Miles Davis/Bitches Brew Appreciation

Also, please forgive me if this topic has been created before; I didn't want to dig too deep and revive a thread from months or years back. Just a new guy on the forums who loves progressive music in all forms!  I'm sure you guys have beaten this album to death - but I'm curious to know your thoughts on this undeniable classic?

PrognosticMind wrote: ... I've grown to love surrealism and abstract art quite a bit over the last year and a half, and I think that just might have something to do with my ears opening up a bit. ... Also, please forgive me if this topic has been created before; I didn't want to dig too deep and revive a thread from months or years back. Just a new guy on the forums who loves progressive music in all forms!  I'm sure you guys have beaten this album to death - but I'm curious to know your thoughts on this undeniable classic?

Welcome.

I have, for 50 years, been a massive fan of surrealism, and enjoyed tremendously the work of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.  The hard part of that was that it has not translated to music very well, and too many music folks think that dissonance is the only version of surrealism you can have on the stage/floor or LP. It's like saying only Ionesco is surrealistic and the originals were simply idiots just fooling around with any thoughts and ideas possible.

The fact of the matter is, and it is very visible in theater and film with acting exercises in rehearsal, that the oddities that can be done in rehearsal, are a VERY GOOD helper and "teacher" as to what an actor can do and learn, if he/she is so receptive. MY IDEA is that the majority of musicians are NOT COMFORTABLE with their craft, enough to play with it and learn something else!

We live in such a "controlled" society setup and vision and education, that I am not sure that it is possible for the social concensus to accept the "anarchy" and "freedom" that experimentalists and "artists" often tend to use to bring about their own craft. AND, of course, many folks hate it, and find it this and that and this and that along the way, no different than they did with a blade going across an eye, or a film maker creating images that some folks find offensive to their own social conditioning.

It's a difficult topic, that would require some more work, but some folks will use one song from a band's catalogue of 100 and say that it is surrealistic (ie Genesis in TLLDOB) and it wasn't. It was merely a representation of a moment in time for the "story" of the album, that you can bring out from the multitude of words on it. Confusion ... !!!

This, for all intents and purpoises, is best visible in comedy, and specially the English segment in the 50's on the BBC with THE GOONS, who did not have television, and Spike Milligan devised sound effects that STILL live in the BBC Library for their incredible creativity, if not weird names ... sock full of custard thrown at the wall ... and the famous thousands of miles to the east and Africa speeding up the sound ... the kind of mind stretching imagination that goes side by side with surrealism, though we consider Spike Milligan's vision "eccentric" and we don't consider Bunuel or Dali eccentric, but surrealistic, and I think it's the same thing ... in a different country!

All in all, and it also goes, SPECIALLY, with "progressive", there is a huge fear of the unknown, and the experiment. FOR ME, it feels like they will do 5 minutes and be proud of their invention ... like a kid you could say ... but there are some interesting folks that are not afraid, and I am not sure that most of them are in the PROGRESSIVE field at all. By the time you hear a Gismonti, a Jarrett, a Garbarek, a Rypdal ... the idea of "progressive" and "surrealistic" is so alive, that people lose interest and would rather believe their Cliff Notes version of the Bible than actually catch/see the real thing at work!

But, by the time you take Peter Hammill, in his long piece (Gog and Magog I think it was), you have a concern. Where does it start and end? And how do you define it? Or is this just an exercise in how maddeningly angry you feel about something or other that you will flip all the knobs regardless of what happens? Would that be considered "experimental" or "surrealistic" and by the original definition by the Manifesto, the answer is ... NO ... it is not surrealistic, and I think a lot of rock music falls into that area.

I actually find that some of the tripping that is found in "krautrock" and in the SF/Fillmore style of concerts a lot more surrealistic than what was done later in London. And this was true of the theater and film traditions as well. Jean -Luc Godard was already crazy and surrealistic way before any of these folks were! But music was too far behind.

And yes, Miles' piece is magnificent, however, I still think this falls more into the "individuality" idea of experimentation and feeling, than it does into a format like "surrealism". In so many ways, I think of Steve Howe, for example, as a Miles Davis with a guitar, going left and right on the scales, and turning obtuse angles to get some really nifty sounds and odd ball relationships within the music, that make it very interesting and enjoyable. But is it surrealistic? I think not, but I will admit that I am trying to differentiate between a "mind" choice and an "intuitive" choice, which for me are two completely different things.

And this is VERY visible in writing, because you can separate the two. Hesse (Steppenwolf), Castaneda (many of the books) and others.