Miles Davis – Bitches Brew

I spent some time comparing my copy of this original 1970 Santa Maria with the 1975 Terre Haute and the MoFi. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but I am. Now, the MoFi was the first stereo copy of BB that I ever bought on vinyl. It's awesome. I expected that one to win, but actually, this original won. It's got a bit more energy and snap than the MoFi, and it's cut louder, which I like.

By no means is the MoFi deficient; quite the opposite. That has a ton of excellent detail. Yet somehow this copy sounds just a bit fresher and more alive. The MoFi is smoothed off; this has more of an edge.

Plus the cover art here is better. A lot better. This is my favorite Miles album, and the original is the one to beat. Thrilled to have a copy of it!

Best release ever !! of all times !! ça fait plus de 20 ans que ce disque m'accompagne !! un régal à tout point de vue

Simply amazing. You have to hear this record with headphones on , it drags you in and blows you away.

I inherited a mint copy of this from my Dad's collection. This is a fantastic press! Vinyl is dead quiet and the mastering is very good. Worth picking up used if you can find one at a decent price.

apart from the 40th anniversary vinyl (coming in the box set) are there standalone LPs that use the ORIGINAL mix? 4 example the newest reissues called "we are vinyl" use the Macero or the Wilder mix?

Absolutely brilliant. Picked up my copy late 1971 and it is in regular listening rotation. Just watch the documentary "Mile Davis, Birth of Cool". Now I am listening to Spanish Key. Absolutely brilliant

Just a wonderful recording in so many ways. Not only can you 'picture' where the trumpet is in the soundscape, on certain tracks you can hear the way it is aimed.

CAN THIS HAPPEN? My copy of the LP album has 2 different labels on the two records. The first record (sides XSM 152412 and 13) has the black and white ink "2 eyes" "360 SOUND" labels. The second record (Sides XSM 152414 and 15) has the black and yellow ink with the word "COLUMBIA" 6 times around the edge, with "Eye" logos in between. I only own one copy, so I couldn't have accidentally switched them. Has anyone ever heard of this kind of thing?

Many talented musicians played on this record. It is regarded as a musical masterpiece by many. They say it grows on you. I found that it over-intelectualized the musical compositions on it to the point of the agonizing-like an ending that never ends at the end of the title track 'Bitches Brew.' Oh well. Joe Zawinul is also credited as playing on a number of tracks along with Chick Corea. I can hear Chick's playing-but I can't make out Zawinul's playing at all. Great album cover art by the same guy who did many brilliant album covers for the band Santana back in the 1970's. "Its not for jazz neophytes" pretty much covers it.

Fusion is either Jazz Rock or Rock Jazz.
This is Fusion's ostensible debut and it is Rock Jazz, that is, it is Jazz being Rock, whereas Ono's "Plastic Ono Band" is arguably Jazz Rock, that is, Rock being Jazz.
However, and curiously, No Wave / Punk Jazz (same thing) are idiomatically an Inversion of Fusion's goals and methods; Fusion is instrumental virtuosos and singers playing BETTER than World-Class Philharmonic professionals, with mega-prog hard-to-play erudition in impeccably recorded audiophile editions, while No-Wave / Punk Jazz is a coke-bottle-glasses-wearing college drop-out hitting a toilet with a segment of reinforcement bar or a Lower East Side dopesick Monobrow sweating into a saxophone recorded onto the very Consumer Cassette Tape you're listening to it on.
It's fascinating, in its brilliant brevity, when BAD BRAINS reveal their own Fusion Roots on their initial full-length, in a coda's conclusiv fermata that curls upward like wisps of intoxicating smoke.
The reason this BAD BRAINS reference is Germane with MILES is the fact that Fusion and No Wave/Punk Jazz are related but not musicologically contiguous. BAD BRAINS WERE a Fusion band and they wisely Regressed into a proto-virtuosic style, Punk, in a contemporaneous shift parallel to THE CONTORTIONS and New York, because at that time, in that context, it was the musical remedy to the excesses of glam, a de-hybridization, just as This album was a musical remedy to Cool Jazz and Mancini-ism, by embracing the hybrid, cream in the coffee.
Again curiously, in animal husbandry, a hybrid cannot procreate, just as Fusion may be an idiomatic dead-end, which could make Punk Jazz --which was falsely emulated by towering talents like Pastorius, again, an inversion because in his case it was the virtuoso, not the unproficient who commits fraud-- A Burro or a Jackass or a Donkey or Perhaps from Spanish, for its don-like gravity; the donkey was also known as "the King of Spain's trumpeter".