MILES DAVIS
(b. May 26, 1926–d. September 28, 1991)
(b. May 26, 1926–d. September 28, 1991)
JOHN COLTRANE
(b. September 23, 1926–d. July 17, 1967)
FIDEL CASTRO
(b. August 13, 1926–d. November 25, 2016)
(b. August 13, 1926–d. November 25, 2016)
CHUCK BERRY
(b. October 18, 1926–d. March 18, 2017)
(b. October 18, 1926–d. March 18, 2017)
OSCAR BROWN, Jr.
(b. October 10, 1926–d. May 29, 2005)
(b. October 10, 1926–d. May 29, 2005)
MICHEL FOUCAULT
(b. October 15, 1926–d. June 25, 1984)
MILES DAVIS SPEAKING:
MILES DAVIS (1926-1991)
“If you sacrifice your art because of some woman, or some man, or for some color, or for some wealth, you can't be trusted.”
"Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”
“It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.”
"Don't play what's there, play what's not there.”
"When you’re creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain’t the limit.
"For me, music and life are all about style."
"I know what I've done for music, but don't call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis."
"I'll play it and tell you what it is later.”
“Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.”
"You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians "
"My father's rich, my momma's good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I've never suffered and don't intend to suffer.
"I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic
"You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four."
"If you got up on the bandstand at Minton's and couldn't play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you or booing you, you might get your ass kicked.
"Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.
"You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played
"Music is the framework around the silence."
"I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life."
"If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!”
“I always listen to what I can leave out.”
"It's always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don't know where it comes from, it's just there and I don't question it."
"The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.”
"It took me twenty years to be able to play that note and you want to understand everything I do in five minutes?”
“Do not fear mistakes - there are none. ”
"All musicians everywhere should get together one certain day and get down on their knees and thank Duke Ellington
"Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street."
"You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played"
"Music is the framework around the silence."
"A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it's going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that's available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different."
"See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that - but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He's got to play above what he knows - far above it. I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens."
"'So What' or 'Kind of Blue' were done in their era, the right hour, the right day. That time is over now. It's on the record."
"It’s not that I’m mean. It’s just that I don’t lie."
"Jazz is the big brother of revolution. Revolution follows it around"
"We just play black. We play what the day recommends”
“It took one black man to make two white boys play their ass off" (Miles’s response to the question of what he thought of the rock trio group Jimi Hendrix Experience)
"If you got up on the bandstand at Minton's and couldn't play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you or booing you, you might get your ass kicked.
"I have to change. It's like a curse”
“Knowledge is freedom. Ignorance is slavery.
“Some day I'm gonna call myself up on the phone, so when I answer, I can tell myself to shut up.”
https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/
Miles Davis
Biography
Articles
News
Has Influenced
Throughout a professional career lasting 50 years, Miles Davis played the trumpet in a lyrical, introspective, and melodic style, often employing a stemless harmon mute to make his sound more personal and intimate. But if his approach to his instrument was constant, his approach to jazz was dazzlingly protean. To examine his career is to examine the history of jazz from the mid-'40s to the early '90s, since he was in the thick of almost every important innovation and stylistic development in the music during that period, and he often led the way in those changes, both with his own performances and recordings and by choosing sidemen and collaborators who forged the new directions. It can even be argued that jazz stopped evolving when Davis wasn't there to push it forward.
Davis was the son of a dental surgeon, Dr. Miles Dewey Davis, Jr., and a music teacher, Cleota Mae (Henry) Davis, and thus grew up in the black middle class of East St. Louis after the family moved there shortly after his birth. He became interested in music during his childhood and by the age of 12 had begun taking trumpet lessons. While still in high school, he started to get jobs playing in local bars and at 16 was playing gigs out of town on weekends. At 17, he joined Eddie Randle's Blue Devils, a territory band based in St. Louis. He enjoyed a personal apotheosis in 1944, just after graduating from high school, when he saw and was allowed to sit in with Billy Eckstine's big band, which was playing in St. Louis. The band featured trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and saxophonist Charlie Parker, the architects of the emerging bebop style of jazz, which was characterized by fast, inventive soloing and dynamic rhythm variations.
It is striking that Davis fell so completely under Gillespie and Parker's spell, since his own slower and less flashy style never really compared with theirs. But bebop was the new sound of the day, and the young trumpeter was bound to follow it. He did so by leaving the Midwest to attend the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (since renamed Juilliard) in September 1944. Shortly after his arrival in Manhattan, he was playing in clubs with Parker, and by 1945 he had abandoned his academic studies for a full-time career as a jazz musician, initially joining Benny Carter's band and making his first recordings as a sideman. He played with Eckstine in 1946-1947 and was a member of Parker's group in 1947-1948, making his recording debut as a leader on a 1947 session that featured Parker, pianist John Lewis, bassist Nelson Boyd, and drummer Max Roach. This was an isolated date, however, and Davis spent most of his time playing and recording behind Parker. But in the summer of 1948 he organized a nine-piece band with an unusual horn section. In addition to himself, it featured an alto saxophone, a baritone saxophone, a trombone, a French horn, and a tuba. This nonet, employing arrangements by Gil Evans and others, played for two weeks at the Royal Roost in New York in September. Earning a contract with Capitol Records, the band went into the studio in January 1949 for the first of three sessions which produced 12 tracks that attracted little attention at first. The band's relaxed sound, however, affected the musicians who played it, among them Kai Winding, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, J.J. Johnson, and Kenny Clarke, and it had a profound influence on the development of the cool jazz style on the West Coast. In February 1957, Capitol finally issued the tracks together on an LP called Birth of the Cool.
Davis, meanwhile, had moved on to co-leading a band with pianist Tadd Dameron in 1949, and the group took him out of the country for an appearance at the Paris Jazz Festival in May. But the trumpeter's progress was impeded by an addiction to heroin that plagued him in the early '50s. His performances and recordings became more haphazard, but in January 1951 he began a long series of recordings for the Prestige label that became his main recording outlet for the next several years. He managed to kick his habit by the middle of the decade, and he made a strong impression playing "'Round Midnight" at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1955, a performance that led major label Columbia Records to sign him. The prestigious contract allowed him to put together a permanent band, and he organized a quintet featuring saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones that began recording his Columbia debut, Round About Midnight, in October. As it happened, however, he had a remaining five albums on his Prestige contract, and over the next year he was forced to alternate his Columbia sessions with sessions for Prestige to fulfill this previous commitment. The latter resulted in the Prestige albums The New Miles Davis Quintet, Cookin', Workin', Relaxin', and Steamin', making Davis' first quintet one of his better documented outfits.
In May 1957, just three months after Capitol released the Birth of the Cool LP, Davis again teamed with arranger Gil Evans for his second Columbia LP, Miles Ahead. Playing flugelhorn, Davis fronted a big band on music that extended the Birth of the Cool concept and even had classical overtones. Released in 1958, the album was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, intended to honor recordings made before the Grammy Awards were instituted in 1959. In December 1957, Davis returned to Paris, where he improvised the background music for the film L'Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud (Escalator to the Gallows). Jazz Track, an album containing this music, earned him a 1960 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance, Solo or Small Group. He added saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to his group, creating the Miles Davis Sextet, which recorded the album Milestones in April 1958. Shortly after this recording, Red Garland was replaced on piano by Bill Evans and Jimmy Cobb took over for Philly Joe Jones on drums. In July, Davis again collaborated with Gil Evans and an orchestra on an album of music from Porgy and Bess.
Back in the sextet, Davis began to experiment with modal playing, basing his improvisations on scales rather than chord changes. This led to his next band recording, Kind of Blue, in March and April 1959, an album that became a landmark in modern jazz and the most popular disc of Davis' career, eventually selling over two million copies, a phenomenal success for a jazz record. In sessions held in November 1959 and March 1960, Davis again followed his pattern of alternating band releases and collaborations with Gil Evans, recording Sketches of Spain, containing traditional Spanish music and original compositions in that style. The album earned Davis and Evans Grammy nominations in 1960 for Best Jazz Performance, Large Group, and Best Jazz Composition, More Than 5 minutes; they won in the latter category.
By the time Davis returned to the studio to make his next band album in March 1961, Adderley had departed, Wynton Kelly had replaced Bill Evans at the piano, and John Coltrane had left to begin his successful solo career, being replaced by saxophonist Hank Mobley (following the brief tenure of Sonny Stitt).
Nevertheless, Coltrane guested on a couple of tracks of the album, called Someday My Prince Will Come. The record made the pop charts in March 1962, but it was preceded into the bestseller lists by the Davis quintet's next recording, the two-LP set Miles Davis in Person (Friday & Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, San Francisco), recorded in April. The following month, Davis recorded another live show, as he and his band were joined by an orchestra led by Gil Evans at Carnegie Hall in May. The resulting Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall was his third LP to reach the pop charts, and it earned Davis and Evans a 1962 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Large Group, Instrumental.
Davis and Evans teamed up again in 1962 for what became their final collaboration, Quiet Nights. The album was not issued until 1964, when it reached the charts and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group or Soloist with Large Group. In 1996, Columbia Records released a six-CD box set, Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, that won the Grammy for Best Historical Album. Quiet Nights was preceded into the marketplace by Davis' next band effort, Seven Steps to Heaven, recorded in the spring of 1963 with an entirely new lineup consisting of saxophonist George Coleman, pianist Victor Feldman, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Frank Butler. During the sessions, Feldman was replaced by Herbie Hancock and Butler by Tony Williams. The album found Davis making a transition to his next great group, of which Carter, Hancock, and Williams would be members. It was another pop chart entry that earned 1963 Grammy nominations for both Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Soloist or Small Group and Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group. The quintet followed with two live albums, Miles Davis in Europe, recorded in July 1963, which made the pop charts and earned a 1964 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group, and My Funny Valentine, recorded in February 1964 and released in 1965, when it reached the pop charts.
By September 1964, the final member of the classic Miles Davis Quintet of the 1960s was in place with the addition of saxophonist Wayne Shorter to the team of Davis, Carter, Hancock, and Williams. While continuing to play standards in concert, this unit embarked on a series of albums of original compositions contributed by the band members, starting in January 1965 with E.S.P., followed by Miles Smiles (1967 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group [7 or Fewer]), Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky (1968 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group), and Filles de Kilimanjaro. By the time of Miles in the Sky, the group had begun to turn to electric instruments, presaging Davis' next stylistic turn. By the final sessions for Filles de Kilimanjaro in September 1968, Hancock had been replaced by Chick Corea and Carter by Dave Holland. But Hancock, along with pianist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin, participated on Davis' next album, In a Silent Way (1969), which returned the trumpeter to the pop charts for the first time in four years and earned him another small-group jazz performance Grammy nomination.
With his next album, Bitches Brew, Davis turned more overtly to a jazz-rock style. Though certainly not conventional rock music, Davis' electrified sound attracted a young, non-jazz audience while putting off traditional jazz fans. Bitches Brew, released in March 1970, reached the pop Top 40 and became Davis' first album to be certified gold. It also earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Arrangement and won the Grammy for large- group jazz performance. He followed it with such similar efforts as Miles Davis at Fillmore East (1971 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Group), A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Live-Evil, On the Corner, and In Concert, all of which reached the pop charts. Meanwhile, Davis' former sidemen became his disciples in a series of fusion groups: Corea formed Return to Forever, Shorter and Zawinul led Weather Report, and McLaughlin and former Davis drummer Billy Cobham organized the Mahavishu Orchestra.
Starting in October 1972, when he broke his ankles in a car accident, Davis became less active in the early 1970s, and in 1975 he gave up recording entirely due to illness, undergoing surgery for hip replacement later in the year. Five years passed before he returned to action by recording The Man With the Horn in 1980 and going back to touring in 1981. By now, he was an elder statesman of jazz, and his innovations had been incorporated into the music, at least by those who supported his eclectic approach. He was also a celebrity whose appeal extended far beyond the basic jazz audience. He performed on the worldwide jazz festival circuit and recorded a series of albums that made the pop charts, including We Want Miles (1982 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist), Star People, Decoy, and You're Under Arrest. In 1986, after 30 years with Columbia, he switched to Warner Bros. Records and released Tutu, which won him his fourth Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance. Aura, an album he had recorded in 1984, was released by Columbia in 1989 and brought him his fifth Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist (on a Jazz Recording).
Davis surprised jazz fans when, on July 8, 1991, he joined an orchestra led by Quincy Jones at the Montreux Jazz Festival to perform some of the arrangements written for him in the late 1950s by Gil Evans; he had never previously looked back at an aspect of his career. He died of pneumonia, respiratory failure, and a stroke within months. Doo-Bop, his last studio album, appeared in 1992. It was a collaboration with rapper Easy Mo Bee, and it won a Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Instrumental Performance, with the track "Fantasy" nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo. Released in 1993, Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux won Davis his seventh Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance.
Miles Davis took an all-inclusive, constantly restless approach to jazz that had begun to fall out of favor by the time of his death, even as it earned him controversy during his lifetime. It was hard to recognize the bebop acolyte of Charlie Parker in the flamboyantly dressed leader with the hair extensions who seemed to keep one foot on a wah-wah pedal and one hand on an electric keyboard in his later years. But he did much to popularize jazz, reversing the trend away from commercial appeal that bebop began. And whatever the fripperies and explorations, he retained an ability to play moving solos that endeared him to audiences and demonstrated his affinity with tradition. At a time when jazz is inclining toward academia and repertory orchestras rather than moving forward, he is a reminder of the music's essential quality of boundless invention, using all available means.
In answer to the question:
"WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DOES YOUR BAND PLAY MILES?"
Miles replied:
"WE JUST PLAY BLACK. WE PLAY WHAT THE DAY RECOMMENDS"
Legendary performance at the Isle of Wight Festival, 1970. Miles, his ensemble, and an audience of 600,000...
ENJOY!
MILES DAVIS SEPTET:
Miles Davis (trumpet)
Gary Bartz (alto saxophone)
Chick Corea (piano)
Keith Jarrett (organ)
Dave Holland (bass)
Jack DeJohnette (drums)
Airto Moreira (percussion)
http://jazztimes.com/articles/26009-we-want-miles-exhibit-opens-in-montreal04/29/10
We Want Miles Exhibit Opens in Montreal
--Miles Davis on jazz and popular music, from Miles: The Autobiography (1989), p. 205
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/16/magazine/miles-davis.html
Miles Davis
by Amiri Baraka
June 16, 1985
New York Times
FOR MANY YEARS OF MY LIFE, MILES DAVIS was my ultimate culture hero: artist, cool man, bad dude, hipster, clear as daylight and funky as revelation. His influence and effect on the music called jazz and its players is still somewhat astonishing.
Davis, as composer and musician, has been at the center of one stream of African-American music and its variations and performers for 40 years - since he first arrived in New York City in 1944 from East St. Louis, Ill., to look for Charlie (Yardbird) Parker, the saxophone genius, and enroll at Juilliard.
But like the music itself, Davis's influence has not been limited to jazz musicians. Davis is almost as well known by contemporary European and Euro-American classical composers and followers; he was the recipient of Denmark's Sonning Prize for lifetime achievement, the first time a jazz musician has received the award. Blues people, rock folk, reggae runners, gospel chanters, neoclassical or neoromantic revelers and on out - all know his music. And the most sensitive have been directly changed by it.
Davis, who helps open the Kool Jazz Festival this Friday at Avery Fisher Hall, is perceived by a wide cross section of artists as a creative artist of the highest and most intense level. Few artists of my generation, whether writers, painters or dancers, do not know the trumpeter's work. Few, too, remain uninfluenced in some way by his work. Many, for instance, sculpted or painted while ''Kind of Blue'' intoned its modal hipness. Many used such pieces as ''Sketches of Spain'' or ''Round About Midnight'' to create their dances. Many stayed up all night whacking away at the typewriter while ''Walkin' '' or ''Steamin' '' made the darkness give up its lonely esthetic to art.
The prospect of finally doing a piece on the man, of having to interview him, meet him up close, was very important to me for these reasons and more. I remember one night in 1960 when I was a little boy of 25 trying to be a jazz critic. I had gone without benefit of a sponsor to the Village Vanguard where Davis was playing.
I don't remember the exact group he had with him then, but John Coltrane, the brilliant tenor saxophonist, was gone. Sax man Hank Mobley, one of my road buddies whom I'd met in Newark, was with Davis.
When I went into the back room, which still passes as a dressing room, the musicians were spread out, casually rapping, Davis all the way to the rear like a point. He waved off my timid request, mumbling something, I guess, about how he didn't want to be bothered.
With that youthful mixture of angry rejection and bold daring, I spat back, saying he would have talked had I been a big-name jazz critic.
The prospect of an interview raised the memory of that history and made me smile a little. Now, coming into the well-appointed, mirror-sparkling bar at the United Nations Plaza Hotel, I wondered would he remember.
My very first impression, watching this beautiful man moving gracefully yet walking with a cane and talking to waiters he knew, is that Miles Davis, who recently turned 59, looks like a real celebrity. His dress sets the rest of him off -as he means it to. His deep, black-brown skin is still a marvel of the African esthetic. At once, his old sobriquet - the Black Prince - comes back. He handles the gold-topped cane like a casual guidon of elegance. The cane becomes the focus, rather than the condition that once required it. Davis wears an unbelievably hip fisherman's cap made of what looks like black raffia, a black military-style jacket, ballooning, black pants and black clogs - along with some extremely expensive-looking sunglasses and the cane.
Old-time Miles Davis worshippers have always dug Davis's ''vines'' (clothing) -whether the cap pulled down around his ears on the hot 1950's ''Dig'' album, or the green button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up, and the impenetrable shades on ''Milestones.'' He was always stylish. Although - and this is instructive as to our perception of the whole esthetic - as Davis got more into the music called ''fusion'' (the merging of cool jazz lines with rhythm-and-blues), he began to wear some wild, Sly and the Family Stone-styled threads we old-time neo-Ivy intellectuals thought of as frankly out. (''Red brightens you up,'' Davis says at a later point. ''Audiences love you even if you ain't doing nothing - even if you're terrible.'' Then he adds, ''If I don't have on something I like, I can't play.'') What I got from Miles Davis in conversation and from his manner is a man always, as the writer Richard Wright said the intellectual and artist must be, ''at the top of his time,'' aware of who he is and what they are and astride them both.
Dizzy Gillespie recently told me the night the Blue Note jazz club celebrated the famed trumpeter's birthday, as well as its own, that Davis ''was like a man who had made a pact with himself . . . to never repeat himself.'' Davis himself has said it is like a ''curse'' to constantly change. But change is a manifestation of his deep sensitivity, forever impressed with the real, and the real is in constant motion.
The introductions are going round as Davis sits. We shake hands; he says, ''The mystery man.'' Me!, a ''mystery man'' - you never know how people perceive each other across the clouds of time and distance, what they look like to each other, what they mean to each other.
A quiet, soft-spoken, even gentle man with a bright, quick sense of humor, Davis does not appear the overbearing ogre some have made him out to be. He banters with the waiters as he eats poached salmon and drinks Perrier.
I had said I only needed an hour. Most people dislike drawn-out interviews - I know I do. I also thought I knew so much about Miles Davis over the years. But being there with the man, the herd of questions his presence occasioned was actually embarrassing. I knew I couldn't ask most of them, coldly probe someone who had in one sense actually given me consciousness.
How did he get to here, to playing ''The Man With the Horn'' and ''Star People,'' albums I do not care very much for? What brought him from the sublime heights of ''Ornithology'' and ''Venus De Milo,'' or the myriad other anthems of the deep hip, to an overheavy back beat blocking the light, whirring, metal ideas?
It was not only in the asking and the telling that something changed for me. His latest albums, ''You're Under Arrest'' and ''Decoy'' (particularly the title tune), are a clear return to a much higher level of performance, more competent technically, more emotionally rewarding esthetically.
The reasons behind his development became clearer to me as we talked (and we would talk for four hours). I went back to his music to test and confirm the understanding his words compelled me toward. WHAT CAN YOU say about Miles?''
Gillespie says. ''He's always changing - you never know what he's going to do next. Plus he's got . . . a kind of . . .''
Another younger musician breaks in, ''an aura.''
''Naw,'' says Gillespie, ''I don't know about that. It sounds too much like some other word.''
''Mystique,'' the younger man rejoinders.
''Yeh,'' he replies, ''that's it. Miles got a mystique about him - plus he's at the top of his profession.'' Gillespie begins his hoarse laughter. ''And he's got way, way, way, way more money.''
He sums it up as only the Diz can: Davis constantly changes; he possesses a mystique that sometimes threatens to obscure his music yet is created in part by the deepness of that music as well as by his legendary personality. Davis, who earns between $30,000 and $50,000 per concert, may have even snatched a few coins in tribute to his ''topness'' and longevity.
For me, his music has always had that single vulnerable feeling, like a person, beautiful and solitary, moving gracefully, sometimes arrogantly, through the night. What does he think of his own music, from those first records and residence with Charlie Parker to his later changes?
''We were always playing way up there,'' says Davis, referring to the tempo. ''It was all so fast, nobody knew what we were playing. Blam. It was over. I thought people needed a bottom, something to refer to.''
He is recalling the 1945-to-1949 tenure with Parker around 52d Street - where the revolutionary music of be-bop and the hottest of the swing players merged downtown after the initial experimental developments uptown. Be-bop was the rebellion against the stiff swing arrangements of the 1940's. It re-emphasized small groups, improvisation, the restoration of African polyrhythms and the primacy of the blues. Such sound scientists as Parker, Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell and Kenny (Klook) Clarke led the charge.
Miles Davis was a young, middle-class intellectual seeking high art - a student of the hottest new musical innovations, yet a product of a conservative, professional, land-owning class. He could study at Juilliard by day and hang out with the artistically brilliant but socially incorrigible Parker the rest of the time. They lived on a weekly allowance sent by his father, an East St. Louis dentist. ''I thought everybody in New York was hip,'' he says. ''I came to New York City expecting everybody was sounding like Dizzy!''
When I ask Davis how he knew it was music he wanted and why the trumpet, his answer has that confirming yet mystifying near-rationalism. ''Basically, it was how they looked when they were playing,'' he says. ''I liked that. I wanted to look like that, too. I liked the way they held the horn, the way they stood. I wanted to do that.'' (It reminded me again of myself, a neophyte trumpet player imitating Davis in the ancient 1950's, a leather gig bag in my hand.) ''I have to hold my horn a certain way,'' explains Davis, who was performing with professional groups by the age of 16. ''When I went to St. Louis with my boys, to check out how a band looked, I could tell by the way a musician holds his horn. If he don't hold his horn right, he can't play.''
The photographs of Davis during the be-bop period show a young blood swimming in New York drape suits, his hair ''gassed'' (straightened), standing next to Bird - in the eye of the hurricane. His cracked notes and flubs from the period are legendary, alongside the awesomely articulate Parker, soaring past the stratosphere into the musical ''way-gonesphere.'' Davis was a striking contrast - anxious, young, archly lyrical, his sprouting musical voice as much a question as a statement.
A few minutes later, Davis had hooked up with Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan, and some of the young white players drawn by Evans's arranging for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra. Evans's cool, lush harmonies and even the innovative use of brass and Ellingtonian scoring (reeds) had a profound effect on Davis. A number of Davis's major successes commercially and artistically, including ''Sketches of Spain'' and ''Porgy and Bess,'' make use of Evans's orchestral approach and arrangements.
Later, the 12 sides on ''Birth of the Cool'' became the first important result of the Davis-Evans collaboration, the symphonic quality transferred to a small group. For me, ''Venus De Milo,'' ''Move,'' ''Godchild,'' ''Budo'' and ''Darn That Dream'' were the highest art I had ever contemplated, and they still are inestimable road signs of mastery.
I asked him how he got from the very hot of bop to ''the cool,'' the prototype setting a whole musical, social and commercial movement in motion. Davis says Thornhill's music drew him because he wanted a music with more melodic access and a ''cushion'' (bottom) of harmonies that made his own simple voice an elegant, somewhat detached ''personality'' effortlessly perceiving and expressing.
What seems subdued in him, as his middle-register light-vibrato tone would seem to confirm, shows up elsewhere as tension, which is dramatic and rhythmically very funky, earthy. That undercurrent of tension comes with the smallest sound of his horn. He can wail with one or two notes placed, dropped, fired, drawled, sung, whispered, as light, reason, sweetness, regard, elation. His solos are extensions of the rhythm yet divide it, as time can be divided, even seemingly obliterated, but be as abstract and as unpredictable as our hearts.
After talking to Davis, I viewed his music video, ''Decoy,'' and an interview filmed by Columbia Records, for whom Davis has recorded since the mid-1950's. Both gave aspects of Davis's abiding passions and his most recent pursuits. ''I'm doing a video because I can,'' he said in the interview. ''I'm gearing the video to all colors. Not just white. I won't be acting silly. I don't look silly and I don't act silly.''
The video is Davis, playing, somewhat exaggerated in his gestures, his tongue pushing out. He seems whirled slowly in place, electronic graphics -much like his own spare drawings - bouncing from his horn.
In the interview, Davis, with his usual clarity and understated hilarity, talked about hiring white musicians, which he has increasingly done over the years and which once generated negative response from black musicians and fans. He explained that he wants to play ''today music.'' Over the years, he has had to tell many musicians - black and white, ''Don't play what you know but what you hear.
''White musicians usually are overtrained, and black musicians sometimes are undertrained,'' he said. ''You have to mix the two. A black musician has his own sound, but if you want it played straight, mix in a white musician and the piece will still be straight, only you'll get feeling and texture - up, down, around, silly, wavy, slow, fast - you have more to work with. There's funky white musicians. But after classical training, you have to learn to play social music. You have to learn to underplay. I tell 'em, 'Don't practice all the time or you'll sound like that.' ''
Davis described how he went ''with his feelings'' in playing, how much he loved music. ''I always play the blues . . . my body's full of rhythm. I like broken rhythm - strong melodies, chords on the synthesizer. I use the DX 7. It's a whole other attitude. It's like sketching.'' The film showed Miles drawing and painting (an example of which appears on the inside jacket of ''Decoy'’).
THE COOLNESS OF the early 1950's gave way to a stomping sound; people marching, the assertion of gospel music and Africa expanded the music stylistically. These developments in the music coincided with a rising national consciousness among the African-American people characterized by the civil-rights movement.
