minutes long, a whole side – but it never gets boring. On second hearing, it tells you more, gives you a tourist’s little view of voodoo.

The whole album leaves you wildly enthusiastic that jazz is alive and back on the track.

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Delaware State News
Don DeMichael : 05/12/1970
Miles Davis: Always Innovating, Exciting

Miles Davis is without doubt one of the exceedingly small number of truly creative musicians In American music. A fellow innovator with Charlie Parker during the 1940s in the jazz idiom called bop, one of the founders and father figures of so-called cool jazz in the ’50s, pacesetter of small-band jazz and explorer of large ensemble sonorities with his musical alter ego, Gil Evans, in the ’60s, Davis has accomplished more in his 42 years than any other American musician, except Duke Ellington.

Sometimes irascible, belligerent and obscene, Davis has never taken himself as seriously as his worshippers (and detractors) have. He has, however, taken his music – whatever its turn of mind – most seriously. He has been known to pore over symphony scores in New York music libraries, reject hours of recording because it did not meet his high standards and even refuse to play when he felt conditions were adverse.

The result of all this has been a reputation that has grown to almost legendary proportions (tales of his insults and escapades abound in the music world), some degree of wealth for the man and a huge amount of gorgeous music of extremely high artistic value.

No Miles Davis record is ever a disappointment. In the last three years, none has been predictable either, for Davis, ever a restless searcher for new means of musical expression, has flirted more and more with rock and avant-garde music forms. Now his most recent recorded adventure is out of Columbia. The two-LP set (at a special price) bears the Milesian title of Bitches Brew. He uses a bank of percussionists (four), sometimes three electric pianos, two bases, two reeds (soprano saxophone and bass clarinet) guitar and his own trumpet. He wrote most of the themes and, as usual, completely dominates the performances. It is the second successful fusion of jazz with rock; the first was Davis’ In a Silent Way released last September.

The unusual instrumentation in the new set produces a round, rolling collection of sound, out of which leap several supporting soloists with important things to say musically. Foremost among the sidemen is British guitarist John McLaughlin, a musician Davis unabashedly admires (one of the Davis themes in the album is renamed for the guitarist and features the Englishman throughout, marking the first Miles Davis recorded performance on which the leader doesn’t blow a note.)

Still it is the creator who is master of his own idiom, and Davis’ improvisations are the ones that stay most firmly locked in the mind’s ear. Poignant, celebratory, mocking, whimpering, screaming, mourning, shouting – the trumpet pulls the listener to the center of the music, ever leading him along strange surprising paths through the thick-textured walls of music.

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Detroit Free Press
Bob Talbert : 04/26/1970

Trumpeter Miles Davis has quit playing the music we’ve known. He’s playing emotion, energy, a feeling, a life force driving into your head and guts. Not really blues. Not really rock. Not really psychedelic. Not really jazz. It’s exciting, flowing like a fever-river, even if you can’t understand what it’s doing or saying. And Chick Corea may be the best electric piano player in the world. If you remember Miles’ be-bopping in 1945, his super-cool in 1950, the chordal approach in 1955, and his modal style in 1960, you’ll wish you knew what to call this.

—–

London Guardian
Sam Peters : 07/28/1970
The Sgt. Pepper of Jazz

When rock first thumped into the hit parade and revitalized pop music, jazz musicians ignored it in the hope that it would go away and die. Fifteen years on, the fusion of jazz and rock is producing some of the most rewarding music on record.

The pianist Junior Mance, on his way home from the Montreux festival, told me: “There has been a big movement towards pop and rock by jazz musicians. Groups like Miles Davis‘ have been delving into the rock bag. His latest record, Bitches Brew, is a good example, and he’s been playing rock gigs at places like Fillmore East in New York. I think it’s a healthy thing It’s added another dimension to Jazz and it’s working both ways. Rock groups like Chicago, and Blood, Sweat and Tears have made albums influenced by jazz. The two kinds of music have been helping each other.”

