Bitches Brew

After about a week of rehearsal, Davis handed his musicians chord lines and sketches and guided them with tempo counts and spoken cues. Lenny White said it was like an orchestra with Miles as conductor, played live with no overdubs. The material was then heavily spliced and looped in post-production. Miles Runs the Voodoo Down is the only unedited track. The cover painting is by Mati Klarwein.

It reached 35 on the Billboard 200 and number one on the jazz albums chart. It became his first gold record in 1976 and went platinum in 2003, and won a Grammy in 1971 for best large jazz ensemble album. The Penguin Guide called it one of the most remarkable creative statements of the last half-century while also finding it profoundly flawed. Donald Fagen called it essentially a big trash-out for Miles. Rolling Stone put it at number 94 in 2003 and 87 in 2020.