Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. (33 1/3, Bloomsbury)

Talk about a daunting project! First, there's the album itself, and its dense, arcane contents. How do you even write about that music? Second, many brave people have written about that music. The corpus of Miles Davis literature is not small. There's gonna be a movie too.  Is there anything new to say about Bitches Brew?

To his credit, Grella does an excellent job within the 33 1/3 format. It does what I want every book in the series to do: hit me with a barrage of heady ideas while wedging in some worthy musical analysis.

He discusses Miles Davis's place in jazz musically and critically (he gets some good jabs in at Stanley Crouch) and within the broader popular culture. The book traces Davis's journey from Birth of the Cool into the electric era. Remarkably, Grella is able to cover all this territory without being rushed or perfunctory. When we reach In a Silent Way, Grella pauses to examine its creation, noting that it's the point where the music enters "a new and previously unimagined dimension," with Teo Macero's razor blade restructuring of open-ended source material. The music became radical, and the studio became an instrument, just as it had for most of the experimental music and cutting-edge pop of the day. Grella funnels these topics towards the book's final third, which is a dissection of Bitches Brew's two LPs and the impact the music had in the years after its release.

He even wedges in just the right amount of personal narrative. I especially liked the book's opening, which describes the author's efforts to understand the music as a teenager: "…we listened, because the dark beauty of the music and the unlimited possibilities it promised were irresistible."