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

Abstract

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.