Landmark Jazz Album #9 - Bitches Brew - Miles Davis (Columbia)

Miles Davis (t), Wayne Shorter (ss), Bennie Maupin (b cl), Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea (el p), John McLaughlin (g), Dave Holland (b), Harvey Brooks (el b), Lenny White, Jack DeJohnette (d), Don Alias (perc) and Jumma Santos (shaker). Rec. 1969

From whatever perspective you choose to view the 1960s – from the Cuba Missile Crisis to the rise of the counter culture movement, the student riots in Paris in May 1968 to the growing anti-Vietnam protests across the USA, the advent of the pill to the rise of rock music – established values were being openly questioned, upturned and in general shaken up.

So in a decade when the leitmotif was change, it’s arguable that Bitches Brew was the album that shook the music world up most. After all, combining jazz and rock? Yes, there had been albums before Bitches Brew that did just that, but Miles Davis’ position in the jazz world sanctioned the union between two seemingly opposed bedfellows.

With Bitches Brew the jazz-rock message was handed down from the mount on tablets of stone. From the title track with Davis, Shorter and Maupin emerging from the matrix of the mix before being swallowed up by this swirling electrical brew, to ‘Miles Runs the Voodoo Down’ with the trumpeter on the heels of Hendrix, the sound of jazz was changed forever.

Credits: SN