Strangely, I first heard BB, all thanks to Napster. I just thought that is what jazz sounded like when I was very young, since I hadn't heard much of it at all except what came on our local NPR radio station.
It took me a few days on a 56k modem (thanks to failed downloads) to finally get one of the full 20+ minute tracks from the album. I think it might have been Pharoah's Dance mislabeled as the track BB... so many mislabeled songs on Napster back then.
This was around the time the Complete BB Sessions [1] came out... so that was one of the first albums I ever asked my parents for as a gift.
A few years after I got the album, I was traveling to a city, and while walking around downtown I heard one sound that sounded like it was identical to a sound from Pharoah's Dance. Whether intentional or not, I thought some of the cacophony of these tracks was intended to represent the chaotic energy that a big city can have.
I've had the opposite experience. Kind of Blue never grabbed me. I've always been drawn to Avant Garde jazz first and foremost. I was introduced to it via Flying Lotus and heard him mention BB in an interview. I recognize that Kind of Blue is a beloved album, but I've listened to BB a hundred times.
If you're a fan of both Flying Lotus and Bitches Brew, you should check out Miles Davis' album On The Corner, which came out two years after Bitches Brew. It feels like a direct precursor to hip-hop and a lot of the sample-based music that gained popularity in the 1980s, partly due to the tape splicing and looping that was done in the studio and partly because of the extremely wide set of influences that got stirred together on that record.
karmelapple|2 years ago
It took me a few days on a 56k modem (thanks to failed downloads) to finally get one of the full 20+ minute tracks from the album. I think it might have been Pharoah's Dance mislabeled as the track BB... so many mislabeled songs on Napster back then.
This was around the time the Complete BB Sessions [1] came out... so that was one of the first albums I ever asked my parents for as a gift.
A few years after I got the album, I was traveling to a city, and while walking around downtown I heard one sound that sounded like it was identical to a sound from Pharoah's Dance. Whether intentional or not, I thought some of the cacophony of these tracks was intended to represent the chaotic energy that a big city can have.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Bitches_Brew_Sess...
Capricorn2481|2 years ago
d12345m|2 years ago
It still sounds fantastically weird.