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A Milestones Exclusive

Bitches Brew and Art of Forgetting
by Eric Nisenson

© Eric Nisenson, used by permission

There is one story about Miles in my book Round About Midnight that almost makes the whole book worthwhile (well, almost). One afternoon Miles and I had a fierce debate on the subject of whether that day was Tuesday or Wednesday. This was during Miles's "retirement" period when he would stay up for days at a time and rarely left his Upper Westside home, which he kept dark day and night, often with only the large screen projection TV providing any light. When I insisted it was Wednesday, Miles fiercely growled "You're a lying motherfucker", a favorite phrase of his that he turned into an almost lilting musical phrase by emphasizing its rhythm and sliding his voice up and then down. Finally I remembered I had a copy of the New York Times in my briefcase. I took it out and, without much feeling of victory, showed it to Miles. He shook his head, sat down and then looked at me." You see all those awards of mine on the wall, Eric?" he asked me, "the reason I won them is because I can' t remember anything worth a damn."

As we all know, Miles was of a master of cryptic statements, both on and off the bandstand, and this one took me a while to figure out what he was talking about. Of course what he meant is that an artist who can forget past achievements is forced to innovate, to relentlessly forge ahead. And to plug into his own time rather than cling to the past, and it forced a artist to eschew cliché's and to dig deeply both in terms of the art itself as well as his emotions and ideas. Of course for a jazz musician, who supposedly creates his music on the spot, the "art of forgetting" is essential in order for his music to be truly spontaneous and "in the moment", and therefore not tethered to the past.

In the last few years, there have been some notorious attacks on Miles's so-called "electric" period, with a few musicians and critics vociferously claiming that from the late Sixties on, Miles simply "sold out" and decided to create music in order to pander to the huge rock audience.

Perhaps this notion is based somewhat on Clive Davis's story that appeared in his autobiography. According to the former boss of Columbia Records, he told Miles that his records had not been selling up to par, and compared to almost any of Columbia's rock acts had been hardly a blip on the screen. After this discussion, Davis (that is Clive Davis), states that Miles set about to record first In a Silent Way and then, and most importantly, Bitches Brew, which became the bestselling jazz record up until it's time and which saved Miles's niche at Columbia.

But such an explanation for this key turning point in Miles's career is ludicrously simplistic. For one thing, anyone who knew Miles at all was aware that he was a complex man and that any major decision he made--particularly one that affected his music--was made for a variety of reasons. And the idea that Miles would produce inferior music simply to pander to the huge pop audience is absurd. To begin with, the insistence of Miles's detractors that Bitches Brew is merely jazz-tinged rock has little basis in truth, and such a description bears virtually no resemblance to the actual music. What piece of rock and roll or even funk has ever sounded like Bitches Brew? It is without any doubt jazz, and great jazz at that. Obviously there are some rock influences, but to my ears they are not much more pronounced than those heard on Filles de Kilamanjaro. Are these people listening to the album or the cover art?

Anyway, it is clear from any close examination of the facts that Miles had clearly been working toward Bitches Brew for a number of years, experimenting with a number of the elements that he utilized on Brew both in live performances and in recording sessions. Much of this transitional work was only heard a number of years later, in such anthologies as Circle in the Round and Directions, and much of the important live transitional work, like that of the supposed "lost" quintet that included Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, can only be heard on bootlegs. A number of those elements can be heard in the recordings of the great Sixties quintet. The young musicians in that classic group had their ears to the ground, and were listening not only to the "Free Jazz" which dominated that era, but also to much of the pop music. They recognized that pop music was going through a historic change, and they helped make Miles aware of all the new developments, from the Beatles and Motown to Sly and the Family Stone and Jimi Hendrix.

Joe Zawinul, who collaborated with Miles on much of his early "Fusion" work including Bitches Brew, once told an interviewer that his whole conception of music changed when he heard the quintet's version of Wayne Shorter's "Nefertiti". As you may recall, on that track the horns repeat the pretty, enigmatic theme over and over again while the rhythm section surges, splashes, and burns. Zawinul told the interviewer that he kept waiting for the music to start( since there were no conventional solos). And only when the tune reached its end did he realize the music had been happening all along.

