In August 1969, Miles Davis and his band spent three days holed up in a studio in Manhattan before emerging with a sprawling, improvised album that sounded like nothing else that had come before. It was the soundtrack to a society in flux, arriving in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, widespread anti-Vietnam war protests and the hippie optimism of Woodstock, which ended the day before they started recording. Influenced by the psychedelic rock of Jimi Hendrix and the funk and soul of Sly and the Family Stone, Davis was taking jazz somewhere new. He wanted to call his spooky, wildly experimental record ‘Witches Brew’. His then-wife (and future-funk diva) Betty Davis had a better idea. “I suggested ‘Bitches Brew’,” she recalled later. “He said: ‘I like that.’”
When it was released in March 1970, ‘Bitches Brew’ divided critics. While many praised the album’s rich, expressive musicality, some purists reacted in much the way folk fans had to Bob Dylan ‘going electric’ in 1965: by accusing Davis of betraying the genre he’d done so much to shape. Half a century on ‘Bitches Brew’ now stands as a landmark of avant garde jazz. It continues to have a mind-altering effect on new generations of musicians, with an influence felt across hip-hop, house, electronica and drum and bass. Martin Terefe, a producer whose 29-year career has seen him work with everyone from Yusuf Islam to KT Tunstall and Yungblud, first heard the record when he was 16. “Three decades later, I still want to put it on,” he says. “Every time you listen to it your brain takes another journey through the music. That makes you feel really free, as a musician. It’s liberating.”
Ahead of the album’s 50th anniversary, Terefe was part of a team planning a tribute concert in London. “It started as an idea to celebrate ‘Bitches Brew’ at the Barbican,” he explains. Of course, the 2020 pandemic soon put paid to those best laid plans. “I was a bit bummed out,” he adds.
The Collected Works of Kevin EG Perry 