Album Reviews

How fast was Miles Davis moving in 1970? Listen to the title track on the double LP recorded late summer 1969 and released the next April and then play the version on the bonus live at Tanglewood CD recorded August 1970. 

True Davis had augmented the group that played on the album with second keyboardist Keith Jarrett and percussionist Airto Moreira, and Gary Bartz had replaced Wayne Shorter, but the "Bitches" Brew" at Tanglewood had taken the original album's murky, mysterious head trip and turned it into a deep tissue full body massage!

How fast was Miles Davis moving in 1970? Listen to the title track on the double LP recorded late summer 1969 and released the next April and then play the version on the bonus live at Tanglewood CD recorded August 1970. 

True Davis had augmented the group that played on the album with second keyboardist Keith Jarrett and percussionist Airto Moreira, and Gary Bartz had replaced Wayne Shorter, but the "Bitches" Brew" at Tanglewood had taken the original album's murky, mysterious head trip and turned it into a deep tissue full body massage!

The Tanglewood Live CD is but one of the many enhancements fans of the Bitches Brew album will find in this sumptuously packaged, superbly annotated set that strongly makes the case for physical media and especially for the vinyl medium. Speaking of which, the double LP sourced from the original two track master tape, sounds better in many ways than the original 1B promo pressing to which I compared it.

Back in "the day" Columbia cut three lacquers for original issues: 1A, 1B  and 1C, with one going to each of its three pressing plants: one on the East Coast in New Jersey, one in Terre-Haute Indiana and one in California. So all three are "first pressings."

The original pressing has somewhat less bass extension a slight bit more extension on top and what sounds like a modest amount of added artificial reverb injected into the mix that imparts a metallic sheen over the proceedings. Or you could say the vinyl reissue is warmer, richer, wetter, deeper and more cavernous in the most positive use of the cave word.

Davis' echoed trumpet dramatically thrusts forth from the blackest depths on the very well pressed reissue. It hovers in the metallic sheen on the original. You can hear  into the farthest reaches of the trumpet's decay into black on the reissue whereas on the original the trumpet fades more quickly into the metallic sheen.

I was surprised to find the reissue delivering far better instrumental textures overall as well. All I can say is, the reissued vinyl is a complete success. Even if you have the original, you'll be happy to have the reissue. It's deeper and far more mysteriously atmospheric.

Is it what Miles and Teo would have wanted compared to the original? It's impossible to know. Nor can we know if they might prefer the reissue's slight revision, with its blacker backdrops and improved textures. It's certainly not the complete revision that the 1998 remix by Mark Wilder sounds like (with all due respect to Mark, who to his credit did not eliminate tape hiss and thus  the recording's actual top end).

After reading this review Greg Calbi emailed to say much of the credit for the excellent results should go to both Ray Janos who did the actual lacquer cutting and to Barry Wolifson who does lathe tech maintenance among other things at Sterling Sound. Calbi says "they were tireless in trying to get a clean cut in (George) Marino's room"....and that he (Calbi) used "absolutely no EQ on those tapes, just figured out the correct alignment for the tones and had a super direct signal path to the cutterhead."

I'm not sure why the set's producers chose to use the remixed version for the CD here when the master tape was available, though it does mean those digital only folks interested in hearing the real deal will have to buy a turntable so I like that! Not surprisingly, the CD edition sounds identical to the remixed CD boxed set edition that's less atmospheric, less mysterious, flatter and more "modern" sounding, sort of like The Beatles "1"  album.

One could argue correctly that the dynamics are greater and the overall sound is "cleaner," but it reminds me of examples of "restored" paintings where the patina has been removed along with the atmosphere. I think the worst part of the CD reissue is the sound of the trumpet. It's flat and harmonically diffuse. It doesn't sound all that much like a trumpet and that's not good! There's less to "look at" and savor.  I don't see how one can sit there and pay it full attention.

Put on the LPs and the production comes to life: there's  space, precise imaging, physicality and air to breath. If you want to make the argument for LPs for someone play the CD  and then the LP. Never mind the remix. The problems present themselves clearly anyway.

The second CD includes previously unreleased alternate takes of "Spanish Key," and "John McLaughlin" as well as single edits of four other tunes, two of which were on the original album and two of which weren't ("Great Expectations" and "Little Blue Frog") but appeared unedited on the 1998 box.

