MURRAY LERNER, a documentary filmmaker now in his 70s, filmed a legendary open-air rock concert on England’s Isle of Wight in August of 1970. Tied up until 1997 in legal hassles, Lerner has only just now released a Woodstock-style documentary of the event’s highlights along with a collection of individual DVDs featuring the entire sets of individual acts.
One of those acts was Miles Davis and his band. Their 38-minute set has been padded with almost 90 minutes of newly taped interviews with several of Davis’s sidemen, along with his acolytes Carlos Santana and Joni Mitchell. The DVD, Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, is informative.
The great benefit of Miles Electric is that it explains what a radical transformation Miles Davis and his music went through in the late 1960s. As Bob Belden, a producer with Sony, puts it:
“This record” was a double album called Bitches Brew which would serve as the basis for the songs played at the Isle of Wight, and as Belden explains, its phenomenal success would alter Miles’ career forever.
WHAT THE AUDIENCE at the Isle of Wight had witnessed was a moment similar to watching Bob Dylan “go electric” for the first time at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. However, the two musicians’ transformations had very different aftereffects.
Dylan’s adoption of rock instrumentation both increased his sales and earned the brief hatred of his fellow folkies (and some of his critics), but was ultimately largely accepted. But when Miles Davis began to feature electric instruments in his act only a few years later, he caused an enormous divide amongst his fan base and jazz critics–a divide which remains unbridged.
The beginning of the Miles Electric DVD reflects this controversy. Carlos Santana appears slightly glassy-eyed and wearing jeans, a faded psychedelic Miles T-shirt, and a leather cap. His first words?
Smash cut to New York Daily News columnist and Wynton Marsalis compatriot Stanley Crouch dressed in a dark suit and tie. Crouch’s reply?
No doubt, Davis probably wanted to make money. But while Bitches Brew was certainly inspired by the music of the late-1960s–Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Motown, Sly Stone, the Beatles, (and Santana claims in the DVD, rather immodestly, his own band)–the album that Davis released was hardly pop music in the conventional sense. (The success of Bitches Brew was certainly not based on the accessibility of its music. And curiously, its follow-up was much more accessible–but had nowhere near the same commercial success.)
BUT ASIDE FROM THE OBVIOUS popular influences, none of the musicians featured on Miles Electric discuss the other elements that went into Bitches Brew. On that album, Davis managed to fuse jazz, rock, and R&B with 20th century classical music, especially 12-tone serial composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen. He also used tape-editing and overdubbing effects such as Musique concrète.
One of the few jazz authors who has understood these influences is musician/author Paul Tingen, who wrote Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967 – 1991. In addition to explaining how Davis brought modern classical elements to his music, Tingen also discusses the editing skills of his producer, Teo Macero, who took the long, frequently unstructured jams of Miles and his band, and turned them into recordings with fugue-inspired structures. He compares Macero’s role in Bitches Brew to George Martin’s introduction of classical elements to the Beatles’s rock and pop compositions. As Tingen notes:
And he’s right. Few musicians have survived as many radical stylistic changes as Davis has. And only Davis could make as complex a recording as Bitches Brew and have it emerge as the then-best selling jazz album of all time–and go from intimate nightclubs playing to wealthy middle-aged metropolitan audiences, to international rock festivals with half a million people in attendance.
Ed Driscoll writes on frequently on technology, pop culture, and politics. For more of his writings, see EdDriscoll.com.
