In August 1969, The First Great Quintet Davis booked Columbia’s 30th Street Studio for three days. He brought nine musicians, no written arrangements, and a set of ideas he had been accumulating for months. He told producer Teo Macero to record everything.

The result was Bitches Brew. Columbia released it as a double album in March 1970. It sold more copies in its first year than anything Miles had previously recorded. It also created a genre — electric jazz, fusion, jazz-rock, depending on who was doing the naming — that would define an entire era of the music.

What Miles Had Heard

The transition from In a Silent Way (recorded January 1969, released that summer) to Bitches Brew was a matter of months and a matter of degree. Miles had been moving toward electric instruments and rock rhythms since at least 1968, when he began playing electric piano himself on recordings and bringing in guitarists.

What accelerated the move was the music he was listening to. He had heard what Sly Stone was doing with rhythm — the dense, layered funk that was appearing on Sly and the Family Stone records, rhythms that were not jazz rhythms but that had a propulsive intelligence he recognised. He had heard Jimi Hendrix. He had gone to Woodstock.

Miles understood that jazz had been losing its popular audience to rock and soul for a decade, and he was not interested in watching that process continue from a comfortable distance. But he also wasn’t interested in simply making rock music. He wanted to take what rock and funk had — the electricity, the volume, the rhythmic insistence — and run jazz improvisation through it.

The Sessions

The musicians he assembled for Bitches Brew represented an extraordinary roster drawn from multiple musical worlds.

Two drummers: Jack DeJohnette and Lenny White. Two bassists: Dave Holland on acoustic bass and Harvey Brooks on electric. Three keyboard players: Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, and Larry Young. Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone. John McLaughlin on guitar. Bennie Maupin on bass clarinet. Miles on trumpet.

He gave them almost nothing to work with. Some melodic sketches. Some rhythmic instructions. The idea that they would play and producer Teo Macero would find the music in the tape afterward.

Macero’s editing — splicing, looping, rearranging sections of improvisation — is itself a compositional act. Bitches Brew does not sound like a jazz record because it was not made the way jazz records were made. It was assembled from a larger quantity of improvised material than any single performance could contain.

What It Sounds Like

The music on Bitches Brew is dense, dark, and unsettled. It does not swing in the conventional jazz sense — the rhythms are more static, more groove-oriented, closer to rock. But the improvisation above those rhythms is jazz: chromatic, searching, long-form.

The opening track, “Pharaoh’s Dance,” runs almost twenty minutes and moves through sections that feel composed and sections that feel discovered in real time, and the border between them is deliberately unclear. Miles’s trumpet plays above the texture rather than through it — economical as always, choosing notes that open space rather than fill it.

“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” is the track closest to rock. It has a riff. It grooves. It was not what jazz musicians in 1969 expected to hear from Miles Davis, and the responses ranged from excitement to dismay.

The musicians didn’t know what genre they were making. That was the point.

The Split It Created

Bitches Brew polarised jazz in a way that no previous Miles record had. Critics who had celebrated Kind of Blue were uncertain or hostile. Jazz purists who had accepted the modal experiments of the 1960s drew the line at electric instruments.

Miles did not engage with the debate. He kept working, kept changing, kept assembling new groups of musicians and pointing them at new problems.

The musicians who played on Bitches Brew scattered into the decade that followed and produced its defining music: Herbie Hancock’s funk records, Chick Corea’s Return to Forever, Wayne Shorter’s Weather Report with Zawinul, John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. What Miles had done in August 1969 was not just make a record — he had shown a generation of jazz musicians what the next decade could sound like.

Some of them never forgave him. Most of them followed.