The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Miles Davis · produced by Teo Macero · Columbia · a double LP, six tracks on four sides, about 94 minutes
Mode
Electric jazz; collective improvisation over rock and funk vamps, with a written ballad at the close, shaped after the sessions by tape editing
Mythos
The conjuring: a pharaoh’s processional, a brew worked by repetition, a sorcerer’s groove, a sanctuary where the brew is quieted; evoked by titles and sleeve, borne in the sound
Phase
Four sides: two side-long pieces that set the method, a third side that runs it as rock, a fourth that ends in groove and then a ballad played out of time
Presentation
Album; the double LP as first released by Columbia in the spring of 1970, GP 26, six instrumental tracks on four sides, about ninety-four minutes, no word sung or spoken
Register
Dark, dense and insistent; trumpet, soprano saxophone and bass clarinet over electric pianos, electric guitar, two basses, two or three drummers and percussion; menace, heat and trance, with a hush at the end
Scale
Thirteen players across the sessions in one New York studio over three days of August 1969, and the editing room after them
Governing Proposition
A trumpeter at the head of his field gathers three horns over a rhythm section of seven or eight players, two drummers, two basses and electric keyboards, lets them improvise over vamps for three days, and has the tapes cut and joined into a double album, which shows that in this music freedom is not openness but density: the single voice no longer stands in front of the band but speaks from inside a field that will not clear for it. Its greatest things are its sound and its consequence; its slack is real.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on a processional without a leader. Joe Zawinul’s piece fills the first side, about twenty minutes, and from its first bars no instrument stands in front. Electric pianos answer each other, two drummers keep different time, a bass figure repeats, and Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet moves underneath the whole like something in water. The trumpet arrives as one voice in the field, not above it. Whatever a listener of 1970 expected from a Miles Davis record, the head stated and the solos taken in turn, is not there.
The piece is also the first sign that the studio is composing. It is widely documented as assembled from many short edits, and at least one passage returns by tape loop, heard twice exactly as it was played once. The sessions were jams over vamps and sketches; the side as issued is a made object, shaped by Teo Macero’s editing after the players had gone home. The record does not hide the joins. It announces with its first side that the finished work was made in the editing room, and that the edits are part of the work, credited and charged to it like any other choice.
The sessions were held at Columbia’s Studio B in New York on 19, 20 and 21 August 1969. The players were Miles Davis, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, soprano saxophone; Bennie Maupin, bass clarinet; Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul, electric pianos, with Larry Young also at the electric piano; John McLaughlin, electric guitar; Dave Holland, bass; Harvey Brooks, electric bass; Lenny White and Jack DeJohnette, drums; Don Alias, drums and congas; Juma Santos, percussion. Three horns stood over a rhythm section of seven or eight. That proportion is the record’s first argument, and the opening side makes it before the title track explains it.
Movement II
The title track is the longest, about twenty-seven minutes, the whole of the second side and the record’s centre of gravity. It begins out of time. The ensemble swells and recedes over a low bass figure, without a beat, as if gathering, and then the trumpet enters, with a studio echo trailing behind each phrase so that the horn seems to answer itself from a distance. This is the record’s summit: grave, threatening, immense. The opening episode returns later as a refrain, and between its returns the band thickens around a vamp and the trumpet stabs into it.
What the track discloses can be stated. In the jazz Davis inherited, and had himself carried as far as it would go, the soloist stood in front of a band that supported him. Here he plays inside a field that will not clear for him, and the field is the community. The trumpet speaks into its echo and over two drummers and three keyboards, heard as one voice among many and still the one that cuts. Freedom here is not openness but density. The record makes audible a condition of its year: Black American music taking in rock, funk and the electric city without asking leave, and the individual held inside a collective noise.
The statement is assembled by the listener more than shown. Much of what the track gives is menace, heat and trance, a mood of great power, and the condition behind the mood is rendered rather than articulated: the record does not say what the field is, only how it sounds to stand inside it. Its playing is of the highest order, Davis’s sound larger and harder than on any earlier record, the drummers interlocking without collapsing into each other. Its faults are in the medium. In the densest stretches the keyboards blur into one wash, some joins are heard as joins, and there are long stretches in which the vamp holds and nothing turns.
Movement III
The third side lets the method run as rock. “Spanish Key”, about seventeen and a half minutes, is a driving straight groove with vamps that modulate, and solos taken over it. It is the record at its most separable: a long rock vamp whose soloing is serviceable rather than inspired, and whose form is a container, the vamp running without being bent by anything it says. Here the subtractive test bites hardest. The record would lose a texture without it, and not a step of its argument.
