“Bitches Brew” by Miles Davis

Quantifying the greatness of Miles Davis’ jazz-fusion masterpiece.

This album review attempts to quantify the greatness of Miles Davis’ jazz-fusion masterpiece to mark its 55th anniversary.

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Genre: Jazz Fusion, Funk, Experimental

Label: Columbia

Release Date: March 30, 1970

Vibe: 💯

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👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform

I discovered Miles Davis’ music the way most jazz-ignorant listeners do: through records like Kind of Blue, Milestones, and Birth of the Cool. In other words, the more melodic version of Davis, with his expressive, stylish, often unabashedly romantic trumpet playing alongside his first great quintet. But what made me a lifelong fan—what made me appreciate his status as an unparalleled music genius—is the electric jazz-fusion wing of his catalog. Beginning in 1969 with In a Silent Way, Davis spent seven years dropping one expectation-defying, industry-altering album after another. Releases like On the Corner, Jack Johnson, and Get Up With It are so daring in their ambition and so experimental in their execution that you’d be hard-pressed to connect them with traditional notions of jazz at all. More than any of the LPs I’m mentioned already, the one that I return to the most (and the one that I’m the most consistently dazzled by) is Bitches Brew, a masterpiece that genuinely rewrote the rules of how you could conceive of and create jazz.

Like towering, audacious artistic feats in other mediums, including Lawrence of Arabia and Infinite Jest, the fact this sprawling, intense collection of tracks exists at all is astonishing. According to those who participated in the recording, there was no plan going in. Davis purposely kept everyone off-balance, preferring to capture instinctual improvisation as it was happening, unrehearsed and unencumbered by groupthink. Lenny White, one of several drummers to participate in the sessions, summed it up like this:

"It was like an orchestra, and Miles was our conductor. We wore headphones. We had to be able to hear each other. There were no guests at that session. No photos allowed. But there was one guest that nobody talked about, Max Roach. All live recording, no overdubs. 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., for three days."

Davis assembled a who’s-who of jazz greats for the August 1969 recordings, several of whom play the same instrument on a single track, with individual contributions confined to the left, right, and sometimes the center of the stereo soundstage. For example, on the serpentine opener “Pharaoh’s Dance,” Joe Zawinul, Larry Young, and Chick Corea play the electric piano. At the same time, White and Jack DeJohnette each have a dedicated channel for percussion. Other well-known names on the tracklist include guitar hero John McLaughlin, clarinetist Bennie Maupin, and the late Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone. Before I go any further, I want to add this disclaimer: If you’ve never listened to Bitches Brew all the way through, do yourself a favor and get your hands on the highest-quality speakers or headphones you can manage. You want the sound to wash over you from all sides, just as the recording intended. You want your listening experience to be as immersive as possible. And please, for the love of all things sacred in music, don’t you dare listen to this one from a smartphone speaker. That would be an insult.

According to multiple sources, Davis and producer Teo Macero, who’s the real star of the show here, just let the tape run, as it were, and captured hours and hours of raw audio that the latter meticulously spliced together, legitimately creating something fresh and exciting out of thin air. “In the studio, I was always free-flowing. I wanted things to really happen. I wanted things to be spontaneous because I knew from my past experience what one could do with a raw tape,” said Macero of his time doing similar but less robust work on In a Silent Way. “Miles would say, ‘You remember that little that we did yesterday?’ I said, ‘Yeah I remember that.’ He said, ‘I want that to be put in the record.’ I said, ‘Leave it to me. Leave it to Beaver […] He would send me the tape and this is how I made all of the [album].” We take this type of editing for granted now with DAWs and plugins, but what Davis and Macero accomplished is nothing short of mind-blowing.

Music writer Paul Tingen, author of Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967–1991, added:

Bitches Brew also pioneered the application of the studio as a musical instrument, featuring stacks of edits and studio effects that were an integral part of the music […] There were many special effects, like tape loops, tape delays, reverb chambers and echo effects. Through intensive tape editing, Macero concocted many totally new musical structures that were later imitated by the band in live concerts. Macero, who has a classical education and was most likely inspired by '50s and '60s French musique concrète experiments, used tape editing as a form of arranging and composition. ‘Pharaoh's Dance’ contains 19 edits – its famous stop-start opening is entirely constructed in the studio, using repeat loops of certain sections. Later on in the track there are several micro-edits: for example, a one-second-long fragment that first appears at 8:39 is repeated five times between 8:54 and 8:59. The title track contains 15 edits, again with several short tape loops of, in this case, five seconds (at 3:01, 3:07 and 3:12). Therefore, Bitches Brew not only became a controversial classic of musical innovation, it also became renowned for its pioneering use of studio technology.

