Bitches Brew Revisited
Friday, October 29, 8PM
SF Jazz Festival
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
San Francisco, CA

Audience recording: Zoom H2 (row H seat 29) > Sound Studio (cut tracks, minimal audience compression, no normalization or volume edits) > xACT (FLAC level 8)

Graham Haynes - cornet
Marco Benevento - keyboards
Antoine Roney - reeds
James Blood Ulmer - guitar
Cindy Blackman - drums
Adam Rudolph - percussion
Melvin Gibbs - bass
DJ Logic - turntables

http://bitchesbrewrevisited.com/

00a SF Jazz announcements
00b Bitches Brew revisited intro
01 Pharoah's Dance
02 Spanish Key
04 Miles speaks
05 percussion
06 drums
07 Bitches Brew
10 Miles speaks
11 Sanctuary
12 Miles Runs the Voodoo Down
13 John McLaughlin
14 exit music

I think I got the songs correct, but could be wrong.
I cut separate tracks for percussion and drums, and the recordings of Miles speaking, they probably could be considered part of Bitches Brew and Sanctuary.

tracks 00a and 00b are deletable tracks.
14 was pre-recorded music

from SF Jazz Festival:

Bitches Brew, a revolutionary 1970 Miles Davis double-LP, heralded the arrival of a brave new era called “fusion.” Combining high-energy jazz improvisation with the rugged textures of post-Jimi Hendrix rock, Bitches Brew featured a mind-boggling assembly of giants including Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Larry Young, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Lenny White and Airto Moreira. No doubt, Davis paved the way for the electric jazz bands of the ‘70s — Weather Report, Return to Forever, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and others — and 40 years later, the music still sounds adventurous. Bitches Brew Revisited provides a fresh perspective on this masterwork. The group is co-led by cornetist Graham Haynes (son of Roy) and keyboardist Marco Benevento. It also features the reeds of Antoine Roney (brother of Wallace), iconic jazz-rock guitarist James Blood Ulmer, monster-drummer Cindy Blackman and the famed DJ Logic on turntables. It assures Bitches Brew and its enormous impact will not be forgotten. Don’t miss this new interpretation of a major tipping point in jazz history.

“Where Miles Davis goes, jazz goes. One result is his Bitches Brew, which must be considered a landmark of recorded music.” The New York Times, 1970
“Bitches Brew gave the budding jazz-rock genre visibility and credibility, and was instrumental in promoting it to the dominant direction in jazz.” JazzTimes

“Bitches Brew retains its freshness and mystery long after its original issue.” All Music Guide



Review from SF Examiner:

HEADY BREW
October 30th, 2010
Stephen Smoliar
SF Classical Music Examiner

Last night SFJAZZ presented Bitches Brew Revisited in the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre. As I had observed in my preview piece, this was, in part, a 40th anniversary celebration of the release of the double vinyl album, Bitches Brew, by trumpeter Miles Davis in April of 1970. Even the cover art by Mati Klarwein was honored at this concert, as the entire performance was accompanied by projections of Klarwein’s work, sometimes psychedelic, often downright kitschy, and always with at least one provocative edge.

This was an ambitious undertaking. Traditionally, jazz had been for a particular kind of elite audience that wanted more substance than could be found in the efforts of the pop song stylists; and they wanted more impetuous spontaneity than they could find in the confining scores of classical music. Miles was never short on substance. With his Julliard training he had a solid grasp of melody and harmony; and, if he was never quite on top of traditional counterpoint, he built up performance chops around a keen sense of how a diverse assortment of voices could engage into a coherent whole. This led to a discipline beyond the usual Julliard curriculum, an acute sense of sonority in terms of both what he could get out of his own instrument and how his instrument could blend with both other melody instruments and the rhythm section.

However, during the Sixties it emerged that jazz no longer held a monopoly on what audiences were seeking by way of substance. The Beatles were first received as the latest major pop phenomenon, butSgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band changed all that. Recording was no longer a matter of simply reproducing what could be heard on stage. In became a new medium to support the symbiosis of electronic technology with vocal and instrumental talent. The horizon of sonority was being pushed far beyond the most ambitious conceptions of arrangers; and, thanks to stereophonic sound, the resulting phenomena were spatial as well as acoustic. Miles wanted to take his jazz into this brave new world that had such music in it, and with the Bitches Brew sessions he made the move from developing a new set of chops to exercising them at a sustained level, prolonged to prodigious duration. Those tracks may no longer shock the way they did when they were first released, but they still have the capacity to provide a stimulating jolt.