Looking back one can see that the fusion was inevitable. Jazz has always been ready to borrow melodies from popular music, making standards of the best of them, and the two idioms have had rhythmic ideas in common since Charlie Parker first recorded a bop solo.

Parker’s melodic and harmonic gifts were so pronounced that we have tended to forget the rhythmic premise on which they were founded. Analysis of any of his solos reveals that their basic pulse is eight, not four, beats to the bar. But rhythm sections, with the bassist walking through the chord sequence and the drummer tied to his top cymbal, were slow to follow him. When leaders like John Coltrane and Bill Evans freed their drummers from time-keeping chores and avant-garde percussionists began to batter aside the frontline soloists, the climate was favourable for a broadminded musician like Davis to see what pop rhythms had to offer.

His Bitches Brew is the Sgt Pepper record of jazz, full of studio gimmicks, stretching the jazz formula of soloist over rhythm section to its limits as the trumpeter and saxist Wayne Shorter blow over a seething base of electric pianos, guitar, fender bass, and drums. This is the post-graduate course for students of jazz-rock, best approached by an easy lesson, Miles Runs The Voodoo Down/Spanish Key (CBS S 5104), a single edited from the LP tracks.

Further examples of jazz finesse improving rock vitality are provided by the Cannonball Adderley quintet’s Country Preacher (Capitol E-ST 404) Elastic Rock (Vertigo 6360 008 stereo) by Nucleus, a thoughtful British group featuring Ian Carr (trumpet, flugelhorn) and Karl Jenkins (baritone sax, oboe, piano, and electric piano); the second side of guitarist Kenny Burrell‘s Asphalt Canyon Suite (Verve SVLP 9250 stereo), with an unidentified percussion team which likes the tambourine sound; and, in my opinion the best buy, pianist Herbie Hancock‘s Fat Albert Rotunda (Warner Brothers WS 1834), absolutely relentless in its use of electric bass ostinato figures and eight-to-the-bar drumming.

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Los Angeles Times
Leonard Feather : 05/17/1970
Miles Davis: Ahead or Rocking Back?

For a quarter century the jazz world has been periodically shaken up by the actions, the counteractions and more lately the abstractions of Miles Dewey Davis.

In 1945 he was the teenaged prodigy who, studying at Juilliard, jamming on 52nd St. with Charlie Parker, seemed to offer bebop its first trumpet alternative to Dizzy Gillespie. Five years later he pied-pipered the revolution away from the aggressions of “hot jazz” through his pivotal series of “Birth of the Cool” records.

Almost a decade later, Davis took the music of his choice on another suborbital flight with his venture beyond chords into jazz based modes (arrangements of the scale). Out of the Davis combos of the late 1950s came a series of luminaries who would all achieve their own share of eminence: John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans.

His personnel evolved through the 1960s with the acquisition of newer, younger musicians: George Coleman or Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass and Tony Williams, drums. Talent of this caliber produced such masterpieces as My Funny Valentine, Stella By Starlight, All of You and a flock of original works by Davis and his sidemen.

Changed Directions

As the decade came around its final stretch, with rock firmly in the saddle while jazz (in the view of some alarmists) faced possible extinction, Davis, along with countless others, took stock of the situation, changed direction yet again, and offered a new music that had been taking shape almost subliminally in his combo over the preceding couple of years.

The combo’s personnel has again undergone a 100% turnover. In his nightclub appearances, Miles and a new band of hell’s angels now offer a heady, sometimes shattering sonic message that often leans on a heavy beat. A set may go on without pause for an hour with almost no discernible themes.

Casual listeners might assume that he had been taken over by the youth movement, rock, stock and barrel. The diagnosis would be dangerously oversimplistic. As can be deduced from his current album, he is creating a new and more complex form, drawing from the avant-garde, atonalism, modality, rock, jazz and the universe. It has no name, but some listeners have called it *space music.”

