Fusion – Locating Artistic Hybridity in Miles Davis’ “Spanish Key”

ABSTRACT

Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1969) was possibly Miles Davis’s most provocative change of musical direction. Existing literature heralds the album as spearheading fusion, an idiom mostly disparaged by academia as a commercially driven sub-style of jazz offering no creative merit. Neo-classicists have persistently endorsed an ideology positioning Davis and his followers as destroying hallowed jazz traditions with bastardised artless commodity. Damaging terms such as imitation and appropriation permeate their aesthetic hypotheses of fusion’s numerous kaleidoscopic models. This paper follows a recent trend to re-address the music of fusion, by acknowledging works of those associated with the movement as creative experiments in hybridity. Focussing on testimony by Davis, an analysis of his fusion of jazz and flamenco in “Spanish Key,” and an adoption of thinking tool philosophies from Per Linell and Mikhail Bakhtin, a blueprint for artistic hybridization offers a new perspective on the jazz trendsetter’s experimentalism and for those that followed his lead.

KEYWORDS:

• Fusion
• jazz
• flamenco
• rethinking aesthetic
• Miles Davis
• artistic hybridity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Collier, “Jazz-Rock,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, ed. Barry Kernfeld (London: Macmillan Press, 1994), 602.

2 Wynton Marsalis, “MUSIC; What Jazz Is – and Isn’t,” The New York Times, July 31st, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/31/arts/music-what-jazz-is-and-isn-t.html (accessed April 8, 2021).

3 Bill Makowski, “Wynton Marsalis: One Future, Two Views”, interview with Wynton Marsalis, JazzTimes, March 1st, 2000, https://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/wynton-marsalis-one-future-two-views (accessed December 30, 2022).

4 John Lincoln Collier, The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History (New York: Dell, 1978), 498.

5 DeVeaux and Giddons, Jazz (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2009), 439.

6 Stuart Nicholson, “Fusions and crossovers” in The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, ed. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 227–31.

7 Fellezs, Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

8 Holt, Genre and Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 100.

9 Fellezs, Birds of Fire, 17.

10 Miles Davis, Bitches Brew, Columbia CS 9995-9996, 1970.

11 Miles Davis, In a Silent Way, Columbia CS 9875, 1969.

12 Nicholson, “Fusions and Crossovers”, 224.

13 Eric Nisenson, Blue: The Murder of Jazz (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), 195.

14 Chick Corea’s official Web site, “Mladina Newspaper: November 2012”, http://chick corea.com/mladina-newspaper-november-2012/ (accessed October 20, 2021).

15 Dan Morgenstern, “Miles in Motion”, Down Beat, September 3, 1970, 7.

16 Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (London: Macmillan London, 1989), 288.

17 Tony Whyton, Jazz Icons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 134.

18 See Stanley Crouch, “Four-Letter Words: Rap & Fusion” Jazz Times, March 1st, 2002, https://jazztimes.com/columns/jazz-alone/four-letter-words-rap-fusion/ (accessed March 12, 2021).

19 Although not giving credit to the solo guitarist performing, Gil Evans (Davis’s longtime collaborator) claims the record used was “the only album in existence” in S. Crease, Gil Evans: Out of the Cool: His Life and Music (Chicago Review Press, 2003), 207. From this statement a conjecture could be made for the recordings as either being from Spanish guitarists Narciso Yepes or Renata Tarrago. Concerto de Aranjuez Narciso Yepes Orquesta Nacional de España, Ataúlfo Argenta, (London International) was released in 1954, and Concerto de Aranjuez, Renata Tarragó, Orquesta de Concierto de Madrid, Odón Alonso, (Columbia) was released 1959/60.

20 See Stephanie Crease, Gil Evans: Out of the Cool: His Life and Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003), 207.

21 Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain Columbia CL 1480, 1960.

22 In his autobiography, Davis explains in detail the moment Evans played him the record of Concerto De Aranjuez and his initial response to it as “Goddamn, these melodies are strong. I knew I had to record it.” See Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, 231.

23 Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, 231.

24 Davis iterates what he observed as “a lot of African blood in the people” in the region of Andalucia. Ibid., 231.

25 Davis also mentions the rudiments of another traditional palo; the ‘solea’, which is reimagined in a track on Sketches of the same title. “Solea is a basic form of flamenco. It’s a song about loneliness, about longing and lament. It’s close to the American black feeling in the blues. It comes from Andalucía, so it’s African based.” Ibid., 232.

26 Ibid.

27 Title given to individuals associated with the academic study of flamenco arts known as flamencology.

28 Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, 233.

29 Ibid., 232.

30 Critical reactions to the fusions of Sketches were tempered in comparison to the derision reserved for those of Bitches. The synthesizing of western classical music with jazz that came to define third stream, despite being viewed as efforts in over-refinement, were still considered by some critical circles to be functional of a jazz tradition. Third stream’s blending with western classical music was seen to provide viable avenues for the continued development of jazz, offering a complexity and sophistication believed to be completely void in fusion’s blending of jazz with rock, pop, funk, et al. See Gunther Schuller, “Third Stream,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, ed. Barry Kernfeld (London: Macmillan Press, 1994), 1199.

31 Miles Davis, ‘Spanish Key’ track 2-1 on Bitches Brew, Columbia/Legacy CD65774, 1998.

32 The adjectives ‘acquiescent’ and ‘malleable’ are used often within my methodology to elucidate the levels of compliant behaviour I view between the intricate jazz and Spanish harmonic fusions exposed.

33 Enrico Merlin, “Code MD: Coded Phrases in the First ‘Electric Period’” (paper presented at the Miles Davis and American Culture II conference, Washington University, St Louis, 10–11 May, 1996). The coded signal technique refers to the leader’s (Davis) harmonic modulation as a musical ‘cue’ to the ensemble, in order to shift the tonal centre of an improvisational phrase.

34 Fellezs, Birds of Fire, 9.

35 Sarah Weiss, “Permeable Boundaries: Hybridity, Music, and the Reception of Robert Wilson’s ‘I La Galigo” Ethnomusicology 52, no. 2 (2008): 234.

36 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson, & Michael Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 360.

37 Weiss, “Permeable Boundaries”, 234.

38 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 361.

39 Per Linell, “Discourse Across Boundaries: On Recontextualizations and the Blending of Voices in Professional Discourse”, Text 18, no. 2 (1998): 154.

40 Nicholson, “Fusions and Crossovers”, 227.

41 Fellezs, Birds of Fire, 9.