immanence

Graham Haynes’s band touring under the name Bitches Brew Revisited, after the famous album by Miles Davis that turned 40 last year, opened the Burlington jazz festival last week.

They were wonderful.

But I think it would have been more accurate to have called it “Electric Miles Remixed,” which would have covered Miles Davis’s entire 1968-75 “electric” period. Hearing updated renditions (complete with a DJ turntablist) of his music from all those years made me realize how good Bitches Brew actually was, and how the albums that followed, while they had some very good music in them, weren’t as good.

It was partly the musicians — Bitches Brew has never been matched before or since: John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, David Holland, Bernie Maupin, Jack DeJohnette, and on and on!… plus the artwork of Mati Klarwein and Teo Macero’s production. And partly it was Miles’s own gradual descent into illness, depression, and addiction. (What was it about the mid-1970s and cocaine addiction? David Bowie was the “thin white duke” to Miles’s cocaine blackness.)

The friend who saw the concert with me wondered if it mattered that Miles Davis beat his wife. Yes, certainly, it matters. But music and art transcend their makers, and we can too. A lot of the best art comes from pain. Not that it has to or that that’s a good thing, but life is painful; the point is to transmute it into something entirely greater than the pain, and Miles did that through music. He took music (all of it) and sent it reeling in so many new directions, time after time.

Bitches Brew was the most radical and dramatic of these departures, and not all of what came in its wake (“jazz-rock fusion,” as it came to be called) was successful. But if creativity is all about opening up new strata on which life can spread, the moment that created Bitches Brew was undoubtedly one of the most fertile prehensions and concrescences in the history of modern music.