Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Robert Christgau | (A−) |
| Penguin Guide to Jazz | |
| Pitchfork Media | (9.5/10) |
| Rolling Stone | (favorable) (1970) |
| Rolling Stone | (2004) |
| Sputnikmusic | |
| Time | (favorable) |
| Virgin Encyclopedia | |
| Zagat Survey | |
Bitches Brew was a turning point in modern jazz. Davis had already spearheaded two major jazz movements – cool and modal jazz – and was about to initiate another major change (like Davis' album Filles de Kilimanjaro, the album's cover also sports the phrase "Directions In Music By Miles Davis" above the title). Some critics at the time characterized this music as simply obscure and "outside", which recalls Duke Ellington's description of Davis as "the Picasso of jazz." Some jazz fans and musicians felt the album was crossing the limits, or was not jazz at all. One critic writes that "Davis drew a line in the sand that some jazz fans have never crossed, or even forgiven Davis for drawing." Bob Rusch recalls, "this to me was not great Black music, but I cynically saw it as part and parcel of the commercial crap that was beginning to choke and bastardize the catalogs of such dependable companies as Blue Note and Prestige.... I hear it 'better' today because there is now so much music that is worse."
On the other hand, many fans, critics, and musicians see the records as an important, vital release. In a 1997 interview, drummer Bobby Previte sums up his feelings about Bitches Brew: "Well, it was groundbreaking, for one. How much groundbreaking music do you hear now? It was music that you had that feeling you never heard quite before. It came from another place. How much music do you hear now like that?" The Penguin Guide to Jazz gave Bitches Brew a four-star rating (out of four stars), describing the recording as "one of the most remarkable creative statements of the last half-century, in any artistic form. It is also profoundly flawed, a gigantic torso of burstingly noisy music that absolutely refuses to resolve itself under any recognized guise." In 2003, the album was ranked number 94 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Along with this accolade, the album has been ranked at or near the top of several other magazines' "best albums" lists in disparate genres.
Read more about this topic: Bitches Brew
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
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“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
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