Horace Silver, the pianist and composer, introduced contemporary gospel into postbop jazz. It was a quick, funky music, with a sharper eye on arrangement, in reponse to the cool. It had a free, screaming, rhythmic emphasis, even whispered. Miles Davis became its most sophisticated master. He developed a new black, postbop, postcool ensemble and solo style: He was laid back yet hot, melodic yet tense -searching. The next few years of his work were a measure of all the music of that period.
In 1955, Davis assembled a group that included the pianist Red Garland, the drummer Philly Joe Jones, the bassist Paul Chambers and, most important, the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. The quintet -without peers during that period - combined the finger-popping urban funk blues of the hard-bop era with a harmonic cushion and Davis's gorgeous melodic invention. It caused a sensation among jazz people. Later, the alto saxophonist Julian (Cannonball) Adderley would join Davis.
''I used to tell them, 'The bass got the tonic. Don't play in the same register as the sax. Lay out. Don't play' '' - the Milesian esthetic for his band. When he listens to his own music, Davis says: ''I always listen to what I can leave out.''
Davis's quintet and sextet, the most popular jazz groups of the times, carried the sound and image of the contemporary, urban American intellectual and artist. The albums ''Milestones'' and ''Round About Midnight'' were great social events as well as artistic triumphs. ''Kind of Blue'' led us into new formal and intellectual vistas. So powerful and broadly expressive was the classic group - with Adderley the formalist on one side and Coltrane the expressionist on the other - that it contained the elements for establishing or redefining two significant jazz styles that have dominated to one degree or another the music for the last 30 years. And though Adderley's later band and the music and the musicians he developed were prototypes for fusion, Miles Davis is the music's real originator.
Coltrane's direction and legacy were to redefine avant-garde - to transform the social upsurge to a musical revolution.
Davis talks about the two directions Coltrane and Adderley represented. ''I showed Trane all that,'' he says, casually accepting credit for the chordal experimentation and chromatic lyricism that the saxophonist began to be identified with, and which in turn revolutionized the music. ''Cannonball just played funk. But he could interpret any feeling.''
DAVIS WAS NOT ONLY the cool hipster of my be-bop youth, but also the embodiment of a black attitude that had grown steadily more ubiquitous in the 1950's -defiance. All the stories about Davis, who shook off a four-year heroin addiction during this time, told us he was ''bad.'' He even had the unfortunate but spiritually-in-tune-with-the-times experience in 1959 of being beaten by racist policemen outside Birdland as he took a breather between sets. Black newspapers called it a ''Georgia head whipping,'' comparing it directly with the beatings black activists got marching against ''Jim Crow.''
My road buddies and I knew he regularly went to the gym and boxed. We had even been close enough a couple of times when the quintet opened at the Bohemia in Greenwich Village to hear the fog-horn bass that was his voice. That was the way he was supposed to sound: hip and somewhat mysterious with a touch of street toughness. ''When I think of Davis's influence, I think he's had a positive influence on black people in general,'' says Steve McCall, drummer and an elder statesmen of the new music. ''He transcended the slave mentality. I remember when he was setting all kinds of styles. The artist. He had class. Good taste. His music had a density.''
By the time he recorded ''Miles Ahead'' in 1957, Davis understood enough about the entire American esthetic - its lushness and pretension -to make the cool statements on a level that was truly popular and which had the accents of African America included not as contrasting anxiety or tension but as an equal sensuousness.
''Sketches of Spain'' and ''Porgy and Bess'' are high American musical statements, their tension being between a functional impressionism, serious in its emotional detail, and mood without significance. It is the bluesiness of the Miles Davis conception, even submerged in all the lushness, that gives these moods an intelligence and sensitivity. His horn probes like a dowser for beauty. The horn itself is so beautiful the listener feels that, maybe, all is a dream.
''Miles just shows several aspects of being creative,'' says Max Roach, the drummer and another of the genius teen-agers to hook up with Parker to create the explosion of be-bop. ''If you're being creative, you can't be like you were yesterday. Miles exemplifies it. The record industry keeps reading us out . . . ,'' categorizing the music as an antiquated music form.
''But Miles will step out. Lester Young did that . . . always looking. It's the law of everything. Miles is that way . . . Ella'' - Fitzgerald - ''and Miles breathed new life into the record companies. I think what Miles is doing is in keeping with our creative people today.''
The classic 1950's Davis group expressed both the soul and the rage. The 60's restatement with such future fusion stars as Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter does not carry the balance. Yet Davis says he told them the same thing, told them what ''not to do too much of.'' Davis's group became the vehicle for the increasing use of the pop-commercial aspect of his mind.
By the end of the 1960's, his music had begun to take on a somber, somewhat formal tone. He was still trying to move, as always, trying to develop new forms, use different materials. The cushion and the use of electrified instruments - once thought to be the exclusive property of rhythm and blues -were also gradually rising.
Davis was moving to change his music and, one would suppose, himself once more. In my own mind, the album ''In A Silent Way'' in 1969 is the beginning of the elaboration of what came to be known as fusion. Davis had come up with a new direction. The music is contradictory, subdued yet bright. Now cushion and soloist - background and foreground seemingly exchanged places constantly.
''Bitches Brew'' was made the same year and demonstrated not only that Davis's music had changed, but that he was ready to elaborate on the changes. The result - the incorporation of a definite back beat and electric instruments - was controversial.
The long passage of the 1960's had worked its magic on Davis. When he came out of his conservative, neo-Ivy threads in the 70's, it was not for loose, flowing African dress; it was for the fringed leather that the Black Panther or the hippie might wear. Davis identified more completely with what finally is the more secular, more ''integrated'' and ultimately more popular and commercial consciousness of rhythm and blues or rock or fusion that led him to the music he is making today. The ''new'' infusion of such white musicians as Joe Zawinul and Keith Jarrett on a ''permanent'' basis in Davis's bands in the early 1970's was akin to the coalition politics of the Panthers. What is clear, though, is Davis carried them and many, many others in his direction. But by 1975, Davis had dropped out of sight, neither recording nor touring. He had consistent health problems, one leading to the insertion of a prosthetic hip joint in 1983.
By the time of his ''cooling out,'' lasting from 1975 until 1981, Davis had made still more personnel changes -adding a permanent electric bass and guitars: Mike Henderson, Pete Cosey, Reggie Lucas, Larry Coryell, and young players such as the drummer Al Foster or the percussionist Mtume. The albums recorded in this period were musically less than dynamic, but their song titles had a politically evocative mood - ''Red China Blues,'' ''Calypso Frelimo'' and ''Zimbabwe.''
The new star trumpeter, Olo Dura, tries to assess Miles Davis's concept and contributions: ''Miles bridged the gap to both Americas. He's hip to the whole culture here. He is playing it in his music. Miles was dealing with all that America had to say. He makes you a true American. He's off the Mississippi River,'' a reference to Miles's Midwest birthplace. ''He's like the center of the pendulum. He goes where the history is - East, West, North, South. He's a consummate musical scientist.'' Davis, both in print and in person, seems a man not only anxious to be appreciated and celebrated by blacks, but sensitive to the tragedy of race in this country, particularly as it relates to his musical and social life. His wife, the actress Cicely Tyson, appears to be like-minded. Davis has had run-ins with the critics, mostly white, particularly about their opinions over the years about his playing. Down beat, the magazine viewed by many as the official jazz chronicle, published new favorable reviews of the Bird-Miles records (the original review was uniformly negative). In a down beat readers' poll, ''Decoy'' was voted the jazz album of 1984.
''I don't pay no attention to these white critics about my music,'' he says. ''Be like somebody from Europe coming criticizing Chinese music. They don't know about that. I've lived what I played.''
Of late, Davis has been trying to reconnect jazz with its most popular and commercial forms, r & b and blues. A great deal of outcry has come from people who revered classical Davis, charging that since ''Bitches Brew,'' he has sold out. Yet jazz is impossible without blues - it is the child of the blues, Langston Hughes told us. The business world, however, categorizes life for the marketplace, and an artificial separation has resulted.
Reggie Workman, the bassist, points out that Davis is doing the same thing, just using the electronics to reach people. ''Miles's music is what he's always been playing,'' he says. ''He's surrounded himself with electronics as a mediator between himself and today's market.''
The results - ''You're Under Arrest'' and ''Decoy'' - clearly stand head and shoulders above his earlier ''out of retirement'' efforts. Most important, Davis is getting his ''chops'' back. One cannot lay off the trumpet, a notoriously taxing instrument, and pop up crackling. The latest recordings show Davis stronger, piercing through the electronic environment tellingly.
''Miles survived,'' explains Craig Harris, the trombonist. ''He kept his mind open. He understands business, and he's doing what he wants to do. Miles don't care who agrees or disagrees with him. Miles says, 'This is what I'm gonna do.' And he sticks by his guns. And everybody follows Miles.''
A version of this article appears in print on June 16, 1985, Section 6, Page 24 of the National edition with the headline: MILES DAVIS. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
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"Everybody thinks that music happens as a result of people playing it--even many musicians think that. But real music only comes about from the act of listening."
"Everybody thinks that music happens as a result of people playing it--even many musicians think that. But real music only comes about from the act of listening."
--Miles Davis (1926-1991)
PHOTOS: MILES DAVIS (1926-1991)
Miles Davis: A New Revolution in Sound
by Kofi Natambu
Black Renaissance Noire
Volume 14, Number 2
Fall, 2014
"Knowledge is Freedom. Ignorance is Slavery.”
—Miles Davis
—Miles Davis
"That period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s was an era in
which the resources of Jazz were being consolidated and refined and the
range of its sources broadened. Some of the Jazz of this period reached
across class and age lines and unified black audiences. Young people
could see this music as "bad" in much the same sense that James Brown
used the word, and older black people could see its links to black
tradition."
--John Szwed
"To the yang of 'hard bop' Davis brought stillness, melodic beauty, and
understatement; to the yin of 'cool' he brought rich sonority, blues
feeling, and an enriched rhythmic capacity that moved beyond swing to
funk. By refusing to color-code either his music or his audience, Davis
rose at the end of the 1950s to the summit of artistic excellence."
--Marsha Bayles
"What is there to say about the instrument? It's my voice--that's all it is"
--Miles Davis
On
July 17,1955 at the second annual Newport Jazz Festival, Davis was
literally invited at the last minute to join a group of prominent Jazz
musicians in a staged twenty minute jam session that had been organized
by the festival s famed music director, impresario, and promoter George
Wein as part of an "opening act" for the then highly popular white
headliner Dave Brubeck.
Scheduled merely as a quick programming lead-in to stage changes between featured performances by the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ), the Count Basie and Duke Ellington Orchestras, Lester Young, and Brubeck, nothing special was planned in advance for this short set which, like most jam sessions, was completely improvised by the musicians performing onstage. Davis was then the least well known musician in the assembled group which was made up of Thelonious Monk, individuals from the MJQ, and other individual members of various groups playing in the festival. Wein just happened to be a big fan of Davis and added him because he was "a melodic bebopper" and a player who, in Wein's view, could reach a larger audience than most other musicians because of the haunting romantic lyricism and melodic richness of his style. Wein's insight turned out to be prophetic.
Despite the fact that most of the mainstream audience on hand had only a vague idea of who Davis was, he was a standout sensation in the jam session and his searing performance was one of the most talked about highlights of the festival. Appearing in an elegant white seersucker sport coat and a small black bow tie, thus already demonstrating the sleek, sharp sartorial style that quickly became his trademark (and led to his eventual appearance on the covers of many fashion magazines in the U.S, Europe, and Asia), Davis captivated the festival throng with haunting, dynamic solos and brilliant ensemble playing on both slow ballads and intensely up-tempo quicksilver tunes alike. Taking complete command of the setting with his understated elegance and relaxed yet naturally dramatic stage presence, the handsome and charismatic Davis breezed through two famous and musically daunting compositions by Thelonious Monk ("Hackensack" and "Round Midnight"), and then ended his part of the program by playing an impassioned bluesy solo on a well-known Charlie Parker composition entitled "Now is the Time" which Davis had originally recorded with Bird in 1945. That clinched it. He was a hit. Miles had returned from almost complete oblivion to becoming a much talked about and heralded star seemingly overnight (of course this personal and professional recognition had been over a decade in the making). After a long, arduous struggle as both an artist and individual that began in his hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois when he started to play trumpet at the age of 13 in 1939, Miles Davis had finally "arrived." For the first time since 1950 he was completely clean and off drugs. No longer addicted, Miles now played with a bravura, command, and creative clarity that he had been fervently searching for well before he had become addicted to heroin. It would be the beginning of many more incredible triumphs and struggles that would catapult the fiery young trumpet player to the very pinnacle of his profession and global fame and wealth over the next ten years.
On hand for that historic summer concert in Newport, RI. was George Avakian, a young music producer from the large corporate recording company called Columbia (now Sony). Miles had been after Avakian for over five years trying to get a recording contract with Columbia which was then the largest and most successful music company in the United States, but Avakian had been cautiously waiting for a sign that Davis had conquered his personal problems and was ready to commit fulltime to his music. Clearly Miles was now ready. Avakian's brother Aram whispered to George during the concert that he should sign Davis now, before he became a big hit and signed with a rival company instead. Miles, himself nonplussed about the critical acclaim he was finally receiving, wondered what the fuss was all about and maintained that he was simply playing like he always had been. While there was some truth to this assertion it was also clear that Miles's highly disciplined demeanor, new responsible attitude, and impeccable playing now indicated his intent on making a new commitment to living a life strictly devoted to his art.
Avakian and Columbia representatives met with Davis two days later on July 19, 1955 to sign him to a new contract with the understanding that Davis would first fulfill the remainder of his contract with the Prestige label by doing a series of recordings in the fall of 1955 and the spring and fall of 1956 while at the same time making his first recordings with Columbia that would not be released until after the public appearance of the Prestige sessions. These small label recordings for Prestige would immediately become famously known as the "missing g" sessions (so-called for the dropping of the letter 'g' in the titles of these records, (e.g. Walkin', Workin', Cookin', Steamin', and Relaxin'). As Miles's first great legendary Quintet this young aggregation (the oldest member of the group was 33 years old) featured then relative unknowns John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. From the very beginning this group and Miles himself would remake Jazz history and become innovative and protean harbingers of great changes to come in the music as well as the general culture.
As with many great musicians, Miles's unique, highly individual sound on his chosen instrument--the trumpet--would be the creative basis and structural foundation of this new cultural and aesthetic intervention. His was a sound that embraced the entire history of Jazz trumpet in its meticulous attention to the demanding technical and physical requirements of the instrument yet also sought a creative and expressive approach that openly allowed for more subtle emotional nuances to emerge from his playing than were common traditionally on trumpet. Miles brought a highly burnished lyricism that was both deeply introspective and fiercely driving all at once. A major characteristic of Davis's playing was a new and different way of phrasing in which a major emphasis and focus on the relationship of space to tempo and melody (and the intervals between notes) became the hallmark of his style. In the process Davis dramatically redefined and expanded the expressive and creative range of the tonal palette and instrumental timbre of the trumpet. By shifting the traditional emphasis from the heraldic and bravura functions of the instrument to a more diverse and expansive range of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ideas Miles was able to openly express the anguished conflict, sardonic irony, restless desire for cultural and social change, and questing existential/ psychological anxiety of the modern age. This intense attention to the broader expressive possibilities of both musical improvisation and composition also turned the feverish search for new forms and methods that characterized the era into a parallel personal quest for discovering a wider range of emotional and psychological contexts in which to play. The sonic exploration of the complexities and ambiguities of joy, rage, love, and melancholia was a major hallmark of Miles's style. Central to Miles's vision and sensibility was an equally exhilarating appreciation for the balanced expressive and intellectual relationship between relaxation and tension in his music. By focusing specifically on the spatial and rhythmic dimensions of melodic invention Miles developed musical methods that called for, and often resulted in, a precise minimalist approach to playing in which each note (or corresponding chord) carried an implied reference to every other note or chord in a particular sequence of musical phrases. Through a technical command of breath control and timbral dynamics induced by his embouchure and unorthodox valve fingerings, Miles could maintain or manipulate tonal pitch at the softest or loudest volumes. By creating stark dialectical contrasts in his sound through alternately attacking, slurring, syncopating or manipulating long tones in particular ensemble or orchestral settings (a technical device Miles often referred to as "contrary motion") Miles was able to convey great feeling and emotion through an economy of phrasing and musical rests. This rapt attention to allowing space or the silence between note intervals to dramatically assert itself as much or more as the notes themselves created great anticipation in his audience as to how these tensions would be resolved (or not). In this respect, the insightful observation by the French Jazz critic and music historian André Hodeir that Miles's sound tends toward a discovery of ecstasy is a rather apt description of Davis's expressive approach. What emerged from Miles's intensely comprehensive investigation of the creative possibilities of the instrument was a deep and lifelong appreciation for the tonal, sonic, and textural dimensions of playing and composing music. These aesthetic concerns as well as Miles's innovative creative solutions to the rigorous challenges of improvisational and composed ensemble structures alike in the modern Jazz tradition soon revolutionized all of American music and made Davis one of the leading and most influential musician-composers in the world during the last half of the 20th century.
Davis's widespread social, cultural, and political influence didn't end there however--especially in the black community. Miles also quickly became a social and cultural avatar whose highly personal combination of cool reserve, fiery defiance, detached alienation, intellectual independence, and striking stylistic innovation in everything from clothes to speech embodied, and largely defined for many, the ethos of 'hip' that pervaded the black Jazz world of the 1950s and early 1960s. But Miles, while remaining very hip, at the same time also lived and worked far beyond the insular world of hipsterism and avant-garde bohemia. He was unique in that his stance was simultaneously existentialist and engaged. As many observers, fans, scholars, friends, and critics have noted, Miles became, in many ways, what the critic Garry Giddins called "the representative black artist" of his era. John Szwed, Yale University music professor and author of a 2002 biography on Miles entitled So What: The Life of Miles Davis speaks for a couple of generations of writers, fans, artists and musicians when he states that by the late '50s, early 1960s:
In the quest to critique many of the philosophical assumptions governing conventional modernist discourse in art while still retaining a fundamental aesthetic connection to other important aspects and principles of modernism--especially those having to do with the continuous necessity of creative change and revision--Davis epitomized the 'progressive' African American Jazz musician's desire to use black vernacular sources, ideas, and values to engage these modernist traditions and principles on his/her own independent social, cultural, and intellectual terms. In such major recordings from the 1957-1967 period as his orchestral masterpieces Miles Ahead, (1957) Porgy & Bess, (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960)--made in collaboration with his longtime friend and colleague, the white composer and arranger Gil Evans --and his equally significant and highly influential small group Quintet and Sextet recordings, Milestones, (1958) Kind of Blue, (1959) Live at the Blackhawk, (1961) My Funny Valentine, (1965) Four & More, (1964) E.S.P., (1965) Miles Smiles, (1966) Miles in Berlin, (1964) Miles in Tokyo, (1964) Live at the Plugged Nickel, (1965) and Nefertiti, (1967) Davis was at the forefront of those African American artists of the period who, in all the arts, were feverishly looking for and often finding fresh, new modes of pursuing aesthetic innovation and social change. By dialectically synthesizing and extending ideas, strategies, methods, and structures culled from such disparate sources as 20th century classical music, the blues, R&B, and many different stylistic forms from the Jazz tradition (i.e. Swing, Bebop, 'Cool' and 'Hard Bop' etc.)--many of which Davis himself had played a pivotal role in developing and popularizing--Miles helped bring about a new creative synthesis of modern and vernacular expressions that greatly changed our perceptions of what American music was and could be.
Scheduled merely as a quick programming lead-in to stage changes between featured performances by the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ), the Count Basie and Duke Ellington Orchestras, Lester Young, and Brubeck, nothing special was planned in advance for this short set which, like most jam sessions, was completely improvised by the musicians performing onstage. Davis was then the least well known musician in the assembled group which was made up of Thelonious Monk, individuals from the MJQ, and other individual members of various groups playing in the festival. Wein just happened to be a big fan of Davis and added him because he was "a melodic bebopper" and a player who, in Wein's view, could reach a larger audience than most other musicians because of the haunting romantic lyricism and melodic richness of his style. Wein's insight turned out to be prophetic.
Despite the fact that most of the mainstream audience on hand had only a vague idea of who Davis was, he was a standout sensation in the jam session and his searing performance was one of the most talked about highlights of the festival. Appearing in an elegant white seersucker sport coat and a small black bow tie, thus already demonstrating the sleek, sharp sartorial style that quickly became his trademark (and led to his eventual appearance on the covers of many fashion magazines in the U.S, Europe, and Asia), Davis captivated the festival throng with haunting, dynamic solos and brilliant ensemble playing on both slow ballads and intensely up-tempo quicksilver tunes alike. Taking complete command of the setting with his understated elegance and relaxed yet naturally dramatic stage presence, the handsome and charismatic Davis breezed through two famous and musically daunting compositions by Thelonious Monk ("Hackensack" and "Round Midnight"), and then ended his part of the program by playing an impassioned bluesy solo on a well-known Charlie Parker composition entitled "Now is the Time" which Davis had originally recorded with Bird in 1945. That clinched it. He was a hit. Miles had returned from almost complete oblivion to becoming a much talked about and heralded star seemingly overnight (of course this personal and professional recognition had been over a decade in the making). After a long, arduous struggle as both an artist and individual that began in his hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois when he started to play trumpet at the age of 13 in 1939, Miles Davis had finally "arrived." For the first time since 1950 he was completely clean and off drugs. No longer addicted, Miles now played with a bravura, command, and creative clarity that he had been fervently searching for well before he had become addicted to heroin. It would be the beginning of many more incredible triumphs and struggles that would catapult the fiery young trumpet player to the very pinnacle of his profession and global fame and wealth over the next ten years.
On hand for that historic summer concert in Newport, RI. was George Avakian, a young music producer from the large corporate recording company called Columbia (now Sony). Miles had been after Avakian for over five years trying to get a recording contract with Columbia which was then the largest and most successful music company in the United States, but Avakian had been cautiously waiting for a sign that Davis had conquered his personal problems and was ready to commit fulltime to his music. Clearly Miles was now ready. Avakian's brother Aram whispered to George during the concert that he should sign Davis now, before he became a big hit and signed with a rival company instead. Miles, himself nonplussed about the critical acclaim he was finally receiving, wondered what the fuss was all about and maintained that he was simply playing like he always had been. While there was some truth to this assertion it was also clear that Miles's highly disciplined demeanor, new responsible attitude, and impeccable playing now indicated his intent on making a new commitment to living a life strictly devoted to his art.
Avakian and Columbia representatives met with Davis two days later on July 19, 1955 to sign him to a new contract with the understanding that Davis would first fulfill the remainder of his contract with the Prestige label by doing a series of recordings in the fall of 1955 and the spring and fall of 1956 while at the same time making his first recordings with Columbia that would not be released until after the public appearance of the Prestige sessions. These small label recordings for Prestige would immediately become famously known as the "missing g" sessions (so-called for the dropping of the letter 'g' in the titles of these records, (e.g. Walkin', Workin', Cookin', Steamin', and Relaxin'). As Miles's first great legendary Quintet this young aggregation (the oldest member of the group was 33 years old) featured then relative unknowns John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. From the very beginning this group and Miles himself would remake Jazz history and become innovative and protean harbingers of great changes to come in the music as well as the general culture.
As with many great musicians, Miles's unique, highly individual sound on his chosen instrument--the trumpet--would be the creative basis and structural foundation of this new cultural and aesthetic intervention. His was a sound that embraced the entire history of Jazz trumpet in its meticulous attention to the demanding technical and physical requirements of the instrument yet also sought a creative and expressive approach that openly allowed for more subtle emotional nuances to emerge from his playing than were common traditionally on trumpet. Miles brought a highly burnished lyricism that was both deeply introspective and fiercely driving all at once. A major characteristic of Davis's playing was a new and different way of phrasing in which a major emphasis and focus on the relationship of space to tempo and melody (and the intervals between notes) became the hallmark of his style. In the process Davis dramatically redefined and expanded the expressive and creative range of the tonal palette and instrumental timbre of the trumpet. By shifting the traditional emphasis from the heraldic and bravura functions of the instrument to a more diverse and expansive range of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ideas Miles was able to openly express the anguished conflict, sardonic irony, restless desire for cultural and social change, and questing existential/ psychological anxiety of the modern age. This intense attention to the broader expressive possibilities of both musical improvisation and composition also turned the feverish search for new forms and methods that characterized the era into a parallel personal quest for discovering a wider range of emotional and psychological contexts in which to play. The sonic exploration of the complexities and ambiguities of joy, rage, love, and melancholia was a major hallmark of Miles's style. Central to Miles's vision and sensibility was an equally exhilarating appreciation for the balanced expressive and intellectual relationship between relaxation and tension in his music. By focusing specifically on the spatial and rhythmic dimensions of melodic invention Miles developed musical methods that called for, and often resulted in, a precise minimalist approach to playing in which each note (or corresponding chord) carried an implied reference to every other note or chord in a particular sequence of musical phrases. Through a technical command of breath control and timbral dynamics induced by his embouchure and unorthodox valve fingerings, Miles could maintain or manipulate tonal pitch at the softest or loudest volumes. By creating stark dialectical contrasts in his sound through alternately attacking, slurring, syncopating or manipulating long tones in particular ensemble or orchestral settings (a technical device Miles often referred to as "contrary motion") Miles was able to convey great feeling and emotion through an economy of phrasing and musical rests. This rapt attention to allowing space or the silence between note intervals to dramatically assert itself as much or more as the notes themselves created great anticipation in his audience as to how these tensions would be resolved (or not). In this respect, the insightful observation by the French Jazz critic and music historian André Hodeir that Miles's sound tends toward a discovery of ecstasy is a rather apt description of Davis's expressive approach. What emerged from Miles's intensely comprehensive investigation of the creative possibilities of the instrument was a deep and lifelong appreciation for the tonal, sonic, and textural dimensions of playing and composing music. These aesthetic concerns as well as Miles's innovative creative solutions to the rigorous challenges of improvisational and composed ensemble structures alike in the modern Jazz tradition soon revolutionized all of American music and made Davis one of the leading and most influential musician-composers in the world during the last half of the 20th century.