“John McLaughlin”, about four and a half minutes, follows. It is an excerpt cut from the sessions and named for the guitarist, and it stands as an interlude more than a piece, a fragment that sits a little outside the record’s argument. The side lengths of a double LP, not the argument, fixed where some of these pieces fall. Ninety-four minutes in six tracks, five of them over ten minutes: the length is not charged, since the trance needs time, but a hostile listener could cut a quarter of the record and the argument would not lose a step.
Yet the side obeys the law that governs the rest. “Spanish Key” is the farthest the record goes from the ballad that will close it, and in both the trumpet speaks over a field it does not command. The range across the four sides is wide, processional, ritual groove, rock vamp, blues and ballad; the palette within it is narrow, the same keyboards, drums and murk on every side. The sequence is counted once and seen whole from here: two side-long pieces to set the method, a third side that runs it, a fourth that ends in groove and then a hush.
Movement IV
The fourth side opens on the record’s most traditional groove, about fourteen minutes of a slow, heavy beat with Davis’s long blues lines over two drummers. It is the most physical lift on the record, and the place where the trumpet is heard at its strongest, long phrases with room around them. The blues the record never names is here: the old form, slowed and electrified, played by the whole band as if by one body.
The turn the record makes was very large, and it cost. The inheritance was acoustic modern jazz, the small band and the soloist in front; the record replaced it with electric keyboards and guitar, rock and funk rhythm, a large ensemble improvising together, and a work finished in the editing. Davis was the most prominent figure in his field, jazz critics charged the record with selling out to rock, and part of his older audience never came back. But the path was opened before. The turn began on Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro in 1968 and was half made on In a Silent Way, recorded six months earlier with the editing as its form, and Hendrix, Sly Stone, James Brown and Tony Williams’s Lifetime had placed parts of the bet. The swerve is completed and enlarged here, not begun. It stands level with that of Kind of Blue, the record of 1959 that also followed a path its predecessor had opened.
What followed is documented and broad. The players of these sessions founded the bands that made the next decade of jazz: Zawinul and Shorter formed Weather Report, McLaughlin the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Corea Return to Forever, and Maupin went on to Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters. The record sold widely for a jazz album and reached a rock audience at the Fillmore halls and beyond, and its method of building a record in the studio was taken up far outside jazz. The reaction shaped jazz too: the neoclassical return of the 1980s defined itself against this record. Its Pressure on Tradition, 9.2, is the highest figure it holds, a tenth above Kind of Blue and Low.
Movement V
The record ends on Wayne Shorter’s ballad, about eleven minutes, the one written tune on the record played largely out of time. The trumpet states it above a band that seems to have spent itself, in a quiet grandeur, and it sounds like the same band after the brew, not a different one. The sequence of titles closes here: a pharaoh’s dance, a witch’s brew, a sorcerer who runs the voodoo down, a sanctuary at the end. Mati Klarwein’s painting on the sleeve completes them, an African man and woman, a sea, a storm, fire and the hands of a rite.
The pattern the record builds is conjuring: the band as a cauldron, elements added one by one until they boil, a spell worked by repetition, then the sanctuary where the brew is quieted. The frame bears load in the sound, since the opening of the title track is a summoning and the record moves from processional to ritual groove to rest. But the myth is carried by titles, sleeve and texture. There is no figure, no person, no place, and the music would serve another myth as well. With The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.0, the record falls short on the two axes where an instrumental double album of long improvisations is weakest, and the summit is closed to it there.
Fifty-six years on, the record survives as issued, its original double LP in print around later additions: CD editions that add a seventh track from a later session, and a box of 1998 that prints the complete sessions unedited. Neither is the work. It is the best known of Davis’s electric records, admired more often than it is played through, and its electric pianos and tape echo are sounds of 1969, though the playing does not date. It stands four tenths below Kind of Blue, the more necessary and more exactly made record of the same maker, and level with Remain in Light: a field without a centre, a voice inside it, and a hush at the end.
