“We played for three days straight with no notes on the page and no repeats. There were 12 musicians in the room, just listening and responding. It was intense.” In December 2020, the jazz saxophonist Nubya Garcia took part in a marathon London-based recording session to mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Miles Davis’s album Bitches Brew. Also recorded over three days, in New York in 1969 with a group of 13 musicians, Bitches Brew is a sprawling work of jazz, funk and psychedelic rock. Squealing horns battle with a thunderous, swinging rhythm section of double drummers, while electronic keyboard and guitars shred through melody with a piercing clarity.
One of the most groundbreaking jazz albums ever made, it won a Grammy in 1971 and has sold more than 1m copies. Its use of tape editing and looping techniques went on to inspire the process of hip-hop sampling, and its sound helped birth the genre-hopping style of jazz fusion, influencing the work of artists as varied as the pianist Herbie Hancock (who played in Davis’s Second Great Quintet until 1968), guitarist George Benson and Radiohead.
