Every day, there’s a pile of hype in my inbox; this album and/or that event is either groundbreaking, incredible, the perfect response to a cultural moment, one-of-a-kind, (the unfortunate) “genre-fluid,” a best-of-the-year, or some other superlative. That goes with the territory, I’m a music critic and publicity material is trying to get my attention and get me to listen. As someone who writes the occasional press release (contact me for my rates!) I know that this all starts with the eyes, something that keeps you reading and then gets you to the next step of listening. This is a real challenge, because there’s so much music that comes out every week, and it’s impossible to listen to it all, much less sample it all—music takes literal time and there are only so many hours in the day/week/year left over after the basic necessities of living and trying to earn a living (and the life of a freelance writer means that last takes up far more time than for anyone with a comparable staff position).
This is why I scan all this with a sense of humor and gentle skepticism. I do not literally expect any of these new recordings to live up to the hype—some do—and so I listen to them on their own terms. There are some exceptions though. Some records come with such astonishing and hubristic claims that, if I get to listen to them, it’s not just to the music as it is, but to how well it matches that hype. As the Sagan Standard goes, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (it seems that though Carl Sagan popularized the phrase, it appears to have been born in the early 19th century), and after decades of experience making music and encountering it, I am a very, very tough customer.
Concord Records is selling a new album, London Brew, as “Inspired by Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew,” made by a group “Comprised of a veritable who’s who of some of the most important and innovative musicians of the 21st century.” The producer, Bruce Lampcov, is quoted as saying “This record was inspired by Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, shaped by the trials of a global pandemic, and created with the exceptional talents of London’s finest musicians.”
Okay then. Better known and more prestigious outlets than the humble but excellent paper you hold in your hands supplied plenty of blurbs to the press material (i.e., they had a hand in promoting London Brew). MOJO said, “It’s a kind of jazz—on an ambitious scale, drawing dark beauty from chaos—it would be nice to hear more than twice a century.”; The Wire (which I write for fairly regularly) commented, “The success of London Brew isn’t in trying to emulate the original Brew but in inspiring the players to live up to the concept. The album feels both of the original vintage in its occasional psychedelic trappings and, masterfully, altogether new.”; and the Grey Lady on Manhattan Island declared it a “Genre-hopping experimentation that blurs the lines between rock, jazz and ambient, sometimes within the scope of one song.”
To be fair to the Times, the blurb is accurate description of some of the music (though the rest of the feature article praises the quality of the music) with one glaring and vital exception: “experimentation.” London Brew is a lot of things, most of them middling but, as someone who literally wrote a book on it (Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, Bloomsbury) it is in no way experimental and, because of that, completely opposite what Bitches Brew is all about. This is not just fanboy grievance; Bitches Brew is a landmark work of musical art that has been both highly praised and, with rare exceptions, misunderstood. London Brew reeks of that misunderstanding.
Bitches Brew, particularly the first LP with “Pharaoh’s Dance” and the title track on opposite sides, is one of the most uncompromising records ever made, a best seller and cultural icon that is far more daring and experimental than almost every bit of self-conscious avant-gardism of the fifty years that followed. Miles went into the studio with some material but no determined outcome, and the musicians who played on those two tracks had no idea what they were making—neither Joe Zawinul nor Bennie Maupin recognized the album when they heard it playing after its release.
Miles and producer Teo Macero made it in a way that had not been done before nor, except for some tracks on some Can albums, since. They had the musicians play fragments, or work through a groove for an extended period, then Macero would take the audio tapes, slice them up with a razor blade and restructure them with tape. Bitches Brew is a quasi-free jazz-rock album that is also a work of studio composition, jazz musique concrète. A one-of-a-kind experiment.
London Brew is nothing like this. It is based in improvisation but there’s nothing experimental about it, the musicians knew what it was they were doing and where they were headed. The lesson they have taken from Bitches Brew is the superficial one for using studio production techniques, but only through effects processes, like phase shifting on the snare drum and distortion on the electric piano that are sonic clichés attached to different eras of recording technology.
The music is not bad, but it’s also not memorable. There are solid grooves, energy, but nothing original or with character, and the production touches are mostly irritating in what seems to be their deliberate pandering to a kind of hip consumerist listener. The best track, “Nu Sha Ni Sha Nu Oss Ra,” is marred by the superfluous and pretentious sound of someone exhaling through their horn, but elsewhere there’s imitation Maupin and a long sample from In a Silent Way that is a highlight (except it wasn’t made by these musicians). The style is based on Miles’ later electric bands, with Michael Henderson on bass. This is Bitches Brew shorn of all jagged edges, funk sexuality, even the blues, bourgeois music for a time when most contemporary jazz is made with a Mercedes-like precision and seems to be meant to appeal to people who can afford a Mercedes.
Decades ago, there use to be a real dividing line between jazz and classical culture, the former seeing the latter as old-fashioned and hidebound, worshipping the past and stuck in the rituals of reanimating it, rather than living in and embracing the present, the energy of the moment, chance, unknown outcomes (not to mention getting high and getting down). Not that jazz hasn’t had issues with its own worship of the past, which is very real and deleterious, but the jazzers were right. Or at least they used to be. Making records like this in 2023, despite the hip reputations of the musicians involved and the nod towards Miles Davis, is no less reactionary than staging La Bohème year after fucking year. Chance are the last thing that jazz seems to want to take these days.
