MILES DAVIS
The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions (Columbia/Legacy)
Rating: 5 out of 7
By Mac Randall

   Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew occupies a place in modern music roughly comparable to that of James Joyce’s Ulysses in modern literature: hailed as a masterpiece by just about everyone, actually listened to by just about no one. Sure, the album was Miles’s first to go gold, and second to win a Grammy, but it’s hard to imagine that more than a fraction of the people who’ve bought it over the years have played it with any frequency. Simply put, Bitches Brew is not good-time music. It’s not music that gracefully blends into the background. It is dense, chaotic, maddening, unrepentantly urban, and it demands your attention. It is the sound of a visionary musician and many, many talented colleagues (including two, sometimes three keyboardists, two drummers, and assorted percussionists) jettisoning all thoughts of conventionality or commerciality in favor of lengthy, open-ended modal explorations. Not the kind of thing most folks would choose to slap on for laughs.
   Of course, Miles’s revolutionary 1970 double album has influenced lots of players, but even that influence has been, I think, overestimated. Most of the so-called "fusion" bands that arose out of the Bitches Brew sessions--like Weather Report, Return To Forever, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra--adopted the then-exciting new concept of combining rock grooves and instrumentation with jazz improvisation but failed to capture the menace, the sense of impending doom, that their mentor had conjured with such depth. It’s arguably only in the '90s, with the rise of artists like Tricky and DJ Shadow, that we’ve finally seen the true successor to the dark, electronically enhanced Miles of 1969/70. Which is why it’s appropriate that this four-CD reconsideration of the period should be appearing now, complete with nearly 90 minutes' worth of previously unreleased material.
   The title The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions is actually something of a misnomer. The official Bitches Brew album, which takes up all of the first disc and a third of the second, was recorded over three days in August 1969; no outtakes from those sessions are included here. Miles went back into the studio five more times, each time with a slightly different group of musicians, between November 1969 and February 1970; the results make up the rest of this set, but it’s unlikely that any of that music was ever slated for what became Bitches Brew. (Some of it trickled out over the years onto the albums Live-Evil, Big Fun, and Circle In The Round.) Stylistically, the material from the later sessions is very un-Brew-like, closer in tone to the more serene, contemplative Miles of that album’s predecessor, In A Silent Way, while the inclusion for the first time of Indian instruments (sitar, tamboura, and tabla) on several tracks also points forward, to the drone-centered Miles of On The Corner and beyond.
   There’s lots of beautiful playing here, particularly guitarist John McLaughlin’s fiery lines on "Corrado" and Miles’s patented lonely trumpet stylings on a cover of David Crosby’s "Guinnevere" (further proof that Davis never stopped looking to the pop world for inspiration). There are also some amusing studio exchanges between Miles and producer Teo Macero (both sound pretty exasperated with one another at times). But much of the unreleased material is spoiled, at least for this listener, by percussionist Airto Moreira’s incessant use of a Brazilian instrument called the guica, which sounds alternately like a dog’s bark, a deep yawn, a peal of laughter, or someone shifting position on the seat cushion of a plush diner booth. Though interesting at first, this unpredictable racket quickly becomes a distraction, then an annoyance, and finally a supreme irritation. If you can get past the guica, you’ll get plenty out of this set. If you don’t think you can, I’d recommend sticking with the original Bitches Brew.