In 1970, jazz trumpet legend Miles Davis rocked the music world with Bitches Brew. The double-album concept had become common in rock music, but Miles made it his own; creating largely improvisational compositions over 20 minutes long, built on the rough sketches and the few suggestions he offered to the musicians of his extended quintet. A hybrid of jazz and rock, this audacious assault on both genres would set the stage for all “fusion” music to follow.
Most contemporary musicians have heard (or at least, heard of) Bitches Brew; and for many it’s a bible. Miles’ massively influential tour de force is rightfully seen as a benchmark, however fusion did not magically start there. Viewed in historical context, Bitches Brew was a flash point, a culmination of the inexorable gravitational pull of stylistic experimentation in jazz that began in the late 1950s. The album was packed with over a decade of progressive musical innovation; incorporating electric instruments as it did was simply the icing on the cake.
Modal Masterpiece
In 1959, Miles recorded Kind of Blue, arguably his greatest masterpiece and jazz’s best-selling album to date. Following up on the modal experimentation of 1958’s Milestones, the music on the album was based entirely on modes, as opposed to traditional tonal centers. Although precedents existed, modal jazz took shape as a theory by composer/pianist George Russell in his 1953 treatise Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, which would serve as the only college-level textbook on the subject until the chord-scale system was developed two decades later. Miles Davis and pianist Bill Evans would press Russell’s theory into practice on Kind of Blue as they worked out arrangements — frameworks for improvisation — that married hard bop underpinnings with modern-sounding bass ostinatos, tonically ambivalent quartal piano voicings, and some of the most epic trumpet, tenor, and alto solos ever committed to tape.
In bebop and hard bop, musicians improvised over the chord changes of a given song. But Miles began to view the rigid structure imposed by increasingly complex chord changes as creativity-stifling. He saw the freedom of modality, which explored the vertical relationship between chords and scales, as the gateway to new directions in music. On Kind of Blue, Miles — together with John Coltrane on tenor sax, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley on alto, Bill Evans on piano (Wynton Kelly played on one track), Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums — not only put together a jazz masterpiece; he and his band changed the course of music history.
Quartal Voicings and the “So What” Chord
An intrinsic component of modal jazz is quartal harmony. Traditionally, chords are built on intervals of thirds (tertiary harmony). Today’s jazz musicians regard this as simplistic and old-fashioned; building chords with stacked fourths results in a much more sophisticated, modern sound. Bill Evans used a two-handed first-inversion quartal voicing for the bass and piano call-and-response intro section of “So What,” a voicing now commonly referred to as the “So What chord.”
If you’re a musician (if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you are!), grab your instrument and try it for yourself. Left hand: E-A; right hand: D-G-B. For the second chord in the pattern, Evans simply moved the shape down a whole step. The entire pattern then modulates up a half step. Rinse, repeat. The thing about quartal chords that makes them sound “modern” is that they seem to just float there, never wanting to resolve; so, in a harmonic sense, they are nonfunctional. Their innate ambiguity and unpredictability also make quartal chords incredibly versatile, allowing for extensive freedom to apply them across different modal contexts.
The Most Feared Song in Jazz
It wasn’t only Miles Davis pushing the envelope in 1959. Jazz was exploding and stretching out into radical, new dimensions on landmark albums by Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, and John Coltrane. Coltrane put the world on notice with Giant Steps, which he started recording two weeks after he had finished working on Kind of Blue. The title track is considered “the most feared song in jazz,” a rite of passage for saxophonists attempting to solo over its complex chordal constructs. Released in early 1960, Giant Steps formally introduced Coltrane’s inimitable approach to soloing, which one critic dubbed “sheets of sound.”
1960 would also see the release of Portrait in Jazz by Bill Evans, whose critically acclaimed collaboration with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian would redefine the piano trio format by elevating bass and drums to nearly equal status with the piano. That year would also give birth to Davis’s flamenco-influenced Sketches of Spain. Integrating jazz, classical, and what would come to be known as “world music” into a large-ensemble context, Sketches is considered a shining example of “Third Stream” composition.
The Second Great Quintet
After several years punctuated by fluctuating band lineups, in late 1964 all the pieces fell into place. Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet was about to change the world. Miles’ most stable lineup in years, the group comprised the crème de la crème of talented, young jazz musicians: pianist Herbie Hancock, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams. Miles was a musical deity; but he wasn’t a composer, per se. His genius lay in surrounding himself with the best musicians on the scene and synthesizing their composition and arrangement contributions into a cohesive musical structure that was all his own. In addition to their roles in the Davis quintet, Hancock and Shorter would embark on contemporaneous solo careers, both contributing to the jazz canon with critically acclaimed albums that spanned the ’60s and beyond.