Davis's widespread social, cultural, and political influence didn't end there however--especially in the black community. Miles also quickly became a social and cultural avatar whose highly personal combination of cool reserve, fiery defiance, detached alienation, intellectual independence, and striking stylistic innovation in everything from clothes to speech embodied, and largely defined for many, the ethos of 'hip' that pervaded the black Jazz world of the 1950s and early 1960s. But Miles, while remaining very hip, at the same time also lived and worked far beyond the insular world of hipsterism and avant-garde bohemia. He was unique in that his stance was simultaneously existentialist and engaged. As many observers, fans, scholars, friends, and critics have noted, Miles became, in many ways, what the critic Garry Giddins called "the representative black artist" of his era. John Szwed, Yale University music professor and author of a 2002 biography on Miles entitled So What: The Life of Miles Davis speaks for a couple of generations of writers, fans, artists and musicians when he states that by the late '50s, early 1960s:
“Miles was becoming the coin of the realm, cock of the walk, good copy for the tabloids, and inspiration for literary imagination. Allusions to him could turn up anywhere…Tributes to him sprang up in poems by Langston Hughes (“Trumpet Player: 52nd Street”), and Gregory Corso…Young people ostentatiously carried his albums to parties and sought out his clothing in the best men’s stores. In person, his every action was observed and read for meaning…A discourse developed around him, one that bore inordinate weight in matters of race—Miles stories—narratives about his inner drives, his demons, his pain, and his ambition. Invariably, his stories climaxed with a short comment, crushingly delivered in a husky imitation of the man’s voice, capped by some obscenity…He was the man.”Among many black people, Davis's outspoken, defiant social stance and hip, charismatic aura signified a profound shift in cultural values and attitudes in the national black community that also had a lasting political significance and influence. This was especially true for the emerging adolescent youth and radical young adults of the era whose overt displays of rebellion and defiance of racism and repression were becoming pervasive with the rise of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Miles quickly became a major symbol of this modern revolutionary spirit in African American culture and was seen by many as an important artistic leader in this struggle and its widespread social and political demands for respect, justice, equality, and freedom for African Americans that marked the period. Thus, it is not surprising that many of the various musical aesthetics that Davis devised and expressed during the late '50s and throughout the '60s consciously sought to advance specifically new ideas about the structural, formal, and expressive dimensions of the modernist tradition in contemporary Jazz music. These changes would openly challenge many of the orthodoxies of this tradition both in terms of form and content while at the same time asserting a radically different set of ideological and aesthetic values about the intellectual and cultural worth, use, and intent of the music that in attitude and style sought to resist or go beyond standard notions of both high art and commercial popular culture. Simultaneously however, Davis sought to consciously establish an even more socially intimate relationship with his black audience (and especially its youthful members) that would embody and hopefully expand Davis's views on the broad necessity for deeply rooted political and cultural change within the African American community and the U.S. as a whole.
In the quest to critique many of the philosophical assumptions governing conventional modernist discourse in art while still retaining a fundamental aesthetic connection to other important aspects and principles of modernism--especially those having to do with the continuous necessity of creative change and revision--Davis epitomized the 'progressive' African American Jazz musician's desire to use black vernacular sources, ideas, and values to engage these modernist traditions and principles on his/her own independent social, cultural, and intellectual terms. In such major recordings from the 1957-1967 period as his orchestral masterpieces Miles Ahead, (1957) Porgy & Bess, (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960)--made in collaboration with his longtime friend and colleague, the white composer and arranger Gil Evans --and his equally significant and highly influential small group Quintet and Sextet recordings, Milestones, (1958) Kind of Blue, (1959) Live at the Blackhawk, (1961) My Funny Valentine, (1965) Four & More, (1964) E.S.P., (1965) Miles Smiles, (1966) Miles in Berlin, (1964) Miles in Tokyo, (1964) Live at the Plugged Nickel, (1965) and Nefertiti, (1967) Davis was at the forefront of those African American artists of the period who, in all the arts, were feverishly looking for and often finding fresh, new modes of pursuing aesthetic innovation and social change. By dialectically synthesizing and extending ideas, strategies, methods, and structures culled from such disparate sources as 20th century classical music, the blues, R&B, and many different stylistic forms from the Jazz tradition (i.e. Swing, Bebop, 'Cool' and 'Hard Bop' etc.)--many of which Davis himself had played a pivotal role in developing and popularizing--Miles helped bring about a new creative synthesis of modern and vernacular expressions that greatly changed our perceptions of what American music was and could be.
Miles Davis
(1926-1991)
Biography by William Ruhlmann
A monumental innovator, icon, and maverick, trumpeter Miles Davis helped define the course of jazz as well as popular culture in the 20th century, bridging the gap between bebop, modal music, funk, and fusion. Throughout most of his 50-year career, Davis played the trumpet in a lyrical, introspective style, often employing a stemless Harmon mute to make his sound more personal and intimate. It was a style that, along with his brooding stage persona, earned him the nickname "Prince of Darkness." However, Davis proved to be a dazzlingly protean artist, moving into fiery modal jazz in the '60s and electrified funk and fusion in the '70s, drenching his trumpet in wah-wah pedal effects along the way. More than any other figure in jazz, Davis helped establish the direction of the genre with a steady stream of boundary-pushing recordings, among them 1957's chamber jazz album Birth of the Cool (which collected recordings from 1949-1950), 1959's modal masterpiece Kind of Blue, 1960's orchestral album Sketches of Spain, and 1970's landmark fusion recording Bitches Brew. Davis' own playing was obviously at the forefront of those changes, but he also distinguished himself as a bandleader, regularly surrounding himself with sidemen and collaborators who likewise moved in new directions, including the luminaries John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, and many more. While he remains one of the most referenced figures in jazz, a major touchstone for generations of trumpeters (including Wynton Marsalis, Chris Botti, and Nicholas Payton), his music reaches far beyond the jazz tradition, and can be heard in the genre-bending approach of performers across the musical spectrum, ranging from funk and pop to rock, electronica, hip-hop, and more.
Born in 1926, Davis was the son of dental surgeon, Dr. Miles Dewey Davis, Jr., and a music teacher, Cleota Mae (Henry) Davis, and grew up in the Black middle class of East St. Louis after the family moved there shortly after his birth. He became interested in music during his childhood and by the age of 12 began taking trumpet lessons. While still in high school, he got jobs playing in local bars and at 16 was playing gigs out of town on weekends. At 17, he joined Eddie Randle's Blue Devils, a territory band based in St. Louis. He enjoyed a personal apotheosis in 1944, just after graduating from high school, when he saw and was allowed to sit in with Billy Eckstine's big band, which was playing in St. Louis. The band featured trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and saxophonist Charlie Parker, the architects of the emerging bebop style of jazz, which was characterized by fast, inventive soloing and dynamic rhythm variations.
It is striking that Davis fell so completely under Gillespie and Parker's spell, since his own slower and less flashy style never really compared to theirs. But bebop was the new sound of the day, and the young trumpeter was bound to follow it. He did so by leaving the Midwest to attend the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (renamed Juilliard) in September 1944. Shortly after his arrival in Manhattan, he was playing in clubs with Parker, and by 1945 he had abandoned his academic studies for a full-time career as a jazz musician, initially joining Benny Carter's band and making his first recordings as a sideman. He played with Eckstine in 1946-1947 and was a member of Parker's group in 1947-1948, making his recording debut as a leader on a 1947 session that featured Parker, pianist John Lewis, bassist Nelson Boyd, and drummer Max Roach. This was an isolated date, however, and Davis spent most of his time playing and recording behind Parker. But in the summer of 1948, he organized a nine-piece band with an unusual horn section. In addition to himself, it featured an alto saxophone, a baritone saxophone, a trombone, a French horn, and a tuba. This nonet, employing arrangements by Gil Evans and others, played for two weeks at the Royal Roost in New York in September. Earning a contract with Capitol Records, the band went into the studio in January 1949 for the first of three sessions and produced 12 tracks that attracted little attention at first. The band's relaxed sound, however, affected the musicians who played it, among them Kai Winding, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, J.J. Johnson, and Kenny Clarke, and it had a profound influence on the development of the cool jazz style on the West Coast. (In February 1957, Capitol finally issued the tracks together on an LP called Birth of the Cool.)
(1926-1991)
Biography by William Ruhlmann
A monumental innovator, icon, and maverick, trumpeter Miles Davis helped define the course of jazz as well as popular culture in the 20th century, bridging the gap between bebop, modal music, funk, and fusion. Throughout most of his 50-year career, Davis played the trumpet in a lyrical, introspective style, often employing a stemless Harmon mute to make his sound more personal and intimate. It was a style that, along with his brooding stage persona, earned him the nickname "Prince of Darkness." However, Davis proved to be a dazzlingly protean artist, moving into fiery modal jazz in the '60s and electrified funk and fusion in the '70s, drenching his trumpet in wah-wah pedal effects along the way. More than any other figure in jazz, Davis helped establish the direction of the genre with a steady stream of boundary-pushing recordings, among them 1957's chamber jazz album Birth of the Cool (which collected recordings from 1949-1950), 1959's modal masterpiece Kind of Blue, 1960's orchestral album Sketches of Spain, and 1970's landmark fusion recording Bitches Brew. Davis' own playing was obviously at the forefront of those changes, but he also distinguished himself as a bandleader, regularly surrounding himself with sidemen and collaborators who likewise moved in new directions, including the luminaries John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, and many more. While he remains one of the most referenced figures in jazz, a major touchstone for generations of trumpeters (including Wynton Marsalis, Chris Botti, and Nicholas Payton), his music reaches far beyond the jazz tradition, and can be heard in the genre-bending approach of performers across the musical spectrum, ranging from funk and pop to rock, electronica, hip-hop, and more.
Born in 1926, Davis was the son of dental surgeon, Dr. Miles Dewey Davis, Jr., and a music teacher, Cleota Mae (Henry) Davis, and grew up in the Black middle class of East St. Louis after the family moved there shortly after his birth. He became interested in music during his childhood and by the age of 12 began taking trumpet lessons. While still in high school, he got jobs playing in local bars and at 16 was playing gigs out of town on weekends. At 17, he joined Eddie Randle's Blue Devils, a territory band based in St. Louis. He enjoyed a personal apotheosis in 1944, just after graduating from high school, when he saw and was allowed to sit in with Billy Eckstine's big band, which was playing in St. Louis. The band featured trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and saxophonist Charlie Parker, the architects of the emerging bebop style of jazz, which was characterized by fast, inventive soloing and dynamic rhythm variations.
It is striking that Davis fell so completely under Gillespie and Parker's spell, since his own slower and less flashy style never really compared to theirs. But bebop was the new sound of the day, and the young trumpeter was bound to follow it. He did so by leaving the Midwest to attend the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (renamed Juilliard) in September 1944. Shortly after his arrival in Manhattan, he was playing in clubs with Parker, and by 1945 he had abandoned his academic studies for a full-time career as a jazz musician, initially joining Benny Carter's band and making his first recordings as a sideman. He played with Eckstine in 1946-1947 and was a member of Parker's group in 1947-1948, making his recording debut as a leader on a 1947 session that featured Parker, pianist John Lewis, bassist Nelson Boyd, and drummer Max Roach. This was an isolated date, however, and Davis spent most of his time playing and recording behind Parker. But in the summer of 1948, he organized a nine-piece band with an unusual horn section. In addition to himself, it featured an alto saxophone, a baritone saxophone, a trombone, a French horn, and a tuba. This nonet, employing arrangements by Gil Evans and others, played for two weeks at the Royal Roost in New York in September. Earning a contract with Capitol Records, the band went into the studio in January 1949 for the first of three sessions and produced 12 tracks that attracted little attention at first. The band's relaxed sound, however, affected the musicians who played it, among them Kai Winding, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, J.J. Johnson, and Kenny Clarke, and it had a profound influence on the development of the cool jazz style on the West Coast. (In February 1957, Capitol finally issued the tracks together on an LP called Birth of the Cool.)
Davis, meanwhile, had moved on to co-leading a band with pianist Tadd Dameron in 1949, and the group took him out of the country for an appearance at the Paris Jazz Festival in May. But the trumpeter's progress was impeded by an addiction to heroin that plagued him in the early '50s. His performances and recordings became more haphazard, but in January 1951 he began a long series of recordings for the Prestige label that became his main recording outlet for the next several years. He managed to kick his habit by the middle of the decade, and he made a strong impression playing "'Round Midnight" at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1955, a performance that led major-label Columbia to sign him. The prestigious contract allowed him to put together a permanent band, and he organized a quintet featuring saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones, who began recording his Columbia debut, 'Round About Midnight, in October.
As it happened, however, he had a remaining five albums on his Prestige contract, and over the next year he was forced to alternate his Columbia sessions with sessions for Prestige to fulfill this previous commitment. The latter resulted in the Prestige albums The New Miles Davis Quintet, Cookin', Workin', Relaxin', and Steamin', making Davis' first quintet one of his better-documented outfits. In May 1957, just three months after Capitol released the Birth of the Cool LP, Davis again teamed with arranger Gil Evans for his second Columbia LP, Miles Ahead. Playing flügelhorn, Davis fronted a big band on music that extended the Birth of the Cool concept and even had classical overtones. Released in 1958, the album was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, intended to honor recordings made before the Grammy Awards were instituted in 1959.
In December 1957, Davis returned to Paris, where he improvised the background music for the film L'Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud. Jazz Track, an album containing this music, earned him a 1960 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance, Solo or Small Group. He added saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to his group, creating the Miles Davis Sextet, which recorded Milestones in April 1958. Shortly after this recording, Red Garland was replaced on piano by Bill Evans and Jimmy Cobb took over for Philly Joe Jones on drums. In July, Davis again collaborated with Gil Evans and an orchestra on an album of music from Porgy and Bess. Back in the sextet, Davis began to experiment with modal playing, basing his improvisations on scales rather than chord changes.
This led to his next band recording, Kind of Blue, in March and April 1959, an album that became a landmark in modern jazz and the most popular album of Davis' career, eventually selling over two million copies, a phenomenal success for a jazz record. In sessions held in November 1959 and March 1960, Davis again followed his pattern of alternating band releases and collaborations with Gil Evans, recording Sketches of Spain, containing traditional Spanish music and original compositions in that style. The album earned Davis and Evans Grammy nominations in 1960 for Best Jazz Performance, Large Group, and Best Jazz Composition, More Than 5 Minutes; they won in the latter category.
This led to his next band recording, Kind of Blue, in March and April 1959, an album that became a landmark in modern jazz and the most popular album of Davis' career, eventually selling over two million copies, a phenomenal success for a jazz record. In sessions held in November 1959 and March 1960, Davis again followed his pattern of alternating band releases and collaborations with Gil Evans, recording Sketches of Spain, containing traditional Spanish music and original compositions in that style. The album earned Davis and Evans Grammy nominations in 1960 for Best Jazz Performance, Large Group, and Best Jazz Composition, More Than 5 Minutes; they won in the latter category.
By the time Davis returned to the studio to make his next band album in March 1961, Adderley had departed, Wynton Kelly had replaced Bill Evans at the piano, and John Coltrane had left to begin his successful solo career, being replaced by saxophonist Hank Mobley (following the brief tenure of Sonny Stitt). Nevertheless, Coltrane guested on a couple of tracks of the album, called Someday My Prince Will Come. The record made the pop charts in March 1962, but it was preceded into the best-seller lists by the Davis quintet's next recording, the two-LP set Miles Davis in Person (Friday & Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, San Francisco), recorded in April. The following month, Davis recorded another live show, as he and his band were joined by an orchestra led by Gil Evans at Carnegie Hall in May. The resulting Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall was his third LP to reach the pop charts, and it earned Davis and Evans a 1962 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Large Group, Instrumental. Davis and Evans teamed up again in 1962 for what became their final collaboration, Quiet Nights. The album was not issued until 1964, when it reached the charts and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group or Soloist with Large Group.
In 1996, Columbia Records released a six-CD box set, Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, that won the Grammy for Best Historical Album. Quiet Nights was preceded into the marketplace by Davis' next band effort, Seven Steps to Heaven, recorded in the spring of 1963 with an entirely new lineup consisting of saxophonist George Coleman, pianist Victor Feldman, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Frank Butler. During the sessions, Feldman was replaced by Herbie Hancock and Butler by Tony Williams. The album found Davis making a transition to his next great group, of which Carter, Hancock, and Williams would be members. It was another pop chart entry that earned 1963 Grammy nominations for both Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Soloist or Small Group and Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group. The quintet followed with two live albums, Miles Davis in Europe, recorded in July 1963, which made the pop charts and earned a 1964 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group, and My Funny Valentine, recorded in February 1964 and released in 1965, when it reached the pop charts.
By September 1964, the final member of the classic Miles Davis Quintet of the '60s was in place with the addition of saxophonist Wayne Shorter to the team of Davis, Carter, Hancock, and Williams. While continuing to play standards in concert, this unit embarked on a series of albums of original compositions contributed by the bandmembers themselves, starting in January 1965 with E.S.P., followed by Miles Smiles (1967 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group [7 or Fewer]), Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky (1968 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group), and Filles de Kilimanjaro. By the time of Miles in the Sky, the group had begun to turn to electric instruments, presaging Davis' next stylistic turn. By the final sessions for Filles de Kilimanjaro in September 1968, Hancock had been replaced by Chick Corea and Carter by Dave Holland. But Hancock, along with pianist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin, participated on Davis' next album, In a Silent Way (1969), which returned the trumpeter to the pop charts for the first time in four years and earned him another small-group jazz performance Grammy nomination. With his next album, Bitches Brew, Davis turned more overtly to a jazz-rock style. Though certainly not conventional rock music, Davis' electrified sound attracted a young, non-jazz audience while putting off traditional jazz fans.
Bitches Brew, released in March 1970, reached the pop Top 40 and became Davis' first album to be certified gold. It also earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Arrangement and won the Grammy for large-group jazz performance. He followed it with such similar efforts as Miles Davis at Fillmore East (1971 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Group), A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Live-Evil, On the Corner, and In Concert, all of which reached the pop charts. Meanwhile, Davis' former sidemen became his disciples in a series of fusion groups: Corea formed Return to Forever, Shorter and Zawinul led Weather Report, and McLaughlin and former Davis drummer Billy Cobham organized the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Starting in October 1972, when he broke his ankles in a car accident, Davis became less active in the early '70s, and in 1975 he gave up recording entirely due to illness, undergoing surgery for hip replacement later in the year. Five years passed before he returned to action by recording The Man with the Horn in 1980 and going back to touring in 1981.
By now, he was an elder statesman of jazz, and his innovations had been incorporated into the music, at least by those who supported his eclectic approach. He was also a celebrity whose appeal extended far beyond the basic jazz audience. He performed on the worldwide jazz festival circuit and recorded a series of albums that made the pop charts, including We Want Miles (1982 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist), Star People, Decoy, and You're Under Arrest. In 1986, after 30 years with Columbia, he switched to Warner Bros. and released Tutu, which won him his fourth Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance.
Aura, an album he had recorded in 1984, was released by Columbia in 1989 and brought him his fifth Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist (on a Jazz Recording). Davis surprised jazz fans when, on July 8, 1991, he joined an orchestra led by Quincy Jones at the Montreux Jazz Festival to perform some of the arrangements written for him in the late '50s by Gil Evans; he had never previously looked back at an aspect of his career. He died of pneumonia, respiratory failure, and a stroke within months. Doo-Bop, his last studio album, appeared in 1992. It was a collaboration with rapper Easy Mo Bee, and it won a Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Instrumental Performance, with the track "Fantasy" nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo. Released in 1993, Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux won Davis his seventh Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance.
Miles Davis took an all-inclusive, constantly restless approach to jazz that won him accolades and earned him controversy during his lifetime. It was hard to recognize the bebop acolyte of Charlie Parker in the flamboyantly dressed leader who seemed to keep one foot on a wah-wah pedal and one hand on an electric keyboard in his later years. But he did much to popularize jazz, reversing the trend away from commercial appeal that bebop started. And whatever the fripperies and explorations, he retained an ability to play moving solos that endeared him to audiences and demonstrated his affinity with tradition. He is a reminder of the music's essential quality of boundless invention, using all available means. Twenty-four years after Davis' death, he was the subject of Miles Ahead, a biopic co-written and directed by Don Cheadle, who also portrayed him. Its soundtrack functioned as a career overview with additional music provided by pianist Robert Glasper and associates. Additionally, Glasper enlisted many of his collaborators to help record Everything's Beautiful, a separate release that incorporated Davis' master recordings and outtakes into new compositions. In 2020, the trumpeter was also the focus of director Stanley Nelson's documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, which showcased music from throughout Davis' career. Also included on the documentary's soundtrack was a newly produced track, "Hail to the Real Chief," constructed out of previously unreleased Davis recordings by the trumpeter's fusion-era bandmates drummer Lenny White and drummer (and nephew) Vince Wilburn, Jr.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/miles-davis/
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/miles-davis/
Miles Davis
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Throughout a professional career lasting 50 years, Miles Davis played the trumpet in a lyrical, introspective, and melodic style, often employing a stemless harmon mute to make his sound more personal and intimate. But if his approach to his instrument was constant, his approach to jazz was dazzlingly protean. To examine his career is to examine the history of jazz from the mid-'40s to the early '90s, since he was in the thick of almost every important innovation and stylistic development in the music during that period, and he often led the way in those changes, both with his own performances and recordings and by choosing sidemen and collaborators who forged the new directions. It can even be argued that jazz stopped evolving when Davis wasn't there to push it forward.
Davis was the son of a dental surgeon, Dr. Miles Dewey Davis, Jr., and a music teacher, Cleota Mae (Henry) Davis, and thus grew up in the black middle class of East St. Louis after the family moved there shortly after his birth. He became interested in music during his childhood and by the age of 12 had begun taking trumpet lessons. While still in high school, he started to get jobs playing in local bars and at 16 was playing gigs out of town on weekends. At 17, he joined Eddie Randle's Blue Devils, a territory band based in St. Louis. He enjoyed a personal apotheosis in 1944, just after graduating from high school, when he saw and was allowed to sit in with Billy Eckstine's big band, which was playing in St. Louis. The band featured trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and saxophonist Charlie Parker, the architects of the emerging bebop style of jazz, which was characterized by fast, inventive soloing and dynamic rhythm variations.
It is striking that Davis fell so completely under Gillespie and Parker's spell, since his own slower and less flashy style never really compared with theirs. But bebop was the new sound of the day, and the young trumpeter was bound to follow it. He did so by leaving the Midwest to attend the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (since renamed Juilliard) in September 1944. Shortly after his arrival in Manhattan, he was playing in clubs with Parker, and by 1945 he had abandoned his academic studies for a full-time career as a jazz musician, initially joining Benny Carter's band and making his first recordings as a sideman. He played with Eckstine in 1946-1947 and was a member of Parker's group in 1947-1948, making his recording debut as a leader on a 1947 session that featured Parker, pianist John Lewis, bassist Nelson Boyd, and drummer Max Roach. This was an isolated date, however, and Davis spent most of his time playing and recording behind Parker. But in the summer of 1948 he organized a nine-piece band with an unusual horn section. In addition to himself, it featured an alto saxophone, a baritone saxophone, a trombone, a French horn, and a tuba. This nonet, employing arrangements by Gil Evans and others, played for two weeks at the Royal Roost in New York in September. Earning a contract with Capitol Records, the band went into the studio in January 1949 for the first of three sessions which produced 12 tracks that attracted little attention at first. The band's relaxed sound, however, affected the musicians who played it, among them Kai Winding, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, J.J. Johnson, and Kenny Clarke, and it had a profound influence on the development of the cool jazz style on the West Coast. In February 1957, Capitol finally issued the tracks together on an LP called Birth of the Cool.
Davis, meanwhile, had moved on to co-leading a band with pianist Tadd Dameron in 1949, and the group took him out of the country for an appearance at the Paris Jazz Festival in May. But the trumpeter's progress was impeded by an addiction to heroin that plagued him in the early '50s. His performances and recordings became more haphazard, but in January 1951 he began a long series of recordings for the Prestige label that became his main recording outlet for the next several years. He managed to kick his habit by the middle of the decade, and he made a strong impression playing "'Round Midnight" at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1955, a performance that led major label Columbia Records to sign him. The prestigious contract allowed him to put together a permanent band, and he organized a quintet featuring saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones that began recording his Columbia debut, Round About Midnight, in October. As it happened, however, he had a remaining five albums on his Prestige contract, and over the next year he was forced to alternate his Columbia sessions with sessions for Prestige to fulfill this previous commitment. The latter resulted in the Prestige albums The New Miles Davis Quintet, Cookin', Workin', Relaxin', and Steamin', making Davis' first quintet one of his better documented outfits.
In May 1957, just three months after Capitol released the Birth of the Cool LP, Davis again teamed with arranger Gil Evans for his second Columbia LP, Miles Ahead. Playing flugelhorn, Davis fronted a big band on music that extended the Birth of the Cool concept and even had classical overtones. Released in 1958, the album was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, intended to honor recordings made before the Grammy Awards were instituted in 1959. In December 1957, Davis returned to Paris, where he improvised the background music for the film L'Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud (Escalator to the Gallows). Jazz Track, an album containing this music, earned him a 1960 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance, Solo or Small Group. He added saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to his group, creating the Miles Davis Sextet, which recorded the album Milestones in April 1958. Shortly after this recording, Red Garland was replaced on piano by Bill Evans and Jimmy Cobb took over for Philly Joe Jones on drums. In July, Davis again collaborated with Gil Evans and an orchestra on an album of music from Porgy and Bess.
Back in the sextet, Davis began to experiment with modal playing, basing his improvisations on scales rather than chord changes. This led to his next band recording, Kind of Blue, in March and April 1959, an album that became a landmark in modern jazz and the most popular disc of Davis' career, eventually selling over two million copies, a phenomenal success for a jazz record. In sessions held in November 1959 and March 1960, Davis again followed his pattern of alternating band releases and collaborations with Gil Evans, recording Sketches of Spain, containing traditional Spanish music and original compositions in that style. The album earned Davis and Evans Grammy nominations in 1960 for Best Jazz Performance, Large Group, and Best Jazz Composition, More Than 5 minutes; they won in the latter category.
By the time Davis returned to the studio to make his next band album in March 1961, Adderley had departed, Wynton Kelly had replaced Bill Evans at the piano, and John Coltrane had left to begin his successful solo career, being replaced by saxophonist Hank Mobley (following the brief tenure of Sonny Stitt).
