Fusion: Where Rock and Jazz Shake Hands
In 1969 a rock music festival took place in Woodstock, NY attracting more than 400,000 people, just weeks after Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. Electronics and technology made both possible, and the undeniable popularity of rock music cast a long shadow over jazz. Noticing the chasm between the thriving culture of rock and roll and the withering jazz scene, Miles Davis took the job of opening act for bands like the Grateful Dead, and Santana at the famed Fillmore in San Francisco in 1970. Accepting pay cuts and second-tier billing, Davis was willing to make sacrifices to accomplish his goal of breathing life back into jazz by blending jazz with elements of rock and roll music.
Woodstock Poster
At these concerts Davis brought with him musicians adept in using the instruments found during a rock concert show - electronic keyboards and guitars, synthesizers and went into the recording studio to create Bitches Brew. Bitches Brew relied on tape and several of its tracks are composed by splicing together different recording sessions into a unique composition - one that actually never took place in the studio! Davis also electronically altered the sound of his trumpet, often by muting it and playing through a wah-wah pedal generally associated with guitars. Davis began to imbue his compositions with rock rhythms and funky bass lines that propelled the music in new directions.
"Pharaoh's Dance" uses a myriad of studio edits along with several special effects processing like echo, tape delay, looping, and reverberation. This recording is more similar to a piece of electronic music composed in an avant-garde classical manner than jazz and much credit needs to be given to Teo Macero, who was the producer for the session.
♫ 
Pharaoh's Dance
Miles Davis
Bitches Brew is an important early album that fused jazz with rock inspired elements and earned Davis his first gold album. Davis continued to form bands featuring a young musicians: John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Keith Jarrett, and Joe Zawinul - all of whom would later go on to successful solo careers. Tragically, this burst of activity was cut short. Davis became addicted to cocaine by the mid-70s, there was a serious car accident and a bad hip, surgeries to remove nodes from his larynx and general bad health from years of substance abuse was now catching up to him. Davis disappeared from public life and many thought he had died. Though Davis would reemerge, the winds of time were now blowing in a very different direction.
"Duke Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions in his lifetime as a Jazz band-leader, composer and pianist, including Jazz standards, film scores and classical works."
