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cdme

An undeniable classic, but I remain partial to Bitches Brew.

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I can't take that record off the shelf without thinking of this CBS memo.

https://i.imgur.com/2GMwXPo.jpg

I’ve never seen this before — love it. Thanks.

If you like Bitches Brew, I would advise checking out "Miles Davis at Fillmore: Live at the Fillmore East" [1] (ideally the 1997 reissue rather than the original which was pretty heavily edited). It's like if someone took Bitches Brew and wanted to make it even more intense and hostile. Genuinely terrifying, amazing music.

[1] https://www.discogs.com/fr/release/5036048-Miles-Davis-Miles...

London Brew is also a very fun album. A lot of elements of BB are clearly evident but they ramp up the chaos and make it more "scary", while incorporating some things like electric guitar and more modern production.

In A Silent Way for me. What a brilliant musician.

This is the one album that I can never say no to if it pops up in my recommendations.

Also a fantastic choice — I love so many of his albums for different reasons.

Me too. While I appreciate why kind of blue and bitches brew are celebrated the way they are, the journey of in a silent way, to me is still unparalleled.

What's remarkable about Bitches Brew to me, is that in many ways Miles was a traditionalist, and yet his foray into the avant garde was more successful than most of his contemporaries.

> What's remarkable about Bitches Brew to me, is that in many ways Miles was a traditionalist, and yet his foray into the avant garde...

John McLaughlin was how I wound up at Bitches Brew - and got introduced to Miles. BB was a departure from the early JMC I was used to and it took me a while to bite into it. Hearing Holland and DeJohnette helped.

A few years later I was all in. Saw Miles on my 19th bday.

That album is more challenging to appreciate for listeners new to jazz, while Kind of Blue is immediately accessible to mainstream listeners.

I've had the opposite experience. Kind of Blue never grabbed me. I've always been drawn to Avant Garde jazz first and foremost. I was introduced to it via Flying Lotus and heard him mention BB in an interview. I recognize that Kind of Blue is a beloved album, but I've listened to BB a hundred times.

If you're a fan of both Flying Lotus and Bitches Brew, you should check out Miles Davis' album On The Corner, which came out two years after Bitches Brew. It feels like a direct precursor to hip-hop and a lot of the sample-based music that gained popularity in the 1980s, partly due to the tape splicing and looping that was done in the studio and partly because of the extremely wide set of influences that got stirred together on that record.

It still sounds fantastically weird.

Awesome, I'll check that out

Strangely, I first heard BB, all thanks to Napster. I just thought that is what jazz sounded like when I was very young, since I hadn't heard much of it at all except what came on our local NPR radio station.

It took me a few days on a 56k modem (thanks to failed downloads) to finally get one of the full 20+ minute tracks from the album. I think it might have been Pharoah's Dance mislabeled as the track BB... so many mislabeled songs on Napster back then.

This was around the time the Complete BB Sessions [1] came out... so that was one of the first albums I ever asked my parents for as a gift.

A few years after I got the album, I was traveling to a city, and while walking around downtown I heard one sound that sounded like it was identical to a sound from Pharoah's Dance. Whether intentional or not, I thought some of the cacophony of these tracks was intended to represent the chaotic energy that a big city can have.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Bitches_Brew_Sess...

My favorite was his work on Miami Vice. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kLyqgd-KTRM

I'm more of a Dark Magus guy, myself.

Which, in many ways is a polar opposite to Kind of Blue. Whereas Kind of Blue is comprised almost entirely of first takes, Bitches Brew was assembled in the editing room, pulling together multiple takes and pieces to form the tracks on the album.

This was eye-opening to me in reading the thick booklet that came with the Complete BB Sessions: how editing was a big part of the output.

But on re-listening, I could hear it immediately. And then I appreciated all the more what a good edit can do for music.

Who wouldn’t love them both.

But I’m partial to Miles from the Bitches Brew era as well.

I really got hooked on the reissue of the “bootleg“ 1969 European concerts a few years back. It gave a whole new perspective on his style in those years, it’s different than BB in some ways.

I think Kind of Blue is a better album but I listen to Bitches Brew more often, maybe due to greater variety of song and texture. The former is like swinging, poignant velvet, the latter a swirling, electronic groove.

I actually now think that Miles's best work was his early stuff, before _Kind of Blue_, but that has to do with changes in my general preferences around jazz.

I'm partial to Cookin. So I guess I'm on team early Miles.

I’ve come to love all sides of Miles.

I recently dicovered that he played on lots of other artists records that I have yet to listen to.

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