Nevertheless, Coltrane guested on a couple of tracks of the album, called Someday My Prince Will Come. The record made the pop charts in March 1962, but it was preceded into the bestseller lists by the Davis quintet's next recording, the two-LP set Miles Davis in Person (Friday & Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, San Francisco), recorded in April. The following month, Davis recorded another live show, as he and his band were joined by an orchestra led by Gil Evans at Carnegie Hall in May. The resulting Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall was his third LP to reach the pop charts, and it earned Davis and Evans a 1962 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Large Group, Instrumental.
Davis and Evans teamed up again in 1962 for what became their final collaboration, Quiet Nights. The album was not issued until 1964, when it reached the charts and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group or Soloist with Large Group. In 1996, Columbia Records released a six-CD box set, Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, that won the Grammy for Best Historical Album. Quiet Nights was preceded into the marketplace by Davis' next band effort, Seven Steps to Heaven, recorded in the spring of 1963 with an entirely new lineup consisting of saxophonist George Coleman, pianist Victor Feldman, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Frank Butler. During the sessions, Feldman was replaced by Herbie Hancock and Butler by Tony Williams. The album found Davis making a transition to his next great group, of which Carter, Hancock, and Williams would be members. It was another pop chart entry that earned 1963 Grammy nominations for both Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Soloist or Small Group and Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group. The quintet followed with two live albums, Miles Davis in Europe, recorded in July 1963, which made the pop charts and earned a 1964 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group, and My Funny Valentine, recorded in February 1964 and released in 1965, when it reached the pop charts.
By September 1964, the final member of the classic Miles Davis Quintet of the 1960s was in place with the addition of saxophonist Wayne Shorter to the team of Davis, Carter, Hancock, and Williams. While continuing to play standards in concert, this unit embarked on a series of albums of original compositions contributed by the band members, starting in January 1965 with E.S.P., followed by Miles Smiles (1967 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group [7 or Fewer]), Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky (1968 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group), and Filles de Kilimanjaro. By the time of Miles in the Sky, the group had begun to turn to electric instruments, presaging Davis' next stylistic turn. By the final sessions for Filles de Kilimanjaro in September 1968, Hancock had been replaced by Chick Corea and Carter by Dave Holland. But Hancock, along with pianist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin, participated on Davis' next album, In a Silent Way (1969), which returned the trumpeter to the pop charts for the first time in four years and earned him another small-group jazz performance Grammy nomination.
With his next album, Bitches Brew, Davis turned more overtly to a jazz-rock style. Though certainly not conventional rock music, Davis' electrified sound attracted a young, non-jazz audience while putting off traditional jazz fans. Bitches Brew, released in March 1970, reached the pop Top 40 and became Davis' first album to be certified gold. It also earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Arrangement and won the Grammy for large- group jazz performance. He followed it with such similar efforts as Miles Davis at Fillmore East (1971 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Group), A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Live-Evil, On the Corner, and In Concert, all of which reached the pop charts. Meanwhile, Davis' former sidemen became his disciples in a series of fusion groups: Corea formed Return to Forever, Shorter and Zawinul led Weather Report, and McLaughlin and former Davis drummer Billy Cobham organized the Mahavishu Orchestra.
Starting in October 1972, when he broke his ankles in a car accident, Davis became less active in the early 1970s, and in 1975 he gave up recording entirely due to illness, undergoing surgery for hip replacement later in the year. Five years passed before he returned to action by recording The Man With the Horn in 1980 and going back to touring in 1981. By now, he was an elder statesman of jazz, and his innovations had been incorporated into the music, at least by those who supported his eclectic approach. He was also a celebrity whose appeal extended far beyond the basic jazz audience. He performed on the worldwide jazz festival circuit and recorded a series of albums that made the pop charts, including We Want Miles (1982 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist), Star People, Decoy, and You're Under Arrest. In 1986, after 30 years with Columbia, he switched to Warner Bros. Records and released Tutu, which won him his fourth Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance. Aura, an album he had recorded in 1984, was released by Columbia in 1989 and brought him his fifth Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist (on a Jazz Recording).
Davis surprised jazz fans when, on July 8, 1991, he joined an orchestra led by Quincy Jones at the Montreux Jazz Festival to perform some of the arrangements written for him in the late 1950s by Gil Evans; he had never previously looked back at an aspect of his career. He died of pneumonia, respiratory failure, and a stroke within months. Doo-Bop, his last studio album, appeared in 1992. It was a collaboration with rapper Easy Mo Bee, and it won a Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Instrumental Performance, with the track "Fantasy" nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo. Released in 1993, Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux won Davis his seventh Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance.
Miles Davis took an all-inclusive, constantly restless approach to jazz that had begun to fall out of favor by the time of his death, even as it earned him controversy during his lifetime. It was hard to recognize the bebop acolyte of Charlie Parker in the flamboyantly dressed leader with the hair extensions who seemed to keep one foot on a wah-wah pedal and one hand on an electric keyboard in his later years. But he did much to popularize jazz, reversing the trend away from commercial appeal that bebop began. And whatever the fripperies and explorations, he retained an ability to play moving solos that endeared him to audiences and demonstrated his affinity with tradition. At a time when jazz is inclining toward academia and repertory orchestras rather than moving forward, he is a reminder of the music's essential quality of boundless invention, using all available means.
Awards
1955, Winner; Down Beat Reader's Poll
1957, Winner; Down Beat Reader's Poll
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Composition Of More Than Five Minutes Duration for Sketches of Spain (1960)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance, Large Group Or Soloist With Large Group for Bitches Brew (1970)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for We Want Miles (1982)
Sonning Award for Lifetime Achievement In Music (1984; Copenhagen, Denmark)
Doctor of Music, honoris causa (1986; New England Conservatory)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for Tutu (1986)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for Aura (1989)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Big Band for Aura (1989)
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1990)
Knighted into the Legion of Honor (July 16, 1991; Paris)
Grammy Award for Best R&B Instrumental Performance for Doo-Bop (1992)
Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance for Miles And Quincy Live At Montreux (1993)
Hollywood Walk Of Fame Star (February 19, 1998)
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction (March 13, 2006)
Hollywood's Rockwalk Induction (September 28, 2006)
RIAA Triple Platinum for Kind of Blue
https://view.joomag.com/my-new-black-magazine-nyu-black-renaissance-noire-brn-fall-206-issue-release/0136805001445708478?page=4
Miles Davis: A New Revolution in Sound
by Kofi Natambu
Black Renaissance Noire
Volume 14, Number 2
Fall, 2014
"Knowledge is Freedom. Ignorance is Slavery.”
—Miles Davis
"That period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s was an era in which the resources of Jazz were being consolidated and refined and the range of its sources broadened. Some of the Jazz of this period reached across class and age lines and unified black audiences. Young people could see this music as "bad" in much the same sense that James Brown used the word, and older black people could see its links to black tradition."
--John Szwed
"To the yang of 'hard bop' Davis brought stillness, melodic beauty, and understatement; to the yin of 'cool' he brought rich sonority, blues feeling, and an enriched rhythmic capacity that moved beyond swing to funk. By refusing to color-code either his music or his audience, Davis rose at the end of the 1950s to the summit of artistic excellence."
--Marsha Bayles
"What is there to say about the instrument? It's my voice--that's all it is"
--Miles Davis
On July 17,1955 at the second annual Newport Jazz Festival, Davis was literally invited at the last minute to join a group of prominent Jazz musicians in a staged twenty minute jam session that had been organized by the festival s famed music director, impresario, and promoter George Wein as part of an "opening act" for the then highly popular white headliner Dave Brubeck.
Scheduled merely as a quick programming lead-in to stage changes between featured performances by the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ), the Count Basie and Duke Ellington Orchestras, Lester Young, and Brubeck, nothing special was planned in advance for this short set which, like most jam sessions, was completely improvised by the musicians performing onstage. Davis was then the least well known musician in the assembled group which was made up of Thelonious Monk, individuals from the MJQ, and other individual members of various groups playing in the festival. Wein just happened to be a big fan of Davis and added him because he was "a melodic bebopper" and a player who, in Wein's view, could reach a larger audience than most other musicians because of the haunting romantic lyricism and melodic richness of his style. Wein's insight turned out to be prophetic.
Despite the fact that most of the mainstream audience on hand had only a vague idea of who Davis was, he was a standout sensation in the jam session and his searing performance was one of the most talked about highlights of the festival. Appearing in an elegant white seersucker sport coat and a small black bow tie, thus already demonstrating the sleek, sharp sartorial style that quickly became his trademark (and led to his eventual appearance on the covers of many fashion magazines in the U.S, Europe, and Asia), Davis captivated the festival throng with haunting, dynamic solos and brilliant ensemble playing on both slow ballads and intensely up-tempo quicksilver tunes alike. Taking complete command of the setting with his understated elegance and relaxed yet naturally dramatic stage presence, the handsome and charismatic Davis breezed through two famous and musically daunting compositions by Thelonious Monk ("Hackensack" and "Round Midnight"), and then ended his part of the program by playing an impassioned bluesy solo on a well-known Charlie Parker composition entitled "Now is the Time" which Davis had originally recorded with Bird in 1945. That clinched it. He was a hit. Miles had returned from almost complete oblivion to becoming a much talked about and heralded star seemingly overnight (of course this personal and professional recognition had been over a decade in the making). After a long, arduous struggle as both an artist and individual that began in his hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois when he started to play trumpet at the age of 13 in 1939, Miles Davis had finally "arrived." For the first time since 1950 he was completely clean and off drugs. No longer addicted, Miles now played with a bravura, command, and creative clarity that he had been fervently searching for well before he had become addicted to heroin. It would be the beginning of many more incredible triumphs and struggles that would catapult the fiery young trumpet player to the very pinnacle of his profession and global fame and wealth over the next ten years.
On hand for that historic summer concert in Newport, RI. was George Avakian, a young music producer from the large corporate recording company called Columbia (now Sony). Miles had been after Avakian for over five years trying to get a recording contract with Columbia which was then the largest and most successful music company in the United States, but Avakian had been cautiously waiting for a sign that Davis had conquered his personal problems and was ready to commit fulltime to his music. Clearly Miles was now ready. Avakian's brother Aram whispered to George during the concert that he should sign Davis now, before he became a big hit and signed with a rival company instead. Miles, himself nonplussed about the critical acclaim he was finally receiving, wondered what the fuss was all about and maintained that he was simply playing like he always had been. While there was some truth to this assertion it was also clear that Miles's highly disciplined demeanor, new responsible attitude, and impeccable playing now indicated his intent on making a new commitment to living a life strictly devoted to his art.
Avakian and Columbia representatives met with Davis two days later on July 19, 1955 to sign him to a new contract with the understanding that Davis would first fulfill the remainder of his contract with the Prestige label by doing a series of recordings in the fall of 1955 and the spring and fall of 1956 while at the same time making his first recordings with Columbia that would not be released until after the public appearance of the Prestige sessions. These small label recordings for Prestige would immediately become famously known as the "missing g" sessions (so-called for the dropping of the letter 'g' in the titles of these records, (e.g. Walkin', Workin', Cookin', Steamin', and Relaxin'). As Miles's first great legendary Quintet this young aggregation (the oldest member of the group was 33 years old) featured then relative unknowns John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. From the very beginning this group and Miles himself would remake Jazz history and become innovative and protean harbingers of great changes to come in the music as well as the general culture.
As with many great musicians, Miles's unique, highly individual sound on his chosen instrument--the trumpet--would be the creative basis and structural foundation of this new cultural and aesthetic intervention. His was a sound that embraced the entire history of Jazz trumpet in its meticulous attention to the demanding technical and physical requirements of the instrument yet also sought a creative and expressive approach that openly allowed for more subtle emotional nuances to emerge from his playing than were common traditionally on trumpet. Miles brought a highly burnished lyricism that was both deeply introspective and fiercely driving all at once. A major characteristic of Davis's playing was a new and different way of phrasing in which a major emphasis and focus on the relationship of space to tempo and melody (and the intervals between notes) became the hallmark of his style. In the process Davis dramatically redefined and expanded the expressive and creative range of the tonal palette and instrumental timbre of the trumpet. By shifting the traditional emphasis from the heraldic and bravura functions of the instrument to a more diverse and expansive range of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ideas Miles was able to openly express the anguished conflict, sardonic irony, restless desire for cultural and social change, and questing existential/ psychological anxiety of the modern age. This intense attention to the broader expressive possibilities of both musical improvisation and composition also turned the feverish search for new forms and methods that characterized the era into a parallel personal quest for discovering a wider range of emotional and psychological contexts in which to play. The sonic exploration of the complexities and ambiguities of joy, rage, love, and melancholia was a major hallmark of Miles's style. Central to Miles's vision and sensibility was an equally exhilarating appreciation for the balanced expressive and intellectual relationship between relaxation and tension in his music. By focusing specifically on the spatial and rhythmic dimensions of melodic invention Miles developed musical methods that called for, and often resulted in, a precise minimalist approach to playing in which each note (or corresponding chord) carried an implied reference to every other note or chord in a particular sequence of musical phrases. Through a technical command of breath control and timbral dynamics induced by his embouchure and unorthodox valve fingerings, Miles could maintain or manipulate tonal pitch at the softest or loudest volumes. By creating stark dialectical contrasts in his sound through alternately attacking, slurring, syncopating or manipulating long tones in particular ensemble or orchestral settings (a technical device Miles often referred to as "contrary motion") Miles was able to convey great feeling and emotion through an economy of phrasing and musical rests. This rapt attention to allowing space or the silence between note intervals to dramatically assert itself as much or more as the notes themselves created great anticipation in his audience as to how these tensions would be resolved (or not). In this respect, the insightful observation by the French Jazz critic and music historian André Hodeir that Miles's sound tends toward a discovery of ecstasy is a rather apt description of Davis's expressive approach. What emerged from Miles's intensely comprehensive investigation of the creative possibilities of the instrument was a deep and lifelong appreciation for the tonal, sonic, and textural dimensions of playing and composing music. These aesthetic concerns as well as Miles's innovative creative solutions to the rigorous challenges of improvisational and composed ensemble structures alike in the modern Jazz tradition soon revolutionized all of American music and made Davis one of the leading and most influential musician-composers in the world during the last half of the 20th century.
Davis's widespread social, cultural, and political influence didn't end there however--especially in the black community. Miles also quickly became a social and cultural avatar whose highly personal combination of cool reserve, fiery defiance, detached alienation, intellectual independence, and striking stylistic innovation in everything from clothes to speech embodied, and largely defined for many, the ethos of 'hip' that pervaded the black Jazz world of the 1950s and early 1960s. But Miles, while remaining very hip, at the same time also lived and worked far beyond the insular world of hipsterism and avant-garde bohemia. He was unique in that his stance was simultaneously existentialist and engaged. As many observers, fans, scholars, friends, and critics have noted, Miles became, in many ways, what the critic Garry Giddins called "the representative black artist" of his era. John Szwed, Yale University music professor and author of a 2002 biography on Miles entitled So What: The Life of Miles Davis speaks for a couple of generations of writers, fans, artists and musicians when he states that by the late '50s, early 1960s:
“Miles was becoming the coin of the realm, cock of the walk, good copy for the tabloids, and inspiration for literary imagination. Allusions to him could turn up anywhere…Tributes to him sprang up in poems by Langston Hughes (“Trumpet Player: 52nd Street”), and Gregory Corso…Young people ostentatiously carried his albums to parties and sought out his clothing in the best men’s stores. In person, his every action was observed and read for meaning…A discourse developed around him, one that bore inordinate weight in matters of race—Miles stories—narratives about his inner drives, his demons, his pain, and his ambition. Invariably, his stories climaxed with a short comment, crushingly delivered in a husky imitation of the man’s voice, capped by some obscenity…He was the man.”
Among many black people, Davis's outspoken, defiant social stance and hip, charismatic aura signified a profound shift in cultural values and attitudes in the national black community that also had a lasting political significance and influence. This was especially true for the emerging adolescent youth and radical young adults of the era whose overt displays of rebellion and defiance of racism and repression were becoming pervasive with the rise of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Miles quickly became a major symbol of this modern revolutionary spirit in African American culture and was seen by many as an important artistic leader in this struggle and its widespread social and political demands for respect, justice, equality, and freedom for African Americans that marked the period. Thus, it is not surprising that many of the various musical aesthetics that Davis devised and expressed during the late '50s and throughout the '60s consciously sought to advance specifically new ideas about the structural, formal, and expressive dimensions of the modernist tradition in contemporary Jazz music. These changes would openly challenge many of the orthodoxies of this tradition both in terms of form and content while at the same time asserting a radically different set of ideological and aesthetic values about the intellectual and cultural worth, use, and intent of the music that in attitude and style sought to resist or go beyond standard notions of both high art and commercial popular culture. Simultaneously however, Davis sought to consciously establish an even more socially intimate relationship with his black audience (and especially its youthful members) that would embody and hopefully expand Davis's views on the broad necessity for deeply rooted political and cultural change within the African American community and the U.S. as a whole.
In the quest to critique many of the philosophical assumptions governing conventional modernist discourse in art while still retaining a fundamental aesthetic connection to other important aspects and principles of modernism--especially those having to do with the continuous necessity of creative change and revision--Davis epitomized the 'progressive' African American Jazz musician's desire to use black vernacular sources, ideas, and values to engage these modernist traditions and principles on his/her own independent social, cultural, and intellectual terms. In such major recordings from the 1957-1967 period as his orchestral masterpieces Miles Ahead, (1957) Porgy & Bess, (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960)--made in collaboration with his longtime friend and colleague, the white composer and arranger Gil Evans --and his equally significant and highly influential small group Quintet and Sextet recordings, Milestones, (1958) Kind of Blue, (1959) Live at the Blackhawk, (1961) My Funny Valentine, (1965) Four & More, (1964) E.S.P., (1965) Miles Smiles, (1966) Miles in Berlin, (1964) Miles in Tokyo, (1964) Live at the Plugged Nickel, (1965) and Nefertiti, (1967) Davis was at the forefront of those African American artists of the period who, in all the arts, were feverishly looking for and often finding fresh, new modes of pursuing aesthetic innovation and social change. By dialectically synthesizing and extending ideas, strategies, methods, and structures culled from such disparate sources as 20th century classical music, the blues, R&B, and many different stylistic forms from the Jazz tradition (i.e. Swing, Bebop, 'Cool' and 'Hard Bop' etc.)--many of which Davis himself had played a pivotal role in developing and popularizing--Miles helped bring about a new creative synthesis of modern and vernacular expressions that greatly changed our perceptions of what American music was and could be.
FOR MILES DAVIS
by Kofi Natambu
Miles blows blue holes thru red skies
blistering black sounds singe the purple air
And the night is a towering orange aura hovering
above his cavernous horn
Miles blows down empty empires
while floating upon the memory
of a song
Miles is a deepsea dancer
leaving acoustic trails
in green earth rhythms
His dramatic tone causes light
to appear & disappear
His trumpet is a carnivorous loa
that is fed every time he speaks
His Notes crush that which cannot
stand its moaning weight
Miles is the eternal ruler
of the Chromatic
Spectrums of color fall from his swollen upper lip
Soaring symphonic syllogisms
race thru his fingers/are thrust
into the royal and open heart
A sweet scatology of beauty
(Poem from: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS
by Kofi Natambu. Past Tents Press, 1991}
https://www.thenewjournal.com/html/nonfiction/williams_mdavis.ht
A Review of Miles Davis and American Culture
Edited by Gerald Early
Missouri Historical Society Press, 2002
by Tyrone Williams
The New Journal
October, 2002
As Eric Porter demonstrates in his overview of the jazz criticism on Miles Davis, "'It's About That Time': The Response To Miles Davis's Electric Turn," the paradoxes, contradictions and conundrums that riddle, if not define, the life and music of Miles Davis have generated a voluminous body of criticism that mirror his musical, cultural and ethical tensions. Thus it is not surprising that Miles Davis and American Culture, a commemorative catalog to the first major museum exhibition of Davis's work, is a microcosm of the conflicting assessments of both the musician and human being, not only between but also, in certain cases, within the essays, memoirs and interviews that comprise this book. Although there is little that is new here in terms of the critical debates over Davis's relationships and contributions to the American music problematically called "jazz," (Davis himself was notorious for his scorn of the term) cool jazz, hard bop and "fusion" (even more problematic a term), this collection does feature a number of interesting essays, at least two of which warrant extended discussion: the introductory essay by Gerald Early and the critical assessment by Martha Bayles. Eric Porter's essay is also valuable reading, but as he is primarily interested in summarizing the critical debates around Davis's music, particularly the post-1969 material, I will limit most of my comments to the contributions of Early and Bayles. But first, the other contributions.
The essays by William Howland Kenney, Eugene Redmond and Benjamin Cawthra situate Davis's music within the cultural and economic history of East St. Louis, Missouri. Specifically, Kenney and Cawthra attempt to account for why Miles Davis is known as someone only "from" East St. Louis, why Davis both chose and had to leave for New York in 1944. Kenney's essay, "Just Before Miles: Jazz in St. Louis, 1926-1944," discusses Davis's formative years as a musician in "hot-dance" riverboat bands in Missouri and Illinois. Kenney argues that the demise of these riverboat bands--due to the advent of air conditioning, interstate highways, federal regulations, and the aging boats themselves--was as crucial a factor in Davis's decision to leave the Midwest as his desire to play with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in New York. Cawthra's contribution, "Remembering Miles in St. Louis: A Conclusion," argues that the erosion of East St. Louis's economic and cultural infrastructures, due to deep-seated racism and political expediency, was and is as great a factor in the city's inability to retain its cultural talent as is the obvious attractions of the East and West coasts. More optimistic is Eugene Redmond's celebratory poem/prose, "'So What'(?)...It's 'All Blues' Anyway: An Anecdotal/Jazzological Tour of Milesville." Unlike Kenney and Cawthra, Redmond reads Davis's "from East St. Louis" as, at worst, mere description, at best, something to be proud of since, Redmond suggests, Davis's legacy might serve as a cornerstone of the foundation on which East St. Louis rebuilds itself.
The book also features interviews with record industry a & r impresario George Avakian and musicians Quincy Jones, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, and Joey DeFrancesco. It concludes with a reprint of Davis's 1962 Playboy interview with Alex Haley. Other contributors include Quincy Troupe, Farah Jasmine Griffin, John Gennari, Ingrid Monson and Waldo Martin, Jr.
As noted above, the essays by Gerald Early, Eric Porter and Martha Bayles attempt comprehensive overviews of the twists and turns of Davis's career: from a "Newer Negro" (Early) playing black music (hard bop) and a black man playing Negro music (cool) to, after 1969, a black man playing black-and-white music (fusion and pop) and, finally, a black man playing African-American music (hip-hop). The intersection between ethnicity, race and gender in the preceding reflects concerns that orient almost all the writings here.
Gerald Early's introductory essay, "The Art of the Muscle: Miles Davis as American Knight and American Knave," begins from the premise that the key to understanding Miles Davis as a man and musician lies in the relationship between his ascendancy as a major force in jazz at the very moment that the music's commercial appeal was in decline. About the latter, Early writes: "No music can eschew its own commercial dimension, and if it does, as jazz sometimes has...it only winds up, paradoxically, trying to sell itself on the basis that it is noncommercial...." (4) Early argues that Davis attempted to solve this dilemma by embracing elitism while repositioning himself within the marketplace.
The decline of jazz as a popular music due, in part, to its own pretensions is an issue taken up later by Martha Bayles, but the theme is a familiar one in the arguments of Stanley Crouch, Wynton Marsalis, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray and others. The common target is bebop, held responsible, to varying degrees, for jazz's demise as a popular music. The target behind the target is the modernist conception of "art" and the "artist," perceived as intrinsically antipopulist, self-indulgent and formalistic to the point of narcissism. In all its forms this argument leads to problematic, if not contradictory, positions, as we will see in Bayles's essay.
Gerald Early, for one, understands the pitfalls of the antiart argument and the rest of his essay dances around its implications. He acknowledges that any contradictions one might perceive in Davis wanting to have it "both ways" depend on prior presumptions about the inviolability of musical genres - which the musician may not share: "In a sense, what Davis wanted to do was transcend jazz and simply embody musical improvisation." (5) However, this generous reading of Davis's motivations will not, as Early knows, sustain scrutiny. Early is merely setting the ground for his own reading of Davis as the quintessential ever-searching, ever-restless romantic figure of jazz. This is Miles Davis through a European lens (to adopt one of Bayles's more useful strategies of reading jazz history). This is Miles Davis as a white man, which might explain why Early writes, with a straight face: "Miles Davis is the American bad boy of jazz, our Huckleberry Finn...."
Early does not neglect the "black" Miles Davis, the would-be homeboy, "Jim." Most illuminating in this regard is his discussion of Davis's fascination with boxing in general and his hero-worship of Sugar Ray Robinson in particular. Davis saw in Robinson's - and, earlier, Jack Johnson's - celebration of the "sporting life" (the indulgence in women, gambling, drugs, etc.) - a model and challenge to the "straight" life, not from the point of view of "hipness" but on the assumption (right or wrong) that black bourgeois culture was largely a form of accommodation to white racism. In particular, as Early makes clear, Davis viewed some - but not all - middle-class mores as attempts to police the "black body," strategies in concert with white modes of control. As a black male secularist and musician dedicated to the pleasures of the body, Davis could no more stomach "Crow Jim" attitudes among Negroes than he could Jim Crow white law. And just as Jack Johnson had, by virtue of his exploits in and out of the ring, become a "New Negro" worthy of the accolades of the Harlem Renaissance literary elite, so too, later, Miles Davis would become a "Newer Negro." Early points out that Davis saw himself as a part of a "black male heroic tradition," but whereas Johnson and Robinson - six years older than Davis - operated as New Negroes in spite of white American hostility, Davis, simply because he was in the right place at the right time, benefitted from the "white Negro"/Newer Negro phenomenon. His on- and off-stage antics thrilled the young, hip, white jazz aficionados (among them, of course, the Beats) of the 1950s. In this context, as Early makes clear, Davis's resentment, however heartfelt, was, like Lionel Hampton's accommodationism, based on the same premise: the audience for jazz, traditional or avant-garde, was overwhelmingly white.
