On March 30, 1970 Columbia Records released Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and in doing so one door opened while another door closed. As he had been at the turn of the previous two decades, Miles was again on the scene, integrally involved in defining the new jazz paradigm, setting out the electronic rules of the road which soon-to-be icons such as Weather Report, Lifetime, The Mahavishnu Orchestra and all the others would greedily pick up and light beam forward. The development was ferocious and cathartic for some and in equal measure, distressing and rife with portent of musical doom for many serious jazz fans, musicologists and critics. These folk had already emphatically spoken their piece back during the mid-sixties when Trane was claimed to have lost his way and in so doing had led the music astray. Now, for better or for worse the newest thing was the new thing and Miles, as usual, led that charge.
For many fans Miles’ great accomplishment was in throwing open the doors and allowing the disinfecting sun to shine in, burnishing a path for all the bright and shiny effects that were to come. And what a towering achievement it was. Bitches Brew was rooted in bebop and cool jazz, west coast and hard bop and soul jazz and acoustic jazz and all of the schools that had come before like Dixieland and hot and swing. The good news being that the foundational legacies of Satchmo and Duke and Bix Beiderbecke and Fletcher Henderson and Cab, Benny Goodman and Count and the like were reinforced and made safe from the ravages of time, style and obsolescence. From Bitches Brew’s branches sprung Grover Washington, Jr, the Brecker Brothers, the “new” Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, as well as all of the cats that Creed Taylor propelled forward at CTI and all the others who would father contemporary jazz – the damnation of music, or so it has been said and fully accepted by some.
Upon hearing it some danced, others cried, while many laughed and partied and made love and celebrated in the streets. Bitches Brew had that effect. It was huge, massive, a roiling, churning, surging, exhilarating mass of sound and fully released energy that established a signalpost and provided guidance and was determinative in this way: All previous predictions of where the music was going were now null and void. Bitches Brew knew the way. Bitches Brew was the way. Down its path was enlightenment and encouragement and it was found to be good. As for those who felt otherwise, well, they just didn’t matter. And that is what happened in 1970. In 1969, however…
I was 15 years old in 1969 and Mama Ernie was killin’ it, keeping the joint jumping with good ones such as Repeat After Me from The Three Sounds’ album, Soul Symphony and Lonnie Smith’s Move Your Hands from the album of the same name, all mixed in with the devastatingly mouth-watering smell of greens, pork chops and corn bread wafting in from the kitchen. Detroit was on the mend from it’s season of spasmodic temporary anarchy that had set the city’s nightscape afire only two years earlier and now the jazz being broadcast on WCHD-FM seemed to match the sense of the Motor City’s struggling revival. Less rooted in what had come before, the music, as did the city, seemed sunnier and if possible, more optimistic – promising – as if something nice was on the verge of happening.
In 1969 Quincy Jones was not the Quincy Jones we now know. This was obviously long before he hooked up with Michael Jackson and Rod Temperton and made history. Well before he brought together rappers Ice T, Kool Moe Dee, Melle Mel and Big Daddy Kane, inventing Back On The Block along the way, becoming one of, if not the first mainstream jazz dude to successfully meld jazz and hip hop.
In his lead-up to ’69 Q had been busy producing movie soundtracks as well as all four of Lesley Gore’s million-selling singles: It’s My Party, blah-blah-blah. Then, in June of that year Q went Walking In Space, producing the smash crossover hit, Killer Joe. That monster lit my ass on fire! I inhaled Killer Joe and what spat out of me was baby …sloe walker, riding shotgun on the soul jazz express. Motown was king in those days, however, if you wanted to swing you tuned into WCHD. As far as I was concerned Detroit had only one radio station worth dialing into and I was there!
I can’t remember if the summer of ’69 was a particularly hot one. I want to accurately make note of it, but I just can’t be sure of it now although I could Google it (that wouldn’t be fair). They usually were you know? And muggy. Hot and muggy. My senior status memory will not allow for unassisted total weather recall but I know what was hot that summer. That year an unknown band out of Chicago featuring one poppa-stoppa Sonny Burke and his sinister organ, wrung every drop of soul-jazz sweat out of an old Beatles song. Damn right! Hey Jude, as rendered by Clarence Wheeler and the Enforcers was smoking and CHD stamped its own prized imprimatur all over that bad boy. It was in heavy rotation.
If Killer Joe set me on the path, Hey Jude urged me down the road. Now more than ever before I was tuned into the goodness happening on CHD.
I got turned onto Les McCann when Mama Ernie brought home Much Les and proceeded to play With These Hands with religious-like fervor. I’m telling you she wore out the grooves on that bad boy. Hands didn’t do much for me at first listening, but as moms continued the McCann torrent it began to take hold. Even though he had won a Navy singing contest leading to an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Les was no Tennyson Stephens. I was like, “who told this guy he could sing in the first place?” Then in June of that year, Les and Eddie Harris of the Exodus-no respect-Eddie Harris, recorded Compared To What with Les warbling again and dropped it from the Swiss Movement album. It was a revelation. Me, my younger brother Marc and godbrother Tony (today he’s John now that he’s grown and all serious like most of us other aching back OGs), we would sing along with Les the line: “Possession is the motivation that is hangin’ up the goddamn nation,” at the tops of our lungs which never failed to cause Tony’s pop – my godfather - to cackle like an unhinged crazy thing.
