The shock of the Brew

Breakthrough or blind alley? Exotic or extraneous? Miles Davis's Bitches Brew sessions still divide the jazz house. Richard Cook hears a lavish new boxed set

Miles Davis was the most prolific of record-makers, but most know him for three touchstone albums: Sketches of Spain, Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew. To go from the first two to the third was an experience which was, when the original album was released in 1970, mind-blowing. Davis lost plenty of his charter audience with this one, a sea-change not unlike Dylan going electric or the Beatles getting psychedelic.

Instead of the pure, metallic beauty of Davis's hard bop, the trumpeter surrounded himself with multiple keyboards and percussion, electric guitar and unexpected woodwinds - bass clarinet and soprano sax. Sitar and tamboura players came in. The music looped on and on, or circled in on itself, the old 4/4 pulse of jazz dumped for a backbeat that the other rhythm players overlaid and multiplied. It may have lost him his Luddite fans, but it won him a new crowd, hooked by the kind of exoticism which many must have heard in the Grateful Dead's open-ended jams.

The release of The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions (Columbia) reshapes another slice of jazz controversy for armchair evaluation. Now spread across an extravagant four CDs, with lots of previously unheard chunks of what may have been hour after hour of studio time, the legacy is dreamlike, evanescent. Sometimes, as in the vituperative title piece, the ensemble reaches boiling point, and the sound becomes as confrontational as its reputation. But more typical are "Spanish Key", "Great Expectations" or "Recollections", explorations of mood and colour which the trumpeter oversees like some crotchety old vizier. Some of the unreleased tracks seem like sketches for a brilliant new music that never quite takes shape, even when they are stand-alone compositions. A feeling persists that Davis, his sidemen and producer Teo Macero were not really sure what the hell was going on much of the time. There is a sublime moment at the beginning of a piece called "Corrado" where Macero asks, in confusion, "Is this gonna be part two or, uh . . . ?", only to be cut off by Davis's imperious, "It's gonna be part nine! What's the difference, muthafucker?"

For all his career-long insistence that he was cursed by a compulsive need for change, Davis remains inimitably himself. The trumpeter who spells out the desolate melody that opens "Lonely Fire" is working the same emotions he had once opened up on "My Funny Valentine"; only the song doesn't remain the same. Although often deemed to be his Miles-goes-rock move, Bitches Brew hardly maps out the same ground as, say, Ten Years After. The drummers still play rimshots, and the other percussionists patter away in a vein that many years later marketeers would start to call worldbeat. More interesting is to reflect on to what extent other hands shaped this music. So much of it sounds like early Weather Report that one wonders if Joe Zawinul, who went straight from these sessions to leading that group, was an uncredited guide in the way that Bill Evans had been 11 years earlier on Kind of Blue.

As Davis himself might have said: what's the difference? Louder than everyone else in this digital remix, he leads these dense and jewelled sessions with a sound that was then much older than the clanking electric pianos and wah-wah guitar. Now it sounds like the only modern thing.

"The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions" (Columbia) is released on 23 November

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