Miles Davis Bitches Brew!!!!

Jazz had long stood at the forefront of groundbreaking music: pushing new ideas into popular culture, worshipping the beat, the rhythm, the groove which stood quite simply for the disenfranchised and the downtrodden.

Yet by the summer of 1969 jazz felt out of step with a rapidly changing world. The civil rights movement had caused huge ruptures to open up across America, and jazz musicians were struggling for a means to express those feelings. Sure, outcasts and mavericks such as Albert Ayler may have strived to turn the anger and beauty of the ’60s into sharps and flats, but compared to the action in the streets those were timidly written artistic manifestos striving to equal the ferocity of a Molotov cocktail. Something had to be done.

Miles Davis virtually defined modern jazz on his ‘Kind Of Blue’ album, but seemed content to sit the ’60s out. Forming his second great quintet the trumpeter taunted his critics - eager for a return to the hushed modal jazz of his 1959 set - by pushing bebop out into unreached territory. Yet still the St. Louis-born musician chafed at the safeguards put on his playing. Introduced to the music of Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and James Brown by his then girlfriend Betty Davis, Miles began to focus on a new, intricate form of composition, which would test any conventional notion of jazz music.