Just as Davis is, for Early, a figure of the romantic artist and opportunistic businessman, benefitting the historical period in which he lived - the rise of the music industry - he is likewise, for Martha Bayles, a latter-day Ulysses, a straight man in an epic tale of pretension and slapstick. Its theme: "the day the music died." Bayles's largely laudatory essay, "Miles Davis and the Double Audience," links the modernist divide between technique and accessibility in modern European music (e.g., serialism) and American music (bebop) to the growing belief in progress and science in the early 20th century. For Bayles, the result is "no audience" for European modernism (she cites Milton Babbitt's famous essay, "Who Cares If You Listen?") and "two audiences" for American modernism. Aside from exasperating class differences and polarizing blacks and whites, the elevation of technique, Bayles argues, has resulted in the debasement of "traditional" musical values (especially melody). Miles Davis is thus the exception that proves the rule, negotiating the Scylla and Charbydis of crass commercialism (accessibility) and artistic isolation (technique): "to the yang of hard bop Davis brought stillness, melodic beauty, and understatement; to the yin of cool he brought rich sonority, blues feeling, and an enriched rhythmic capacity that moved beyond swing to funk." (155). This is, of course, a gloss on Gary Giddins's more pithy observation - cited by two other authors in this book - that Davis was the "Midwestern parent" of both West Coast cool and East Coast bop. These two modes of jazz quickly became color-coded as white and black in the late Fifties and early Sixties. As Gerald Early implied with his Huckleberry Finn-Sugar Ray Robinson metaphors, Davis is, for Bayles, a figure of musical and racial reconciliation despite his occasional posturing.
Bayles's essay stands alone in this volume in its attempt to not only bracket but also criticize the extramusical forces that influenced Davis's music, particularly after 1969 when he helped popularize fusion. In relation to music criticism, these forces function as "contexts." Bayles begins by noting, pace Porter et al, Davis's interracial audiences and the resulting discomfiture for this son of a "race man." (149) But audience, too, is a "context," and Bayles will privilege this particular context - for whom is this music? - and oppose other "contextual" approaches for being, of all things, insufficiently contextual. Especially, it seems, the political context(s). Yet what surprises one is the insufficient attention Bayles pays to historical contexts, a failure which results in misreadings and distortions of the historical record. Bayles, thinking of Gary Tomlinson (cited by Eric Porter), asserts that notions of "dialogue," like that of "contestation," do not provide "genuine insight" into Davis's music and its significance. Those terms, of course, not only imply "contexts" but, more important, they presuppose separate black and white cultures and traditions. This is what Bayles must reject as "significant," much less "positive," influences on Davis's music. And though she concedes the limitations of a purely "formal analysis" of Davis's music, Bayles proceeds to place into abeyance all contextual factors except "audience." Of course, this makes perfect sense since to invoke formalism sans audience would mean a retreat into modernist isolation.
I do not have the space to discuss the ways Bayles distorts the relationship between modernism, science and "progress" (in this respect she misreads Babbitt's essay) vis-a-vis serialism and aleatory music (though her distinction between aleatory music and free jazz is illuminating). Instead I will conclude by focusing on what Bayles has to say about American jazz and pop. It is perhaps a little fussy to note that Davis's infamous turning of his back to the audience is read by Bayles as contempt (she tries to distinguish gradations of contempt in Davis's behavior) when he himself claimed that his stage movements were a rejection of the jazz musician as "entertainer." As already noted in Gerald Early's essay, Davis came onto the stage of history when a black musician could not only be tolerated for rejecting the mask that Louis Armstrong had to wear but could, in fact, be lionized for doing so. This rejection of the entertainer role preceded Davis (as Bayles notes), but she can only see it in extremes, in polarized terms as either contempt or "a clever marketing device." She quotes Davis gleefully reveling in his "bad boy" role without sufficiently attending to its significance as a "role."
More egregious is Bayles's reading of Davis's "electric turn." Effusing over the 1960s in terms of "crossover" audiences, Bayles writes, "The seemingly miraculous spectacle of the double audience blending into one attracted Davis." Not according to almost everyone else in this volume and elsewhere. It was not race that mattered to Davis in this context but age - he wanted to go after the youth market, and the youth market was rock 'n roll and r&b. Had these audiences already been 'blending into one" fusion would have already been popular. Moreover, the term "crossover" was and is equivalent to "integration," largely a one-way street in popular music and social history. Black music was and is more popular with white audiences than the reverse just as black people move into white neighborhoods more often than the reverse.
So what "genuine insight" does Bayles offer in lieu of "dialogue" and "contestation"? Contemplating Davis's turn to fusion, she writes: "With the popular audience Davis shared an appreciation for the primary capacities of music: the power of rhythm to move the body (dance) and the power of melody to move his emotions (song). Perhaps fusion should be judged by these standards." (161) I could not agree more, but that's not to say that these are more profound criteria than the "simplistic notions of 'dialogue' and 'contestation.'" On the contrary, Bayles has simply withdrawn Davis's music from one "context" (political and social forces) and inserted it in another context (audience reception) on the basis of traditional musical values (melody, rhythm). Which really means: certain kinds of melodic treatment, certain kinds of rhythmic measure.
As I hope my extended - if incomplete - analyses of Early's and Bayles's essays - and there are other good ones here - imply, Miles Davis and American Culture is a worthy addition to the collection of anyone still fascinated by the enigma that was - and is - Miles Davis.
All contents copyright The New Journal, 2002
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/for-the-artists-critical-writing-volume-2
For the Artists: Critical Writing, Volume 2
by GREG MASTERS
October 31, 2007
AllAboutJazz
“Miles' music of the 1970s is not just a rejection of beauty, but a beautiful embrace of the rejected.”
—Greg Masters
Miles Davis: The Complete On the Corner Sessions
Sony Legacy Music, October 2007
"There is no architecture and no build-up. Just a vivid, uninterrupted succession of colors, rhythms and moods." —Arnold Schoenberg, describing his Five Pieces for Orchestra in a letter to Richard Strauss, 1909
From: The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)
For the Artists, Vol. 2 -© 2014 Greg Masters
The music Miles Davis forged in the first half of the 1970s, his so-called "electric period," is not jazz. In a determined effort to keep his sound fresh, he took the audacious step of leaving behind all the frameworks of the art form which had made him a recognized and venerated figure throughout the world. In an effort to open himself up to new ideas and to expand his audience, his new sound maintains elements of the jazz style he'd evolved for the previous 30 years, while appropriating styles of music outside the jazz repertoire, namely the propulsive dance groove of 70s funk (particularly James Brown and Sly Stone), the raucous, rough-edged, electro-charged brashness of Jimi Hendrix, the metallic sparkle of India's Ravi Shankar, the European classical avant-garde methods of Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as the traditions of jazz going back to Dixieland and ragtime. It's also indebted to the free playing of Albert Ayler and late John Coltrane with Pharoah Sanders.
And what does this add up to? All I know is that the music manages to expresses feelings I've yet to find in any other art form. Complex, raw, primal feelings splayed and made tangible.
The music Miles made in these years—particularly with the scorching electric guitars of Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, grounded in the steady, incantory pulse of Al Foster's 4/4 rhythm on drums and Michael Henderson's unswerving definition of tempo and key via electric bass—defined an organic, body-centered response to nature. Bird calls and the sound of wind through the trees is as much a part of the pastiche as is the dance of the inner psyche. We've heard these sounds on walks through the woods.
But the music is—despite the assault of its unfamiliar gestures and its straying beyond bar measures—rooted in blues. The whole thing is still a child of the body and spirit-form called blues. Miles was clearly intending to move his music out of the elite confines of the music hall and into the street, or at least onto the radio.
Miles' generosity of spirit, his openness to influences from outside the expected, his need to dig deep into emotional recesses never before expressed so vividly, make it seem that the music is contemporary. To these ears it is not at all dated or relegated to a nostalgic dip into the past. It was so far ahead of its time that we're still catching up to it nearly 40 years later.
The Complete On the Corner Sessions (Sony-Legacy Music, 2007) is the eighth and final set in a series of Miles Davis boxes. This six-CD package includes six-plus hours of music, including 12 previously unissued tracks, plus five tracks previously unissued in full. The package contains a 120-page booklet with liner notes and essays by musician/co-producer Bob Belden (Michael Cuscuna is the other co-producer), journalist Tom Terrell and arranger/musician Paul Buckmaster.
The Complete On the Corner Sessions is an inaccurate and misleading title in an academic sense. The tracks he recorded at Columbia Studio B over the course of 16 sessions presented in this set from March 9, 1972 to May 5, 1975 offer up at least two very different artistic intentions. The first is the material realized for what would be released as On the Corner in July 1972 —the "extended grooves," as bassist Michael Henderson explains in the liner notes. This is a singular event in the Miles chronology, although it can be seen as an extension of the sound he had developed in 1970 in an ensemble that included Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Michael Henderson, Gary Bartz, John McLaughlin and Airto Moreira (represented on The Cellar Door Sessions, released as a six-CD box set in 2005).
Other tracks collected here, particularly those assembled on Get Up With It (released November 1974), are another matter. Following the June 1972 sessions that resulted in On the Corner, Miles moved the ensemble sound away from an insistence on a churning, full-speed-ahead jam on one chord. On a handful of sessions over the next few years, orchestral colors are explored and there's room for chord changes and melodies. Perhaps it's quibbling, but I'm more comfortable with distinguishing each of the original LPs as distinct periods, or moments, in Miles' continuous evolution.
The new solo
In the early 1970s, Miles could not play trumpet with the intensity, force and bravado he'd exhibited throughout his career and which had been at a peak in 1969 and 1970 as he put himself on display to a whole new audience of rock crowds at the Fillmore East (March 6-7, 1970 and again June 17-20, 1970) and Fillmore West (April 10-11, 1970 and again Oct. 15-18, 1970), at huge rock festivals (Isle of Wight, Aug. 29, 1970) and other venues larger than the night clubs and corner bars he'd been playing for decades.
His embouchure was compromised. He was in ill health. His use of recreational drugs was reportedly abundant. Playing trumpet is physically demanding and Miles, in the 1970s, was willing, but his body was just not near the same levels as it had been. His soloing and his steering of the ensemble sound via his horn was diminished from what it had been.
But what he lacked in physical stamina, he made up for by taking huge risks in exposing his every vulnerability via a shift in musical intention. He refused to rely on playing crowd favorites or tunes from his past repertoire. He was intent on forging something entirely brand new, of presenting something which hadn't been seen or heard before.
The case could be made that he was insulting his devoted audience by merely presenting incomprehensible noise. But I am in the camp which believes this music is valuable in its revolutionary intentions.
The Complete On the Corner Sessions box showcases Miles' power as a leader. While the musicians are not playing charts, within their prescribed roles each player contributes an individual intensity and voice while fitting into the ensemble sound.
Miles' conducting of the group improvisation is firm enough to give a recognizable shape to the tune while trusting enough of the individual voices to bring out their best. Not many of the musicians who passed through Miles' various groups ever sounded better than when they were with him. Why? Because part of Miles' genius was in encouraging his partners to reach for expressions they hadn't known were within them. As leader, he afforded them the time to expand on their ideas, while at the same time maintaining a unifying order to contain the amalgam of personal contributions.
However, here the soloing is less rewarding to listen to because the musicians aren't as skilled as were the musicians in Miles' previous ensembles. And there's often less gradations to which the improvisations can respond. Often the solos are enlisted to override the churning, molten funk of the groove laid down by the rest of the pack. So, less skilled and less brave than Miles was when he complemented Charlie Parker's fusillade attack with a whole different approach, the soloing musicians on these sessions take less risks and resort to sounding off on their horns in a frenzy of notes in their attempt to meet the demands of the ensemble sound. There's little nuance, little chance to explore and test, as the musical concept is forceful and deliberate.
But this is less a liability because the act of soloing acquires a new purpose and intent on these tracks. Each solo is less ego-based than solos from the 60 years of improvisational music dating back to Louis Armstrong's emergence with King Oliver. Here, the solo is not the showcase for virtuosity it was before. While each player's skill is on display and each brings his own personal touch to the solo, it's more directed to serve the music. The solo is a momentary display within the textures of the process. It's a thread in the fabric.
Too, while Charlie Parker in the 78 rpm era only had three minutes to make his statement, Miles in the LP era can take his time and uses the space to elongate the music-listening experience so it can extend the range and incorporate moods and tones beyond bebop and standards boundaries.
The argument could be made that the level of musicianship in the ensembles Miles led throughout these electric years was not as skilled as it had previously been. These musicians lacked the virtuosic capabilities of the now recognized jazz masters who had played with Miles throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s, players who were capable of soloing at the proper time in their prescribed roles as sidemen—beautiful statements that adhered to the chord changes and showed off their technical facility and aesthetic craft in the service of making art music.
This was the basic structure: A small team of musicians would play a theme, then each would take a turn soloing, the theme would be stated again by the ensemble and the piece would end. The audience knew what to expect. The thrill was in how articulate the soloists could express themselves.
Miles, even at 19 years old when he joined the Charlie Parker band, added something different to the pyrotechnic virtuosity of players like Parker. Miles' sound brought a softer, feminine element, a brooding, reflective wistfulness that countered the alpha male assertiveness of most other jazz music of the time and of the preceding 50 years.
There are several reasons why Miles' music of the 70s may be less attractive to listeners. For one, it's nasty. It digs deep to express dark recesses of feelings and sustains those moods for long stretches. It is not enjoyable in the sense that art had served previously. As Theodor Adorno says, in discussing the music of Schoenberg, affability ceases. The music is less about serving as entertainment and is more an unrestrained attempt to express the rawest emotions. It's beyond entertainment. Miles was through pandering to audience expectations. Too, with his trumpet-playing limited because of poor health, he began using an electric organ to produce occasional howls, chords not heard before, eerie, dark blocks of sound.
Defiling the Cult of Beauty: The Influence of Stockhausen and Messiaen
The music deserves more serious examination and certainly more recognition and acclaim. It is remarkable music in that it integrates a universe of sounds. It's not simply bringing in the ethnic influence of a foreign culture, as Dizzy Gillespie did decades earlier by bringing Caribbean dance rhythms into his sound. The music adds textures and complexities learned from European avant-garde—particularly the collage effects of Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose pieces since the 1950s, besides traditional orchestral instrumentation, were making use of electronic effects (synthesizers, amplified soloists, ring modulators), as well as short wave receivers.
In the liner notes, Paul Buckmaster, a British cellist and composer who had experimented with tape loops, recounts how he exposed Miles to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen at this time. The influence this had on Miles' sound is easy to imagine. Stockhausen's music is a radical break from the classical music tradition in that it does not rely on narrative. Like a Godard movie, it interrupts the spoon-fed story-telling structure to offer up a new palette of sensual and intellectual effects. It is full of surprises, as the listener can never anticipate what's coming next. It's a music free of sentiment, unencumbered from the Romantic strategy of appealing to common urges (assuming agreement is pleasing).
After an absorption in the compositions of Stockhausen, as well as those of Olivier Messiaen, with their open-ended structures, Miles' methods can be seen to jettison the traditional thematic structure left over from the Romantic era, where a piece of music follows a pattern, or narrative, describing a set of experiences or feelings through time. Miles begins here, like modern composers Messiaen and Stockhausen, to make use of the moment. The allegiance to a story is abandoned. Each moment of the musical piece is attuned to the extraordinary. Miles acquires a new tonal palette incorporating ominous and chilling explorations, such as examined in the music of Stockhausen and Messiaen.
Also, with the use of silences, the band's forward progression coming to a sudden halt, a strategy also likely picked up from Stockhausen, the music emphasizes the collage-like, fragmentary nature of perception, not an ideal make-believe illusion. The listener can enter and leave anywhere.
Too, not answerable to any agenda, the music's idiosyncratic path is decidedly not intended to placate audience expectation. Pure art seeks to explore and enunciate more than entertain.
These expressions take art away from the merely beautiful and the artifice of luxury. The illusion of safe extravagance is removed in order to portray less-than-polite feelings. Left behind is good taste, decorative entertainment for the comfort of paying patrons.
The music is so densely layered and there is so much musical activity that repeated listening is rewarded as moments and threads are heard differently each time. And, without the formal dependence on theme and dramatic progression, our listening experience is splayed out to concentrate on the moment, not the anticipation of a climax and resolution.
Much of the music contained in this package could be designated "new age," though it's often more raucous than what we typify today as the calming ambient music we use for relaxing or performing yoga.
While Miles' intentions with his music might have been to get people up to dance, at the same time he created a panache of listenable grooves filled with surprises and unprecedented ensemble sounds that still retain their freshness and audacious attitude.
Dissonance, Our Friend
Miles' music of the 1970s is not just a rejection of beauty, but a beautiful embrace of the rejected.
For Miles, dissonance was an acknowledgement that there was more to be expressed in music than comfort and resolvable sensations. The musical vocabulary of traditional Western harmony—the I, IV, V form, the basic foundation for everything from church hymns to blues, standards and rock 'n' roll —imposed limitations to exploring and expressing a range of emotions and a depiction of possibilities beyond the familiar tonal centers available in major and minor patterns.
His departure from these confines might be traced back as far as 1959's Kind of Blue, which broke from the blues-based form by using modal scales that gave an effect of suspension, as chords didn't resolve back to the root chord as in the familiar traditional manner. Pleasing an audience with tasteful, familiar songs, providing entertainment, became too tired. Miles wanted to grow as an artist.
Miles' group of the mid-60s took it even further. Pushed by Wayne Shorter's spiral compositions and fragmentary style of soloing on sax and by keyboardist Herbie Hancock's schooling in Debussy and Ravel and drummer Tony Williams' aggressive splattering of bar lines, this music too offered a sense of suspension as it uprooted the root and tonic.
The shift from the traditional standards repertory to a push into something new is discerned in The Complete Live at The Plugged Nickel set from Dec. 22-23, 1965 (released as an eight-CD box set in July 1995). Miles, the leader, seems in poor health. His trumpet playing lacks breath and his soloing comes in short bursts which he can't sustain. He, in fact, does not play a lot over the course of the seven live sets over two nights. His weakness gives more of the spotlight to his young, energetic sidemen, who are eager to advance into new realms beyond the standards repertoire to which their boss has been anchored.
Later in the decade, Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea would even be nudging the music into totally free territory—leaving behind the grounding in a common key and time signature—before Miles, not quite convinced of the emotional impact of a total abandonment of order, would rein the group back down to a place of agreement.
Fortunate to be working for a record company—Columbia (now Columbia/Legacy, a division of Sony BMG Music Entertainment)—that indulged his direction and allowed him to pursue his project, Miles ran with it. Not obliged to the record company to fester as a recognizable brand, Miles could use the studio and countless live dates, to continue developing and pushing into unexplored territory to create sounds which were unheard and unimagined previously.
The Tunes
There are some gems among the previously unreleased tracks, particularly "On the Corner (take 4)" and "Mr. Foster," and the release of unheard music from this phase of Miles' career will thrill devotees of his electric music.
"On the Corner (take 4)" offers up the entire universe in one chord. It's a five-minute studio fragment that propels the listener via one effect: a determined mining of a vamp pedaled to one chord onto which the musicians, particularly John McLaughlin, augment with furious yet mannered waves of variation. It could have fit onto side one of A Tribute to Jack Johnson (released Feb. 1971).
On "On the Corner (unedited master)," as well as the unedited master and issued take of "Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X," some new variants are heard, dark colorful chords on organ, but pedestrian, Theremin-like keyboard noodling by Harold Ivory Williams (my guess, the other two keyboardists were Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, or possibly it's Dave Creamer on guitar) is amateurish and grates after awhile. We hear for the first time instrumental solos by Keith Jarrett on electric piano, John McLaughlin on electric guitar and even Miles on wah-wah trumpet that were excised in the final mix, sacrificed for the ensemble concept.
The idea here is that individual efforts contribute to a whole. Ego is gone. What's important is the ensemble.
"Ife" repeats a riff over and over to induce a trance-like fixation on the spiral pattern. Onto that is layered Miles' solo, which wrestles with the rhythm, punctuating oscillations. Paul Buckmaster is noted on electric cello, but I can't discern his presence in the mix.
"Chieftain," another previously unissued track, has a startling, almost Caribbean multi-rhythmic groove provided by Al Foster on drums and Reggie Lucas on electric guitar, with Badal Roy on tablas and Mtume on congas. Michael Henderson provides a bass drone pulse and Miles solos achingly through the wah wah. It's nice to hear a sitar in the mix, but Khalil Balakrishna is no Ravi Shankar.
"Rated X" begins with Miles playing eerie chord clusters on electric organ. Michael Henderson enters on electric bass with an adrenaline-chilling vamp repeated over and over, with Al Foster laying down his basic pulse-enhancing 4/4. The tune proceeds as an exploration of the colors with no actual soloing, like a masseuse touching a nerve ending you never knew existed. It's a diagram of a mood, unexplained before, reaching foundation feelings rooted in primitive needs.
The previously unreleased studio takes of "Turnaround" and "U-Turnaround," a tune that would become a staple of his live shows for the next few years, doesn't quite get off the ground in this premier rendition. The elementary theme is stated repeatedly over the funk groove with Miles stretching the head statement into varying permutations, but there's little transcendence. Perhaps it's effective as a dance groove, but as concert music this doesn't provide enough complexity. Note: On his Miles Beyond website, Paul Tingen, in consultation with Miles discography expert Jan Lohmann, disputes the record company's titling of these tracks. They agree that "Turnaround" and "U-Turnaround," in fact, are two early takes of "Agharta Prelude."
The tunes which would be gathered on Get Up With It (collecting tracks recorded between 1970 and 1974 and released as a double LP on November 22, 1974), generally employ the churning groove layers of musical activity, but add reprieves in the form of chord changes and choruses, such as "Maiysha" and "Mtume." The earliest recorded track in this box, "Red China Blues," which would end up on GUWI, is another matter. This is a standard 12-bar blues with a compact horn arrangement. Miles' other-worldly-sounding solo through electronic effects is the only aspect that makes it unusual. It might have been an attempt to create a reasonably marketable track.
Miles is in fine form on "Mr. Foster," presumably so named in honor of the fine drummer keeping a steady, propulsive pulse with him. After the band sets up the groove and intones a sad mood, Miles enters on muted trumpet played through a wah-wah pedal and begins a long declaration, growling in the low register, meandering assuredly through the mid-range and even pushing into the high range, as expressive of states of sorrow as possible.
Miles knew how to shape a solo. For the most part, his solos have something to say. They express an emotional theme. The other soloists—Dave Liebman and Pete Cosey, especially on this box—decorate the music, but don't have the lucidity of Miles' statements. But, at 15 minutes, the track ends too soon.
"Calypso Frelimo" rides on a jaunty texture, with Al Foster's cymbal work shuffling, allied with a simple, child-like statement played on the electric organ, which Miles would subsequently use frequently in concerts. Miles plays with a mournful pleading sound, as if appealing to the life forces from hell. At around 10 minutes in, a new movement begins quietly, with Henderson's bass figure repeated as an ostinato, setting up an eerie, mysterious, almost reverential atmosphere. Guitar chords are spread to open fields and the organ figure repeats, this time with other instruments joining in and answering. The figure has earned a presence. Miles again enters and begins his statement, calmly engaging the wah-wah to spread his notes with a feeling of suspension. We're enticed to slow down until the ensemble returns to the jaunty vamps of the first movement and we're restored to the surface of the earth. Miles is still expressing darker feelings, but gradually the bounce of the band's groove proves too infectious and his playing becomes more playful and as full of the celebration as the others. A re-statement of the organ figure closes the piece as if to wrap things up.
"He Loved Him Madly" is the most astounding of compositions, seamlessly assembled from five different tracks. A dirge for the recently deceased Duke Ellington, it begins with Miles playing chilling organ chords, or, more accurately, tone clusters—the likes of which I've heard before only in the music of Olivier Messiaen. Guitar shadings seem to be picking through bones, while Al Foster taps out a graveyard blues as the cortège passes. Things change when the bass enters at almost 11 minutes in and Foster, in a rhythmic chant never heard in music before, starts tapping out a slow 4/4, accenting each beat. Liebman enters on flute (through echo) for the first melodic improvisation, a tasty solo that picks up for a second iteration after a trumpet solo from Miles, which begins 16 minutes into the piece. He, too, is playing through an echo, which adds to the chill of his haunting cavernous utterances, an eloquent communication of grief over the loss of his much beloved and venerated predecessor, until it dissipates for all time.
Each track is astounding, but not all are completely successful as refined artistic statements. It's the nature of the improv business.
On "Jobali," for example, Michael Henderson lays down a riff, the sort of structure he's used before and will use again, but here it's just not as interesting and feels unrelenting and insistent, rather than a structure onto which a composition may develop and unwind.
In a typical funk or R&B song, after 12 or so bars, the vamp shifts into a chorus or refrain, but here it plods along as a root onto which Miles solos like a low-flying bird, texturing on an investigative explication. While the structure is a radical departure from traditional American song form, with lucid melody and an underlying chordal and harmonic structure to support and embellish it, here, there are statements, but they're more like calls, summonings.
Other previously unheard tracks in this set—notably "Big Fun" and "Holly-wuud" (really two different takes of the same material, 7/26/73), as well as "Minnie" from 5/5/75—seem to have similar commercial intent. They foreshadow the pop sound Miles would emerge with in 1981 after a six-year hiatus, while retaining some of the eccentricities of the other, more formidable "serious" tracks gathered here. Note: Tingen claims that "Minnie" is, in fact, a tune Miles titled "Mr. Foster" when it was recorded. As for the tune called "Mr. Foster (from 9/18/73) discussed earlier, who knows?
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Is this box too much of a good thing for those just getting initiated. I'd steer those seekers away from this package and toward the individual releases, especially On the Corner and Get Up With It. Then, you can work your way back to In a Silent Way, A Tribute to Jack Johnson and Bitches Brew and forward a bit to the live Agharta, Pangea and Dark Magus. From there, the road is open.
As Bob Belden says in the liner notes, the box set is also a testament to the genius of producer Teo Macero, who sculpted the hours of studio jams down to artful form, excising weak sections, splicing together complementary movements, layering and performing all manner of tape acrobatics to fashion finished and refined musical compositions. He is more than an able producer, he is a collaborator.
Once again, I must fault Legacy's design department for the packaging of these Miles sets. While this package is beautiful to look at, for practical purposes it's irritating to use. The 120-page booklet, while colorful, is bound into the spine of the package, which makes it harder than necessary to peruse and the sans serif typeface is not easy to read, especially when blue type is used over a blue background. Worse, each track's discography data is scattered amidst the CD sleeves and various pages.
