Listen to This by Victor Svorinich & Bitches Brew

Author:Victor Svorinich & Bitches Brew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2015-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Aftermarket

Over the years, there has been a lot of interest in Bitches Brew’s unreleased rehearsal material. When Columbia released The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions in 1998, critics and fans were not exactly thrilled with the limited amount of additional insight on the sessions. The unissued material, however, is in fact rehearsals and not the finished work as Miles saw it. When deciding on what to pull out from the vaults, there is always the matter of principles and artistic integrity. Considering the abundance of material put out by Davis in his lifetime, if he wanted it to be released, he would have done so. Davis decided to deliver the album as a finished product without the scraps, false starts, and incomplete takes deemed unsuitable. “These artists were very careful about what they wanted on their record,” explained Macero. “That’s why when they put these reissues out and all these outtakes and everything else on the great records, it’s a mistake!”35 “To me they are an invasion of an artist’s privacy,” remarked Cuscuna. “You should be putting a lot of thought and care before you override the decisions of the artists and producers. You should have a pretty good reason.”36 The unearthed tracks that found their way onto the 1998 compilation were not the leftover scraps from Brew, but completed takes of pieces recorded around the time of Brew’s creation that never found a home in Davis’s lifetime.

The Columbia engineering staff had their hands full dusting off these counterculture-era tapes from the vaults. In preparation for Brew’s digital and analog re-release, they decided to get the mixes as close as could be to the original musical statement, which meant remixing the album from the original session eight-track, one-inch reels. This controversial move did not sit well with all listeners, including the original engineering/production staff (especially Macero), but was never considered a replacement for the original mix (both mixes are still in print). It was made to give, as Wilder explains, “a better picture of what when on in the studio and the evolution of this body of work.” This was an arduous task, but it would eliminate a lot of tape hiss and achieve a better dynamic range. The team was looking to strip down some of the post-production work, or, in other words, “the layer of technology applied during the mix between the music and the listener, such as the reverbs, Teo-1, all the EQ and compression, and the dramatic mix moves, which there are many,” as Wilder points out.37 The last thing the crew wanted to do was over-compress the album. Teo loved compression and he loved brightening stuff, but with modern technology, a record can be remastered in a full-dynamic-range way without squashing or punching the sound.38 Over the years, Teo has been blamed for overdoing it sometimes—and not just with Miles. His work on Monk’s 1967 album Underground, for example, was lambasted not only for the massive editing job ripping out portions of each soloist’s work, but for the super-compressed production, making the volume levels too hot.

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