Bitches Brew (Legacy Edition - CD / DVD Combo)

This Legacy Edition celebrates the 40th Anniversary of one of the most remarkable albums in Miles Davis' career and jazz history in general. Originally released in 1970, Bitches Brew became Davis' first gold album. This 40th Anniversary 3-disc package offers the original album on 2 CDs plus rare bonus audio material and a DVD of the entire previously unreleased Copenhagen performance from November 4, 1969.

The revolution was recorded: in 1969 Bitches Brew sent a shiver through a country already quaking. It was a recording whose very sound, production methods, album-cover art, and two-LP length all signaled that jazz could never be the same. Over three days anger, confusion, and exhilaration had reigned in the studio, and the sonic themes, scraps, grooves, and sheer will and emotion that resulted were percolated and edited into an astonishingly organic work. This Miles Davis wasn't merely presenting a simple hybrid like jazz-rock, but a new way of thinking about improvisation and the studio. And with this two-CD reissue (actually, this set is a reissue of the original set plus one track, perfect for the fan who's not so overwhelmed as to need the four-CD Complete Bitches Brew box), the murk of the original recording is lifted. The instruments newly defined and brightened, the dark energy of the original comes through as if it were all fresh. Joe Zawinul and Bennie Maupin's roles in the mix have been especially clarified. With a bonus track of "Feio"--a Wayne Shorter composition recorded five months later that serves both as a warm-down for Bitches Brew and a promise of Weather Report to come--this is crucial listening. --John F. Szwed

Bitches Brew was a shot across the bow of jazz insularity, and, much like the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper before it, it drew upon elements both inside and outside the mainstream to fashion an avant-garde, yet extremely influential, take on popular music's relation to modernism, and vice versa. As such, Miles Davis became a lightning rod for jazz's transformation (or corruption as some diehards insist), and by mixing the fundamental elements of collective improvisation with fulminating dance rhythms, psychedelic electric textures, polytonal harmonies and a freely inflected brand of blues phrasing (as reflected in his own Kind of Blue-brand of modalism and the parallel directions of Hendrix, Cream, Sly Stone, James Brown, and Marvin Gaye), Davis signaled a sea-change in jazz. However, producer Teo Macero's spooky, compressed mix tends to suck all the air out of the room, emphasizing the often static nature of Harvey Brooks's bedrock Fender bass heartbeats, while obscuring the complex polytonal/polyrhythmic web of volatile harmonies, colliding cross-rhythms and contrasting melodic lines. Bitches Brew is a modern jazz masterpiece screaming for a critical reassessment (and a re-mix), but nothing can obscure the crafty tension and release of Davis's turn over a "Sex Machine"-styled ostinato on "Spanish Key," nor the spatial collective "&mysterioso" and epic breadth of the title tune. --Chip Stern