Listening to Bitches Brew Summary

all the parts

Miles Davis’s big double-LP Bitches Brew (1969) is mysterious and hard to comprehend: as a sonic artifact, as a physical thing, as an event in musical history. One locked-down COVID summer, I listened attentively, through earbuds walking through the woods, and with my eyes closed through my big Klipsch speakers at home, on my laptop at work. I extended my reach to Miles’s recordings just before and after, and further back and forward, to live performances of the material on the record, and more. This series of articles chronicles my listening project, a case study in the effort to understand the ways that music makes us free.

Here’s an overview of all seven posts (including the sources). Learn all about — and revel in — the Groove Thicket, the use of immobilité harmonique and durée illimitée, Miles’s Deception Principle, the Recombinant Phenomenon, the Aural Penumbra, and Wayne Shorter’s revelation of WHAT MUSIC IS FOR!

1. As Icon and Performance

2. As Post-Performance Production and Physical Thing

3. As Recombinant Phenomenon (Whatever That Means)

4. Track-by-Track

5. The Aural Penumbra

6. As Evocation

7. Sources: Books and Records

8. A huge TIDAL playlist with a lot of the music discussed