I’ve got Miles Davis on my mind this week, as we prepare for drummer, composer and bandleader Bobby Previte’s Monday, October 7 homecoming gig at the Sportsmen’s Tavern, with his Bitches Brew Band – a curated roster of heavy hitters on the Buffalo jazz scene, including Jared Tinkham, Harry Graser, John Bacon, Matt Incontro, Joe Goehle and Griff Kazmierczak.
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(You can check out my Why Music Matters with Jeff Miers podcast interview with Bobby below, if you’d like to know a bit about where his idea-filled head is at these days.)
As far as where my own head is at, well, it’s filled with the music Miles and his compatriots made at Columbia Studios in New York City on those two fateful days in August of 1969 – the music that would become Bitches Brew, and album that full earn the sobriquet game-changing masterpiece.
Why obsess over music recorded so long ago? Surely, it can’t have any relevance in the present day, right? Why not let it go?
Well, I just can’t shake this music off my back. I’ve never been able to, from the first moment I heard it, as an 11 year-old in the 6th grade at a school in Clifton Park, NY, where my family had just moved from rural Massachusetts. I’m not sure I realized at the time how damn cool my most likely underpaid and undervalued elementary school music teacher was for attempting to turn a classroom full of sniffling ingrates on to the charms of not just James Taylor and Carol King (easy to love, I’d already heard them), but to the much more complex, dark and tangled world of the Who’s Tommy and Miles’ Bitches Brew.
Tommy, I took to instantly, having been a Beatles fanatic from the time I could first form an independent thought. The album seemed akin to the Fabs’ Abbey Road in my nascent imagination, with a bit more bombast, which was appealing then, and remains so now. I interpreted the Who as ‘heavy Beatles,’ and I loved it.
Bitches Brew was another story, however. It scared the hell out of me.
In retrospect, I’m a bit surprised that my music teacher – her name escapes me, sadly, but I can still see her face, and I’m pretty sure I had a bit of a 6th grade crush on her, in no small part due to the fact that she was clearly enraptured by the sounds she was sharing – chose to introduce this music to the class by dropping the needle on side 4, rather than side 1. That meant that the first sound I heard was the tandem dislocated drum groove offered by Jack DeJohnette and Don Alias, followed quickly by an ominous bass ostinato played by either Harvey Brooks or Dave Holland, heralding the arrival of “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down.”
For the next 13 minutes, my still-fragile eggshell mind was blown. What was this sultry, menacing music, this sonic melange that offered the aural equivalent of a solitary walk through a dense jungle at night, sounds emerging from the darkness like ill portents, while the trumpet exulted in the danger and risk, as if doing so was its natural role in the order of things? Was this jazz? It certainly didn’t sound like my mother’s Modern Jazz Quartet albums, or even that record that had afforded me my only previous exposure to Miles Davis, the compendium Miles Davis Greatest Hits, and what I guess must’ve been Mom’s favorite track on it, “My Funny Valentine.”
No. This was something far different. This music didn’t sound like it was made to entertain the listener. It felt confrontational. As if it really didn;t care whether or not you liked it.
The years since have taught me that it’s the very albums that at first seem off-putting to our sensibilities that end up having the deepest impact. That has certainly been the case with me and Bitches Brew. I’ve been listening to the album for some 40 years, and am still finding new wrinkles, new nooks and crannies of sound, new conceptions of improvisation, and new notions of what ‘freedom’ means in the context of music. How many albums can we honestly and authentically make that claim for?
Every musician involved in those two days of recording in 1969 – particularly Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea and Dave Holland – now numbers among my list of personal favorites, and I’ve grown to know and love all of their post- and pre-Miles catalogs.
And every time I drop the needle on side 4, the opening 30 seconds of ‘“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” still sends a delicious shiver down my spine…
Miles Davis.
“Immediate Family” and “The Wrecking Crew” films w/ director Denny Tedesco LIVE
Saturday, October 5, 7 pm and 9:30 pm screening at North Park Theatre, Buffalo, NY
I grew up reading Guitar Player Magazine, long before I even owned a guitar, to saying nothing of devoting my life to the instrument. So I knew Niagara Falls native Tommy Tedesco’s smiling face before I even realized that he was the most recorded session guitarist of the 1950s and 1960s, with a resume that included, among hundreds upon hundreds of other recordings, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Tommy’s ‘Studio Log’ column appeared in the magazine every month, and he detailed his life as a session guitarist, an occupation that seemed so exotic and incredibly cool to young me. (It’s incredibly cool to old me, too.) The guy gave great advice, and it’s advice I turn to often still, after 40 years spent with a guitar in my hands for at least an hour a day.
It’s been incredibly cool to watch Tommy’s son, the film director Denny Tedesco, build an amazing career. Denny’s first film, The Wrecking Crew, documented the working lives of his father and his father’s friends, who happened to form the greatest session band of the 50s and 60s.
Denny’s new film, Immediate Family, picks up where The Wrecking Crew left off, and tells the story of the studio band known as The Section – guitarist Danny Kortchmar, bassist Leland Sklar, drummer Russ Kunkel and guitarist Waddy Wachtel, who were the go-to cats for the artists behind so many timeless records from the 70s and 80s, among them masterworks by Carol King, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Warren Zevon, Phil Collins, Linda Ronstadt and Keith Richards, and so many others.
Denny will be in town for this Immediate Family screening at the North Park Theatre, which will also include a showing of The Wrecking Crew, following a live Q & A, moderated by yours truly. See you there!
Thursday, October 3 – Sunday, October 6, Cherry Hill Campground, Darien Center, NY
This year’s full lineup:Consider the Source, Lightnin’ Luke (Artist at Large), Folkfaces, The Plate Scrapers, DiTrani Brothers, Joe’s Truckstop, Sally Babys Silver Dollars, The Bandit Queen of Sorrows, The Crybabies, Cory Grinder & the Playboy Scouts, Hypnotic Clambake, Hunter Burgamy, Dwight Hawkins, Isto, Steel City Jug Slammers, Annie and the Fur Trappers, Well Worn Boot, Billy Scribbles, Flying Object, Cammy Enaharo, Slyboots Circus, C’est Bon Cajun Dance Band, The Steam Donkeys, St. Vith, The Mustard Tigers, Leftover Stew, Tyler Bagwell & Sally Schaefer, The Beard and the Bird, Dr. Jazz & the Jazzbugs, Joseph Elliott Trudgeon, Adam the Traveling Pianist, Shaun Jones, Plant Water, a square dance with Jim Kimball & Geneseo Stringband, and a Sunday Songwriter Circle with Brian Thomas, Tom Robert, Adrianna Noone, Walter, and Julia Monica (of Aperature).
Get your tickets, scope the daily schedule, and explore camping options here.
Saturday, October 5, 1:30 pm at Ciminelli Recital Hall (3rd Floor of Rockwell Hall) at Buffalo State University, Buffalo. $20/BSU Student: FREE Get tickets here.
“Victor Wooten, a five-time Grammy Award-winning artist, has graced the cover of Bass Player Magazine five times. He is a founding member of the eclectic group Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and is recognized as one of the greatest living bassists today, and was named one of the ‘Top ten bassist of all time’ by Rolling Stone Magazine. He is also an award-nominated author, naturalist, and music educator and has been running his unique music/nature camps since the year 2000. Wooten’s camps are held at his own Wooten Woods, which is just outside of Nashville.”
