Day 188: Miles Davis – Bitches Brew
I’ve realised jazz pairs well with cooking. I think other people realised this way before me, but hey, I’m there now. There’s no lyrics that I automatically start to focus on and there’s enough going on that even mundane normal meals that I’ve made a thousand times over feel a bit more stimulating than usual. Today’s order of business was vegetarian lasagne, simultaneously my favourite thing to cook and my favourite thing to eat. It’s fool proof, genuinely, as even I can make it, and I could cook a mean lasagne before I could even properly cook.
Album cover courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment
I’m skipping the background info on Miles Davis as I’ve already covered him when I wrote about Kind of Blue on Day 152, so we can get straight into it. Whereas Kind of Blue was a classic and elegant album of what you probably think of when someone talks about jazz, Bitches Brew is more experimental. It’s psychedelic fusion jazz with rock-inspired guitars and electric piano that was released in 1969 and gained popularity as a seminal work in rock jazz.
The creation of the record was organic and fluent, with Davis giving the musicians limited instructions on things like chords, tempo count or melody, but largely he wanted the musicians to improvise to see where the album was going and capture spontaneity and raw emotion. He says, “I knew what I wanted would come out of a process and not some prearranged shit. This session was about improvisation, and that's what makes jazz so fabulous."
I am kind of aware that I probably don’t have the prerequisite information to say how impressive this album is, and I am well aware that I’m coming at this with a limited knowledge of jazz, but I have to say that I wasn’t too blown away for the simple reason that it just didn’t make me feel much at all. I liked it, it was fun to have in the background, but it was actually just fun and nothing more. I wasn’t blown away, I didn’t feel like it was something I had no idea about, but I enjoyed it.
I think that’s one thing I like about art, if you don’t know much about it you can just go “well, how does this make me feel?” It felt fine. I had a nice time, but I know I could have a nicer time with something else from Miles Davis. It’s still a reasonable 8.5/10.