The photos add a lot of information, namely a sense of the theatricality of a live Miles Davis show during this era. The tableau we see is equal parts African warrior, Haight-Ashbury, Carnaby Street and Harlem street.
Another quibble is that the sequencing is hard to figure out. There seems to be a stab at positioning the tracks chronologically, as recorded, but that order breaks down with disc six, thus grouping the OTC material as originally offered on LP with unrelated tracks that diffuse the coherence and impact of the original OTC issue.
For more on electric Miles, Paul Tingen's Miles Beyond (Billboard Books, 2001) is the must-have book for its thorough and dependable documentation of the facts and extensive interviews. Philip Freeman's Running the Voodoo Down (Backbeat Books, 2006) has justifiably come under attack for its sloppy research resulting in a slew of historical inaccuracies (corrected by Tingen on his Miles Beyond website), but for its impassioned yet reasoned descriptions of the music and its discussions of how the music fits into the trajectory of its time, it is an invaluable aid and pleasant accompaniment to Miles' electric music.
http://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/milesdavisMiles Davis
Primary Instrument: Trumpet
Born: May 26, 1926 | Died: September 28, 1991
Throughout a professional career lasting 50 years, Miles Davis played the trumpet in a lyrical, introspective, and melodic style, often employing a stemless harmon mute to make his sound more personal and intimate. But if his approach to his instrument was constant, his approach to jazz was dazzlingly protean. To examine his career is to examine the history of jazz from the mid-'40s to the early '90s, since he was in the thick of almost every important innovation and stylistic development in the music during that period, and he often led the way in those changes, both with his own performances and recordings and by choosing sidemen and collaborators who forged the new directions. It can even be argued that jazz stopped evolving when Davis wasn't there to push it forward.
Davis was the son of a dental surgeon, Dr. Miles Dewey Davis, Jr., and a music teacher, Cleota Mae (Henry) Davis, and thus grew up in the black middle class of East St. Louis after the family moved there shortly after his birth. He became interested in music during his childhood and by the age of 12 had begun taking trumpet lessons. While still in high school, he started to get jobs playing in local bars and at 16 was playing gigs out of town on weekends. At 17, he joined Eddie Randle's Blue Devils, a territory band based in St. Louis. He enjoyed a personal apotheosis in 1944, just after graduating from high school, when he saw and was allowed to sit in with Billy Eckstine's big band, which was playing in St. Louis. The band featured trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and saxophonist Charlie Parker, the architects of the emerging bebop style of jazz, which was characterized by fast, inventive soloing and dynamic rhythm variations.
It is striking that Davis fell so completely under Gillespie and Parker's spell, since his own slower and less flashy style never really compared with theirs. But bebop was the new sound of the day, and the young trumpeter was bound to follow it. He did so by leaving the Midwest to attend the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (since renamed Juilliard) in September 1944. Shortly after his arrival in Manhattan, he was playing in clubs with Parker, and by 1945 he had abandoned his academic studies for a full-time career as a jazz musician, initially joining Benny Carter's band and making his first recordings as a sideman. He played with Eckstine in 1946-1947 and was a member of Parker's group in 1947-1948, making his recording debut as a leader on a 1947 session that featured Parker, pianist John Lewis, bassist Nelson Boyd, and drummer Max Roach. This was an isolated date, however, and Davis spent most of his time playing and recording behind Parker. But in the summer of 1948 he organized a nine-piece band with an unusual horn section. In addition to himself, it featured an alto saxophone, a baritone saxophone, a trombone, a French horn, and a tuba. This nonet, employing arrangements by Gil Evans and others, played for two weeks at the Royal Roost in New York in September. Earning a contract with Capitol Records, the band went into the studio in January 1949 for the first of three sessions which produced 12 tracks that attracted little attention at first. The band's relaxed sound, however, affected the musicians who played it, among them Kai Winding, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, J.J. Johnson, and Kenny Clarke, and it had a profound influence on the development of the cool jazz style on the West Coast. In February 1957, Capitol finally issued the tracks together on an LP called Birth of the Cool.
Davis, meanwhile, had moved on to co-leading a band with pianist Tadd Dameron in 1949, and the group took him out of the country for an appearance at the Paris Jazz Festival in May. But the trumpeter's progress was impeded by an addiction to heroin that plagued him in the early '50s. His performances and recordings became more haphazard, but in January 1951 he began a long series of recordings for the Prestige label that became his main recording outlet for the next several years. He managed to kick his habit by the middle of the decade, and he made a strong impression playing “'Round Midnight” at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1955, a performance that led major label Columbia Records to sign him. The prestigious contract allowed him to put together a permanent band, and he organized a quintet featuring saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones that began recording his Columbia debut, Round About Midnight, in October. As it happened, however, he had a remaining five albums on his Prestige contract, and over the next year he was forced to alternate his Columbia sessions with sessions for Prestige to fulfill this previous commitment. The latter resulted in the Prestige albums The New Miles Davis Quintet, Cookin', Workin', Relaxin', and Steamin', making Davis' first quintet one of his better documented outfits.
In May 1957, just three months after Capitol released the Birth of the Cool LP, Davis again teamed with arranger Gil Evans for his second Columbia LP, Miles Ahead. Playing flugelhorn, Davis fronted a big band on music that extended the Birth of the Cool concept and even had classical overtones. Released in 1958, the album was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, intended to honor recordings made before the Grammy Awards were instituted in 1959. In December 1957, Davis returned to Paris, where he improvised the background music for the film L'Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud (Escalator to the Gallows). Jazz Track, an album containing this music, earned him a 1960 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance, Solo or Small Group. He added saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to his group, creating the Miles Davis Sextet, which recorded the album Milestones in April 1958. Shortly after this recording, Red Garland was replaced on piano by Bill Evans and Jimmy Cobb took over for Philly Joe Jones on drums. In July, Davis again collaborated with Gil Evans and an orchestra on an album of music from Porgy and Bess.
Back in the sextet, Davis began to experiment with modal playing, basing his improvisations on scales rather than chord changes. This led to his next band recording, Kind of Blue, in March and April 1959, an album that became a landmark in modern jazz and the most popular disc of Davis' career, eventually selling over two million copies, a phenomenal success for a jazz record. In sessions held in November 1959 and March 1960, Davis again followed his pattern of alternating band releases and collaborations with Gil Evans, recording Sketches of Spain, containing traditional Spanish music and original compositions in that style. The album earned Davis and Evans Grammy nominations in 1960 for Best Jazz Performance, Large Group, and Best Jazz Composition, More Than 5 minutes; they won in the latter category.
By the time Davis returned to the studio to make his next band album in March 1961, Adderley had departed, Wynton Kelly had replaced Bill Evans at the piano, and John Coltrane had left to begin his successful solo career, being replaced by saxophonist Hank Mobley (following the brief tenure of Sonny Stitt).
Nevertheless, Coltrane guested on a couple of tracks of the album, called Someday My Prince Will Come. The record made the pop charts in March 1962, but it was preceded into the bestseller lists by the Davis quintet's next recording, the two-LP set Miles Davis in Person (Friday & Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, San Francisco), recorded in April. The following month, Davis recorded another live show, as he and his band were joined by an orchestra led by Gil Evans at Carnegie Hall in May. The resulting Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall was his third LP to reach the pop charts, and it earned Davis and Evans a 1962 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Large Group, Instrumental.
Davis and Evans teamed up again in 1962 for what became their final collaboration, Quiet Nights. The album was not issued until 1964, when it reached the charts and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group or Soloist with Large Group. In 1996, Columbia Records released a six-CD box set, Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, that won the Grammy for Best Historical Album. Quiet Nights was preceded into the marketplace by Davis' next band effort, Seven Steps to Heaven, recorded in the spring of 1963 with an entirely new lineup consisting of saxophonist George Coleman, pianist Victor Feldman, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Frank Butler. During the sessions, Feldman was replaced by Herbie Hancock and Butler by Tony Williams. The album found Davis making a transition to his next great group, of which Carter, Hancock, and Williams would be members. It was another pop chart entry that earned 1963 Grammy nominations for both Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Soloist or Small Group and Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group. The quintet followed with two live albums, Miles Davis in Europe, recorded in July 1963, which made the pop charts and earned a 1964 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group, and My Funny Valentine, recorded in February 1964 and released in 1965, when it reached the pop charts.
By September 1964, the final member of the classic Miles Davis Quintet of the 1960s was in place with the addition of saxophonist Wayne Shorter to the team of Davis, Carter, Hancock, and Williams. While continuing to play standards in concert, this unit embarked on a series of albums of original compositions contributed by the band members, starting in January 1965 with E.S.P., followed by Miles Smiles (1967 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group [7 or Fewer]), Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky (1968 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group), and Filles de Kilimanjaro. By the time of Miles in the Sky, the group had begun to turn to electric instruments, presaging Davis' next stylistic turn. By the final sessions for Filles de Kilimanjaro in September 1968, Hancock had been replaced by Chick Corea and Carter by Dave Holland. But Hancock, along with pianist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin, participated on Davis' next album, In a Silent Way (1969), which returned the trumpeter to the pop charts for the first time in four years and earned him another small-group jazz performance Grammy nomination.
With his next album, Bitches Brew, Davis turned more overtly to a jazz-rock style. Though certainly not conventional rock music, Davis' electrified sound attracted a young, non-jazz audience while putting off traditional jazz fans. Bitches Brew, released in March 1970, reached the pop Top 40 and became Davis' first album to be certified gold. It also earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Arrangement and won the Grammy for large- group jazz performance. He followed it with such similar efforts as Miles Davis at Fillmore East (1971 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Group), A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Live-Evil, On the Corner, and In Concert, all of which reached the pop charts. Meanwhile, Davis' former sidemen became his disciples in a series of fusion groups: Corea formed Return to Forever, Shorter and Zawinul led Weather Report, and McLaughlin and former Davis drummer Billy Cobham organized the Mahavishu Orchestra.
Starting in October 1972, when he broke his ankles in a car accident, Davis became less active in the early 1970s, and in 1975 he gave up recording entirely due to illness, undergoing surgery for hip replacement later in the year. Five years passed before he returned to action by recording The Man With the Horn in 1980 and going back to touring in 1981. By now, he was an elder statesman of jazz, and his innovations had been incorporated into the music, at least by those who supported his eclectic approach. He was also a celebrity whose appeal extended far beyond the basic jazz audience. He performed on the worldwide jazz festival circuit and recorded a series of albums that made the pop charts, including We Want Miles (1982 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist), Star People, Decoy, and You're Under Arrest. In 1986, after 30 years with Columbia, he switched to Warner Bros. Records and released Tutu, which won him his fourth Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance. Aura, an album he had recorded in 1984, was released by Columbia in 1989 and brought him his fifth Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist (on a Jazz Recording).
Davis surprised jazz fans when, on July 8, 1991, he joined an orchestra led by Quincy Jones at the Montreux Jazz Festival to perform some of the arrangements written for him in the late 1950s by Gil Evans; he had never previously looked back at an aspect of his career. He died of pneumonia, respiratory failure, and a stroke within months. Doo-Bop, his last studio album, appeared in 1992. It was a collaboration with rapper Easy Mo Bee, and it won a Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Instrumental Performance, with the track “Fantasy” nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo. Released in 1993, Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux won Davis his seventh Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance.
Miles Davis took an all-inclusive, constantly restless approach to jazz that had begun to fall out of favor by the time of his death, even as it earned him controversy during his lifetime. It was hard to recognize the bebop acolyte of Charlie Parker in the flamboyantly dressed leader with the hair extensions who seemed to keep one foot on a wah-wah pedal and one hand on an electric keyboard in his later years. But he did much to popularize jazz, reversing the trend away from commercial appeal that bebop began. And whatever the fripperies and explorations, he retained an ability to play moving solos that endeared him to audiences and demonstrated his affinity with tradition. At a time when jazz is inclining toward academia and repertory orchestras rather than moving forward, he is a reminder of the music's essential quality of boundless invention, using all available means.
Awards
1955, Winner; Down Beat Reader's Poll
1957, Winner; Down Beat Reader's Poll
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Composition Of More Than Five Minutes Duration for Sketches of Spain (1960)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance, Large Group Or Soloist With Large Group for Bitches Brew (1970)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for We Want Miles (1982)
Sonning Award for Lifetime Achievement In Music (1984; Copenhagen, Denmark)
Doctor of Music, honoris causa (1986; New England Conservatory)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for Tutu (1986)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for Aura (1989)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Big Band for Aura (1989)
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1990)
Knighted into the Legion of Honor (July 16, 1991; Paris)
Grammy Award for Best R&B Instrumental Performance for Doo-Bop (1992)
Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance for Miles And Quincy Live At Montreux (1993)
Hollywood Walk Of Fame Star (February 19, 1998)
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction (March 13, 2006)
Hollywood's Rockwalk Induction (September 28, 2006)
RIAA Triple Platinum for Kind of Blue
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2011/01/miles-davis-septet-at-isle-of-wight.html
Saturday, January 1, 2011
1955, Winner; Down Beat Reader's Poll
1957, Winner; Down Beat Reader's Poll
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Composition Of More Than Five Minutes Duration for Sketches of Spain (1960)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance, Large Group Or Soloist With Large Group for Bitches Brew (1970)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for We Want Miles (1982)
Sonning Award for Lifetime Achievement In Music (1984; Copenhagen, Denmark)
Doctor of Music, honoris causa (1986; New England Conservatory)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for Tutu (1986)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for Aura (1989)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Big Band for Aura (1989)
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1990)
Knighted into the Legion of Honor (July 16, 1991; Paris)
Grammy Award for Best R&B Instrumental Performance for Doo-Bop (1992)
Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance for Miles And Quincy Live At Montreux (1993)
Hollywood Walk Of Fame Star (February 19, 1998)
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction (March 13, 2006)
Hollywood's Rockwalk Induction (September 28, 2006)
RIAA Triple Platinum for Kind of Blue
https://view.joomag.com/my-new-black-magazine-nyu-black-renaissance-noire-brn-fall-206-issue-release/0136805001445708478?page=4
Miles Davis: A New Revolution in Sound
by Kofi Natambu
Black Renaissance Noire
Volume 14, Number 2
Fall, 2014
"Knowledge is Freedom. Ignorance is Slavery.”
—Miles Davis
"That period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s was an era in which the resources of Jazz were being consolidated and refined and the range of its sources broadened. Some of the Jazz of this period reached across class and age lines and unified black audiences. Young people could see this music as "bad" in much the same sense that James Brown used the word, and older black people could see its links to black tradition."
--John Szwed
"To the yang of 'hard bop' Davis brought stillness, melodic beauty, and understatement; to the yin of 'cool' he brought rich sonority, blues feeling, and an enriched rhythmic capacity that moved beyond swing to funk. By refusing to color-code either his music or his audience, Davis rose at the end of the 1950s to the summit of artistic excellence."
--Marsha Bayles
"What is there to say about the instrument? It's my voice--that's all it is"
--Miles Davis
On July 17,1955 at the second annual Newport Jazz Festival, Davis was literally invited at the last minute to join a group of prominent Jazz musicians in a staged twenty minute jam session that had been organized by the festival s famed music director, impresario, and promoter George Wein as part of an "opening act" for the then highly popular white headliner Dave Brubeck.
Scheduled merely as a quick programming lead-in to stage changes between featured performances by the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ), the Count Basie and Duke Ellington Orchestras, Lester Young, and Brubeck, nothing special was planned in advance for this short set which, like most jam sessions, was completely improvised by the musicians performing onstage. Davis was then the least well known musician in the assembled group which was made up of Thelonious Monk, individuals from the MJQ, and other individual members of various groups playing in the festival. Wein just happened to be a big fan of Davis and added him because he was "a melodic bebopper" and a player who, in Wein's view, could reach a larger audience than most other musicians because of the haunting romantic lyricism and melodic richness of his style. Wein's insight turned out to be prophetic.
Despite the fact that most of the mainstream audience on hand had only a vague idea of who Davis was, he was a standout sensation in the jam session and his searing performance was one of the most talked about highlights of the festival. Appearing in an elegant white seersucker sport coat and a small black bow tie, thus already demonstrating the sleek, sharp sartorial style that quickly became his trademark (and led to his eventual appearance on the covers of many fashion magazines in the U.S, Europe, and Asia), Davis captivated the festival throng with haunting, dynamic solos and brilliant ensemble playing on both slow ballads and intensely up-tempo quicksilver tunes alike. Taking complete command of the setting with his understated elegance and relaxed yet naturally dramatic stage presence, the handsome and charismatic Davis breezed through two famous and musically daunting compositions by Thelonious Monk ("Hackensack" and "Round Midnight"), and then ended his part of the program by playing an impassioned bluesy solo on a well-known Charlie Parker composition entitled "Now is the Time" which Davis had originally recorded with Bird in 1945. That clinched it. He was a hit. Miles had returned from almost complete oblivion to becoming a much talked about and heralded star seemingly overnight (of course this personal and professional recognition had been over a decade in the making). After a long, arduous struggle as both an artist and individual that began in his hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois when he started to play trumpet at the age of 13 in 1939, Miles Davis had finally "arrived." For the first time since 1950 he was completely clean and off drugs. No longer addicted, Miles now played with a bravura, command, and creative clarity that he had been fervently searching for well before he had become addicted to heroin. It would be the beginning of many more incredible triumphs and struggles that would catapult the fiery young trumpet player to the very pinnacle of his profession and global fame and wealth over the next ten years.
On hand for that historic summer concert in Newport, RI. was George Avakian, a young music producer from the large corporate recording company called Columbia (now Sony). Miles had been after Avakian for over five years trying to get a recording contract with Columbia which was then the largest and most successful music company in the United States, but Avakian had been cautiously waiting for a sign that Davis had conquered his personal problems and was ready to commit fulltime to his music. Clearly Miles was now ready. Avakian's brother Aram whispered to George during the concert that he should sign Davis now, before he became a big hit and signed with a rival company instead. Miles, himself nonplussed about the critical acclaim he was finally receiving, wondered what the fuss was all about and maintained that he was simply playing like he always had been. While there was some truth to this assertion it was also clear that Miles's highly disciplined demeanor, new responsible attitude, and impeccable playing now indicated his intent on making a new commitment to living a life strictly devoted to his art.
Avakian and Columbia representatives met with Davis two days later on July 19, 1955 to sign him to a new contract with the understanding that Davis would first fulfill the remainder of his contract with the Prestige label by doing a series of recordings in the fall of 1955 and the spring and fall of 1956 while at the same time making his first recordings with Columbia that would not be released until after the public appearance of the Prestige sessions. These small label recordings for Prestige would immediately become famously known as the "missing g" sessions (so-called for the dropping of the letter 'g' in the titles of these records, (e.g. Walkin', Workin', Cookin', Steamin', and Relaxin'). As Miles's first great legendary Quintet this young aggregation (the oldest member of the group was 33 years old) featured then relative unknowns John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. From the very beginning this group and Miles himself would remake Jazz history and become innovative and protean harbingers of great changes to come in the music as well as the general culture.
As with many great musicians, Miles's unique, highly individual sound on his chosen instrument--the trumpet--would be the creative basis and structural foundation of this new cultural and aesthetic intervention. His was a sound that embraced the entire history of Jazz trumpet in its meticulous attention to the demanding technical and physical requirements of the instrument yet also sought a creative and expressive approach that openly allowed for more subtle emotional nuances to emerge from his playing than were common traditionally on trumpet. Miles brought a highly burnished lyricism that was both deeply introspective and fiercely driving all at once. A major characteristic of Davis's playing was a new and different way of phrasing in which a major emphasis and focus on the relationship of space to tempo and melody (and the intervals between notes) became the hallmark of his style. In the process Davis dramatically redefined and expanded the expressive and creative range of the tonal palette and instrumental timbre of the trumpet. By shifting the traditional emphasis from the heraldic and bravura functions of the instrument to a more diverse and expansive range of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ideas Miles was able to openly express the anguished conflict, sardonic irony, restless desire for cultural and social change, and questing existential/ psychological anxiety of the modern age. This intense attention to the broader expressive possibilities of both musical improvisation and composition also turned the feverish search for new forms and methods that characterized the era into a parallel personal quest for discovering a wider range of emotional and psychological contexts in which to play. The sonic exploration of the complexities and ambiguities of joy, rage, love, and melancholia was a major hallmark of Miles's style. Central to Miles's vision and sensibility was an equally exhilarating appreciation for the balanced expressive and intellectual relationship between relaxation and tension in his music. By focusing specifically on the spatial and rhythmic dimensions of melodic invention Miles developed musical methods that called for, and often resulted in, a precise minimalist approach to playing in which each note (or corresponding chord) carried an implied reference to every other note or chord in a particular sequence of musical phrases. Through a technical command of breath control and timbral dynamics induced by his embouchure and unorthodox valve fingerings, Miles could maintain or manipulate tonal pitch at the softest or loudest volumes. By creating stark dialectical contrasts in his sound through alternately attacking, slurring, syncopating or manipulating long tones in particular ensemble or orchestral settings (a technical device Miles often referred to as "contrary motion") Miles was able to convey great feeling and emotion through an economy of phrasing and musical rests. This rapt attention to allowing space or the silence between note intervals to dramatically assert itself as much or more as the notes themselves created great anticipation in his audience as to how these tensions would be resolved (or not). In this respect, the insightful observation by the French Jazz critic and music historian André Hodeir that Miles's sound tends toward a discovery of ecstasy is a rather apt description of Davis's expressive approach. What emerged from Miles's intensely comprehensive investigation of the creative possibilities of the instrument was a deep and lifelong appreciation for the tonal, sonic, and textural dimensions of playing and composing music. These aesthetic concerns as well as Miles's innovative creative solutions to the rigorous challenges of improvisational and composed ensemble structures alike in the modern Jazz tradition soon revolutionized all of American music and made Davis one of the leading and most influential musician-composers in the world during the last half of the 20th century.
Davis's widespread social, cultural, and political influence didn't end there however--especially in the black community. Miles also quickly became a social and cultural avatar whose highly personal combination of cool reserve, fiery defiance, detached alienation, intellectual independence, and striking stylistic innovation in everything from clothes to speech embodied, and largely defined for many, the ethos of 'hip' that pervaded the black Jazz world of the 1950s and early 1960s. But Miles, while remaining very hip, at the same time also lived and worked far beyond the insular world of hipsterism and avant-garde bohemia. He was unique in that his stance was simultaneously existentialist and engaged. As many observers, fans, scholars, friends, and critics have noted, Miles became, in many ways, what the critic Garry Giddins called "the representative black artist" of his era. John Szwed, Yale University music professor and author of a 2002 biography on Miles entitled So What: The Life of Miles Davis speaks for a couple of generations of writers, fans, artists and musicians when he states that by the late '50s, early 1960s:
“Miles was becoming the coin of the realm, cock of the walk, good copy for the tabloids, and inspiration for literary imagination. Allusions to him could turn up anywhere…Tributes to him sprang up in poems by Langston Hughes (“Trumpet Player: 52nd Street”), and Gregory Corso…Young people ostentatiously carried his albums to parties and sought out his clothing in the best men’s stores. In person, his every action was observed and read for meaning…A discourse developed around him, one that bore inordinate weight in matters of race—Miles stories—narratives about his inner drives, his demons, his pain, and his ambition. Invariably, his stories climaxed with a short comment, crushingly delivered in a husky imitation of the man’s voice, capped by some obscenity…He was the man.”
Among many black people, Davis's outspoken, defiant social stance and hip, charismatic aura signified a profound shift in cultural values and attitudes in the national black community that also had a lasting political significance and influence. This was especially true for the emerging adolescent youth and radical young adults of the era whose overt displays of rebellion and defiance of racism and repression were becoming pervasive with the rise of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Miles quickly became a major symbol of this modern revolutionary spirit in African American culture and was seen by many as an important artistic leader in this struggle and its widespread social and political demands for respect, justice, equality, and freedom for African Americans that marked the period. Thus, it is not surprising that many of the various musical aesthetics that Davis devised and expressed during the late '50s and throughout the '60s consciously sought to advance specifically new ideas about the structural, formal, and expressive dimensions of the modernist tradition in contemporary Jazz music. These changes would openly challenge many of the orthodoxies of this tradition both in terms of form and content while at the same time asserting a radically different set of ideological and aesthetic values about the intellectual and cultural worth, use, and intent of the music that in attitude and style sought to resist or go beyond standard notions of both high art and commercial popular culture. Simultaneously however, Davis sought to consciously establish an even more socially intimate relationship with his black audience (and especially its youthful members) that would embody and hopefully expand Davis's views on the broad necessity for deeply rooted political and cultural change within the African American community and the U.S. as a whole.
In the quest to critique many of the philosophical assumptions governing conventional modernist discourse in art while still retaining a fundamental aesthetic connection to other important aspects and principles of modernism--especially those having to do with the continuous necessity of creative change and revision--Davis epitomized the 'progressive' African American Jazz musician's desire to use black vernacular sources, ideas, and values to engage these modernist traditions and principles on his/her own independent social, cultural, and intellectual terms. In such major recordings from the 1957-1967 period as his orchestral masterpieces Miles Ahead, (1957) Porgy & Bess, (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960)--made in collaboration with his longtime friend and colleague, the white composer and arranger Gil Evans --and his equally significant and highly influential small group Quintet and Sextet recordings, Milestones, (1958) Kind of Blue, (1959) Live at the Blackhawk, (1961) My Funny Valentine, (1965) Four & More, (1964) E.S.P., (1965) Miles Smiles, (1966) Miles in Berlin, (1964) Miles in Tokyo, (1964) Live at the Plugged Nickel, (1965) and Nefertiti, (1967) Davis was at the forefront of those African American artists of the period who, in all the arts, were feverishly looking for and often finding fresh, new modes of pursuing aesthetic innovation and social change. By dialectically synthesizing and extending ideas, strategies, methods, and structures culled from such disparate sources as 20th century classical music, the blues, R&B, and many different stylistic forms from the Jazz tradition (i.e. Swing, Bebop, 'Cool' and 'Hard Bop' etc.)--many of which Davis himself had played a pivotal role in developing and popularizing--Miles helped bring about a new creative synthesis of modern and vernacular expressions that greatly changed our perceptions of what American music was and could be.
