Take Two: Dave Harrington’s Pranksters East

Recorded in 1969 at Columbia’s Studio B in New York City, *Bitches Brew* documents Miles Davis pivoting jazz toward electric instruments and rock-adjacent momentum. The album’s long, open forms lean on collective improvisation, then were reshaped in the studio through producer Teo Macero’s editing, treating tape as part of the composition. In NYC terms, it stands as a downtown-adjacent artifact of a city where clubs, studios, and cross-genre scenes routinely overlapped. One clear takeaway is how decisively it redefined what a “jazz record” could be.