Post Bop: Ambiguity and Structured Chaos
Between 1965 and 1968, Miles’ new quintet released six studio albums. These records would introduce and exemplify a jazz subgenre that would come to be known as “post bop.” Seamlessly blending hard bop, modal jazz, and free jazz without necessarily being any one of these styles, post bop was mainstream jazz’s answer to the free jazz movement, which by the mid-1960s was gaining steam through the efforts of artists such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane. By this time, Miles’ former sax player was liberally incorporating free jazz concepts and constructs into his music with his Classic Quartet, which included pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones. Tyner played nonfunctional quartal chords, and Coltrane improvised over them with liberal chromaticism so that he wasn’t just playing in a single mode; he was fluidly sliding between them. In some cases, Tyner would lay out completely.
Altered Chord Progressions
Traditional jazz tunes are typically structured on a “head-solo-head” framework — the head consisting of the melody with an underlying chord progression; the solo, improvisation over the same chord progression. By the 1960s, the formula had become a bit stale for jazz musicians thirsty to incorporate progressive ideas into their music, so they started experimenting with various ways of structuring the performance of a song. One of these concepts used by Miles’ Second Great Quintet was to alter the chord progression during the solo. This was done in one of four ways: either by adding a tag to the chord progression, by keeping the same progression but altering the rhythm, by employing a completely different chord progression, or by keeping the time but disregarding the chord changes — or, as Miles put it: “time, no changes.”
Time, No Changes
“Time, no changes” borrowed the free jazz construct where the piano lays out during (or during parts of) the solo, leaving the trumpet or sax free to “stroll” (improvise over the drums and a walking bass line). This sparse framework gives the soloist extreme freedom, as the only harmonic content being generated are momentary dyads created in passing by two monophonic instruments. This concept was already being employed extensively in free jazz. Indeed, Ornette Coleman’s band didn’t even have a piano; just two horns, bass, and drums.
The Road to Fusion
If free jazz was complete freedom, then post bop was controlled freedom. Integrating metric, rhythmic, and harmonic ambiguity into a hard bop instrumental context, post bop was the critical, penultimate step on the road to fusion. Effectively positioning itself halfway between traditional jazz and free jazz, post bop broke many musical rules but retained others, all while maintaining considerably more structure than free jazz. Post bop embraced some free jazz concepts but kept others from traditional jazz. And, notably, jazz’s characteristic swing was gradually being ironed out in favor of straight-up rock beats. It was this freewheeling, mix-and-match approach to stylistic ideas and elements that opened up jazz musicians in the mid-’60s to what was going on in the world of pop and rock music.
Electricity and Guitars
In 1965 (the year the Beatles recorded Rubber Soul), the Second Great Quintet released their first album, E.S.P. It would be followed by Miles Smiles (1967), Sorcerer (1967), Nefertiti (1968), Miles in the Sky (1968), and Filles de Kilimanjaro (1969). Nefertiti would be the group’s last all-acoustic album, as electric piano and electric bass began to infiltrate their arrangements starting with Miles in the Sky. Also, on that album, guitar — an instrument that would become an intrinsic part of Davis’s bands going forward — makes its first appearance on a Davis release with a funky performance by a young George Benson on “Paraphernalia.” But electric or acoustic, the music was changing fast. The stage was set for the birth of fusion.
Changing Lineups
Recorded on two dates in June and one in September of 1968, Filles de Kilimanjaro would take the quintet inexorably forward on Miles’ insatiable quest for musical experimentation, even as it marked the first break in the solid lineup that had held firm for four years. The June sessions featured Shorter on sax, Hancock on Fender Rhodes electric piano, Carter on electric bass, and Williams on drums. The September session replaced Hancock with Chick Corea and Carter with Dave Holland, making Kilimanjaro the last Davis album to feature Miles’ Second Great Quintet — however, all (except Carter) would play on his next album, In a Silent Way.
Rewriting Jazz History
For those who think of In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew as the first fusion albums, we would recommend listening to Filles de Kilimanjaro and the five albums that preceded it. This body of work shows a remarkably linear progression from hard bop to fusion. Indeed, Miles Davis had his ear pressed to the rail of contemporary music and was responding in real time. While Miles was rewriting jazz history, Jimi Hendrix was extending the vocabulary and range of the electric guitar into uncharted creative territory. The cultural impact of Jimi’s music was monumental, extending well beyond the world of rock. “Mademoiselle Mabry” from Kilimanjaro was a reworking of Jimi’s “The Wind Cries Mary.” Miles had met with Jimi more than once, and it’s tantalizing to think about the collaborations that might have taken place had not fate intervened.
