Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in
American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of
jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain
access to Davis’s live recordings from this time, when he was working
with an ensemble that has come to be known as the Lost Quintet. In this
book, jazz historian and musician Bob Gluck explores the performances of
this revolutionary group—Davis’s first electric band—to illuminate the
thinking of one of our rarest geniuses and, by extension, the
extraordinary transition in American music that he and his fellow
players ushered in.
Gluck listens deeply to the
uneasy tension between this group’s driving rhythmic groove and the
sonic and structural openness, surprise, and experimentation they were
always pushing toward. There he hears—and outlines—a fascinating web of
musical interconnection that brings Davis’s funk-inflected sensibilities
into conversation with the avant-garde worlds that players like Ornette
Coleman and John Coltrane were developing. Going on to analyze the
little-known experimental groups Circle and the Revolutionary Ensemble,
Gluck traces deep resonances across a commercial gap between the
celebrity Miles Davis and his less famous but profoundly innovative
peers. The result is a deeply attuned look at a pivotal moment when
once-disparate worlds of American music came together in explosively
creative combinations.
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