These alternative takes don't produce the surprises you'll hear on the Tanglewood live CD recorded in 1970 (That's one performance I'm sorry I missed!) but to my ears they show the songs one step less fully formed and less subtle and mysterious than what's on the final release, regardless of the order in which they were recorded. 

The previously unreleased DVD contains a 1969 Copenhagen live performance recorded before the studio versions of three of the tunes were produced. These sound as different from the Bitches Brew album versions as the ones from Tanglewood, only in the opposite direction! The live set personnel were Davis, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea (looking so young!),  Dave Holland (all but unrecognizable) and Jack DeJohnette. 

Video quality is subpar compared to what we get now in HD (the opposite of contemporary recorded sound quality, which is now mostly dreadful), but it doesn't look bad. The sound is monophonic and wideband but not particularly well-mixed with the lead instruments consistently buried too deeply below the accompanying instrumentation, but again, it won't stop you from enjoying this newly unburied treasure.

That leaves the booklet and overall presentation and here's where the producers really got it right. The full-sized full color booklet is sumptuously produced with eye-pleasing smart graphics, good photos and assorted memorabilia, and most importantly, really insightful and useful annotation covering all bases from the production to the artwork and of course to the music and time in which it was made.

As drummer Lenny White opens in his contribution, "To understand Bitches Brew you have to understand that the first notes we made in the studio happened twenty four hours after the last note Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock."

Greg Tate's energizing, colorfully written annotation covers all bases including Miles' early history, his mold breaking 1949 record Birth of the Cool and everything else Miles accomplished before Bitches Brew. Most importantly, Tate focuses on what was happened around Davis that influenced him as much as he does on how Davis influenced everyone else, particularly in how what's called "Fusion" sprung from Davis's work.

Tate describes the influence his cover girl girlfriend then wife Betty Mabry Davis had on his music. and on how her exposing him to the electric music of others played such a key role in the music he ended up making: Dylan, Zappa, Beatles, Sly and of course Funkadelics and James Brown. Those who accused Davis of "selling out" to pop music were so missing the point, not to mention engaging in incredible "purist" hypocrisy when you consider that much of bop is based upon Broadway show tunes and even Disney.

Those complaints faded quickly as this music re-invigorated a jazz scene that had grown tired and attracted a new, young audience. Speaking of which, youngsters coming to this album today are lucky to have the excellent perspective the box provides. So that the Tanglewood performance isn't heard in a vacuum, the producers smartly include the  "The Fillmore at Tanglewood" program that on three different Tuesdays presented lineups including The Who, Jethro Tull,  Joe Cocker and other rockers. The final Tuesday was Santana, Miles and the Voices of East Harlem.  

Tate covers the George Martin like role Macero played in the production of this album. Macero went from the typical jazz producer's role at the time to a "hand on" effort wherein he created razor cut tape loops that froze the music in time and created hypnotic sonic strobe effects. He also points out the album's "unsung hero" electric bassist Harvey Brooks who put in the ultra-bottom end that anchors everything above.

Cover artist Mati Klarwein's contribution to the proceedings get its due as well in both superb reproductions of his works and in his notes. Having been born in Germany and having fled with his family to Palestine to escape the Nazis (as some of us are currently planning to perhaps escape the Tea Party), Klarwein describes himself as "...only half German and only half Jewish with an Arab soul and an African heart." 

The packaging and presentation are first rate. Everything about this box exudes quality and care. In other words, it's the opposite of the shoddy Rolling Stones reissue of Exile on Main Street. About the only thing I can complain about is the failure to issue the original mix on CD. Otherwise everything else about this box sets a reissue/anniversary standard that others will have a hard time surpassing or even matching.

Speaking personally, much as I considered myself a "rocker," both In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew were my personal soundtrack guides to an extremely unsettling time in America, the world and in my personal life. The albums represented chaos, freedom, liberation, anger, frustration and fear, all of which hung in air at a time when it seemed as if the world's and America's order and structure were breaking down before our eyes. I know mine was! And I'm much better off for it!

Young people forget or don't know that this was a time of empty cities, "white flight" racial unrest, a sense that the "flower power" '60s comfort was over, the war in Vietnam was raging and I could go on! If you need to know what that "felt" like, play this album! In retrospect, it has a womblike comfort zone tucked into the seeming dissonance. It invites you in as much as it attacks. It dances and dazzles and fires the imagination as effectively today as it did forty years ago. While the album is credited for having invented "fusion" jazz, in reality it led nowhere. It stands by itself. There was no place for anyone else to take it though of course Miles managed to do so!