Miles Davis - Bitches Brew (1970 Japanese CBS/Sony SONP 50255~6 2xLP)

Miles Davis - Bitches Brew | 2 x Vinyl LP - 1970 CBS/Sony Japan (SONP 50255~6, SX68Sound, gatefold)

• Recorded over three days at Columbia Studio B in New York, August 19-21, 1969, with three electric pianos, three drummers, electric and acoustic bass, electric guitar, soprano saxophone and bass clarinet. Produced by Teo Macero.
• The personnel list doubles as a founding document for jazz fusion: Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul (Weather Report), Chick Corea (Return to Forever), John McLaughlin (Mahavishnu Orchestra), Larry Young (Tony Williams Lifetime), Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Lenny White, Bennie Maupin, Harvey Brooks and Airto’s percussionist Jumma Santos.
• 1970 Japanese pressing on CBS/Sony in the SX68Sound series, gatefold sleeve with Mati Klarwein cover art and Japanese liner notes. Same year as the US release.

The first session started at ten in the morning on August 19, 1969, one day after Woodstock ended. Miles set the musicians up in a half-circle in Columbia’s Studio B, with himself and Wayne Shorter in the middle, and they played “Bitches Brew” first. The full piece runs twenty-seven minutes across the entire second side. Teo Macero kept the tapes rolling and later cut, looped and spliced the raw material into shape. That editing process is as much a part of the record’s sound as anything the musicians played. “Pharaoh’s Dance” opens the album at twenty minutes, with Zawinul, Corea and Larry Young playing electric piano simultaneously over interlocking patterns from DeJohnette, Don Alias and Lenny White on drums. Harvey Brooks, a rock bassist who had played with Bob Dylan and the Electric Flag, doubles Dave Holland on Fender bass. Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet provides the low-end colour that a saxophone section would in a conventional big band. McLaughlin’s guitar darts in and out.

Side C pairs “Spanish Key”, the most groove-driven thing here at seventeen and a half minutes, with the four-minute “John McLaughlin”, a feature for the guitarist. Side D gives “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” fourteen minutes and closes with “Sanctuary”, a slower, more spacious piece that points back toward In a Silent Way. Every musician on this record went on to define some corner of jazz in the 1970s. Shorter and Zawinul formed Weather Report. Corea started Return to Forever. McLaughlin built the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Young was already deep into Lifetime with Tony Williams. Holland and DeJohnette became touchstones for the ECM generation. The album went gold, the first jazz record to do so, and was later inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. Mati Klarwein painted the cover. Ralph J. Gleason wrote the liner notes. This copy is the 1970 Japanese pressing on CBS/Sony in the SX68Sound series, in gatefold sleeve.