So, Miles picked my brain for anything he could relate to.”ĭavis was curious, too, about the new sound of psychedelia. He would hit a couple of chords on the piano and say: ‘What do you hear? Do you hear a riff? A bass line?’ In England, I had earned my living playing rhythm and blues, funk and R&B-jazz. I lost count of how many days I spent there, just hanging out. “I used to go over to his house on West 77th Street and he always wanted me to bring my guitar. “Miles took me under his wing,” the musician said. McLaughlin’s guitar proved crucial to that expansion. Though a contemplative and inward work, Silent Way made a deep impression when it came out in July 1969, encouraging Davis to expand his electric forays exponentially with Bitches. Silent Way – which also featured key players like Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul – represented Davis’s first all-electric album, following dalliances in that direction the year before on the Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro albums. “I just closed the score and started playing: no rhythm, no harmony, just playing the melody and casting my fate to the wind. Photograph: Ian Dickson / Rex FeaturesĪs soon as they started recording, Davis gave the young player cryptic instructions, such as “play like you don’t know how to play guitar”, McLaughlin recalled. McLaughlin calls the Silent Way sessions a “baptism by fire”. It was an album that would become nearly as legendary as Bitches. Davis seized on the young McLaughlin purely on the strength of Williams having hired him, as well as on his interest in using an electric guitar on the album he was starting to record, In a Silent Way. But before he could start working with Williams, Davis snagged him, despite the fact that the trumpeter hadn’t heard McLaughlin’s just-recorded debut solo album, which planted the seeds for what would become the fusion movement. McLaughlin had come to America to join Lifetime, a new band led by Davis’s drummer, Tony Williams. “I’d only been in New York for 48 hours and I was with my hero!” “I was nervous as anything, with sweat running off me,” the guitarist recalled, with a laugh. McLaughlin found himself a central figure in that drama immediately after arriving in New York from his home in Europe at the start of 1969. But a key part of the drama centers on what led up to, and followed, the creative Vesuvius that was Bitches Brew. (The film, which debuts on 25 February in the US, opens in the UK on 13 March and also spawned a new soundtrack on Legacy Records.) It covers everything from Davis’s ravenous creative development, to his ever-evolving fashion sense, to his complex relationship with women. The full arc of Davis’s sound, and life, forms the basis of Birth of the Cool, a two-hour film created for the PBS series American Masters. A double set released in March 1970, Bitches greatly advanced a pattern of progression in Davis’s music that snaked back to the start of his recording career in the 1950s. Next month will mark the 50th anniversary of Bitches Brew, a pivotal album that altered the trajectory of jazz, messed with the boundaries of funk, and pushed psychedelic rock to new heights of exploration.
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