Bitches Brew  

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"Bitches Brew also pioneered the application of the studio as a musical instrument, featuring stacks of edits and studio effects that were an integral part of the music. Even though it sounded like an old-style studio registration of a bunch of guys playing some amazing stuff, large sections of it relied heavily on studio technology to create a fantasy that never was. Miles and his producer, the legendary Teo Macero, used the recording studio in radical new ways, especially in the title track and the opening track, "Pharaoh's Dance".


Bitches Brew is an album recorded by American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in 1969 and released in 1970. It also the name of a piece included in this album.

Recorded over the course of three days (August 19August 21 1969, immediately after the end of the Woodstock Festival), Bitches Brew incorporated electric instruments, such as electric piano and guitar, and mostly rejected traditional jazz rhythms in favor of a looser, rock-influenced improvisational style.

Post-production

Some might argue Teo Macero deserves much of the credit for Bitches Brew. His contributions were sometimes controversial, certainly important, and perhaps invaluable. His impact on the arranging and post-performance re-mixing of Davis' work validates the analogy: Teo Macero is to Miles Davis as George Martin was to The Beatles.

There was significant editing done to the recorded music. Short sections were spliced together to create longer pieces, and various effects were applied to the recordings. Enrico Merlin reports:

Bitches Brew also pioneered the application of the studio as a musical instrument, featuring stacks of edits and studio effects that were an integral part of the music. Miles and his producer, Teo Macero, used the recording studio in radical new ways, especially in the title track and the opening track, "Pharaoh's Dance". There were many special effects, like tape loops, tape delays, reverb chambers and echo effects. Through intensive tape editing, Macero concocted many totally new musical structures that were later imitated by the band in live concerts. Macero, who has a classical education and was most likely inspired by the 1930s and 1940s musique concrète experiments, used tape editing as a form of arranging and composition.
"Pharaoh's Dance" contains 19 edits – its famous stop-start opening is entirely constructed in the studio, using repeat loops of certain sections. Later on in the track there are several micro-edits: for example, a one-second-long fragment that first appears at 8:39 is repeated five times between 8:54 and 8:59. The title track contains 15 edits, again with several short tape loops of, in this case, five seconds (at 3:01, 3:07 and 3:12). Therefore, Bitches Brew not only became a controversial classic of musical innovation, it also became renowned for its pioneering use of studio technology.

This extensive editing was sometimes controversial in jazz circles as purists and detractors argued that jazz should be "spontaneous". But decades earlier trumpeter Louis Armstrong had quickly perceived the photographic nature of the audio recording, becoming the first musician to assemble a band solely for the purpose of recording it live in the studio.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Bitches Brew" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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