Miles Davis - Big Fun

9.5 - USA - 1974

-- Masterpiece --

Bitches Brew is the greatest album of all time. Of all time. And yet, in many respects, it was just the beginning. A new beginning for Miles Davis, who, well into his forties, had just hit upon an entirely new form of jazz that added godlike electricity and driving rock rhythms. Chord changes largely dispensed with, this new jazz - which could scarcely be called jazz -- relied heavily on rhythm and texture rather than melody and harmony. Thrilling stuff.

And yet he wasn't done there. In the wake of these "new directions", Davis spent the rest of the early seventies churning out scores of deep, dark funk. The immediate follow-ups to Bitches Brew (11.0) were 1971's Live-Evil (8.0), a double helping of a stripped-down live version of Davis' jazz fusion culled and reconstructed from a series of shows at Washington's Cellar Door club (with some studio stuff thrown in here and there) and the 1970 soundtrack A Tribute To Jack Johnson (10.0), an amazing record that offered a further stripped-down take on Bitches Brew new, rocky direction, one that out-rocked even the best moments of, say, Led Zeppelin and out-funked, say, Funkadelic at their spaciest (some incredible incendiary guitar work by John McLaughlin on that record). And then 1972 brought On The Corner (9.0), a highly divisive album that simultaneously rendered jazz obsolete while anticipating hip hop (to put it algebraically: On The Corner : Bitches Brew :: Bitches Brew : Kind Of Blue). By the time Get Up With It (8.5) was put out in 1974 and Miles began his reclusive retirement, it was but the glorious afterglow of an astonishing explosion of innovation and wonderment.

And yet there was more. As Sony Legacy's boxed set treatment of The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions reveals, the album proper was constructed from the first few sessions of Davis' electric experiments. Some of the later sessions would find their way onto wax throughout the seventies on such career-spanning compilations of strays like Directions and Circle In The Round. And easily the best of these records is 1974's Big Fun, largely because unlike the others it concentrates on the wonderful electric music produced in the wake of the epoch-shattering Bitches Brew.

The original double-lp -- cruelly overlooked in its time -- featured four side-long cuts. Side 2's "Ife" came from the same sessions that produced On The Corner; though very much cut from the same cloth, it wouldn't have fit thematically with the repetitive street-funk of the rest of that album. And so its loping bass-groove and ultra-funky double drums are best presented here. Side 3's "Go Ahead, John" comes from the Jack Johnson sessions, though the way it was (re-)mixed for Big Fun removes it from the stripped-down funk-rock of that soundtrack and puts it more in line with the more elaborate arrangements of the later Bitches Brew material. The first part of that track consists of a fantastic John McLaughlin fuzz solo that is processed such that, as the liners say, it "suggest[s] a hornet trapped uinder a glass that's repeatedly lifted and lowered". The track then mellows out as an echo-plexed Miles duets with both himself and Steve Grossman's soprano sax. 

The other two cuts -- Side 1's "Great Expectations" and Side 4's "Lonely Fire" -- come from the later Bitches Brew sessions. Here Miles (and the great producer Teo Macero) expanded on the pallette they had used to create such masterpieces as "Bitches Brew" and "Spanish Key". Whereas those tracks were built on an arrangement of McLaughlin's electric guitar, a series of stacked keyboards, and all manner of layered percussion, here the exotic textures of tabla and electric sitar are added to the mix to give a sense of smokey mystery. "Lonely Fire" in particular is a work of exquisite beauty, one that takes a while to build from a haze of textures and tentative gestures into a swirling maelstrom of dark, sensuous funk.

The 2000 reissue adds four more tracks drawn from these same sessions that immediately followed the sessions that produced Bitches Brew, and all of this points to an awesome follow-up to that album that, unfortunately, was never realized (I guess by this time, Miles was deep into the the sparser sounds that ended up being the Jack Johnson soundtrack). This never-produced (presumably double) LP is certainly not a disappointment on the order of the almost-but-not-quite-happened collaboration with Jimi Hendrix -- certainly, we are much better off for having a Big Fun that includes "Ife" and "Go Ahead, John" -- but it is still tantalizing to imagine a Big Fun that is more than just an under-appreciated collection of cast-offs from Davis' most exciting period.  Then again, given the transcendent mystical nature of this baffling music, perhaps it is a record that's best kept slightly under the radar, only truly appreciated by those in the know.