30 For 30: Bitches Brew by Miles Davis

I turned 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 16, we rap about double albums and use the word 'awesome' a lot.

The double album is a rare beast in today's music. The last modern double album I can remember was The Flaming Lips's Embryonic. However, that one is cheating a bit, since it's only 70 minutes of music spread across two “albums.” In the 90s, because of the way the CD format changed how albums were paced and flowed, it was not uncommon for a band's album to be as long as Embryonic despite being counted as a single album. For example, Spiritualized's Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space is 69 minutes long and Adore by the Smashing Pumpkins is actually longer at 73 minutes long (Billy Corgan was never known for being succinct). Of course, two of the first double albums, Frank Zappa's Freak Out! and Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde, were only 60 and 72 minutes, respectively, so as the years have gone by the idea of what really constitutes a double album has become a bit muddled. Is it defined by the length of the music or by the whims of the artist?



There is no such gray area with Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. Even without the bonus track often appended to new copies of the album on CD, it runs a sturdy 94 minutes. Bitches Brew is a double album through and through, and anyone who owns it on vinyl knows what I mean by that. Truly only a gatefold sleeve does justice to the cover art, which wraps from the front to the back; truly only a rambling, poetic essay by Ralph J. Gleason and an oddly framed picture of a shirtless Miles Davis could work inside a gatefold sleeve. There is something satisfying about the heft of a double record, especially one that would even take two CDs to contain it. I have a few double albums on vinyl and they put you in a different mindset when listening to them. It feels like something you do on a long weekend afternoon: burn some incense and relax next to the record player while staring at the covers and liner notes and such.

The full cover, albeit a scan of a CD booklet version of it

You need to have patience and focus to sit through double albums, something our increasingly short attention spans have made difficult. It's a different listening experience and a valuable one; compared to how we normally listen to music—in the car, on an iPod at work or while exercising, on a computer with the songs on random shuffle—it feels like meditation. To simply sit by a record player and listen to an album while not doing anything else feels quaint and outdated by today's standards, like something you'd expect Henry David Thoreau to write about in Walden. Even I don't do it as often as I used to but I suppose it makes it more of a special experience when I do. For instance, I had today off of work thanks to a snowstorm, and spent my morning half-awake drinking coffee and listening to Bitches Brew. Somehow it fit the visibility limiting wall of wind and snow outside my window. The experience of giving it a listen first thing in the morning with my full attention has also set the tone for the rest of my day. If you've ever woken up early on the weekend and watched a movie first thing, you might know what I mean by that. But I digress.

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'Miles Runs The Voodoo Down'

“Awesome” was my response to hearing Bitches Brew for the first time. I was in high school and had finally made friends with someone who also loved music. As usually happens, you end up borrowing a bunch of music from each other and sitting around trading off on albums saying things like “wait'll you hear this one...” Every time I listen to Bitches Brew it takes me back to that mindset, when I was first discovering all that music had to offer beyond the forgettable modern rock and pop music that had been my only musical world since middle school. After Bitches Brew I finally went and listened to some of the records my parents had from their youth. After Bitches Brew I started to listen to jazz in all its forms, and to give other genres of music a chance. And so on.



If I'm ever making a list of my favorite albums of all time, Bitches Brew has to be on it. There are some Miles Davis albums from this same era that I think are more interesting (On The Corner) and some I think do a better job of being a jazz/rock fusion (A Tribute To Jack Johnson), but none of them can match Bitches Brew overall. It has everything in it. Despite being an instrumental album, every human emotion is in there at some point. What's more, it feels like it has every instrument in it, too. While I think most people listen to this record loud on a stereo, it works just as well on headphones since you pick up how much detail is in the production. How Davis and producer Teo Marcero managed to wrangle this many musicians at a time, and to edit the various parts of the numerous performances into the final versions on the album, is beyond me. Again, I implore you to give this a spin with some good headphones if you never have before. It's almost dizzying how many sounds are going on at some points, while at other calmer points the space and separation between instruments reveals how masterful all the musicians were for these recording sessions. If you follow a single instrument through each song, you see points where they step up to let loose and other times where they recede into the background while still contributing to the rhythms, textures, or melodies. There's collective improvisation, and then there's a group that has become a singular unit without an ego steering it. Bitches Brew is ego-less: Miles Davis, whose album this ostensibly is, doesn't even appear on the song 'John McLaughlin.'

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'John McLaughlin'

But let us return to that initial “awesome” reaction. You see, I had never really listened to a double album before, and certainly not one with long songs on it. Keep in mind, there is only one song on Bitches Brew that is less than 10 minutes long. You can imagine how much of a 'brave new world' this felt like as I heard it for the first time in my friend's bedroom on a warm Saturday afternoon in Spring. 'Pharaoh's Dance' slowly worked itself up as I was looking through the CD booklet, trying to get some kind of context for the music I was hearing. I had something of an idea of what Bitches Brew might be like, since Radiohead had mentioned Miles Davis's electric fusion era as an influence on OK Computer, but imagining what music will sound like based on written descriptions is not the same as hearing the actual product. Anyway, I recall feeling lost inside 'Pharaoh's Dance', and I had to ask several times if it was still the same song.


Then the title track started and it sounded completely alien to me. I know now it's a trumpet fed through a delay/echo pedal, but at the time, I didn't know much of anything about recording techniques. Despite being a trumpet player for several years in school, I had no idea what I was hearing. And it was awesome. It was weird. It was...indescribable. It was the kind of experience that I repeat whenever I hear music that takes me completely by surprise and warps my expectations of what I thought sound and music could be like. Time and again I find myself muttering “awesome” and loving the challenge of figuring out something novel, making sense of something alien.

Bitches Brew is the album I would take with me to a desert island. It is the album I could listen to all day, talk about for half the day and write about for the other half of the day. Hearing it for the first time around age 17 made me say “awesome” and hearing it for the umpteenth time at age 30 made me feel awesome. So why is Bitches Brew on my list of 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years? Nothing complicated this time: it's because it's awesome.