Some regard Bitches Brew as Miles Davis’ attempt at staying relevant to black audiences by merging Jazz with Rock, Funk, and experimental music. These fans feel that Bitches Brew, while inaccessable to most people, was an effort to build the keep in which Jazz could remain vital for decades to come. In some ways, this is true. Clearly, an album as incongruous as Bitches Brew remains timeless because it barely fit the time in which it was created. To me, however, Bitches Brew is not Miles’ attempt at protecting Jazz, but, instead, his effort to burn down the fortress and spitefully destroy the spoils for the invading army.
The composition and recording concepts incorporated in the creation of Bitches Brew are as groundbreaking and influential those used in Kind of Blue, but, like most music which is groundbreaking, the end result may not be the most palettable.
Bitches Brew’s followup, Live-Evil (1970), is a good warm-up for listeners who are intimidated by its predecessor. While this album continues Bitches Brew’s chaotic free-form flurry, it has a more earthy “live band” foundation that keeps it fundamentally conjoined at even its most adventurous moments.
I think a lot of this stability comes from a new face. While Dave Holland plays on the studio half of Live-Evil, the bass chair is shared with a young R&B bassist named Michael Henderson. Henderson has the distinction of being the first “Fender Bass” player in the Miles Davis band who did not double on the upright. Arguably, he is the first electric bassist to play with Miles who actually sounds comfortable on the instrument. While the liner notes in the CD claim Henderson had been playing with Aretha Franklin before meeting up with Davis, in a more recent interview with Bass Player Magazine (March ‘02) he says he was playing with Stevie Wonder. Either way, Henderson’s R&B & Soul credibility was well established before he first stepped on stage with the Dark Magus. On the tracks which Henderson plays, the solid grooves manage to simultaneously ground and propell the mayhem being wrought by the rest of the band.
In his autobiography, Miles retells how he had befriended Jimi Hendrix and the two had hoped to someday record a project together, but obviously these plans never came to fruition. Recorded fourth months after Jimi’s death, MacLaughlin’s fuzz-wah funk in the album’s opening track Sivad leaves me perplexed, forlorn, and filled with nervous wonderment for what might have been the greatest fusion record of all time.
Live-Evil is not for everyone– it is surely among the less accessible of Miles’ discography. With Bitches Brew, Live-Evil is an example of the fury and energy that can be created by jazz after it was set free from the constraints of popularity.
