Bitches Brew

And if people don't know her, she was married to Miles Davis.

She's on the cover of Bitches Brew.

And she basically is responsible for helping something called Jazz Fusion exist because she was a rocker like Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone.

That was Betty Davis's community.

Beautiful.

But Miles, when he did Bitches Brew, You know, he introduced electronic instruments to jazz, and no one did that before, and he was destroyed by the press.

And eventually, of course, Pitch Spirit is one of the most important albums in music, period.

And yeah, that is really cool, like how artists think, how artists push, how they're fearless.

It's like he didn't invent hard bop or post-bop or these genres, but basically it's like, "Who can I get that will sound really amazing doing this?" Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Ron Carter, right? And that's why those things sound so modern, 'cause they were experimenting too, and he pulls them in and says, "I'm gonna work in this genre.

Make it sound good." And then when things were free in the '60s with the Bitches Brew and some of these other albums, same idea.

Just like he didn't s- invent free jazz, but he finds somebody and he finds compositions that make it work for him.

And that's, like, the pattern over and over.

house.

I was playing kit, right? Playing along to everything from Van Halen to Bitches Brew, right? Yeah.

And because of my cousin, Joe, Joe Lovano.

Joe.

Oh, Joe.

Joe got me on

Bitches Brew when I was young.

Great musician.

It's interesting.

In the mid-70s, we started to get a little bit this whole idea of jazz transfusion, right? And these jazz and rock coming together and Buddy Miles, of course, leading that road with Bitches Brew.

And it just became all of a sudden like jazz and rock started to...

Well, they started to fuse together.

Because they never changed who they were.

Miles Davis, no matter if it was kind of blue, Bitches Brew, or the stuff he did with Marcus Miller towards the end-

Yeah

...

And it, it takes a while for some things to grow on you.

Yeah.

Took me five years to figure out what was going on on Bitches Brew.

I listened to that.

It was a deliberate choice, constantly trying to refresh and challenge.

For example, the quintet, which created key albums like Bitches Brew, were built from a fusion of older, experienced prayers with a fresh angle, not least from a drummer, Tony Williams, who was only 17 when he joined the band.

It's this intersection and it's an approach which has served other artists equally well.

Paul Simon's reinvention of his style to embrace African rhythms and melodies in the album Graceland owes a great deal to his deliberate recruitment of local musicians, in particular Ladysmith Black Ambaso.

With almost rhythmic precision, he'd take apart a sound which critics and audience had come to love.

Yeah, every five years or so.

His changes, from his early days in the frenzied bebop world with which he began, through to cool jazz, the 1950s miles, through to the electric rock sprawl of Bitches Brew and beyond, these are running like waves of creative destruction across his music.

It wasn't a case of him running out of ideas.