"Bitch brew." How Miles Davis Revolutionized Jazz 50 Years Ago

 Exactly half a century ago, on March 30, 1970, an album by Miles Davis called Bitches Brew was released. The album radically changed the whole picture of jazz, laid the foundations for new musical styles - jazz-rock, fusion, psychedelic jazz - and determined the development of improvised music for the coming decades.

The eternal revolutionary at the crossroads

By the late 1960s, Miles Davis was at a crossroads. On the one hand, it seemed that life and career have developed as well as possible. Barely over forty years old, he was already a recognized classic of jazz, and one of the coolest, most fashionable and popular stars of American culture and show business.

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As a 19-year-old youth, he staked out his place in history by taking part in the revolutionary, laying the foundations of modern jazz - be-bop - Charlie Parker ensemble of the mid-1940s.

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20-year-old Miles Davis in the ensemble of his idol Charlie Parker

Just a few years later, his own ensemble recorded the album Birth of the Cool. Prophetically born from these recordings, cool jazz became not only one of the most important musical trends of the 1950s, but also the sonic equivalent of the era-defining relaxed, hipster beatnik culture.

And Davis's own cool style was greatly facilitated by the passionate romance that developed in Paris in those years with the famous French chansonnier Juliette Greco, and the recording of music for the cult film "Elevator to the scaffold" by the French new wave director Louis Malle.

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Miles Davis and his lover Juliette Greco at the Saint-Germain Club in Paris. 1958

In the late 50s, his first "great" quintet with John Coltrane and Bill Evans laid the foundations of "modal jazz" and recorded Kind of Blue, which is considered the greatest jazz album to this day.

In those same years, he remembered that behind him - not only wandering around jazz clubs, but also a solid classical education at Juilliard, one of the best conservatories in America, and, together with the orchestra of the composer and arranger Gil Evans, recorded several magnificent orchestral records that put the beginning and became classics of the "third trend", popular at the turn of the 1950s-60s, the idea of ​​synthesis of jazz and classical music.

In the mid-1960s, the second "great" quintet with saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, double bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams expanded the freedom of improvisation to the limit, without destroying - in contrast to the already fully developed free jazz - the foundations of melodic, rhythmic and harmonic construction of jazz composition.

By the late 1960s, however, Davis found himself in a state of confusion and decline—both musically and personally.

The addiction to drugs that had been overcome in the 1950s returned again - however, the deadly heroin was replaced by a slightly more gentle, but no less personality-destroying cocaine.

Jazz, of which Miles felt himself, indeed, indeed, was the undisputed and dominant star, seemed to have undeniably dominated American popular music for half a century, was rapidly and at first glance irreversibly pushed to the periphery by rock.

American youth, including blacks - and racial identity has always been important to Davis - no longer listened to jazz, but to rhythm and blues and soul and even white rock and roll.

"I was not ready to become just a memory," Davis himself said about this period in a late interview.

New music, new style

The well-known jazz critic Leonard Feather recalled that, having visited Davis's apartment in New York in 1968, he was surprised to find that the jazz classics and his always beloved Stravinsky, Debussy, Bartok, Chopin and Ravel were replaced by James' records constantly spinning on the player. Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone and even the Grateful Dead and Byrds.

It is believed that the impetus for Davis's transition to a new faith was his new lover - 22-year-old model Betty Mabry.

Yes, under the influence of Maybry Davis changed strict exquisite suits for wide, brightly colored open blouses, suede and leather.

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The manner of dressing, appearance and style of behavior Davis began to fit into the countercultural image of the turn of the 60s and 70s. 1970

But the main thing was the desire to regain a mass audience, to invade the space in which Hendrix, who caused him sincere respect and admiration, operated so successfully. Miles and Jimmy were well acquainted, since 1969 they repeatedly talked about joint performances and recording an album, and these plans were only prevented by the untimely death of the guitarist in September 1970.

But nevertheless, Davis was not going to completely change his native jazz element to rock. He wanted to expand the palette of the jazz language, to enrich it, as he had repeatedly done in previous decades, with new rhythms, new sounds, and, most importantly, with a new, modern worldview.

With composer and arranger Gil Evans, Davis recorded at the turn of the 50s and 60s several magnificent orchestral albums that became classics of the "third current". The most famous of them is Sketches of Spain.

With composer and arranger Gil Evans, Davis recorded at the turn of the 50s and 60s several magnificent orchestral albums that became classics of the "third current". The most famous of them is Sketches of Spain. 

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