Right around that same time I became aware, I mean eyes and ears wide open, tingly senses aware of Herbie Hancock with the release of Tell Me A Bedtime Story. Little did I realize Herb had been helping to reprogram our jazz appreciation gene along with Miles and his second great quintet. Watermelon Man has long since entered the jazz canon and I was hip to it of course, however, it never occurred to me back then to put two and two together. I never correlated the man with the music. More than the fact that Bedtime Story was in CHD heavy rotation along with Jude, Killer and Compared To What, what did it for me and some of the other hip youngbloods was its parent album being Fat Albert’s Rotunda. In my neighborhood Fat Albert was everyone’s favorite cousin, and a husky lad such as myself had even more reason to relate to Large Alberto. Bedtime Story was hey-hey-hey clean outta sight!
On the other hand life in the Motor City was not all beer and skittles. Did I mention I grew up in Detroit where Motown was king? Being a 15-year-old jazz buff meant living a semi-hermitic existence, at least from a musical perspective. What then to say about all the intellectuals who sneeringly looked down with jaundiced eye on soul jazz and whatever else stood for contemporary jazz in that time, staking out the position that the music may swing, it may have a beat, but it wasn’t saying anything. Even worse: the magniloquent blatherskite from critics cursed with their own heightened sense of immaculate noblesse renouncing those halcyon days with their snooty didactics. For instance, I recently read a scalding review of The Many Facets Of David Newman, giving it a dismissive three-star back of its hand. Don’t care. Featuring Children Of Abraham, I dug it in ’69. Still do.
And so the wind blows.
You’ve noticed by now that most of my references here are to soul jazz releases or of similar ilk. Meanwhile, the straight-ahead and free jazz cats were out there doing their thing, of course. In fact Trane’s old right hand, Pharoah Sanders, dropped Karma, its psychic center being the 32 minute epic, The Creator has a Master Plan, although I kinda favor Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah from his Jewels Of Thought album, both, ‘69 releases. However, I didn’t become hip to either of them until much later while in the Air Force and in the thrall of a dialed-in soul brother (DIS-B) from Harbor City, California (more from him later). After all I was only 15 in 1969 as I mentioned before. What the hell did I know?
As I scratch out this particular blog I am reminded why I was inspired to do so in the first place. See, for me jazz is not merely some intellectual exercise. As I value it, its all about the emotions and memories it evokes. I pity the fool critic who can only understand and appreciate jazz as something bordering on a mathematical equation. Performed correctly and in accordance with their learned dictates and within painstakingly established guardrails; a precise progression of notes and chords, changes and modalities.
I suggest that many writers, critics and musicologists have spent so much time learning how to write well and cogently about the subject matter that they have forgotten how to just feel the music, or the importance, at given times, of simply feeling the music. Allowing it to marshal whatever your head is telling you is happening, paying mind instead to what your heart is telling you it is feeling. The way we non-critics absorb the music and make purchase decisions.
That is why fusion, and yes, smooth contemporary jazz remain culturally relevant. They too have a story to tell, just as real and sustaining as your most recent breath.
Just who, the musicologists would then argue, would waste valuable time examining feelings in relation to understanding what precisely makes for good jazz? It’s all about dedicated, hard-nosed scholarship and having the fortitude and wizardry to explain in diverse company how Duke’s relative lack of education left him compositionally out to lunch (thank God for St. Billy of Strayhorn). And truly mean it.
Gary Giddins is a venerable and venerated jazz critic and I dig him. Here is what he once wrote: “Most of us become critics because we venerate critics. We try and measure up.” Not me. I’m well aware of my shortcomings. For that reason my intent is simply to share what the music means to me in straightforward terms and then go have lunch.
Accordingly, I’m no bother to the critics. I’m easy prey for those rapier wits armed with their rhetorical flourishes, data points and muscular liberal arts degrees. They have merely to wave their harrumphing ‘I am a serious writer’ ensign at me and I’ll topple over like a soused uncle. I am to Giddins and his learned brethren what an over-cooked hot dog is to Kobiashi: ya burnt!
Many of the critics, especially the white oracles (not intended as a pejorative no matter what you think), dismissed out-of-hand Miles in his 70’s incarnation, especially the album In The Corner, due to having no practical point of reference in which to measure this man and this artistry. They didn’t know, could never understand life in the streets. Miles did, from Beverly Hills to eastside Detroit and could turn the day-to-day into beautiful music. That in part is why Miles was great. Bitches Brew synthesized all the pain, all the joy, all the life we brothers and sisters were experiencing at the turn of that epochal decade, making 1969 a touchstone memory in addition to being a path forward, and frankly, for me, joyous to reflect upon.
Give a listen to the playlist, …sloe walker’s 1969, at the bottom of the sidebar on this page and feel me
