Artist: Miles Davis
Album: Bitches Brew
Year: 1970
I love me some Miles Davis. Kind of Blue was one of my top 10 albums of the 1960's, if not of all-time. Birth of the Cool is such a smooth and classy jazz album which helped jazz make the transition from the virtuosic bop performers into something more refined. Bitches Brew is a different animal from those earlier albums, sharing more commonalities with the jazz-rock of In a Silent Way. This one feels even a little more off the deep end than that one.
I don't know how I feel about it, either. It's certainly not an album like Kind of Blue that I feel rewards close listening. It is, however, a great album to just kind of have on in the background.
I am having the hardest time thinking of ways to describe this one. Basically it's all light rhythms, organs, guitars, and Miles on trumpet. It's definitely got the highly experimental feel of a jazz album but it feels very comparable to some funk albums and is not too far off from Jimi Hendrix acid-rock territory. There's even a tune here entitled "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down," which I might presume (given its musical content) is some kind of homage to Hendrix. It's a groove-driven album that certainly does not fail in that department.
This is the kind of album that will divide listeners. People who like the purer jazz like Kind of Blue are probably not going to care for this so much. Experimental rock listeners like fans of The Grateful Dead and Hendrix are going to eat this stuff up. Me, I guess I'm somewhere in the middle. I'd have to say it's a cool album to listen to, but I think I like it more in theory than in execution. Miles...always different, always the same.
Rating: Worth a listen
No comments:
Post a Comment