We are currently fascinated—and Cheadle’s film is part of this—by Miles’s electric period, 1968 to 1975. Last year, two books were published about Bitches Brew, the churning, chthonically powerful double album of Afro-rock improvisations that Davis released in 1970: George Grella Jr.’s Bitches Brew, and Victor Svorinich’s Listen to This: Miles Davis and Bitches Brew. This year’s contribution to Miles studies is Bob Gluck’s The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles, which locates the music of his electric epoch within a historic continuum of exploratory jazz. “Electric Miles” is the version who plugged in to the zeitgeist, traded his suits for hipster finery, and opened up his music to distortion and groove-based repetition, either transcending or dramatically repudiating (depending on your perspective) his roots in acoustic jazz. Critics wept—literally, in the case of one tearful pundit at a 1973 concert—as Miles surrounded himself with electric guitarists, electric keyboardists, and extra drummers; wired himself up with a wah-wah pedal; and fired frosty fillips of trumpet-sound into halls of reverb. The Miles of Cheadle’s Miles Ahead is, properly speaking, post-electric: Limping around and cursing people out in his cindery whisper, the great man is still neurologically fried from the high-risk, high-yield experiments of a few years earlier, the experiments that continue to freak out musicians and engross musicologists.

Electric Miles grabs us in three ways: musically, symbolically, and politically. Musically, because Miles was channeling Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, and the tearing noise at the edge of a James Brown scream, while sounding nothing like any of them. Symbolically, because the music represented creativity at full tilt, at a pitch of invention almost indistinguishable from the destruction (aesthetic and, as it also turned out, personal) necessary to establish its conditions. And politically, because Miles was a militantly autonomous black artist, a whitey-scorning, Uncle Tom–excoriating, no-shit-taking man of his time—and this music, above all, was his statement. In Listen to This, Svorinich makes the excellent point that the Bitches Brew sessions began the day after Hendrix performed his screaming, sorrowful, polyvalent version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, turning the national anthem into a feedback chorale. The echoes, the fumes, of this consummate art act were in the ether as Miles and his musicians convened at the CBS Studio Building at 49 East 52nd Street in New York City. Hendrix at Woodstock on Monday, Bitches Brew on Tuesday: There’s the summer of 1969 for you.

What happened at the CBS studio over the next three days was without parallel. Looking backwards, we can see how Miles got there. Sketches of Spain, in 1960, had been a ritual in a heat-haze, a summoning of the duende—the ecstatic imp that alights, flamelike, on flamenco musicians in moments of transport. The softly electrified In a Silent Way, in 1969, was a glittering portal in space, a dreamed-up gateway for the new sound. Nonetheless, when that new sound came—the tremendous shuffling organism of the Bitches Brew band, directed this way and that by the hieratic motifs of Miles’s trumpet—it felt like a rupture in the vocabulary. “Pharaoh’s Dance” kicks the album off with predatory, lightly panting drums and doom-green auras of electric piano and guitar. (Grella hails this opening as “the single most ominous thing in the infinite man-years of experience and consumption that pop culture has produced.”) Thereafter, the music intensifies and falls apart, intensifies and falls apart: The layered rhythms—two drum kits, assorted other percussion—clatter and shake; John McLaughlin makes chopped, oblique comments on his guitar; there are caustic sprinkles of electric piano from Chick Corea, and a kind of hubbling, bubbling underjazz from Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet.