Bitches Brew - Miles Davis (1970)

ideated from: some birthday-inspired comfort food records.

This is Miles’ best selling record, an eternal classic, and maybe only behind Kind Of Blue in terms of the man perpetrating new directions in jazz.

Fusion as a mix of jazz and rock approaches was already a thing before Miles took it up (wiki says the term might have been coined talking about the 1968 Axelrod record I wrote up already). But having a leading light of the traditional jazz community taking up the standard legitimized the movement in a way it wouldn’t have been otherwise.

While the personnel on each track differ, the basic band was Miles, Wayne Shorter, and Bennie Maupin on horns and reeds, Jack DeJohnette on drums, John McLaughlin on guitar, and both Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul on duelling electric pianos. If that sounds kinda bonkers, it’s because it was.

Columbia didn’t know what to do with Miles most of the time, so they wisely just let him work.