In a Silent Way
By ’69, Miles’ core gigging group included Wayne Shorter on tenor and soprano sax, Dave Holland on bass, Chick Corea on electric piano, and Jack DeJohnette on drums. The band, minus DeJohnette, recorded In a Silent Way, which also featured Joe Zawinul (keyboards) and John McLaughlin (guitar) along with Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams from the Second Quintet. Incorporating electronic instruments such as electric piano, organ, and guitar, the album formalized the start of Davis’s “electric period.” Hailed as a proto-ambient masterpiece, In a Silent Way is regarded by fans and critics alike as one of Davis’s finest works. But on his next studio album, Miles would explore his electronic jazz-rock fusion style even further.
The Bitches Brew Sessions
This being Sweetwater, it would be remiss not to include a shout-out to the legendary studio where Miles Davis recorded almost all his albums during the three decades that he was signed to Columbia Records. Convening at CBS 30th Street Studio in New York City for the Bitches Brew sessions on August 19, 1969, the Davis quintet was joined by Zawinul, McLaughlin, Larry Young (electric piano), Lenny White (drums), Don Alias and Jumma Santos (percussion), Bennie Maupin (bass clarinet), and Harvey Brooks (electric bass). Miles had written simple chord charts, initially for three keyboards, which he expanded into sketches for his larger-scale compositions. He told the musicians they could play anything that sprang to mind as long as they played off of the right chord. Davis had not arranged each piece because he was unsure of the direction of the album and wanted to keep it improvisational, not prearranged.
Rhythmic Revolution
Bitches Brew was undeniably revolutionary in so many ways, but perhaps its most critical innovation was rhythmic. With a rhythm section comprising two bassists (one playing electric, the other upright), two or three drummers (panned left, center, and right), two to three electric pianos (again panned left, center, and right), and one or more percussionists — all playing simultaneously — the album’s polyrhythmic complexity is staggering, particularly when heard through a good pair of headphones! And John McLaughlin’s wicked guitar chops contributed to the intensity of this polyrhythmic stew — perhaps best heard on “Spanish Key,” the title of which indicated that Miles was revisiting the modal adventure he began a decade earlier on “Flamenco Sketches.”
The Studio as a Musical Instrument
Recorded live to 1-inch 8-track, Bitches Brew pioneered the use of the recording studio as a musical instrument. Extensively editing the multitrack tapes in post production, Miles’ long-time producer Teo Macero attempted to create order by slicing, splicing, omitting, duplicating, and elaborating on refrains and improvised passages from notes repeated in the introduction, in the interlude, or over the course of a solo; elsewhere he applied his own studio effects. He would fly out sections of individual tracks to 2-track and fly them back into the 8-track master where he wanted them. “Pharaoh’s Dance” contains 19 edits; its infamous stop-start intro was entirely built in the studio using repeated loops of certain sections. The title track has 15 edits. Of course, Macero consulted with Miles on the overall direction; but Davis, who had little patience for editing, mostly left him alone to work his magic.
A New Era for Jazz
Bitches Brew would go on to reach No. 35 on the Billboard album charts and to sell more than a million copies. It was credited by critics in the 1970s as the album that renewed jazz’s popularity with mainstream audiences of that decade. On the strength of Bitches Brew, Miles Davis was headlining rock concerts and selling out big venues worldwide. Miles had achieved a level of commercial success unheard-of for a jazz artist, but he was also opening the portal for the jazz fusion crossover artists of the ’70s and beyond. It was a new decade, but an entirely new era for jazz.
The Fusion Revolution
After Bitches Brew, Miles Davis put together new bands and thoroughly investigated the nexus of jazz, funk, rock, and world music on early ’70s releases such as On the Corner and Jack Johnson. He recorded live albums at his standing-room-only concerts. The musicians Miles had worked with would go on to establish fusion as a driving force in the music business. Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul would form Weather Report; John McLaughlin founded the Mahavishnu Orchestra; Chick Corea and Lenny White, Return to Forever; Tony Williams, Lifetime. Herbie Hancock would crank out some of the most successful jazz-funk of the ’70s with his Headhunters group. These bands and others would record gold albums and pack arenas. Jazz had become mainstream, but it took electricity and straightening up the eighth notes to make it happen.
Shorter and Hancock remain, to this day, two of the most important and prolific composers in jazz. Miles himself would put his career on hiatus in the latter half of the ’70s due to health issues but would re-emerge in 1980 with a new album that began his association with bassist Marcus Miller, who would play a major writing/arranging role in much of Davis’s output until the trumpeter’s untimely death in 1991.
The Enduring Legacy of a Masterpiece
Today, Bitches Brew reverberates with an enduring legacy that has inspired generations of musicians across all genres. It’s a living testament to the fact that you can put talented musicians in a studio with only the faintest idea of what they’re supposed to play — and emerge with a masterpiece.
