Miles Davis The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Jerry Springer on "Biography"; Drew Carey meets the Partridge family Thinking inside the box By Eric Alterman The year's best in box sets provides obsessed fans of country, jazz, blues and rock with some treasures and some trash Coffee-table books for holiday giving -- and grabbing From photos of naked people in Los Angeles to New York living rooms, this year's crop of big books has something for everyone ___________________ Search BarnesandNoble.com for books about Miles Davis ___________________ Y E S T E R D A Y What's so funny about peace, love and understanding? By Gina Arnold The worlds of pop and pomp collide at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo (12/15/98) R E C E N T_. M U S I C Sharps & Flats Reviews of new CDs by the Royal Philharmonic, Afghan Whigs and Geoff Muldaur, and of a live performance by Billy Bragg (12/09/98) Back in white By David Bowman An appreciation of "The White Album" at 30 (12/08/98) Sharps & Flats Reviews of new CDs by Pearl Jam, Sandra Bernhard and the Silos (12/02/98) Sharps & Flats Reviews of new CDs by Jewel, Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu, John Lennon and others (11/18/98) Sharps & Flats Reviews of new CDs by Beck, Seal and Alanis Morissette (11/11/98) BROWSE THE MUSIC ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

a Master at dangerous play - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - _____WITH HIS LAST MASTERPIECE, "BITCHES BREW," _____MILES DAVIS CHANGED JAZZ HISTORY -- AGAIN.   BY GARY KAMIYA I first heard "Bitches Brew" the year it came out, in 1969. It was shocking. The opening sidelong notes of Miles Davis' trumpet in "Pharaoh's Dance," insinuating themselves into a restless polyrhythmic jungle of percussion, oddly knowing keyboards, a seething electric guitar and an uncanny bass line that seemed to go everywhere and nowhere at once, announced an alien world, shot through by darkness, whose beauties were indistinguishable from its terrors. Listening today to "Bitches Brew," the complete sessions of which Columbia has just released in a four-CD box set, is still shocking. With its maniacal loose-jointed precision, its self-attuned formlessness, its refusal to answer any of the questions it asks, its sense of tendrils rising up out of an unknowable earth, it is a chaotic symphony of the modern -- an electric version of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." "Bitches Brew" may be the strangest landmark in jazz history. It wasn't the first fusion album -- that honor is shared by Gary Burton, Tony Williams' Lifetime and the Fourth Way, among others. But it stands alone. The double album with the frightening extraterrestrial Nubians on the cover marked the first time a first-generation bop master, a giant whose pedigree went back to Bird, Diz and Max Roach, had ventured into the mysterious electric forest. And Miles didn't just add a few rock elements to his music -- he invented a whole new form. And it was bolder and just plain weirder than any fusion before -- and probably since. "Bitches Brew" should carry a label: "Warning: Master at Dangerous Play." Miles had changed history. But for the greatest creator of improvisational music in the 20th century, changing history was par for the course. In 1968, Miles was evolving so fast even he couldn't catch up to himself. At age 43, he stood at the top of the mountain. For four years, he had led what was probably the most formidable quintet in the history of jazz. This astonishing unit, featuring Tony Williams, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, completely changed the landscape of jazz. Miles' so-called second great quintet moved beyond the bebop formula to explore radically new territory. On classic albums like "ESP," "Nefertiti" and "Miles Smiles," the quintet made music that had the intensity and risk-taking quality of avant-garde free jazz, while still remaining in touch with tonality. The result was the jazz version of high modernism -- music that neither collapsed into the chaotic, anti-formal gestures of wild men like Cecil Taylor or Ornette Coleman, nor retold the technically dazzling but familiar stories of bebop. The group took group improvisation further than it had ever been taken. But Miles wasn't content to rest there. In 1968, he released "Filles de Kilimanjaro," an album so perfect in its out-there idiosyncrasy that no one has even tried to make anything like it since. In this album -- on which "Bitches Brew" stalwarts Chick Corea and Dave Holland made their Miles debuts -- jazz seemed to have been boiled down into the most intimate, elusive and enigmatic of essential parts. At once lyrical and off-kilter, it had the weight of a classical composition -- and was as airy and insubstantial as a soap bubble. Miles said two of his big influences at this time were Jimi Hendrix and James Brown, and after the fact you just might be able to tell -- but it was a strange and convoluted line of transmission. You can feel the same open spaces behind this music that you can in his classic "Kind of Blue," but it's a less comforting space now, uncannier, more pop, more machinelike, more electric. It's the first hint of the chill of those heights Miles was about to explore. N E X T__P A G E .|. A complete break with tradition