2023.08.07 Steven Bernstein and Scotty Hard on Miles Davis 1970

You’re Miles Davis.  It’s March of 1970 and you’re about to release Bitches Brew, your most incendiary album yet.  You have an electric band of young assassins (each of whom will go on to become a legendary bandleader in his own right) and they don’t sound like any band anyone has ever heard.  You know you’ve got the goods.  You’re looking for a new audience for this new sound and you get invited to share a bill with a major rock band at the Fillmore East, THE place where the Woodstock Generation is finding its music.  Can you win them over?  What do you hit them with?  

Slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein and producer/beatmaster Scotty Hard have both been both relentless shatterers of audience expectations and dedicated fans of Miles Davis, particularly in this phase of his career.   What happens if we put them in the audience for Miles’s first night at the legendary Fillmore East?  (and did we mention that it’s Wayne Shorter’s last gig with Miles?).  

Find out Monday (8/7) from 6p to 9p NYC time on Mitch Goldman’s Deep Focus on WKCR 89.9FM, WKCR-HD or wkcr.org.  Next week it goes up on the Deep Focus podcast on your favorite podcasting app or at https://mitchgoldman.podbean.com/ 

Photo credit: Miles Davis – Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. – 1970 by Robert Houston – Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Robert and Greta Houston.

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