Miles Davis - Bitches Brew

There are records that push music forward and there are records that tear open an entirely new space for it to exist in. Bitches Brew is the latter. Released on March 30, 1970, Miles Davis's landmark double album arrived as a genuine shock to the system, a record that rejected the conventions of jazz, rock, and funk simultaneously while drawing on all three to create something that belonged to none of them.

Building on the electric experimentation of In a Silent Way the previous year, Davis assembled a large and shifting cast of musicians and set them loose in the studio with electric pianos, guitars, and a rhythm section unbound from traditional jazz conventions. What emerged was music built on improvisation and loose, rock-influenced arrangements that felt like nothing that had come before, dense and hypnotic and endlessly alive.

In the years since its release, Bitches Brew has been recognized as one of the greatest albums in jazz history and the record that essentially invented jazz fusion, its influence rippling outward into rock, funk, and experimental music in ways that are still being felt today. Half a century on it remains as bold, strange, and vital as the day it was recorded.

Pressed on double vinyl and best heard loud and without interruption.