It is not much of a jump from "Nefertiti" to the constantly boiling rhythm section, electric pianos, guitar and Bennie Maupin's bass clarinet which is the musical landscape pf Bitches Brew. And on such pieces as "Circle in the Round" and "Directions", recorded years before Brew, with the quintet plus additional musicians, including Zawinul, and the guitarist Joe Beck, we can hear many of the elements that went into the making of Bitches Brew. So the idea that Miles suddenly decided to change his music in order to reach a wider audience is obviously not true.

In addition, Miles's innovations of the late Sixties and early Seventies, like all jazz innovations, arose out of, among other things, the music of the era that just preceded it, particularly that of his former colleague John Coltrane.

Throughout the Sixties, it is clear that Miles's attitude toward Coltrane was rather ambivalent. In a way, he never fully recovered from Trane leaving his band. And his attitude towards the classic Coltrane's group was quite similar to his attitude toward most of the music produced by former sidemen--namely that they had played far better when they had been with him (and he frequently was correct). As well, it is obvious that Miles was more than a bit jealous of Coltrane's fame, and in particular his respect among young African-Americans--he clearly felt that Coltrane had co-opted his former role as the dominant figure in jazz and the jazz musician with the greatest cultural significance.

But it is also clear that he took to heart several aspects of Coltrane's music. Bitches Brew bears a marked resemblance to such Coltrane pieces as Kulu Se Mama, and in the improvising over pedal point and the use of two bassists, one serving as the anchor, the other playing far more freely, the classic India or later Coltrane's version of "Nature Boy". And Miles was also more generally by the innovations of Sixties jazz other than Coltrane's. He might have badmouthed "Free Jazz" but he had also been aware of some of the most arresting qualities of that music. Miles's ears were always open, especially to any sort of innovative thinking. Like "Free Jazz", Bitches Brew rarely has a definite pitch; its rhythms are complex as many as three percussionists playing simultaneously-- and dense and while it is never "Free" rhythm, its density often amounts to the same thing; and perhaps most importantly, there is genuine group improvisation. Although even at the height of the bop era there was always an element of group improvisation in jazz, basically jazz had become dominated by the soloist with little regard for the polyphony of group improvisation of the New Orleans era. The "Free" jazz musicians brought back this element, perhaps most famously in Ornette's classic Free Jazz album, and of course John Coltrane's way outside version of the old "meet the band" number, Ascension. Miles had been including some elements of group improvisation in his performances with the quintet--this can be heard as early as the 1965 Plugged Nickel sessions, which of course have been recently issued in their wonderful entirety. But Bitches Brew, with its three electric pianos, two bassists and bass clarinet constantly interweaving with each other was a new, and I think wonderful, use of group improvisation. The climax of "Pharoah's Dance", while Miles states and re-states the primary theme, the rest of the band reaches a cacophonous frenzy that is obviously an echo of Free Jazz or Ascension at their most mind-bindingly intense.

There was another way that the "Free Jazz" period led to Miles's Fusion era. and that was a rather backhanded, negative way. Miles believed that the avant garde jazz which had dominated jazz in the Sixties had lost sight of, as he put it, the "folk roots of jazz", and that was a main reason that jazz--all of jazz--was losing its audience to rock. It was no longer, in his opinion, a people's music, but a music for elitists, particularly white jazz critics. By bringing elements of funk and rock to jazz he hoped he would make it relevant to most people's lives again.

Beyond simply trying to create music that he believed was relevant to its time, Bitches Brew and indeed all of Miles's late Sixties and Seventies electric ouevre were in a way a solution for Miles to the previously schizoid nature of his career. In a way, Miles had two careers (not unlike Wynton Marsalis)--one, as leader of small groups, some of the greatest of his time, of course. The other side of his career was the series of orchestral albums he recorded with Gil Evans (music rarely played outside the recording studio). Both modes lacked an element of key importance to Miles that the other had. The small group music could be almost completely improvised and had a flexibility and spontaneity of course lacking in the orchestral works. On the other hand, the orchestral works had dense tonal colors that had been simply impossible for the post-bop small groups that Miles led.

