Bitches Brew Liner Notes...

Unfortunately this would make alot more sense to the people who have heard it, but it's an interesting thing nonetheless. Im gonna start a paragraph into it cause the first paragraph is more personal. So here it goes.

"... and sometimes I think maybe what we need is to tell people that this is here because somehow in this plasticized they have the automatic reflex that if something is labeled one way then that is all there is in it and we are always finding out to our surprise that there is more to Blake or more to Ginsberg or more to 'Trane or more to Stravinsky than whatever it was we thought was there is the first place.

So be it with music we have called jazz and which I never knew what it was because it was so many different things to so many different people, each apparently contradicting the other, and one day I flashed that it was music. That's all, and what it was great music it was great art and it didnt have anything to do with labels and who says Mozart is by definition better than Sonny Rollins and to whom.

So Lenny Bruce said there is only what is and that's a pretty good basis for a start. This music is. This music is new. This music is new music and it hits me like an electric shock and the word "electric" is interesting becauset the music, either by virtue of what you can do with tapes and by the process by which it is preserved on tape or by the use of electricity in the actual making of the sounds themselves.

Electric music is the music of this culture and in the breaking away (not the breaking down) from previously assumed forms a new kind of music is emerging. The whole society is like that. The old forms are inadequate, not the old enternal verities but the old structures. And new music isn't new in that sense either, it is still creation which is life itself and it is only done in a new way with new materials. So we have to reach out to the world with new ideas and new forms and in music this has meant leaving the trditional forms of bars and scales, keys and chords, and playing something else altogether which maybe you cant identify and classify yet but which you recognize when you hear it and which when it makes it, really makes it, it is the true artistic turn on.

Sometimes it comes by accident. Serendipity. With the ones who are truly valuable, the real aritists, it comes because that is what they are here to do even if they can say as Miles says of his music, I dont know what it is, what is it? They make music like they make those poems and those pictures and the rest because if they do not they cannot sleep nor rest nore, really, live at all. This is how they live, the true ones, by making the art which is creation.

Somtimes we are lucky enough to have one of these people like Miles, like Dylan, like Duke, like Lenny here in the same world at the same time we are and we can live this thing and feel it and love it and be moved by it and it is a wonderful and rare experience and we should be grateful for it. Look. Miles changed the world. More than once. That's true you know. Birth of the cool was first. Then when it all went wrong Miles called all the children home with Walkin'. He just got up there and blew it and put it on an LP and all over the world they stopped in their tracks when they heard it. They stopped what they were doing and they just listened and it was never the same after that. Just never the same.

It will never be the same again now. How can it ever be the same? I dont mean you cant listen to Ben. How silly. We can always listen to Ben play funny valentine, until the end of the world it will be beautiful and how can anything be more beautiful than Hodges playing passion flower? He never made a mistake in 40 years. It's not more beautiful, just different. A new beauty. A different beauty. The other beauty is stil beauty. This is new and right now it has the dge of newness and that snapping fire you sense when you go out ther from the spaceship where nobody has ever been before.

What a thing to do! What a great thing to do. What an honest thing to do there in the studio to take what you knew to be true, to hear it, use it and put it in the right place. When they are concerned only with the art, thats when it really makes it. Miles hears and what he hears he paints with. When he sees he hears, eyes are just an aid to hearing if you think of it that way. It's all in there, the beauty, the terror and the love, the sheer humanity of life in this incredible electric world which is so full of distortion that it can be beautiful and frightening in the same instant.

What is so incredible about what Miles does is whoever comes after him, whenever, wherever, they have to take him into consideration. They have to pass him to get in front. He laid it out there and you cant avoid it. It's not just the horn. It's a concept. It's a life support system for a whole world. And it's complete in itself like all the treaures have always been.

Music is the greatest of the arts for me because it cuts through everything, needs no aids. It is. It simply is." - Ralph J. Gleason

I agree with most of the stuff he said, with the exception of a couple things. But I thought it was great regardless and something to ponder if you're interested at all in that sort of thing. My posts havnt been as music oriented lately as they usually are so I figured this would be somethin good.