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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.