Don't put it in the trash yet. This discussion has been happening since the record came out (or perhaps for a little longer as In A Silent Way, which came out before BB is the beginning of this era in my mind).
To a certain extent, you get enjoy it or you don't. Trying to place it in the context of Kind of Blue or any of his bop recordings is probably an exercise in frustration. Mile's genius had many aspects and there are a few of them at work here. Just as he had in his previous ensembles, he played his musicians like instruments. Instead of telling them explicitly what to play, he chose the musicians for what he knew they would do left to minimal instruction. Also, as he had in the past, he was looking for ways to move beyond his previous efforts. There was no point for him to do another Kind of Blue, or Relaxin' or Birth of the Cool, as they had all been done and he had played out that material live to the point that it had been reinvented as far as it would go, especially with the Ron Carter/Wayne Shorter?Herbie Hancock, etc. group. What do you do when you've exhausted the intellectual/athletic possibilities in the genre you've created? Faced with another evolution, he wanted to include other streams of music that he heard around him, a lot of which were more groove based, whether funk from James Brown, rock from Jimi Hendrix (who was a huge influence) or music he heard from Africa. Realize also that the culture of 1969 was very different from today. What had been revolutionary uptown music (played in Harlem after hours after the musicians had done their downtown commercial gigs) had become mainstream music that had lost cultural relevance with contemporary black culture. While now it is seen as America's classical music, at that time, from those at the cutting edge of the revolution, it had the aura of being a sellout and the irrelevant music of people's parent's who had lost the fire to find freedom. From our comfortable view of history, it's easy to listen to Bitches Brew and find fault with it from a technical and effectiveness standpoint: it's meandering and not very dynamic. However, we've also got to realize that we've suffered the fallout from this music, which has been an endless barrage of noodly one chord funk jams that truly have no direction played by people who don't have the depth of experience behind them the way Miles and his musicians did. Remember that this really was new when it happened and there had yet to be any playbook written for this kind of music. What is the structure of no structure? Remember also, classical music and many other art forms had already gone through this kind of deconstruction, from Schoenberg to Jackson Pollock. Do you like Cubism? 12 tone music? Dadaism? Birthing a new music is sometimes messy. It can take some time to discover the logic and beauty in it for both creator and listener.
So, best jazz album of all time? Who knows? I think that is an analysis that misses the point of music (I've always hated Downbeat for their ridiculous polls). It's not a competition, but a communication. So, it might be one of the most effective communications ever (I transcend your pigeonholing of me as a player of jazz according to what you think jazz should be! Check this out! says Miles to the world in 1969). Even better, Miles still has people talking about this music more than 40 years later!
Perhaps another issue to consider is the editing. Teo Macero produced this record and took it upon himself to splice together various jams to create the pieces as he saw fit. Some think that he did a masterful job, others have opined that he butchered it. I'm so used to it that I appreciate it the way it is, but one of these days I'd like to hear the unedited versions. The technique of tape editing had never been used before in jazz, so like the rest of the record, it was an experiment where sometimes the theoretical aspects of the experiment outran the aural results, but to my ear, the overall CD is a success.
So, like it or not, but if you throw it out and it lies dormant in your head, you may find in a few years that you have an itch that only Bitches Brew will scratch. Or not.
I had that experience with retsina ( a very dry white wine from Greece that is stored in pine casks, giving it a pronounced flavor of turpentine). My parents gave me a taste when I was 17 or so and I couldn't imagine that anyone would drink it by choice. 4 years later, all of a sudden I had a craving for it in the worst way!
