The Electric Storm

Black Belt · Lesson 7 of 11 · Estimated Time: 20-25 minutes · Listening Assignment: Included

You have been following Miles Davis across this entire curriculum. You heard Kind of Blue in your first week as a White Belt, returned to it in Brown Belt with new ears, and met him again in Sketches of Spain bending jazz toward the Spanish classical tradition. Each time you encountered him, he was already somewhere new. Bitches Brew is where that restlessness reached its most extreme and most consequential expression. By 1970, Davis had left modal jazz behind entirely and walked into a studio with electric instruments, no written arrangements, and no existing model for what he was about to make. What came out was not fusion — the genre that word would eventually name had not yet been invented. What came out was the thing that made fusion possible.

Part 1 — What Davis Was Hearing

In 1969, Miles Davis was attending Jimi Hendrix concerts. This is worth sitting with. The most celebrated figure in jazz history, a man who had already reinvented the music twice over, was standing in the crowd watching a guitarist in a feather boa summon sounds from an electric instrument that no one had heard before. Davis was also listening obsessively to Sly Stone and James Brown — not as guilty pleasures but as serious artistic study. He heard in those records something that jazz, in its drive toward harmonic and rhythmic complexity, had moved away from: raw electricity, physical force, the kind of sound that hit the body before it hit the mind.

His conversations with Hendrix during this period were documented and direct. Davis wanted to know how Hendrix got those sounds. Hendrix, for his part, was interested in what Davis was doing. There was mutual respect between two artists who were both, in their own idioms, pushing further out than anyone around them. Davis’s engagement with rock in 1969 was not a commercial calculation. Columbia Records was not demanding that he chase the youth market. The decision came entirely from inside: this music was doing something important, and Davis wanted to understand it, and then he wanted to do something with that understanding that no one else had done.

He brought electric instruments into the studio. He brought amplification, wah-wah pedals, electronic keyboards. He did not bring a score.

Part 2 — The Studio as Instrument

Bitches Brew, as you will hear it, was assembled. Producer Teo Macero spent months with hours of recorded improvisation — multiple sessions, multiple configurations of musicians, ideas that appeared and disappeared and reappeared in different forms. He cut the tape literally, spliced sections together, created loops, applied studio processing borrowed from electronic music and musique concrète. The album that emerged was a construction. No one ever played it the way it sounds.

This raises a question worth taking seriously: can a constructed album be jazz? Jazz is, at its core, a real-time art form. The value it places on improvisation is not incidental — it is the whole point. The conversation between musicians happening in the moment, the decisions made under pressure, the irreversibility of it. What Macero and Davis did with the Bitches Brew sessions was edit improvisation into a new shape, which is something different from improvising. The original performances were improvised. But the album is a composition assembled from fragments of those performances.

The answer Davis would probably have given is that the question is less interesting than the music. He was always more concerned with what was possible than with what was permitted. And what Macero’s approach made possible was a kind of density and structural complexity that no live performance could sustain — multiple electric pianos in dialogue, rhythmic patterns that recur in ways the original players never planned, a narrative arc across forty-plus minutes that no group of musicians improvised in real time. The studio became its own instrument. That idea would define the following decade of recorded music, across every genre.

Part 3 — The Musicians and the Big Bang

Look at the personnel on Bitches Brew. John McLaughlin on guitar. Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul on electric keyboards. Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone. Jack DeJohnette and Lenny White on drums. Dave Holland on bass. Harvey Brooks on electric bass. John McLaughlin would form Mahavishnu Orchestra within two years and define jazz-rock fusion. Corea would form Return to Forever. Zawinul would form Weather Report with Shorter. DeJohnette would anchor decades of ECM recordings. Holland would lead his own groups and become one of the most respected bassists in jazz.

Every major figure of the fusion era was in that studio. Davis did not recruit established fusion musicians — fusion did not exist yet. He gathered people who interested him, let them improvise without a road map, and the record they made together became the blueprint that each of them then spent years interpreting. Bitches Brew is not a document of fusion. It is the moment of creation from which fusion radiated in every direction. In one set of sessions, Davis assembled the artists who would spend the next decade building the genre he had just invented.

This is what it looks like when a musician is operating at the very front edge of a form. He is not following a movement — he is the precondition for the movement to exist.

Part 4 — Four Miles Davises

You have now encountered Miles Davis in four distinct configurations across this curriculum. In Kind of Blue, he was the modal revolutionary, stripping jazz down to scales and space, making room for Coltrane and Bill Evans to find their own voices inside that openness. In Sketches of Spain, he was the genre-crosser, working with arranger Gil Evans to place jazz improvisation inside Spanish classical forms, treating trumpet as a lead instrument in an orchestral palette. In the great quintet of the mid-1960s — referenced rather than heard in this curriculum — he was the bandleader who created a working unit so tight and so mutually attentive that their studio recordings captured something close to telepathy. And in Bitches Brew, he is the electric provocateur, abandoning everything comfortable and building something new from scratch, in a studio, with musicians who had no more idea than he did where they were going.

The connecting thread is not style. It is refusal. Davis refused to repeat himself. He refused to become a museum of his own past achievements. Kind of Blue was released in 1959 and was immediately the most celebrated jazz recording of its era. Davis could have made Kind of Blue for the rest of his life, or near enough, and remained beloved and commercially successful. He did not. He moved. He kept moving. The restlessness was not commercial instinct and it was not boredom — it was a conviction, maintained across four decades, that the only interesting thing was what had not yet been done.

That is the most important lesson this album teaches, and it has nothing to do with electric instruments.

Black Belt Listening Assignment — Lesson 7

Miles Davis — Bitches Brew (1970) Track: Miles Runs the Voodoo Down

YouTube: Search: Miles Davis Miles Runs the Voodoo Down Bitches Brew official Columbia

Listening Cue: Electric bass, electric piano, wah-wah trumpet — jazz using rock instrumentation. The first thing you will notice is the texture: thick, layered, electric in a way that Kind of Blue absolutely was not. But listen beneath that texture. The improvisational conversation is still there. Two drummers are negotiating in real time. The electric pianos are responding to each other and to what the horns are doing. Davis’s trumpet, pushed through a wah-wah pedal, is still phrasing like Davis’s trumpet — the space, the restraint, the choice of exactly which note to play. The tools changed. The language did not. Your job on the first listen is to find the conversation inside the electricity. It will take a few minutes to locate it beneath the unfamiliar surface. Stay with it.

On the second listen, pay attention to structure. This track is nearly fourteen minutes long. Find where the energy rises and falls. Find where Davis enters and exits. Notice what the rhythm section does when the horns drop out — this is not a gap, it is a section. A jazz musician trained on bebop hearing this record for the first time in 1970 would have been disoriented and likely troubled. A rock musician hearing it would have found the rhythms alien and the harmonic language strange. Davis was building something that belonged to neither world completely, which meant it belonged to a new world he was in the process of inventing. Listen for that in-between quality. It should feel slightly unstable, like standing on new ground.