Act III · The Twelve
Ninety-four minutes in six pieces, and the subtractive test finds both resistance and give. “Pharaoh’s Dance” must open: it states the method, an ensemble without a centre, and its edited form announces that the studio is the composer. The title track is the centre of gravity. “Sanctuary” must close, the brew ending in a hush. The give is large. “Spanish Key” is the most separable side, a long rock vamp; “John McLaughlin” is an excerpt cut from the sessions and stands as an interlude more than a piece; and inside the two long pieces there are stretches where the vamp holds and nothing turns. Length is not charged; the trance needs time. But a quarter of the record could go without the argument losing a step, which holds it well under Low and Remain in Light at 8.4.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Disclosure through sound is credited as fully as through words, and what the record brings into the open can be stated: freedom here is not openness but density. The soloist, who in the jazz Davis inherited stood in front of a supporting band, now plays inside a field that will not clear for him, and the field is the community. Davis’s trumpet on the title track speaks into an echo and over two drummers and three keyboards, one voice among many and still the one that cuts. The record makes audible a condition of 1969: Black American music taking in rock, funk and the electric city without asking leave. Held well below the summit because the condition is rendered more than articulated; much of what the record gives is menace, heat and trance, a mood, and mood ranks below meaning.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The elevation is dark and comes in surges. The title track’s opening, the ensemble swelling and receding out of time over a low bass figure, then the trumpet entering with its echo trailing behind it, is the record’s summit: grave, threatening, immense. “Pharaoh’s Dance” rises through its ominous processional, the bass clarinet underneath like something moving in water. “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” has the height of a slow, heavy groove with long blues lines over it, the record’s most physical lift, and “Sanctuary” ends in a quiet grandeur. Against that, “Spanish Key” and the long middle stretches of the first two sides hold level, and much of the power is intensity rather than height. High peaks at moderate frequency: level with Remain in Light, under the 8.8 of Low.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth is strongly evoked and only partly built. The titles do the evoking: a pharaoh’s dance, a witch’s brew, a sorcerer of voodoo, a sanctuary at the end. Mati Klarwein’s painting on the sleeve joins them, an African man and woman, a sea, a storm, fire and the hands of a rite. The pattern built is conjuring: the band as a cauldron, elements added one by one until they boil, a spell worked by repetition, then the sanctuary where the brew is quieted. That frame bears load in the sound, from processional to ritual groove to rest. What holds it is the particular: no figure, no person, no place, and the music would serve another myth as well. Level with Low, under the 8.2 of Remain in Light, which has at least a voice to possess.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance is acoustic modern jazz: the small band, the head and solos, the soloist in front, and Davis’s own second quintet, which had made that form as free as it would go. The turn is very large: electric keyboards and guitar, rock and funk rhythm from two drummers, a large ensemble improvising together over vamps, and the finished work made in the editing room rather than on the stand. The stake was real and was paid: jazz critics charged the record with selling out to rock, and part of Davis’s older audience never came back. Held short of the top by the path. The turn had begun on Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro in 1968 and was half made on In a Silent Way, recorded six months earlier; Hendrix, Sly Stone, James Brown and Tony Williams’s Lifetime had placed parts of the bet. Level with Kind of Blue.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the record loses what it knows, because its knowledge is the form: a music in which no part leads and the whole is made after the fact. Played as heads and solos by a quintet, these tunes would be vamps; their meaning is the density of the field and the way a voice emerges from it. The editing is a second form inside the first: “Pharaoh’s Dance” repeats a passage by tape, and the title track returns to its rubato episode as a refrain, so that a jam gains a shape no player chose in the moment. The sequence is counted here, once: two side-long pieces set the method, the third side runs it as rock, the fourth gives a groove and then a written ballad. Held down by the third side, form as container, and by side lengths that placed some pieces. Under Low at 9.0, a tenth under Remain in Light.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over fifty-six years. The record has never settled: it is still argued as the start of fusion, as a betrayal of jazz, as the first great studio-composed jazz record, and as a forerunner of production practices that came much later. The issue of the complete session tapes in 1998 opened a second literature, on what the musicians played against what was made of it in the editing, and studies of the sessions keep finding new seams. In the record itself the layers separate on return: two drummers playing different time, three keyboards answering each other, the bass clarinet moving underneath. Each hearing finds another line. What holds it is that the semantic yield is thinner than the formal, and some of what listeners hear is projection invited by murk. A tenth above Low.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is the jazz of its decade and its meeting with rock and funk. The intrinsic force is large: the record reorganised what a jazz ensemble could be, with rhythm as a dense field rather than accompaniment, electric instruments as the norm, collective improvisation over rock grooves, and the record built in the studio as composition. Part of that force is shared with In a Silent Way and with the rock and funk it took in, which holds it short of the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its players founded the bands that made the next decade of jazz, Weather Report (Zawinul and Shorter), the Mahavishnu Orchestra (McLaughlin), Return to Forever (Corea), with Maupin on Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters; a wide sale for a jazz record and a rock audience at the Fillmore halls and beyond; a studio method taken up far outside jazz; and a reaction, the neoclassical return of the 1980s, that defined itself against it.