As one of the most catalytic popular forces in jazz (the Fillmore crowd can now be numbered among his admirers), Davis presumably will be able to lead most of his followers wherever he wants to take them. There are those, however, who balk. One reader, Sandy Schuckett of Los Angeles, recently wrote:

“I long for the ‘old days’ (1950s) when one could go into a club and hear Miles caress the notes of Just Squeeze Me or Round Midnight or Godchild. I fear those days are through, and as an old Miles fan I sure will miss them. Guess I’ll have to be content with records.”

Reactions Divided

Fellow musicians are divided in their reaction. Dizzy Gillespie says: “I asked Miles what he’s doing and he said: ‘I don’t have to tell you – you already know.’ So I told him ‘No, I really don’t; explain it. He said he could do that if I had six or seven hours to spare. Then I recorded him one night at a live performance and took the tape home to study. But I still don’t understand. I won’t put him down; it’s wrong to put down things just because you don’t understand them.”

Freddie Hubbard, hailed by some fans as the most important new trumpeter since Miles, says: “Miles is still basically unchanged himself, but he’s trying to bridge the gap by putting his band in a rock bag. For myself, I prefer to experiment without rock. There’s still enough of a public for jazz so you can make a living. It’s up to the musicians to lead the way, show how to extend jazz and still do your own thing. Herbie Hancock has been doing this, since he left Miles and formed his own group.”

Shelly Manne, in whose club Davis played recently, urges caution lest hasty judgments be formed: “You have to do an awful lot of listening, and don’t try too hard to figure out what’s happening; just react to it emotionally. Miles is really into something important.”

Composer Quincy Jones, an ex-trumpeter himself, says: “A whole lot of cats who were hesitating will be running into that bag now that Miles has done it. With every change of direction he’s always arrived at a valid musical conclusion. Anyhow, I’d rather hear him do it than the The Doors.”

The critics, unbothered by such musical reservations as those that troubled Gillespie, have lost no time in presenting Miles and his new music with the Davis Cup.

In a sense, jazz history is repeating itself: once again the brooding, no-longer-so-young man with a horn (he’ll be 44 on May 25) becomes the jazz world’s overriding conversation piece. The arguments pro and con will resound from here to Siberia (assuming the hip cognoscenti out there can still hear the Voice of America). For those closer to home, the following prescription is recommended:

ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Miles Davis – Bitches Brew (Columbia GP 26). The augmented personnel includes three electric pianos (Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Larry Young), electric guitar, electric bass, bass clarinet, soprano sax, etc. The title track, first of six in a two-volume album, occupies an entire side, runs 27 minutes and exemplifies the shock wave of which Davis is the epicenter. I’m inclined to agree with both Gillespie and Manne.

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Milwaukee Sentinel
Keith Spore : 04/25/1970
Miles Davis Finds New Jazz Realm

Like other art forms, music is a changing thing. Though its flow of creative energy is generally stabilized, there are occasional sluggish periods and, alternatively, intense buildups of creative pressure that find relief only by exploding. We call these explosions “breakthroughs” – events that, in a sudden rush of inspiration, change and broaden the face of music for all time.

Such breakthroughs usually are associated with one or two artists whose insights leave an afterburn of influence. It happened at the juncture called bop – when Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and a few others found a new way to express themselves. Maybe it also happened in the middle sixties, when The Beatles and Bob Dylan, working separately, discovered the musical tools that transformed rock into progressive rock.

Now, it appears that we are being swirled into the vortex of another breakthrough. The progenitor is a man old enough to have cut his musical teeth with the Charlie Parker quintet in 1946, yet young enough to be constantly dissatisfied with the musical status quo – Miles Davis.

– Davis has been building toward a breakthrough since 1959, when his Kind of Blue helped popularize the modal school of jazz.

[Modal compositions and improvisations are based on scales rather than traditional configurations or explorations of chords.]

– In late 1968 and early 1969, Davis took another important step, demonstrating on Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro lovely mastery of fragmented line composing.

[The composer of such music might write a half bar and ad lib a half bar; write a bar and ad lib a bar, etc. Such compositions will sound different each time one hears them.]