But the new age of electronic instruments changed all that. Frank Zappa once made an interesting point. He said that three rock musicians could produce through sheer volume and electronic effects the musical density and weight of a large orchestra. Miles found that by using electric instruments produced he could create at least to an extent the tonal colors that his small group music had formerly lacked while maintaining their free-wheeling improvisational spontaneity. So, finally he had brought together the two sides of his career. And, of course, he never recorded another orchestral work with Evans after he went "electric". One footnote--Evans, too, turned to electronic instruments and rock-derived rhythms by the early Seventies and his own music became looser and was far more improvised.

One more question must be tackled that has been brought up my the detractors of Miles's "electric" period: is Bitches Brew, and all of the music of Miles's "electric period" outside the true "jazz tradition"? Well, personally I believe that the only true jazz tradition is no tradition at all. Music made "in the moment" cannot be bound by somebody's narrow idea of what is allowed of a so-called "jazz tradition" apparently written out on stone tablets somewhere. But even if you believe in that tradition, what about, Bitches Brew, or the works that follow, that pushes it outside that envelope. The use of electric instruments? The idea that only so-called "acoustic" instruments can be played when performing supposedly "authentic" jazz is absolutely ridiculous. If anything, jazz musicians have continually been pioneers in making electric instruments viable, to give them real musical life. The electric guitar? Even before Charlie Christian, there was Eddie Durham. His recordings with Lester Young's Kansas City Six are indisputable classics. And of course Christian was one of the greatest of all jazz musicians, despite, or because, of his electric guitar. Electric keyboards? Does the name Jimmy Smith ring the bell? Would anybody insist that neither he, nor his hordes of imitators (and the occasional true original, like Larry Young) are not jazz musicians, squarely in whatever tradition you please to invent? As for the electric bass--jazz musicians had been using electric bass for a long while before Miles--For example, Dizzy had used it, so had Cannonball. And although I used to be prejudiced against the electric bass, that was before I heard masters like Bob Cranshaw or Steve Swallow play it. Once again, it was jazz musicians who turned this clunky instrument into something that was musically viable. And what about the vibraharp--it is certainly and electric instrument. Are Lionel Hampton, Milt Jackson, Bobby Hutcherson, etc., now should be declared "non-jazz musicians"?

Then what about the rhythm--Bitches Brew does not swing, right?. But does all jazz have to be played in 4/4, straight ahead swing rhythm? That would surely eliminate a hell of a lot of music that has long been considered not only jazz, but some of it very important jazz, including all Afro-Cuban jazz, Brazilian jazz (say Stan Getz or Dizzy playing a bossa nova), and such indisputable jazz masterpieces as Miles's "All Blues" , Coltrane's version of "My Favorite Things", and Sonny Rollins's "Valse Hot". As far as funk rhythms go-- certainly Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man" or "Cantalope Island" or Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder" are jazz, as well as all those Lou Donaldson "Boogaloo" albums (I am not saying they are necessarily good jazz). The rhythms heard throughout Bitches Brew and Miles's other Seventies electric work (the eighties stuff is whole different matter) are often quite complex polyrhythms, derived from jazz, funk, rock, Afro-Cuban and Brazilian rhythms. But the bottom line is that they are jazz rhythms in their complexity and flexibility. And the very bottom line is that Brew has that thing, as Miles would put it, that vibrant rhythmic push that he had heard previously in the drumming of Philly Joe Jones, Jimmy Cobb, and Tony Williams.

Certainly Bitches Brew is part of any kind of jazz tradition, as is all of Miles's electric work. Actually, in its spontaneity and genuine innovation, it is far truer to any real jazz tradition than those who play a style that reached its peak even before they were born.

Miles Davis was jazz's greatest existentialist, someone who believed that the only music worth hearing was if the musician put his entire being on the line. If Miles was the "Prince of Darkness" it is because he had looked long and hard into the void, and that was certainly a part of his music. But he was really a prince of light, because he constantly showed us that the way to lead a truly creative and fulfilling life was to continually forget the past and forge fearlessly into the future.