FOR MILES DAVIS
by Kofi Natambu
Miles blows blue holes thru red skies
blistering black sounds singe the purple air
And the night is a towering orange aura hovering
above his cavernous horn
Miles blows down empty empires
while floating upon the memory
of a song
Miles is a deepsea dancer
leaving acoustic trails
in green earth rhythms
His dramatic tone causes light
to appear & disappear
His trumpet is a carnivorous loa
that is fed every time he speaks
His Notes crush that which cannot
stand its moaning weight
Miles is the eternal ruler
of the Chromatic
Spectrums of color fall from his swollen upper lip
Soaring symphonic syllogisms
race thru his fingers/are thrust
into the royal and open heart
A sweet scatology of beauty
(Poem from: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS
by Kofi Natambu. Past Tents Press, 1991}
https://www.thenewjournal.com/html/nonfiction/williams_mdavis.ht
A Review of Miles Davis and American Culture
Edited by Gerald Early
Missouri Historical Society Press, 2002
by Tyrone Williams
The New Journal
October, 2002
As Eric Porter demonstrates in his overview of the jazz criticism on Miles Davis, "'It's About That Time': The Response To Miles Davis's Electric Turn," the paradoxes, contradictions and conundrums that riddle, if not define, the life and music of Miles Davis have generated a voluminous body of criticism that mirror his musical, cultural and ethical tensions. Thus it is not surprising that Miles Davis and American Culture, a commemorative catalog to the first major museum exhibition of Davis's work, is a microcosm of the conflicting assessments of both the musician and human being, not only between but also, in certain cases, within the essays, memoirs and interviews that comprise this book. Although there is little that is new here in terms of the critical debates over Davis's relationships and contributions to the American music problematically called "jazz," (Davis himself was notorious for his scorn of the term) cool jazz, hard bop and "fusion" (even more problematic a term), this collection does feature a number of interesting essays, at least two of which warrant extended discussion: the introductory essay by Gerald Early and the critical assessment by Martha Bayles. Eric Porter's essay is also valuable reading, but as he is primarily interested in summarizing the critical debates around Davis's music, particularly the post-1969 material, I will limit most of my comments to the contributions of Early and Bayles. But first, the other contributions.
The essays by William Howland Kenney, Eugene Redmond and Benjamin Cawthra situate Davis's music within the cultural and economic history of East St. Louis, Missouri. Specifically, Kenney and Cawthra attempt to account for why Miles Davis is known as someone only "from" East St. Louis, why Davis both chose and had to leave for New York in 1944. Kenney's essay, "Just Before Miles: Jazz in St. Louis, 1926-1944," discusses Davis's formative years as a musician in "hot-dance" riverboat bands in Missouri and Illinois. Kenney argues that the demise of these riverboat bands--due to the advent of air conditioning, interstate highways, federal regulations, and the aging boats themselves--was as crucial a factor in Davis's decision to leave the Midwest as his desire to play with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in New York. Cawthra's contribution, "Remembering Miles in St. Louis: A Conclusion," argues that the erosion of East St. Louis's economic and cultural infrastructures, due to deep-seated racism and political expediency, was and is as great a factor in the city's inability to retain its cultural talent as is the obvious attractions of the East and West coasts. More optimistic is Eugene Redmond's celebratory poem/prose, "'So What'(?)...It's 'All Blues' Anyway: An Anecdotal/Jazzological Tour of Milesville." Unlike Kenney and Cawthra, Redmond reads Davis's "from East St. Louis" as, at worst, mere description, at best, something to be proud of since, Redmond suggests, Davis's legacy might serve as a cornerstone of the foundation on which East St. Louis rebuilds itself.
The book also features interviews with record industry a & r impresario George Avakian and musicians Quincy Jones, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, and Joey DeFrancesco. It concludes with a reprint of Davis's 1962 Playboy interview with Alex Haley. Other contributors include Quincy Troupe, Farah Jasmine Griffin, John Gennari, Ingrid Monson and Waldo Martin, Jr.
As noted above, the essays by Gerald Early, Eric Porter and Martha Bayles attempt comprehensive overviews of the twists and turns of Davis's career: from a "Newer Negro" (Early) playing black music (hard bop) and a black man playing Negro music (cool) to, after 1969, a black man playing black-and-white music (fusion and pop) and, finally, a black man playing African-American music (hip-hop). The intersection between ethnicity, race and gender in the preceding reflects concerns that orient almost all the writings here.
Gerald Early's introductory essay, "The Art of the Muscle: Miles Davis as American Knight and American Knave," begins from the premise that the key to understanding Miles Davis as a man and musician lies in the relationship between his ascendancy as a major force in jazz at the very moment that the music's commercial appeal was in decline. About the latter, Early writes: "No music can eschew its own commercial dimension, and if it does, as jazz sometimes has...it only winds up, paradoxically, trying to sell itself on the basis that it is noncommercial...." (4) Early argues that Davis attempted to solve this dilemma by embracing elitism while repositioning himself within the marketplace.
The decline of jazz as a popular music due, in part, to its own pretensions is an issue taken up later by Martha Bayles, but the theme is a familiar one in the arguments of Stanley Crouch, Wynton Marsalis, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray and others. The common target is bebop, held responsible, to varying degrees, for jazz's demise as a popular music. The target behind the target is the modernist conception of "art" and the "artist," perceived as intrinsically antipopulist, self-indulgent and formalistic to the point of narcissism. In all its forms this argument leads to problematic, if not contradictory, positions, as we will see in Bayles's essay.
Gerald Early, for one, understands the pitfalls of the antiart argument and the rest of his essay dances around its implications. He acknowledges that any contradictions one might perceive in Davis wanting to have it "both ways" depend on prior presumptions about the inviolability of musical genres - which the musician may not share: "In a sense, what Davis wanted to do was transcend jazz and simply embody musical improvisation." (5) However, this generous reading of Davis's motivations will not, as Early knows, sustain scrutiny. Early is merely setting the ground for his own reading of Davis as the quintessential ever-searching, ever-restless romantic figure of jazz. This is Miles Davis through a European lens (to adopt one of Bayles's more useful strategies of reading jazz history). This is Miles Davis as a white man, which might explain why Early writes, with a straight face: "Miles Davis is the American bad boy of jazz, our Huckleberry Finn...."
Early does not neglect the "black" Miles Davis, the would-be homeboy, "Jim." Most illuminating in this regard is his discussion of Davis's fascination with boxing in general and his hero-worship of Sugar Ray Robinson in particular. Davis saw in Robinson's - and, earlier, Jack Johnson's - celebration of the "sporting life" (the indulgence in women, gambling, drugs, etc.) - a model and challenge to the "straight" life, not from the point of view of "hipness" but on the assumption (right or wrong) that black bourgeois culture was largely a form of accommodation to white racism. In particular, as Early makes clear, Davis viewed some - but not all - middle-class mores as attempts to police the "black body," strategies in concert with white modes of control. As a black male secularist and musician dedicated to the pleasures of the body, Davis could no more stomach "Crow Jim" attitudes among Negroes than he could Jim Crow white law. And just as Jack Johnson had, by virtue of his exploits in and out of the ring, become a "New Negro" worthy of the accolades of the Harlem Renaissance literary elite, so too, later, Miles Davis would become a "Newer Negro." Early points out that Davis saw himself as a part of a "black male heroic tradition," but whereas Johnson and Robinson - six years older than Davis - operated as New Negroes in spite of white American hostility, Davis, simply because he was in the right place at the right time, benefitted from the "white Negro"/Newer Negro phenomenon. His on- and off-stage antics thrilled the young, hip, white jazz aficionados (among them, of course, the Beats) of the 1950s. In this context, as Early makes clear, Davis's resentment, however heartfelt, was, like Lionel Hampton's accommodationism, based on the same premise: the audience for jazz, traditional or avant-garde, was overwhelmingly white.
Just as Davis is, for Early, a figure of the romantic artist and opportunistic businessman, benefitting the historical period in which he lived - the rise of the music industry - he is likewise, for Martha Bayles, a latter-day Ulysses, a straight man in an epic tale of pretension and slapstick. Its theme: "the day the music died." Bayles's largely laudatory essay, "Miles Davis and the Double Audience," links the modernist divide between technique and accessibility in modern European music (e.g., serialism) and American music (bebop) to the growing belief in progress and science in the early 20th century. For Bayles, the result is "no audience" for European modernism (she cites Milton Babbitt's famous essay, "Who Cares If You Listen?") and "two audiences" for American modernism. Aside from exasperating class differences and polarizing blacks and whites, the elevation of technique, Bayles argues, has resulted in the debasement of "traditional" musical values (especially melody). Miles Davis is thus the exception that proves the rule, negotiating the Scylla and Charbydis of crass commercialism (accessibility) and artistic isolation (technique): "to the yang of hard bop Davis brought stillness, melodic beauty, and understatement; to the yin of cool he brought rich sonority, blues feeling, and an enriched rhythmic capacity that moved beyond swing to funk." (155). This is, of course, a gloss on Gary Giddins's more pithy observation - cited by two other authors in this book - that Davis was the "Midwestern parent" of both West Coast cool and East Coast bop. These two modes of jazz quickly became color-coded as white and black in the late Fifties and early Sixties. As Gerald Early implied with his Huckleberry Finn-Sugar Ray Robinson metaphors, Davis is, for Bayles, a figure of musical and racial reconciliation despite his occasional posturing.
Bayles's essay stands alone in this volume in its attempt to not only bracket but also criticize the extramusical forces that influenced Davis's music, particularly after 1969 when he helped popularize fusion. In relation to music criticism, these forces function as "contexts." Bayles begins by noting, pace Porter et al, Davis's interracial audiences and the resulting discomfiture for this son of a "race man." (149) But audience, too, is a "context," and Bayles will privilege this particular context - for whom is this music? - and oppose other "contextual" approaches for being, of all things, insufficiently contextual. Especially, it seems, the political context(s). Yet what surprises one is the insufficient attention Bayles pays to historical contexts, a failure which results in misreadings and distortions of the historical record. Bayles, thinking of Gary Tomlinson (cited by Eric Porter), asserts that notions of "dialogue," like that of "contestation," do not provide "genuine insight" into Davis's music and its significance. Those terms, of course, not only imply "contexts" but, more important, they presuppose separate black and white cultures and traditions. This is what Bayles must reject as "significant," much less "positive," influences on Davis's music. And though she concedes the limitations of a purely "formal analysis" of Davis's music, Bayles proceeds to place into abeyance all contextual factors except "audience." Of course, this makes perfect sense since to invoke formalism sans audience would mean a retreat into modernist isolation.
I do not have the space to discuss the ways Bayles distorts the relationship between modernism, science and "progress" (in this respect she misreads Babbitt's essay) vis-a-vis serialism and aleatory music (though her distinction between aleatory music and free jazz is illuminating). Instead I will conclude by focusing on what Bayles has to say about American jazz and pop. It is perhaps a little fussy to note that Davis's infamous turning of his back to the audience is read by Bayles as contempt (she tries to distinguish gradations of contempt in Davis's behavior) when he himself claimed that his stage movements were a rejection of the jazz musician as "entertainer." As already noted in Gerald Early's essay, Davis came onto the stage of history when a black musician could not only be tolerated for rejecting the mask that Louis Armstrong had to wear but could, in fact, be lionized for doing so. This rejection of the entertainer role preceded Davis (as Bayles notes), but she can only see it in extremes, in polarized terms as either contempt or "a clever marketing device." She quotes Davis gleefully reveling in his "bad boy" role without sufficiently attending to its significance as a "role."
More egregious is Bayles's reading of Davis's "electric turn." Effusing over the 1960s in terms of "crossover" audiences, Bayles writes, "The seemingly miraculous spectacle of the double audience blending into one attracted Davis." Not according to almost everyone else in this volume and elsewhere. It was not race that mattered to Davis in this context but age - he wanted to go after the youth market, and the youth market was rock 'n roll and r&b. Had these audiences already been 'blending into one" fusion would have already been popular. Moreover, the term "crossover" was and is equivalent to "integration," largely a one-way street in popular music and social history. Black music was and is more popular with white audiences than the reverse just as black people move into white neighborhoods more often than the reverse.
So what "genuine insight" does Bayles offer in lieu of "dialogue" and "contestation"? Contemplating Davis's turn to fusion, she writes: "With the popular audience Davis shared an appreciation for the primary capacities of music: the power of rhythm to move the body (dance) and the power of melody to move his emotions (song). Perhaps fusion should be judged by these standards." (161) I could not agree more, but that's not to say that these are more profound criteria than the "simplistic notions of 'dialogue' and 'contestation.'" On the contrary, Bayles has simply withdrawn Davis's music from one "context" (political and social forces) and inserted it in another context (audience reception) on the basis of traditional musical values (melody, rhythm). Which really means: certain kinds of melodic treatment, certain kinds of rhythmic measure.
As I hope my extended - if incomplete - analyses of Early's and Bayles's essays - and there are other good ones here - imply, Miles Davis and American Culture is a worthy addition to the collection of anyone still fascinated by the enigma that was - and is - Miles Davis.
All contents copyright The New Journal, 2002
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/for-the-artists-critical-writing-volume-2
For the Artists: Critical Writing, Volume 2
by GREG MASTERS
October 31, 2007
AllAboutJazz
“Miles' music of the 1970s is not just a rejection of beauty, but a beautiful embrace of the rejected.”
—Greg Masters
Miles Davis: The Complete On the Corner Sessions
Sony Legacy Music, October 2007
"There is no architecture and no build-up. Just a vivid, uninterrupted succession of colors, rhythms and moods." —Arnold Schoenberg, describing his Five Pieces for Orchestra in a letter to Richard Strauss, 1909
From: The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)
For the Artists, Vol. 2 -© 2014 Greg Masters
The music Miles Davis forged in the first half of the 1970s, his so-called "electric period," is not jazz. In a determined effort to keep his sound fresh, he took the audacious step of leaving behind all the frameworks of the art form which had made him a recognized and venerated figure throughout the world. In an effort to open himself up to new ideas and to expand his audience, his new sound maintains elements of the jazz style he'd evolved for the previous 30 years, while appropriating styles of music outside the jazz repertoire, namely the propulsive dance groove of 70s funk (particularly James Brown and Sly Stone), the raucous, rough-edged, electro-charged brashness of Jimi Hendrix, the metallic sparkle of India's Ravi Shankar, the European classical avant-garde methods of Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as the traditions of jazz going back to Dixieland and ragtime. It's also indebted to the free playing of Albert Ayler and late John Coltrane with Pharoah Sanders.
And what does this add up to? All I know is that the music manages to expresses feelings I've yet to find in any other art form. Complex, raw, primal feelings splayed and made tangible.
The music Miles made in these years—particularly with the scorching electric guitars of Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, grounded in the steady, incantory pulse of Al Foster's 4/4 rhythm on drums and Michael Henderson's unswerving definition of tempo and key via electric bass—defined an organic, body-centered response to nature. Bird calls and the sound of wind through the trees is as much a part of the pastiche as is the dance of the inner psyche. We've heard these sounds on walks through the woods.
But the music is—despite the assault of its unfamiliar gestures and its straying beyond bar measures—rooted in blues. The whole thing is still a child of the body and spirit-form called blues. Miles was clearly intending to move his music out of the elite confines of the music hall and into the street, or at least onto the radio.
Miles' generosity of spirit, his openness to influences from outside the expected, his need to dig deep into emotional recesses never before expressed so vividly, make it seem that the music is contemporary. To these ears it is not at all dated or relegated to a nostalgic dip into the past. It was so far ahead of its time that we're still catching up to it nearly 40 years later.
The Complete On the Corner Sessions (Sony-Legacy Music, 2007) is the eighth and final set in a series of Miles Davis boxes. This six-CD package includes six-plus hours of music, including 12 previously unissued tracks, plus five tracks previously unissued in full. The package contains a 120-page booklet with liner notes and essays by musician/co-producer Bob Belden (Michael Cuscuna is the other co-producer), journalist Tom Terrell and arranger/musician Paul Buckmaster.
The Complete On the Corner Sessions is an inaccurate and misleading title in an academic sense. The tracks he recorded at Columbia Studio B over the course of 16 sessions presented in this set from March 9, 1972 to May 5, 1975 offer up at least two very different artistic intentions. The first is the material realized for what would be released as On the Corner in July 1972 —the "extended grooves," as bassist Michael Henderson explains in the liner notes. This is a singular event in the Miles chronology, although it can be seen as an extension of the sound he had developed in 1970 in an ensemble that included Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Michael Henderson, Gary Bartz, John McLaughlin and Airto Moreira (represented on The Cellar Door Sessions, released as a six-CD box set in 2005).
Other tracks collected here, particularly those assembled on Get Up With It (released November 1974), are another matter. Following the June 1972 sessions that resulted in On the Corner, Miles moved the ensemble sound away from an insistence on a churning, full-speed-ahead jam on one chord. On a handful of sessions over the next few years, orchestral colors are explored and there's room for chord changes and melodies. Perhaps it's quibbling, but I'm more comfortable with distinguishing each of the original LPs as distinct periods, or moments, in Miles' continuous evolution.
The new solo
In the early 1970s, Miles could not play trumpet with the intensity, force and bravado he'd exhibited throughout his career and which had been at a peak in 1969 and 1970 as he put himself on display to a whole new audience of rock crowds at the Fillmore East (March 6-7, 1970 and again June 17-20, 1970) and Fillmore West (April 10-11, 1970 and again Oct. 15-18, 1970), at huge rock festivals (Isle of Wight, Aug. 29, 1970) and other venues larger than the night clubs and corner bars he'd been playing for decades.
His embouchure was compromised. He was in ill health. His use of recreational drugs was reportedly abundant. Playing trumpet is physically demanding and Miles, in the 1970s, was willing, but his body was just not near the same levels as it had been. His soloing and his steering of the ensemble sound via his horn was diminished from what it had been.
But what he lacked in physical stamina, he made up for by taking huge risks in exposing his every vulnerability via a shift in musical intention. He refused to rely on playing crowd favorites or tunes from his past repertoire. He was intent on forging something entirely brand new, of presenting something which hadn't been seen or heard before.
The case could be made that he was insulting his devoted audience by merely presenting incomprehensible noise. But I am in the camp which believes this music is valuable in its revolutionary intentions.
The Complete On the Corner Sessions box showcases Miles' power as a leader. While the musicians are not playing charts, within their prescribed roles each player contributes an individual intensity and voice while fitting into the ensemble sound.
Miles' conducting of the group improvisation is firm enough to give a recognizable shape to the tune while trusting enough of the individual voices to bring out their best. Not many of the musicians who passed through Miles' various groups ever sounded better than when they were with him. Why? Because part of Miles' genius was in encouraging his partners to reach for expressions they hadn't known were within them. As leader, he afforded them the time to expand on their ideas, while at the same time maintaining a unifying order to contain the amalgam of personal contributions.
However, here the soloing is less rewarding to listen to because the musicians aren't as skilled as were the musicians in Miles' previous ensembles. And there's often less gradations to which the improvisations can respond. Often the solos are enlisted to override the churning, molten funk of the groove laid down by the rest of the pack. So, less skilled and less brave than Miles was when he complemented Charlie Parker's fusillade attack with a whole different approach, the soloing musicians on these sessions take less risks and resort to sounding off on their horns in a frenzy of notes in their attempt to meet the demands of the ensemble sound. There's little nuance, little chance to explore and test, as the musical concept is forceful and deliberate.
But this is less a liability because the act of soloing acquires a new purpose and intent on these tracks. Each solo is less ego-based than solos from the 60 years of improvisational music dating back to Louis Armstrong's emergence with King Oliver. Here, the solo is not the showcase for virtuosity it was before. While each player's skill is on display and each brings his own personal touch to the solo, it's more directed to serve the music. The solo is a momentary display within the textures of the process. It's a thread in the fabric.
Too, while Charlie Parker in the 78 rpm era only had three minutes to make his statement, Miles in the LP era can take his time and uses the space to elongate the music-listening experience so it can extend the range and incorporate moods and tones beyond bebop and standards boundaries.
The argument could be made that the level of musicianship in the ensembles Miles led throughout these electric years was not as skilled as it had previously been. These musicians lacked the virtuosic capabilities of the now recognized jazz masters who had played with Miles throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s, players who were capable of soloing at the proper time in their prescribed roles as sidemen—beautiful statements that adhered to the chord changes and showed off their technical facility and aesthetic craft in the service of making art music.
This was the basic structure: A small team of musicians would play a theme, then each would take a turn soloing, the theme would be stated again by the ensemble and the piece would end. The audience knew what to expect. The thrill was in how articulate the soloists could express themselves.
Miles, even at 19 years old when he joined the Charlie Parker band, added something different to the pyrotechnic virtuosity of players like Parker. Miles' sound brought a softer, feminine element, a brooding, reflective wistfulness that countered the alpha male assertiveness of most other jazz music of the time and of the preceding 50 years.
There are several reasons why Miles' music of the 70s may be less attractive to listeners. For one, it's nasty. It digs deep to express dark recesses of feelings and sustains those moods for long stretches. It is not enjoyable in the sense that art had served previously. As Theodor Adorno says, in discussing the music of Schoenberg, affability ceases. The music is less about serving as entertainment and is more an unrestrained attempt to express the rawest emotions. It's beyond entertainment. Miles was through pandering to audience expectations. Too, with his trumpet-playing limited because of poor health, he began using an electric organ to produce occasional howls, chords not heard before, eerie, dark blocks of sound.
Defiling the Cult of Beauty: The Influence of Stockhausen and Messiaen
The music deserves more serious examination and certainly more recognition and acclaim. It is remarkable music in that it integrates a universe of sounds. It's not simply bringing in the ethnic influence of a foreign culture, as Dizzy Gillespie did decades earlier by bringing Caribbean dance rhythms into his sound. The music adds textures and complexities learned from European avant-garde—particularly the collage effects of Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose pieces since the 1950s, besides traditional orchestral instrumentation, were making use of electronic effects (synthesizers, amplified soloists, ring modulators), as well as short wave receivers.
In the liner notes, Paul Buckmaster, a British cellist and composer who had experimented with tape loops, recounts how he exposed Miles to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen at this time. The influence this had on Miles' sound is easy to imagine. Stockhausen's music is a radical break from the classical music tradition in that it does not rely on narrative. Like a Godard movie, it interrupts the spoon-fed story-telling structure to offer up a new palette of sensual and intellectual effects. It is full of surprises, as the listener can never anticipate what's coming next. It's a music free of sentiment, unencumbered from the Romantic strategy of appealing to common urges (assuming agreement is pleasing).
After an absorption in the compositions of Stockhausen, as well as those of Olivier Messiaen, with their open-ended structures, Miles' methods can be seen to jettison the traditional thematic structure left over from the Romantic era, where a piece of music follows a pattern, or narrative, describing a set of experiences or feelings through time. Miles begins here, like modern composers Messiaen and Stockhausen, to make use of the moment. The allegiance to a story is abandoned. Each moment of the musical piece is attuned to the extraordinary. Miles acquires a new tonal palette incorporating ominous and chilling explorations, such as examined in the music of Stockhausen and Messiaen.
Also, with the use of silences, the band's forward progression coming to a sudden halt, a strategy also likely picked up from Stockhausen, the music emphasizes the collage-like, fragmentary nature of perception, not an ideal make-believe illusion. The listener can enter and leave anywhere.
Too, not answerable to any agenda, the music's idiosyncratic path is decidedly not intended to placate audience expectation. Pure art seeks to explore and enunciate more than entertain.
These expressions take art away from the merely beautiful and the artifice of luxury. The illusion of safe extravagance is removed in order to portray less-than-polite feelings. Left behind is good taste, decorative entertainment for the comfort of paying patrons.
The music is so densely layered and there is so much musical activity that repeated listening is rewarded as moments and threads are heard differently each time. And, without the formal dependence on theme and dramatic progression, our listening experience is splayed out to concentrate on the moment, not the anticipation of a climax and resolution.
Much of the music contained in this package could be designated "new age," though it's often more raucous than what we typify today as the calming ambient music we use for relaxing or performing yoga.
While Miles' intentions with his music might have been to get people up to dance, at the same time he created a panache of listenable grooves filled with surprises and unprecedented ensemble sounds that still retain their freshness and audacious attitude.
Dissonance, Our Friend
Miles' music of the 1970s is not just a rejection of beauty, but a beautiful embrace of the rejected.
For Miles, dissonance was an acknowledgement that there was more to be expressed in music than comfort and resolvable sensations. The musical vocabulary of traditional Western harmony—the I, IV, V form, the basic foundation for everything from church hymns to blues, standards and rock 'n' roll —imposed limitations to exploring and expressing a range of emotions and a depiction of possibilities beyond the familiar tonal centers available in major and minor patterns.
His departure from these confines might be traced back as far as 1959's Kind of Blue, which broke from the blues-based form by using modal scales that gave an effect of suspension, as chords didn't resolve back to the root chord as in the familiar traditional manner. Pleasing an audience with tasteful, familiar songs, providing entertainment, became too tired. Miles wanted to grow as an artist.
Miles' group of the mid-60s took it even further. Pushed by Wayne Shorter's spiral compositions and fragmentary style of soloing on sax and by keyboardist Herbie Hancock's schooling in Debussy and Ravel and drummer Tony Williams' aggressive splattering of bar lines, this music too offered a sense of suspension as it uprooted the root and tonic.
The shift from the traditional standards repertory to a push into something new is discerned in The Complete Live at The Plugged Nickel set from Dec. 22-23, 1965 (released as an eight-CD box set in July 1995). Miles, the leader, seems in poor health. His trumpet playing lacks breath and his soloing comes in short bursts which he can't sustain. He, in fact, does not play a lot over the course of the seven live sets over two nights. His weakness gives more of the spotlight to his young, energetic sidemen, who are eager to advance into new realms beyond the standards repertoire to which their boss has been anchored.
Later in the decade, Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea would even be nudging the music into totally free territory—leaving behind the grounding in a common key and time signature—before Miles, not quite convinced of the emotional impact of a total abandonment of order, would rein the group back down to a place of agreement.
Fortunate to be working for a record company—Columbia (now Columbia/Legacy, a division of Sony BMG Music Entertainment)—that indulged his direction and allowed him to pursue his project, Miles ran with it. Not obliged to the record company to fester as a recognizable brand, Miles could use the studio and countless live dates, to continue developing and pushing into unexplored territory to create sounds which were unheard and unimagined previously.
The Tunes
There are some gems among the previously unreleased tracks, particularly "On the Corner (take 4)" and "Mr. Foster," and the release of unheard music from this phase of Miles' career will thrill devotees of his electric music.