– Then, In late 1969 came the intimation of a new kind of music. On In a Silent Way, Davis employed two and sometimes three electric pianists. It was almost inevitable, in the heat of improvisation, that the pianists would fall into a polytonal groove.

[Polytonality is the simultaneous use of two or more musical keys or tonalities.]

– Davis must have liked what he heard, because his newest outing, Bitches Brew is jazz’s most ambitious and most accomplished probe into the realm of polytonality.

It also seems to be the spearhead of a musical breakthrough. Jazz can never be the same after this.

The music on Bitches Brew isn’t merely an exercise in polytonal gimmickry. It also is polyrhythmic (the simultaneous combination of contrasting rhythms), rich and incredibly complex.

Yet, for all its complexity, It has a stunningly simple logic. The clue to understanding is the lineup of rhythm section instrumentalists.

Once again, Davis departs from traditional small group formats. On Bitches Brew he employs two electric pianists, two bassists, a guitarist, three drummers and a percussionist.

“Why such a large rhythm section?” you might ask. And that’s precisely the kind of question that will thwart your understanding.

Instead of thinking of a “large rhythm section,” think in terms of two rhythm sections two teams, each taking an individual tonal and rhythmic stance, thus creating the framework for a new polytonal, polyrhythmic jazz.

Conjure an image of a musical space bounded on two sides by two rhythm sections, each making a different rhythmic and tonal pronouncement. Now, Imagine the soloists Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone and Bennie Maupin on bass clarinet exploring the broad space delineated by the two rhythm sections.

See how much more varied the possibilities for expression are?

Of course, it sounds simple on paper. But it takes genius to oversee it, to guide it toward a comprehensible goal, to avoid fomenting an orgy, or fragmented expressions.

Davis is the perfect quarterback. On the title tune, for example, you can hear him whisper instructions to his sidemen. The rhythm section(s) suddenly move(s) into a soft pulsating groove. Davis pounces on the mood Instantly, whispering, “Keep it like that.”

Ultimately, It could be said that many of the ideas in Bitches Brew were anticipated in 1959 by the playing of Ornette Coleman‘s Double Quartet on Free Jazz.

Coleman, however, only touched the handle of the door. Miles has opened it.

—–

Minneapolis Star
Walter Lide : 07/22/1970

While the Jefferson Airplane and the Beatles have been singing about making revolution, Miles Davis has created his own revolution in music. Witness the recording Bitches Brew.

Davis is a trumpet player who has been playing in the jazz clubs of the New York City area and elsewhere for years, but his genius has not been fully recognized.

The album is a pointer to a new type of jazz. The music which Davis is exploring started with an album last fall called In a Silent Way. In Bitches Brew, he continues the exploration. He will never be able to turn back, not even if he calls the regression a “revival.”

Bitches Brew is a masterpiece, expertly structured, and an outstanding example of recording and electrical engineering.

The music from the instruments can be felt in various parts of the body. The mellow bass clarinet of Bennie Maupin reaches the stomach, Davis’ trumpet echoes through the head. The distant sound of Wayne Shorter‘s soprano sax and the psychic intensity from Larry Young‘s electric guitar take the listener deep into his mind in search of images. The drive of drums and percussion and the beat of Harvey Brooks on fender bass and Dave Holland on string bass seem to open the doors to a person’s inner self.

The two-record set is so much in tune with the physical and psychological rhythms of existence that it arouses an assortment of continuous, meaningful and vivid images.
It is impossible to pick out a few cuts in the album and say that this is good or this is bad. All the pieces seem connected and of one context; no doubt Davis meant the album to be heard in its full force.

—–

New York Daily News
Douglass Watt : 05/17/1970

Whither jazz? The older boys are still jamming to the tunes of the 1920’s and 1930’s, some of them with reasonable success in clubs around the land. But the spirited innovations brought to the form by the younger set during the 1950’s seem to have reached a dead end. Jazz is nowhere today and it is unusual, indeed, to come across a new jazz recording in a stack of new pop records, almost all of them featuring new rock artists or groups.

