I'm ashamed of myself: I've been writing this blog for three months and I've never written about a jazz album. I've been pulling out a classic lately - Bitches Brew by Miles Davis is still one of the wildest, most creative, and beautifully confounding things I've ever heard.
The opening track, "Pharaoh's Dance", is a acid jazz journey that can keep you in a trance for twenty minutes. The clamoring keyboards and drums drive a blasting trumpet climax that catches me by surprise every time. The title track, which is even longer, creeps around the chorus, builds, falls apart, and then repeats all of that a few times.
The second disc contains four cuts that are slightly less daring. "Miles Runs The Voodoo Down" touches on funk but maintains the hazy acid spirit of the rest of the record. "Sanctuary" closes the album on a hauntingly beautiful note.
Even if you don't like jazz, you need to experience this one. It doesn't surprise me that this album is said to have inspired the likes of Pink Floyd more than it inspired any jazz musician. Buy this one alongside Charles Mingus' The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady. Then let me know if you don't have some kind of emotional out-of-body experience.
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2 comments:
Weirdly enough, Bitches Brew was the first jazz record I owned, and I have a lot of affection for it. And The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, for some reason, always reminds me of the score for "Taxi Driver" (this is a good thing).
On a side note, instead of "Even if you don't like jazz...", you should have said, "If you don't like jazz, I will stab you." Because there are only two respectable kinds of people: those who love jazz, and those who have not yet listened to enough jazz, but plan to enlighten themselves. Everyone else is full of fail.
Music: "I like everything except country and rap"
Anybody who writes the above statement is my enemy. I hate you and I wish for your death. If you have ever written that, please kill yourself. There is no joke here, only your suicide and my satisfaction.
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