Listen to This: Miles Davis and Bitches Brew by Victor Svorinich (review)

Miles Davis fans and scholars should rejoice. We now have a book that completes the set of works that account for the most important albums in Miles Davis’s career: Listen to This: Miles Davis and Bitches Brew, an excellent new volume that details the essence of the Bitches Brew album, written by Kean University professor Victor Svorinich. It complements two books about the events that went into the creation of the 1959 Kind of Blue, one by Ashley Kahn (Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece [New York: Da Capo, 2000]) and another by Eric Nisenson (The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and his Masterpiece [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000]). It also complements Frank Tirro’s wonderful analysis of the Davis Nonet sessions of 1948–50, dubbed “The Birth of the Cool” recordings (The Birth of the Cool of Miles Davis and His Associates (CMS Sourcebooks in American Music, no. 5) [Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2009]), Keith Waters’s book The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965–68 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Paul Tingen’s Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967–1991 (New York: Billboard Books, 2001).

Svorinich, taking numerous elements into account, eases readers into an understanding of how the finished versions of the music came about. His prodigious labors also help us perceive why the work is so important historically and aesthetically. The author conveys an appreciative knowledge and comprehension of the philosophy behind the sound of this music and is aided by his work as a musician and composer, in addition to being a fan.

Miles Davis is often considered to have been the most significant bandleader in jazz after Duke Ellington. Like Ellington, he was a savvy talent scout. Davis brought together great innovators at early stages in their careers. Several Davis-led recordings are revered by jazz musicians and have become staples in the record collections of jazz fans all over the world. Three separate sets of his recording sessions are generally rated among the most important in modern jazz: Birth of the Cool, Kind of Blue, and Bitches Brew. Unlike much of Ellington’s work, however, these Davis recording sessions contributed products so dissimilar that outsiders are often surprised that they came from the same bandleader. This is especially true when contrasting the music on Bitches Brew, from 1969, with the music on Kind of Blue, recorded ten years before. Even more dramatic is the difference between the music on Bitches Brew and the music from the Birth of the Cool sessions, which preceded the former by twenty years.

Of enormous value in this new book is the author’s edit-by-edit account of what actually occurred during and after each recording session. This is immensely revealing because extensive editing pervaded the Bitches Brew session tapes. Svorinich reports that “Most of the pieces on Bitches Brew are not brief. ‘Pharaoh’s Dance’ (20:04) and the title track (26:58) take up the first two sides. Most of these tracks, however, were recorded in small clumps and assembled later during post-production” (p. 46). Svorinich includes a sample of the careful thinking that went into editing when he reproduces a set of explicit instructions written by Davis and sent to producer Teo Macero (p. 106). In one such message the bandleader actually requests the repetition of a certain portion of one passage. He also orders Macero to combine passages from two different takes. Because of Svorinich’s detailed research, readers learn exactly what moments were stitched together, when, and by whom. This is important, in part, because these methods differed substantially from the method that Davis used in most of his previous bands’ recording sessions. In those cases he instructed the producer and engineer to record everything that happened in...