Miles Davis / Bitches Brew (Columbia) is a two-record set in which the ever-experimenting Davis seeks to point a possible new direction. In doing so, he employs some of the trappings of the rock scene – electric guitar, fender bass and electric piano as well as various percussion instruments, a bass clarinet, bass fiddle, soprano sax and, of course, his own indispensable trumpet. In addition, he resorts to some very sophisticated use of tapes to implement the total design.

There are just six selections, the longest the 27-minute title piece, the shortest a 4:23 number called John McLaughlin.

I confess that after just one hearing I am puzzled. Some gorgeous sounds turn up and Davis’ trumpet work is always arresting, but it struck me that neither he nor his fellow musicians were exactly aware of what they were doing. Experimental, to be sure, but with ill-defined results.

—–

Raleigh News and Observer
Raymond Lowery : 04/26/1970

Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis‘ newest Columbia entry is Bitches Brew, a rather elaborately packed two-disk album containing close to two hours of music – some of it beautiful and some strangely complex. The soloist is supported by soprano sax, drums, bass clarinet, bass, electric piano and electric guitar.

Miles always has wished there were no notes on his record sleeves, preferring to let the music speak for itself, but he doesn’t always get his wish. Critic Ralph J. Gleason writes at great length about the music in this album, never coming close to identifying it and classifying it, but pointing out how beautiful it is, and suggesting that the music is “reaching out to new worlds with new ideas and new forms.”

The music is to some degree electric music, either by virtue of what you can do with tapes and by the process by which it is preserved on tape or by the use of electricity in the actual making of the sounds themselves.

Davis’ solo work, with its breathy, almost vocal quality, has retained a lyrical and sometimes jubilant character. He has obviously drawn on his African heritage for some of his ideas, although his playing continues virtually untouched by the defiantly angry aspects of the jazz avant garde.

There are six selections, with the 25-minute title tune occupying all of one side of the first disk – it is the choice performance – and Pharaoh’s Dance on the reverse. Each of the other four tunes (Spanish Key, John McLaughlin, Miles Runs the Voodoo Down and Sanctuary) is half as long in playing time.

Bitches Brew is Miles Davis at his experimental best. Better get this one, if you’re a fan.

—–

San Francisco Examiner
Ralph J. Gleason : 04/19/1970
Making the Trumpet Sing

One of the most interesting things about Miles Davis‘ recent appearance at Fillmore West was the way in which his success (the sets got better all weekend, until he had a standing ovation on closing night) made one think.

Fillmore audiences in general have been spoiled by the performers who have (most of them) catered to the audience outrageously. Miles Davis caters to no one. Fillmore audiences have been brainwashed to hold still for anything that looks right, (i.e. hippie-ish) and has vocals and electric sounds.

Miles does not look like any hippie, nor does he sing. In fact, nobody in his group sings (Chick Corea does on his own albums, but as far as I know, not with Miles).

Up until now, the Fillmore audiences have not demonstrated any particular willingness to listen to instrumental solo music when played by any instrument other than a guitar. But even guitar solos generally are not really long. And horn players, even though more and more of them have appeared in recent years, are almost exclusively relegated to subsidiary roles accompanying (“backing up” as the term now is) the vocals.

Miles, however, does something very special on trumpet. He sings, or rather, he makes the trumpet sing, and I do not think that the Fillmore audiences have been exposed to this before.

Miles makes the trumpet sing and he plays with such concentrated emotion and his group produces such a turmoil of tensions and contrasts that the end product is dramatic to a degree that demands attention.

Miles’ success does not mean, of course, that all other musicians in the jazz world can automatically communicate to the Fillmore audience. It does mean that Miles’ art is of that particular kind which can communicate to that audience as well as to the audience it has already established. Among the other jazz players I would suspect capable of the same degree of communication (though not necessarily the same kind of art) would be Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor (he did it two years ago), Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp and possibly some of the younger players.

Fillmore audiences have believed that jazz was too intellectual for them. It took Miles to demonstrate how gut-level emotional jazz can be, even when there are cerebral elements involved (as there are in any art).