What does it mean to “revisit” the release of such a revolutionary recording? For Graham Haynes, who served last night as the leader of the group assembled for this occasion, revisitation was decidedly not a matter of reproduction. After all, what is to be gained by reproducing a medium that had been developed for the sake of reproduction itself? A more appropriate synonym for “revisitation” might be “imitation,” in the sense that Aristotle engaged in his discussion of drama in “Poetics.”

Last September I wrote that “while imitation must entail a departure from authenticity, it may capture the significance of that which is imitated more effectively than the more authentic source.” At that time I was writing about a piano recital by Paul Hersh, and I observed that several of the works he performed could be approached as “imitative remembrance.” That phrase may be equally applicable to what Haynes brought to last night’s performance. As the son of Roy Haynes, he clearly has a “memory base” rich in jazz experiences; but, in a pre-concert interview, he talked specifically about his personal memories of Miles’ recordings and of the release of Bitches Brew. He also talked about the revisitation project as a “work in progress,” which I take to mean that he personal acts of remembrance are still highly active.

From this point of view, it is important to recognize that the ensemble assembled for this concert was not a strict reproduction of the one formed for the recording sessions. The basic instrumentation was the same, but it was distributed in different ways. Antoine Roney played both bass clarinet and soprano saxophone, thus covering the contributions of Bennie Maupin and Wayne Shorter, respectively. James Blood Ulmer brought a more seasoned personal style to his electric guitar than John McLaughlin had evoked in his studio work. More significantly, however, there was only one keyboard performed, Marco Benevento, rather than the three that worked with Miles. Similarly, while the recording sessions used two drum sets, this performance had only one, performed by Cindy Blackman (who, with all of her energy, may have well been two persons in the same place at the same time); but her work was supplemented by a broader “percussion session” handled by Adam Rudolph. Melvin Gibbs covered the bass line with an electric instrument; and the most important alteration was the addition of a turntable player, DJ Logic. The purist in me was a bit skeptical about this decision; but Logic’s console provided a valuable source of “connective tissue” for the continuity of the entire concert (which included a few interview clips to provide some historical context).

For my own experience last night was far wilder, absorbing, and stimulating than any of my past encounters with the recorded and scrupulously edited sessions. This was probably as much a matter of personal ideology as anything else. However much I may appreciate good recording, I continue to believe that music only really lives through performance. One might say that, deep within each of the edited tracks that finally got pressed into Columbia vinyl, there was a “real performance” screaming to get out. Last night Haynes and his colleagues released such performances; and, if this really is the work in progress that he declared it to be, we can hope that they will continue to release them in the future and that each such release will be another revealing listening experience.


also from the SF Examiner:

"Bitches Brew" still packs a punch 40 years on
October 30th, 2010 12:56 pm PT
David Becker
Bay Area Jazz Examiner

It caused all kinds of a ruckus at the time of its release 40 years, but "Bitches Brew" hasn't gotten a lot of love since then. The album, Miles Davis' booming declaration of how jazz would relate to the rock era, isn't a collection of songs so much as a few epic journeys, certainly not the kind of compositions that are going to encourage cover artists. The instrumentation is big and powerful -- not the kind of sound you can achieve with a nice, economical trio. And the beats are awfully complex -- nothing like the streamlined rhythms that would later come to mark fusion and ease its devolution into smooth jazz.

So there was plenty of excitement when an trumpeter Graham Haynes (son of the now officially immortal drummer Roy Haynes) announced he was putting together an all-star crew of contemporary players top tackle the beast. Bitches Brew Revisited hit the Palace of Fine Arts on Friday as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival, and you were well-served to be ready to have your mind totally re-blown.

As befits an artistic tribute, the group didn't try to recreate the Davis tunes so much as elaborate on them, creating a powerful sound of its own that still remained true to Miles' vision.

The biggest props have to go to drummer Cindy Blackman, whose complex, driving beats kept the music at a rolling boil all night, especially her machine-gun attack on "Pharaoh's Dance." With bassist Melvin Gibbs and percussionist Adam Rudolph joining in, the group delivered a powerful reminder that rhythmic intensity and innovation were the foundation of "Bitches Brew." Miles' contributions were more atmosphere and coloring, driven to the forefront through the sheer force of his personality.

Haynes seemed to wisely judge that he didn't have quite that level of punch, so he relied more on nuance, bending and shaping notes with electronic effects to create passages of subtle power and haunting beauty.

Guitarist James "Blood" Ulmer was surprisingly understated assaying John McLaughlin's fiery bits, while keyboardist Marco Benevento mainly supported the rhythm section with his funky Fender Rhodes vamps.

With saxophonist Antoine Roney adding atmosphere with his bass clarinet rumble and DJ Logic amplifying the beat-storm, the net effect was a sonic storm almost as bracing as it was when Miles let it lose 40 years ago.