Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew at 50: “Aphex Twin, Brian Eno, Portishead, Flying Lotus and Joni Mitchell have all cited the album as an influence, while Radiohead’s OK Computer was directly inspired by it”

The Bitches Brew 50th anniversary on March 30 is worth celebrating since the reverberations following its release are still being felt today. Bob Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 was nothing compared to the impact Davis made with Bitches Brew. For a start its cover art made a startling visual statement with Mati Klarwein’s frightening extraterrestrial Nubians making a break with any Davis album of the past. The music made an even more powerful statement. Several musicians had been experimenting with combining the electronic tone colours and rhythms of rock, but such was Davis’ stature in jazz firmament that he single-handedly sanctioned these developments and effectively opened a new chapter in the history of the music.

You only have to look at American man-of-letters Stanley Crouch venting his spleen on Davis for supping with the devil in the inexcusably bad final episode of the Ken Burns documentary Jazz from 2001 to get a sense of outrage it caused for some – and this was 31 years after its release. Yet at the time there were major gatekeepers of jazz culture who welcomed the album – Downbeat magazine gave the album its top five star rating saying: “Though electronic effects are prominent, art not gimmickry prevails… Miles has given us the music and that’s all we need.” While Rolling Stone magazine put it this way: “Miles’ music continues to grow in its beauty, subtlety and sheer magnificence. Driven forward by a creative élan unequalled in the history of American music, he incorporates each successive triumph into the next leap forward.”

In the liner notes for Bitches Brew, written by Ralph J. Gleason, the distinguished critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, there was some remarkably clear-headed advice for the jazz public, “I don’t mean you can’t listen to Ben [Webster] play ‘Funny Valentine’, he said. “Until the end of the world it will be beautiful. [Bitches Brew] is not more beautiful, it’s just different.” It’s a view some of the album’s harshest critics failed to take heed of. He also pointed out that Bitches Brew was on “the edge of newness [with] that snapping fire you sense when you go out there from the spaceship where nobody has been before.” That pathfinder feel is still apparent today; in a 1997 interview with 5/4 magazine, drummer Bobby Previte said: “How much groundbreaking music do you hear now? It was music that you had that feeling you never heard quite before. It came from another place.”

At the time of its release in 1970 Bitches Brew’s influence was immediate, musicians who played on the session were empowered by the new spirit of the age; Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter went on to form Weather Report, John McLaughlin formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Chick Corea formed Return to Forever. Herbie Hancock formed the Headhunters, Joe Henderson recorded Black Is The Color, Larry Young recorded Lawrence of Newark, Donald Byrd recorded Electric Byrd and Santana recorded Lotus.

Today, there is no shortage of musicians basking in its aurora such as Cassandra Wilson’s Electric Miles; Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith’s Yo Miles; Bill Frisell’s Unspeakable; Ben Monder’s The Distance; and Craig Taborn’s Junk Magic. Other ensembles have been empowered by the spirit of Bitches Brew such as Bobby Previte’s Voodoo Orchestra, The Bitches Brew Band playing out of Boston, and David Fiuczynski’s Screaming Headless Torsos. It has also left its mark on popular culture – Aphex Twin, Tricky, Brian Eno, Can, Portishead, Flying Lotus, and Joni Mitchell have all cited the album as an influence while Radiohead’s OK Computer was directly inspired by it.

Bitches Brew would represent Davis’ last great achievement in jazz. Never again would he turn himself, and the music of his time, inside out. He remained on the scene for another five years, and took a furlough from jazz until his much publicised comeback in 1981 when the heights he once conquered remained firmly behind him. It left Bitches Brew as the last epoch making album to appear in jazz, and it is astonishing how its lustre has never dimmed in the intervening years. It is indeed an anniversary worth celebrating – it’s the last great classic album from jazz’s Golden Age.

Trumpeter Nick Walters pays tribute to Miles' iconic album at the Jazz Cafe, Camden on 30 March