The thing about Miles, of course, is that music is first. Everything else follows. When the music makes it, he grooves. Miles’ records today (his new double LP Bitches Brew is a good example) involve a unique amalgam of many different elements of contemporary music from electronics to rock. But, instead of the situation being, as it has been with some jazz men in the past, a musician dedicated to one field entering another in disguise, Miles is Miles at all times and when he uses an electrical or electronic effect it is because he has heard it and hears a use for it in what he is already involved in saying. That’s why what he does makes sense. You will never get an LP of “Current hits in the Miles Davis Manner.” He’s too busy.

—–

San Francisco Examiner
Phillip Elwood : 05/06/1970
Miles Undeniably Great

Achievement of jazz greatness represents stature of genius in a very personal area of artistic expression. Very few musicians have climbed to that summit.

But two undeniable greats are playing now in town at our only two sustaining modern jazz clubs: Miles Davis at the Both-And, and Charles Mingus at the Jazz Workshop.

Concurrent with the Davis gig is the issue of his newest LP release, Bitches Brew, a Columbia double-disc package of astonishingly high musical quality.

The fine, contemplative pianist Bill Evans (once a Davis sideman) wrote many years ago that “Miles Davis presents frameworks in time which are exquisite in their simplicity yet contain all that is necessary to stimulate performance.”

The Davis sextet at the Both-And and the somewhat larger recording ensemble on the LPs are both products of the Davis floating-in-time framework described by Evans.

Three of the LP cuts, Pharaoh’s Dance, Bitches Brew, and Sanctuary (which run about an hour, combined) are the pure distillate of current Davis free musical expression. They are collective improvisation held together by time, tempo, artistic cohesiveness … and also by the sounds of Chick Corea‘s electric piano and Miles’ trumpet.

Other tracks are the funky African-rhythmed Miles Runs the Voodoo Down, with a reprise called John McLaughlin (after a featured bassist) and Spanish Key, which is shuffle-Latin in beat and Moorish in feeling.

The current in-person Davis group plays long concert-sets, almost an hour, like the LP cuts.

They don’t really begin or end – what a listener gets is a big slice of musical life. It seems disarmingly simple from a distance yet actually the music is as active as a blob of liquid under a microscope.
Davis’ horn has a clear fluidity to it. He is playing far more now as part of the band than ever before (in spite of a raw lip, last night) and often soars high and dominant in the manner we associate with his Sketches of Spain record triumph of a dozen years ago.

The Both-And sextet includes percussionists Jack DeJohnette and Airto Moreira, playing noises, beats, sounds and textures … and surprisingly little formal “rhythm.”

Bassist Dave Holland, alternating from acoustic upright to electric instrument, has gorgeous solo spots and, like Chick Corea’s electric piano, plays an important role as a catalyst in keeping the extended themes together.

Steve Grossman plays both soprano and tenor sax; an expressive, young musician with particularly fine tonality.

And there is Corea, again, providing hundreds of droplets of electronic tones which act as a continuous sparkling backdrop of little jewels. It is his work at the keyboard which makes the big difference – and defines this as one of the great Miles Davis bands.

—–

University of Windsor Lance
Michael Muldoon : September, 1970

Any description of Miles Davis‘ Bitches Brew runs the risk of being too effusive or exhausting a thesaurus of superlatives.

Yet perhaps one word may characterize this phenomenon – Protean. Davis examines an entire constellation of experience, both artistic and personal. For the past two decades, from his early days in New York studying at Julliard and playing under the tutorship of the immortal Charlie “Bird” Parker and the great Dizzy Gillespie in the “bop” period, through his own “cool” groups with such outstanding Jazz greats as Gerry Mulligan, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane, to mention only a few, right up to this present masterpiece, Miles has been one of our most mercurial and eclectic musicians.

He has continually developed through constant experimentation and exploration with old and new forms. His achievements have always added to and altered the music of the past and the present, and too he has directed the course of the music to come.