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifty-six years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, continuously in print, remastered and expanded around an intact original. Presence is continuous and wide for a jazz record: it is the best known of Davis’s electric records, heard whole and not only in excerpt, and placed high wherever the century’s records are counted. Two charges hold it to the usual figure for its span. Its presence is narrower than the widest, and part of it is reputation more than listening: a double album of long improvisations is admired more often than played through. And the fabric bears its moment, the electric piano timbres and the tape echo sounds of 1969, though the record never chased a period production sound and the playing does not date. A tenth above Low.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the editing credited here as making and its invention elsewhere. The playing is of the highest order. Davis’s trumpet is at its strongest, with a larger, harder sound than on any earlier record of his: long lines on “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down”, stabbing phrases on the title track. Shorter and Maupin colour the ensemble exactly, Holland and Brooks lock a two-bass foundation, and the drummers interlock without collapsing into each other. The editing is load-bearing: repeated passages and the rubato refrain give long jams a shape. The faults lie in the medium. Several edits are heard as joins rather than as form; the mix is muddy in the densest stretches, where keyboards blur into one wash; the soloing on “Spanish Key” is serviceable; and the inspired passages are spread thin. Under Low at 9.0, a tenth above Remain in Light.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law governs the record: a voice emerging from a dark, dense field that never clears, over a slow, insistent pulse. Take the two most distant elements. “Spanish Key” is the record at its most rock, a driving straight groove with modulating vamps; “Sanctuary” is a written ballad played out of time, the oldest kind of jazz on the record. They obey one law: in both the trumpet speaks over a field it does not command, and “Sanctuary” sounds like the same band after the brew, not a different band. The range is wide: processional, ritual groove, rock vamp, blues, ballad. What holds the figure is that the palette within that range is narrow, the same keyboards, drums and murk on every side, and narrowness is not coherence; and “John McLaughlin”, a fragment, sits a little outside the argument. Level with Low.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as one voice in a crowd. The collective is held fully, more than on most records: the ensemble is a society, and the form says how a person stands inside it. The city and the moment of 1969 are held through sound, in rock, funk, electricity and noise. The sacred is evoked as rite and conjuring in the titles and on the sleeve, and the body is present as groove. What holds the axis lowest is absence: history beyond the moment, the family, labour, the state, and the natural order beyond the sleeve’s sea and fire do not appear. Several orders, two held strongly and the rest carried by titles and sleeve. Level with Low and with Kind of Blue.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, then The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 8.9. A record that reorganised what a jazz ensemble could be and whose players founded the bands of the next decade; a turn from the acoustic small band to a dense electric field finished in the editing room, paid for with critics and an older audience; and layers that still separate on return, argued for fifty-six years. Below them, The Imperishable and The Made at 8.8, the second on playing of the highest order and editing that gives long jams their shape.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: consciousness held as one voice in a crowd, the collective and the moment of 1969 held strongly, the sacred evoked as rite and the body as groove, and history, the family, labour, the state and the natural order absent. Then The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8: a third side and an interlude the argument could lose, and a myth of conjuring evoked by titles and sleeve with no figure or place to build it. The Unconcealment at 8.0 follows: a condition rendered more than articulated, its larger part a mood.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, The Swerve at 8.9 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and with the Epochal Gate unmet and an aggregate of 8.4 the work stands in Tier IV.
Basis · Bitches Brew, the double LP as first released by Columbia in the spring of 1970, catalogue GP 26, six tracks in their original order on four sides, about ninety-four minutes; recorded at Columbia’s Studio B, New York, on 19, 20 and 21 August 1969, and produced by Teo Macero; judged from knowledge of the recording, its making and its reception; no recording or score was in hand, and running times are approximate. Side one: Pharaoh’s Dance (Joe Zawinul). Side two: Bitches Brew (Miles Davis). Side three: Spanish Key; John McLaughlin (both Miles Davis). Side four: Miles Runs the Voodoo Down (Miles Davis); Sanctuary (Wayne Shorter). The cover painting is by Mati Klarwein. The edits made after the sessions are part of the work as released and are credited or charged to the work, not to any one maker. The seventh track added on later CD editions and the complete sessions issued in 1998 are evidence, not the object. There are no words; nothing is quoted. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact day of release, the exact running times, the number and placing of the edits, the distribution of the players across the tracks, the reissue on which the added track first appeared, and the titles of the book-length studies of the sessions and of the album, are not given.