Much of the public reaction around this release centered around Davis’ apparent rejection of jazz norms, instead “selling out” to rock and R&B audiences instead of being content where he was (although, if you take stock of his entire career, especially his even stranger 80s genre fusion experiments, it’s clear he had no interest in staying put in one culturally constructed box for too long). Even with the heavy post-production doctoring, the influences are still readily apparent. “John McLaughlin” is reminiscent of Deep Purple and Jimi Hendrix, while “Spanish Key” injects more than a little Sly Stone into its psychedelic tapestry. Sometimes, the groove folds into itself in the most beautifully dissonant way possible, like on “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” where Dave Holland’s bass vamps barely hold warring drum and piano factions at bay. Davis and company expand their worldview beyond North American and European influences with “Feio,” a haunting Afro-futurist composition that builds a dystopian soundscape with Brazilian and West African influences.

The boundary-pushing nature of Bitches Brew extends to its cover art by Greman-born French surrealist painter Malti Klarwein. Bursting with vivid, psychedelic components, it’s an excellent visual representation of what Davis explores throughout its nearly two-hour running time. Each track intermingles the light and the dark, re-examining cultural assumptions of race, sexuality, and, perhaps most important, man’s relationship to the natural world. In demolishing most Western expectations of what a jazz record should sound like, Davis and those assembled for the recording bring the genre back to its roots, going back hundreds of years, far beyond the confines of Harlem’s style or the West Village’s cool. For me, those emotions are all present in the artwork. Two figures embrace, but it’s unclear whether it’s a romantic or platonic relationship—whether they’re returning home or waiting to leave. Another more prominent figure looks over them (or past them?) into the distance, where a storm gathers, and the sky melts into the sea. It’s extraordinarily breathtaking, an image that deserves its spot on the album art Mount Rushmore alongside the likes of The Dark Side of the Moon and Aladdin Sane.

Bitches Brew broke new ground for jazz fusion, signaling the first time that Davis and the marketing team at Columbia actively promoted his latest album to a younger, hipper audience. He traded in his bespoke suits for bright colors, wild patterns, and leather. He grew his hair long and referred to the musicians he played with on this record as “the greatest rock band of all time.” He was clearly moving away from what his existing fan base would recognize and was comfortable with, updating his persona for a more liberal-minded generation. His live dates at the Fillmore East in June 1970 are among some of the loudest, most abrasive concerts he ever played, much to the chagrin of jazz fans who maligned his move away from a more soothing, safer sound. As he later wrote in his autobiography, he felt he had to get with the times or risk being left behind. "Jazz music seemed to be drying up like grapes on the vine,” he explained. “For the first time in a long time, I wasn't playing to full houses. In Europe, my concerts were always sold out, but in the United States in 1969, we often played in half-empty clubs. To me, that was a sign."

The risk paid off for everyone who had a stake in Bitches Brew’s success. It sold over 100,000 units in its initial run, an unheard-of number for a jazz release, paving the way for Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters to become the genre’s first Platinum seller a few years later. Eventually peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard album charts, Bitches Brew stands tall as Davis’ second-most popular studio creation, trailing only Kind of Blue in terms of cultural staying power. It’s the kind of artistic achievement that feels far less likely in the age of recycled ideas and AI proliferation—a vision that alters how the average person listens to music. Not simply evolving tired tropes past what most would think them capable of, though this record accomplished that too, but opening brand-new doors that people didn’t know existed in the first place. It’s a little bit like the ending of The Truman Show, when (spoiler) Jim Carrey climbs up a staircase and escapes the frighteningly manicured hell he’s been living for his entire life. He was happy living in that bubble for a time, but when you discover the delights that reside beyond those borders, you want nothing more than to transcend them. Bitches Brew did that for me as a music lover.