This year in a Rolling Stone interview, Miles said that rock was the new voice of contemporary music and he also stated that if given the inclination and the opportunity, he could form an aggregation of the best young musicians around and establish the finest rock band this world has ever heard.

What sounded like an idle boast came into fruition with this album. A concert of this music at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East brought the house down and received rave reviews. Musician and lay-listener alike have applauded his accomplishments over the years, but they have never reached such an enthusiastic pitch.

As always, Miles plays with spirit and fire, soaring off into high note runs with confidence and precision, building lines bristling with emotional intensity and yet retaining all the singing elements of his more lyrical side.

The use of an echo effect for his horn brings new dimensions to the trumpet in our age of electric music.

Miles maintains a keen balance between the cerebral and the emotional, and, as a leader, demands, coaxes, and gets the best from his sidemen. The brilliant young pianist Chick Corea combines with veteran Joe Zawinul and Larry Young to produce some abstract and bizarre, yet beautiful, effects on electric piano – especially on cuts like Pharaoh’s Dance, Spanish Key, and the title number, Bitches Brew.

The other ingredients combined in Miles’ musical cauldron are Wayne Shorter, whose consistently competent soprano sax couples with Bennie Maupin‘s fine bass clarinet to afford the listener excitement as well as source for Miles to play with and around. John McLaughlin‘s outstanding guitar work alone is worth listening to, especially on John McLaughlin, Spanish Key, and Miles Runs The Vodoo Down.

There is also a rich and interesting use of the multiple rhythmic talents of three drummers, Lenny White, Charles Alias, and the very fine Jack DeJohnette. Electric bass and three drummers on every cut create new rhythm patterns for both rock and jazz.

Harvey Brooks‘ strong, sustained Fender bass does everything to complement and support the already incredible percussion section.

The music on this album is at times dense, complex, perhaps esoteric, and seemingly chaotic to the neophyte’s ear – but it is governed by Miles’ virtuosity and passion, or what Gerry Mulligan calls “Davis’ controlled violence”. A couple of listenings is needed to fully appreciate its vitality and its genius.

Listen to it; let Miles take you where he has been; let it exorcise devils; let it wash over you like a consummate wave; but if you are into music by all means don’t miss it.

—–

Down Beat : 06/11/1970
Jim Szantor : 5 stars

Listening to this double album is, to say the least, an intriguing experience. Trying to describe the music is something else again – mainly an exercise in futility. Though electronic effects are prominent, art, not gimmickry, prevails and the music protrudes mightily.

Music, most of all music like this, cannot be adequately described. I really don’t want to count the cracks on this musical sidewalk – I’d rather trip over them. Fissures, peaks, plateaus; anguish, strange beauty – it’s all there for a reason. And it can be torn up for a reason.

To be somewhat less ambiguous – but to list only my lasting impressions: Maupin‘s bass clarinet works generally; the eerie echo effect employed on Miles‘ various phrases throughout Brew; the rhythm section’s devices during parts of Brew (highly reminiscent of Wagner‘s Siegfried’s Funeral March from Goetterdaemmerung); Shorter‘s solos on Key and Voodoo; the electric piano work on Key; Miles’ lyricism on Sanctuary, and McLaughlin on McLaughlin.

Parenthetically, my liking for recorded Miles came to an abrupt halt with Nefertiti. I didn’t think I could go beyond that with him. I’m still uncertain, but this recording will surely demand more of my attention than the three intervening albums. It must be fully investigated.

You’ll have to experience this for yourself – and I strongly advise that you do experience it. Miles has given us the music, and that’s all we need.

—–

Liner Notes by Ralph J. Gleason

There is so much to say about this music. I don’t mean so much to explain about it because that’s stupid, the music speaks for itself. What I mean is that so much flashes through my mind when i hear the tapes of this album that if I could I would write a novel about it full of life and scenes and people and blood and sweat and love.

And sometimes I think maybe what we need is to tell people that this is here because somehow in this plasticized world they have the automatic reflex that if something is labeled one way then that is all there is in it and we are always finding out to our surprise that there is more to Blake or more to Ginsberg or more to ‘Trane or more to Stravinsky than whatever it was we thought was there in the first place.

