005: Bitches Brew, by Miles Davis

Miles Davis (USA)
Bitches Brew (1970)
7 tracks, 105 minutes (1999 CD release)
Spotify · iTunes

Although I’d been listening to music since I was very little, and always used to fall asleep listening to Jazz FM when I was in primary school, jazz was always something that I thought was a nice relaxing thing to have in the background. Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew changed that.

I can’t really remember how old I was when my parents gave me the album (for Christmas I think) but it was young enough for me to still think it was cool and subversive just for having a swear word in the title. But it’s cool and subversive on the record too. It’s mysterious and aggressive and exciting. It was like nothing I’d heard before – it was jazz, somehow, but it required concentrated listening, and even then I didn’t quite get it, but it was intoxicating.

I think the success of the album is that it struck a lot of people in a similar way (although without the childish perception of jazz). It marked the next evolution of jazz, or at least one of the possibilities, in that it was rock in a jazz frame, or jazz in a rock frame, with a bucketful of electronic doodads and studio wizardry. The brain can’t categorise it, but the ears approve nonetheless. In a way, it wasn’t a million miles away from the technique pioneered by Ornette Coleman on the album I wrote about the other day: a roomful of amazing musicians given a vague brief and then told “off you go!” for twenty-odd minutes of collective improvisation. That the two albums sound so different shows just how wide the box labelled ‘jazz’ can stretch, and also just how much music can change in ten years.

In general, I’m not a massive Miles fan – he did some amazing work, but others of his era touch me more – but this one remains a firm favourite. Listening to this in a pitch-black room with no other sounds going on is always an intense experience. Transcendental, psychedelic…it will fill your soul and haunt your dreams. And, if you’re a lad just getting your ear used to jazz, get ready to have your soundworld exploded forever.