So be it with the music we have called jazz and which I never knew what it was because it was so many different things to so many different people each apparently contradicting the other and one day I flashed that it was music. That’s all, and when it was great music it was great art and it didn’t have anything at all to do with labels and who says Mozart is by definition better than Sonny Rollins and to whom.

So Lenny Bruce said there is only what is and that’s a pretty good basis for a start. This music is. This music is new. This music is new music and it hits me like an electric shock and the word “electric” is interesting because the music is to some degree electric music either by virtue of what you can do with tapes and by the process by which it is preserved on tape or by the use of electricity in the actual making of the sounds themselves.

Electric music is the music of this culture and in the breaking away (not the breaking down) from previously assumed forms a new kind of music is emerging. The whole society is like that. The old forms are inadequate. Not the old eternal verities but the old structures. And new music isn’t new in that sense either, it is still creation which is life itself and it is only done in a new way with new materials.

So we have to reach out to the new world with new ideas and new forms and in music this has meant leaving the traditional forms of bars and scales, keys and chords and playing something else altogether which maybe you can’t identify and classify yet but which you recognize when you hear it and which when it makes it, really makes it, it is the true artistic turn on.

Sometimes it comes by accident. Serendipity. With the ones who are truly valuable, the real artists, it comes because that is what they are here to do even if they can say as Miles says of this music i don’t know what it is, what is it? They make this music like they make those poems and those pictures and the rest because if they do not they cannot sleep nor rest nor, really, live at all. This is how they live, the true ones, by making the art which is creation.

Sometimes we are lucky enough to have one of these people like Miles, like Dylan, like Duke, like Lenny here in the same world at the same time we are and we can live this thing and feel it and love it and be moved by it and it is a wonderful and rare experience and we should be grateful for it.

I started to ask Teo how the horn echo was made and then I thought how silly what difference does it make? And it doesn’t make any difference what kind of brush Picasso uses and if the art makes it we don’t need to know and if the art doesn’t make it knowing is the most useless thing in life.

Look. Miles changed the world. More than once. That’s true you know. Out of the Cool was first. Then when it all went wrong Miles called all the children home with Walkin’. He just got up there and blew it and put it on an LP and all over the world they stopped in their tracks when they heard it. They stopped what they were doing and they listened and it was never the same after that. Just never the same.

It will never be the same again now, after In a Silent Way and after Bitches Brew. Listen to this. How can it ever be the same? I don’t mean you can’t listen to Ben. How silly. We can always listen to Ben play Funny Valentine, until the end of the world it will be beautiful and how can anything be more beautiful than Hodges playing Passion Flower? He never made a mistake in 40 years. It’s not more beautiful. Just different. A new beauty. A different beauty. The other beauty is still beauty. This is new and right now it has the edge of newness and that snapping fire you sense when you go out there from the spaceship where nobody has ever been before.

What a thing to do! What a great thing to do. What an honest thing to do there in the studio to take what you know to be true, to hear it, use it and put it in the right place. When they are concerned only with the art that’s when it really makes it. Miles hears and what he hears he paints with. When he sees he hears, eyes are just an aid to hearing if you think of it that way, it’s all in there, the beauty, the terror and the love, the sheer humanity of life in this incredible electric world which is so full of distortion that it can be beautiful and frightening in the same instant.

Listen to this. This music will change the world like the Cool and Walkin’ did and now that communication is faster and more complete it may change it more deeply and more quickly. What is so incredible about what Miles does is whoever comes after him, whenever, wherever, they have to take him into consideration. They have to pass him to get in front. He laid it out there and you can’t avoid it. It’s not just the horn. It’s a concept. It’s a life support system for a whole world. And it’s complete in itself like all the treasures have always been.

Music is the greatest of the arts for me because it cuts through everything, needs no aids. It is. It simply is. And in contemporary music Miles defines the terms. That’s all. It’s his turf.