"On the Corner (take 4)" offers up the entire universe in one chord. It's a five-minute studio fragment that propels the listener via one effect: a determined mining of a vamp pedaled to one chord onto which the musicians, particularly John McLaughlin, augment with furious yet mannered waves of variation. It could have fit onto side one of A Tribute to Jack Johnson (released Feb. 1971).
On "On the Corner (unedited master)," as well as the unedited master and issued take of "Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X," some new variants are heard, dark colorful chords on organ, but pedestrian, Theremin-like keyboard noodling by Harold Ivory Williams (my guess, the other two keyboardists were Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, or possibly it's Dave Creamer on guitar) is amateurish and grates after awhile. We hear for the first time instrumental solos by Keith Jarrett on electric piano, John McLaughlin on electric guitar and even Miles on wah-wah trumpet that were excised in the final mix, sacrificed for the ensemble concept.
The idea here is that individual efforts contribute to a whole. Ego is gone. What's important is the ensemble.
"Ife" repeats a riff over and over to induce a trance-like fixation on the spiral pattern. Onto that is layered Miles' solo, which wrestles with the rhythm, punctuating oscillations. Paul Buckmaster is noted on electric cello, but I can't discern his presence in the mix.
"Chieftain," another previously unissued track, has a startling, almost Caribbean multi-rhythmic groove provided by Al Foster on drums and Reggie Lucas on electric guitar, with Badal Roy on tablas and Mtume on congas. Michael Henderson provides a bass drone pulse and Miles solos achingly through the wah wah. It's nice to hear a sitar in the mix, but Khalil Balakrishna is no Ravi Shankar.
"Rated X" begins with Miles playing eerie chord clusters on electric organ. Michael Henderson enters on electric bass with an adrenaline-chilling vamp repeated over and over, with Al Foster laying down his basic pulse-enhancing 4/4. The tune proceeds as an exploration of the colors with no actual soloing, like a masseuse touching a nerve ending you never knew existed. It's a diagram of a mood, unexplained before, reaching foundation feelings rooted in primitive needs.
The previously unreleased studio takes of "Turnaround" and "U-Turnaround," a tune that would become a staple of his live shows for the next few years, doesn't quite get off the ground in this premier rendition. The elementary theme is stated repeatedly over the funk groove with Miles stretching the head statement into varying permutations, but there's little transcendence. Perhaps it's effective as a dance groove, but as concert music this doesn't provide enough complexity. Note: On his Miles Beyond website, Paul Tingen, in consultation with Miles discography expert Jan Lohmann, disputes the record company's titling of these tracks. They agree that "Turnaround" and "U-Turnaround," in fact, are two early takes of "Agharta Prelude."
The tunes which would be gathered on Get Up With It (collecting tracks recorded between 1970 and 1974 and released as a double LP on November 22, 1974), generally employ the churning groove layers of musical activity, but add reprieves in the form of chord changes and choruses, such as "Maiysha" and "Mtume." The earliest recorded track in this box, "Red China Blues," which would end up on GUWI, is another matter. This is a standard 12-bar blues with a compact horn arrangement. Miles' other-worldly-sounding solo through electronic effects is the only aspect that makes it unusual. It might have been an attempt to create a reasonably marketable track.
Miles is in fine form on "Mr. Foster," presumably so named in honor of the fine drummer keeping a steady, propulsive pulse with him. After the band sets up the groove and intones a sad mood, Miles enters on muted trumpet played through a wah-wah pedal and begins a long declaration, growling in the low register, meandering assuredly through the mid-range and even pushing into the high range, as expressive of states of sorrow as possible.
Miles knew how to shape a solo. For the most part, his solos have something to say. They express an emotional theme. The other soloists—Dave Liebman and Pete Cosey, especially on this box—decorate the music, but don't have the lucidity of Miles' statements. But, at 15 minutes, the track ends too soon.
"Calypso Frelimo" rides on a jaunty texture, with Al Foster's cymbal work shuffling, allied with a simple, child-like statement played on the electric organ, which Miles would subsequently use frequently in concerts. Miles plays with a mournful pleading sound, as if appealing to the life forces from hell. At around 10 minutes in, a new movement begins quietly, with Henderson's bass figure repeated as an ostinato, setting up an eerie, mysterious, almost reverential atmosphere. Guitar chords are spread to open fields and the organ figure repeats, this time with other instruments joining in and answering. The figure has earned a presence. Miles again enters and begins his statement, calmly engaging the wah-wah to spread his notes with a feeling of suspension. We're enticed to slow down until the ensemble returns to the jaunty vamps of the first movement and we're restored to the surface of the earth. Miles is still expressing darker feelings, but gradually the bounce of the band's groove proves too infectious and his playing becomes more playful and as full of the celebration as the others. A re-statement of the organ figure closes the piece as if to wrap things up.
"He Loved Him Madly" is the most astounding of compositions, seamlessly assembled from five different tracks. A dirge for the recently deceased Duke Ellington, it begins with Miles playing chilling organ chords, or, more accurately, tone clusters—the likes of which I've heard before only in the music of Olivier Messiaen. Guitar shadings seem to be picking through bones, while Al Foster taps out a graveyard blues as the cortège passes. Things change when the bass enters at almost 11 minutes in and Foster, in a rhythmic chant never heard in music before, starts tapping out a slow 4/4, accenting each beat. Liebman enters on flute (through echo) for the first melodic improvisation, a tasty solo that picks up for a second iteration after a trumpet solo from Miles, which begins 16 minutes into the piece. He, too, is playing through an echo, which adds to the chill of his haunting cavernous utterances, an eloquent communication of grief over the loss of his much beloved and venerated predecessor, until it dissipates for all time.
Each track is astounding, but not all are completely successful as refined artistic statements. It's the nature of the improv business.
On "Jobali," for example, Michael Henderson lays down a riff, the sort of structure he's used before and will use again, but here it's just not as interesting and feels unrelenting and insistent, rather than a structure onto which a composition may develop and unwind.
In a typical funk or R&B song, after 12 or so bars, the vamp shifts into a chorus or refrain, but here it plods along as a root onto which Miles solos like a low-flying bird, texturing on an investigative explication. While the structure is a radical departure from traditional American song form, with lucid melody and an underlying chordal and harmonic structure to support and embellish it, here, there are statements, but they're more like calls, summonings.
Other previously unheard tracks in this set—notably "Big Fun" and "Holly-wuud" (really two different takes of the same material, 7/26/73), as well as "Minnie" from 5/5/75—seem to have similar commercial intent. They foreshadow the pop sound Miles would emerge with in 1981 after a six-year hiatus, while retaining some of the eccentricities of the other, more formidable "serious" tracks gathered here. Note: Tingen claims that "Minnie" is, in fact, a tune Miles titled "Mr. Foster" when it was recorded. As for the tune called "Mr. Foster (from 9/18/73) discussed earlier, who knows?
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Is this box too much of a good thing for those just getting initiated. I'd steer those seekers away from this package and toward the individual releases, especially On the Corner and Get Up With It. Then, you can work your way back to In a Silent Way, A Tribute to Jack Johnson and Bitches Brew and forward a bit to the live Agharta, Pangea and Dark Magus. From there, the road is open.
As Bob Belden says in the liner notes, the box set is also a testament to the genius of producer Teo Macero, who sculpted the hours of studio jams down to artful form, excising weak sections, splicing together complementary movements, layering and performing all manner of tape acrobatics to fashion finished and refined musical compositions. He is more than an able producer, he is a collaborator.
Once again, I must fault Legacy's design department for the packaging of these Miles sets. While this package is beautiful to look at, for practical purposes it's irritating to use. The 120-page booklet, while colorful, is bound into the spine of the package, which makes it harder than necessary to peruse and the sans serif typeface is not easy to read, especially when blue type is used over a blue background. Worse, each track's discography data is scattered amidst the CD sleeves and various pages.
The photos add a lot of information, namely a sense of the theatricality of a live Miles Davis show during this era. The tableau we see is equal parts African warrior, Haight-Ashbury, Carnaby Street and Harlem street.
Another quibble is that the sequencing is hard to figure out. There seems to be a stab at positioning the tracks chronologically, as recorded, but that order breaks down with disc six, thus grouping the OTC material as originally offered on LP with unrelated tracks that diffuse the coherence and impact of the original OTC issue.
For more on electric Miles, Paul Tingen's Miles Beyond (Billboard Books, 2001) is the must-have book for its thorough and dependable documentation of the facts and extensive interviews. Philip Freeman's Running the Voodoo Down (Backbeat Books, 2006) has justifiably come under attack for its sloppy research resulting in a slew of historical inaccuracies (corrected by Tingen on his Miles Beyond website), but for its impassioned yet reasoned descriptions of the music and its discussions of how the music fits into the trajectory of its time, it is an invaluable aid and pleasant accompaniment to Miles' electric music.
http://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/milesdavisMiles Davis
Primary Instrument: Trumpet
Born: May 26, 1926 | Died: September 28, 1991
Throughout a professional career lasting 50 years, Miles Davis played the trumpet in a lyrical, introspective, and melodic style, often employing a stemless harmon mute to make his sound more personal and intimate. But if his approach to his instrument was constant, his approach to jazz was dazzlingly protean. To examine his career is to examine the history of jazz from the mid-'40s to the early '90s, since he was in the thick of almost every important innovation and stylistic development in the music during that period, and he often led the way in those changes, both with his own performances and recordings and by choosing sidemen and collaborators who forged the new directions. It can even be argued that jazz stopped evolving when Davis wasn't there to push it forward.
Davis was the son of a dental surgeon, Dr. Miles Dewey Davis, Jr., and a music teacher, Cleota Mae (Henry) Davis, and thus grew up in the black middle class of East St. Louis after the family moved there shortly after his birth. He became interested in music during his childhood and by the age of 12 had begun taking trumpet lessons. While still in high school, he started to get jobs playing in local bars and at 16 was playing gigs out of town on weekends. At 17, he joined Eddie Randle's Blue Devils, a territory band based in St. Louis. He enjoyed a personal apotheosis in 1944, just after graduating from high school, when he saw and was allowed to sit in with Billy Eckstine's big band, which was playing in St. Louis. The band featured trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and saxophonist Charlie Parker, the architects of the emerging bebop style of jazz, which was characterized by fast, inventive soloing and dynamic rhythm variations.
It is striking that Davis fell so completely under Gillespie and Parker's spell, since his own slower and less flashy style never really compared with theirs. But bebop was the new sound of the day, and the young trumpeter was bound to follow it. He did so by leaving the Midwest to attend the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (since renamed Juilliard) in September 1944. Shortly after his arrival in Manhattan, he was playing in clubs with Parker, and by 1945 he had abandoned his academic studies for a full-time career as a jazz musician, initially joining Benny Carter's band and making his first recordings as a sideman. He played with Eckstine in 1946-1947 and was a member of Parker's group in 1947-1948, making his recording debut as a leader on a 1947 session that featured Parker, pianist John Lewis, bassist Nelson Boyd, and drummer Max Roach. This was an isolated date, however, and Davis spent most of his time playing and recording behind Parker. But in the summer of 1948 he organized a nine-piece band with an unusual horn section. In addition to himself, it featured an alto saxophone, a baritone saxophone, a trombone, a French horn, and a tuba. This nonet, employing arrangements by Gil Evans and others, played for two weeks at the Royal Roost in New York in September. Earning a contract with Capitol Records, the band went into the studio in January 1949 for the first of three sessions which produced 12 tracks that attracted little attention at first. The band's relaxed sound, however, affected the musicians who played it, among them Kai Winding, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, J.J. Johnson, and Kenny Clarke, and it had a profound influence on the development of the cool jazz style on the West Coast. In February 1957, Capitol finally issued the tracks together on an LP called Birth of the Cool.
Davis, meanwhile, had moved on to co-leading a band with pianist Tadd Dameron in 1949, and the group took him out of the country for an appearance at the Paris Jazz Festival in May. But the trumpeter's progress was impeded by an addiction to heroin that plagued him in the early '50s. His performances and recordings became more haphazard, but in January 1951 he began a long series of recordings for the Prestige label that became his main recording outlet for the next several years. He managed to kick his habit by the middle of the decade, and he made a strong impression playing “'Round Midnight” at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1955, a performance that led major label Columbia Records to sign him. The prestigious contract allowed him to put together a permanent band, and he organized a quintet featuring saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones that began recording his Columbia debut, Round About Midnight, in October. As it happened, however, he had a remaining five albums on his Prestige contract, and over the next year he was forced to alternate his Columbia sessions with sessions for Prestige to fulfill this previous commitment. The latter resulted in the Prestige albums The New Miles Davis Quintet, Cookin', Workin', Relaxin', and Steamin', making Davis' first quintet one of his better documented outfits.
In May 1957, just three months after Capitol released the Birth of the Cool LP, Davis again teamed with arranger Gil Evans for his second Columbia LP, Miles Ahead. Playing flugelhorn, Davis fronted a big band on music that extended the Birth of the Cool concept and even had classical overtones. Released in 1958, the album was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, intended to honor recordings made before the Grammy Awards were instituted in 1959. In December 1957, Davis returned to Paris, where he improvised the background music for the film L'Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud (Escalator to the Gallows). Jazz Track, an album containing this music, earned him a 1960 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance, Solo or Small Group. He added saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to his group, creating the Miles Davis Sextet, which recorded the album Milestones in April 1958. Shortly after this recording, Red Garland was replaced on piano by Bill Evans and Jimmy Cobb took over for Philly Joe Jones on drums. In July, Davis again collaborated with Gil Evans and an orchestra on an album of music from Porgy and Bess.
Back in the sextet, Davis began to experiment with modal playing, basing his improvisations on scales rather than chord changes. This led to his next band recording, Kind of Blue, in March and April 1959, an album that became a landmark in modern jazz and the most popular disc of Davis' career, eventually selling over two million copies, a phenomenal success for a jazz record. In sessions held in November 1959 and March 1960, Davis again followed his pattern of alternating band releases and collaborations with Gil Evans, recording Sketches of Spain, containing traditional Spanish music and original compositions in that style. The album earned Davis and Evans Grammy nominations in 1960 for Best Jazz Performance, Large Group, and Best Jazz Composition, More Than 5 minutes; they won in the latter category.
By the time Davis returned to the studio to make his next band album in March 1961, Adderley had departed, Wynton Kelly had replaced Bill Evans at the piano, and John Coltrane had left to begin his successful solo career, being replaced by saxophonist Hank Mobley (following the brief tenure of Sonny Stitt).
Nevertheless, Coltrane guested on a couple of tracks of the album, called Someday My Prince Will Come. The record made the pop charts in March 1962, but it was preceded into the bestseller lists by the Davis quintet's next recording, the two-LP set Miles Davis in Person (Friday & Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, San Francisco), recorded in April. The following month, Davis recorded another live show, as he and his band were joined by an orchestra led by Gil Evans at Carnegie Hall in May. The resulting Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall was his third LP to reach the pop charts, and it earned Davis and Evans a 1962 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Large Group, Instrumental.
Davis and Evans teamed up again in 1962 for what became their final collaboration, Quiet Nights. The album was not issued until 1964, when it reached the charts and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group or Soloist with Large Group. In 1996, Columbia Records released a six-CD box set, Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, that won the Grammy for Best Historical Album. Quiet Nights was preceded into the marketplace by Davis' next band effort, Seven Steps to Heaven, recorded in the spring of 1963 with an entirely new lineup consisting of saxophonist George Coleman, pianist Victor Feldman, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Frank Butler. During the sessions, Feldman was replaced by Herbie Hancock and Butler by Tony Williams. The album found Davis making a transition to his next great group, of which Carter, Hancock, and Williams would be members. It was another pop chart entry that earned 1963 Grammy nominations for both Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Soloist or Small Group and Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group. The quintet followed with two live albums, Miles Davis in Europe, recorded in July 1963, which made the pop charts and earned a 1964 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group, and My Funny Valentine, recorded in February 1964 and released in 1965, when it reached the pop charts.
By September 1964, the final member of the classic Miles Davis Quintet of the 1960s was in place with the addition of saxophonist Wayne Shorter to the team of Davis, Carter, Hancock, and Williams. While continuing to play standards in concert, this unit embarked on a series of albums of original compositions contributed by the band members, starting in January 1965 with E.S.P., followed by Miles Smiles (1967 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group [7 or Fewer]), Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky (1968 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group), and Filles de Kilimanjaro. By the time of Miles in the Sky, the group had begun to turn to electric instruments, presaging Davis' next stylistic turn. By the final sessions for Filles de Kilimanjaro in September 1968, Hancock had been replaced by Chick Corea and Carter by Dave Holland. But Hancock, along with pianist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin, participated on Davis' next album, In a Silent Way (1969), which returned the trumpeter to the pop charts for the first time in four years and earned him another small-group jazz performance Grammy nomination.
With his next album, Bitches Brew, Davis turned more overtly to a jazz-rock style. Though certainly not conventional rock music, Davis' electrified sound attracted a young, non-jazz audience while putting off traditional jazz fans. Bitches Brew, released in March 1970, reached the pop Top 40 and became Davis' first album to be certified gold. It also earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Arrangement and won the Grammy for large- group jazz performance. He followed it with such similar efforts as Miles Davis at Fillmore East (1971 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Group), A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Live-Evil, On the Corner, and In Concert, all of which reached the pop charts. Meanwhile, Davis' former sidemen became his disciples in a series of fusion groups: Corea formed Return to Forever, Shorter and Zawinul led Weather Report, and McLaughlin and former Davis drummer Billy Cobham organized the Mahavishu Orchestra.
Starting in October 1972, when he broke his ankles in a car accident, Davis became less active in the early 1970s, and in 1975 he gave up recording entirely due to illness, undergoing surgery for hip replacement later in the year. Five years passed before he returned to action by recording The Man With the Horn in 1980 and going back to touring in 1981. By now, he was an elder statesman of jazz, and his innovations had been incorporated into the music, at least by those who supported his eclectic approach. He was also a celebrity whose appeal extended far beyond the basic jazz audience. He performed on the worldwide jazz festival circuit and recorded a series of albums that made the pop charts, including We Want Miles (1982 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist), Star People, Decoy, and You're Under Arrest. In 1986, after 30 years with Columbia, he switched to Warner Bros. Records and released Tutu, which won him his fourth Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance. Aura, an album he had recorded in 1984, was released by Columbia in 1989 and brought him his fifth Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist (on a Jazz Recording).
Davis surprised jazz fans when, on July 8, 1991, he joined an orchestra led by Quincy Jones at the Montreux Jazz Festival to perform some of the arrangements written for him in the late 1950s by Gil Evans; he had never previously looked back at an aspect of his career. He died of pneumonia, respiratory failure, and a stroke within months. Doo-Bop, his last studio album, appeared in 1992. It was a collaboration with rapper Easy Mo Bee, and it won a Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Instrumental Performance, with the track “Fantasy” nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo. Released in 1993, Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux won Davis his seventh Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance.
Miles Davis took an all-inclusive, constantly restless approach to jazz that had begun to fall out of favor by the time of his death, even as it earned him controversy during his lifetime. It was hard to recognize the bebop acolyte of Charlie Parker in the flamboyantly dressed leader with the hair extensions who seemed to keep one foot on a wah-wah pedal and one hand on an electric keyboard in his later years. But he did much to popularize jazz, reversing the trend away from commercial appeal that bebop began. And whatever the fripperies and explorations, he retained an ability to play moving solos that endeared him to audiences and demonstrated his affinity with tradition. At a time when jazz is inclining toward academia and repertory orchestras rather than moving forward, he is a reminder of the music's essential quality of boundless invention, using all available means.
Awards
1955, Winner; Down Beat Reader's Poll
1957, Winner; Down Beat Reader's Poll
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Composition Of More Than Five Minutes Duration for Sketches of Spain (1960)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance, Large Group Or Soloist With Large Group for Bitches Brew (1970)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for We Want Miles (1982)
Sonning Award for Lifetime Achievement In Music (1984; Copenhagen, Denmark)
Doctor of Music, honoris causa (1986; New England Conservatory)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for Tutu (1986)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for Aura (1989)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Big Band for Aura (1989)
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1990)
Knighted into the Legion of Honor (July 16, 1991; Paris)
Grammy Award for Best R&B Instrumental Performance for Doo-Bop (1992)
Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance for Miles And Quincy Live At Montreux (1993)
Hollywood Walk Of Fame Star (February 19, 1998)
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction (March 13, 2006)
Hollywood's Rockwalk Induction (September 28, 2006)
RIAA Triple Platinum for Kind of Blue
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2011/01/miles-davis-septet-at-isle-of-wight.html
Saturday, January 1, 2011
MILES DAVIS SEPTET AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL, AUGUST 29, 1970
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE AND WELCOME TO 2011!
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE AND WELCOME TO 2011!
In answer to the question:
"WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DOES YOUR BAND PLAY MILES?"
Miles replied:
"WE JUST PLAY BLACK. WE PLAY WHAT THE DAY RECOMMENDS"
Legendary performance at the Isle of Wight Festival, 1970. Miles, his ensemble, and an audience of 600,000...
ENJOY!
MILES DAVIS SEPTET:
Miles Davis (trumpet)
Gary Bartz (alto saxophone)
Chick Corea (piano)
Keith Jarrett (organ)
Dave Holland (bass)
Jack DeJohnette (drums)
Airto Moreira (percussion)
http://jazztimes.com/articles/26009-we-want-miles-exhibit-opens-in-montreal04/29/10
We Want Miles Exhibit Opens in Montreal
Exhibit on legendary trumpeter runs through August 29, 2010
by Lee Mergner
Miles Davis was always known as a jazz artist for whom image was important. He was also one of the music’s most photogenic figures. And he was a restless and creative artist who changed his music with the times. Finally, he was an artist who loved to paint large canvases of slightly abstract figures in bold bright colors. So it’s no surprise that a large-scale exhibit of photography, art and artifacts dedicated to the legendary trumpeter has been organized. The show, “We Want Miles” opened on April 30 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, Quebec in Canada. The show had previously been mounted at the Musee de la Musique in Paris.
The exhibit was curated by Vincent Bessieres, who wrote about Miles: “More than the archetype of the cool musician—deliberate, distant, elegant, uncompromising—Davis is the incarnation of audacity and invention.” The exhibit certainly has gone to great lengths to capture his mercurial brilliance.
Included in this first North American multimedia exhibition on Davis are:
• Paintings by Davis and works contemporary artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Niki de Saint Phalle, among others;
• Original manuscripts and musical scores including the composition for Birth of the Cool;
• Musical instruments including horns that he played, and initial pressings of his records;
• Intimate portraits taken by such legendary photographers as Annie Leibovitz, Lee Friedlander, Anton Corbijn, and Irving Penn, among others;
• Video clips of and full length live concert footage, and stage clothes.
Naturally, it would impossible to appreciate the art without hearing the music, and so the museum has gone to great lengths to insure that visitors get to hear the Prince of Darkness in all his glory. Speakers shaped like trumpet mutes are scattered throughout the exhibit and there will be twenty listening stations, as well as a series of large scale projections of various performances and clips.
In addition, a companion book has also been published by the fine art publisher Rizzoli Press. The lavish coffee-table book with the provocative if somewhat contradictory title, We Want Miles: Miles Davis vs. Jazz, was written by Franck Bergerot, the editor-in-chief of Jazz Magazine in France. In addition to the text by Bergerot, the book includes remembrances of Davis by David Liebman, John Szwed, Ira Gitler, George Avakian and others. However, the images comprise the main attraction here. Included are nearly every iconic image of the trumpeter—from Don Hunstein’s photos of Miles in the studio recording Kind of Blue to Irving Penn’s stark and dramatic portrait for the Tutu album cover.
The exhibit and book are the subject of an upcoming Final Chorus column by Nat Hentoff in the July/August issue of JazzTimes.
http://jazztimes.com/articles/26262-a-fine-arts-museum-s-tribute-to-nonpareil-miles
July/August 2010 • By Nat Hentoff
A Fine Arts Museum’s Tribute to Nonpareil Miles
Nat Hentoff on We Want Miles Exhibit and Book
When I lived in Boston eons ago, the Museum of Fine Arts was within walking distance, and I often visited to get high on such paintings as a Renoir of a young couple in what looked like a New Orleans-style slow dance. I’d stand there fantasizing about taking the man’s place in the painting, but I never expected to find anything of jazz in this legendary museum’s exhibitions. Nor have I heard of jazz as a fine art in any of the other museums around the country. I have been at jazz concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but there’s nothing of Louis, Duke, Pres, Bix or Trane in the galleries there.
Suddenly, however, in a very prestigious museum of fine arts—having opened in April and continuing until Aug. 29—there is a stunning media exhibition on someone the museum accurately calls “one of the jazz world’s greatest innovators.”Coinciding with the event is a very large-size, hardback catalog, on the cover of which—characteristically sizing you up skeptically—is Miles Davis. The book and exhibition are titled “We Want Miles: Miles Davis vs. Jazz.” And nowhere else have I seen so much of Miles, from his boyhood on.Miles and I were friends—until Bitches Brew. He never forgave me for not turning handsprings over his venture into electronics. I felt Miles was electrifying without the added wattage. But since he was always trying something new, and always expecting attention, I’m sure he would have been delighted by this polyrhythmic, visual and sonic odyssey of his life.This tribute to the always-alive music of Miles is not in an American museum; the ones here are not yet hip to jazz as an art. This awakening challenge to our treasures of high art is mounted by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It’s the first one there, but it has been brewing for a long time. The MMFA’s director, Nathalie Bondil, has a long-term relationship with the Musée de la Musique in Paris, which originally conceived the exhibit, and Bondil is much involved, as she puts it, in “cross-roading visual art and music.”Miles was a painter, and the exhibition shows some of his visual improvisations. Also, along with his original manuscripts and scores, there are horns he played. And dig this from Cecilia Bonn, the museum’s communications consultant: “Small chambers placed throughout the installation in the form of the ‘mutes’ Miles used are among the design initiatives to ensure optimal acoustic conditions. And twenty listening stations will enable visitors to immerse themselves in Miles’ multiple musical currents.” Also, you’ll be able to hear Miles “live” in “a series of large-screen projections featuring clips and full-length footage from such concert performances as the 1985 Montreal International Jazz Festival.”My unsolicited suggestion to Nathalie Bondil is that she invite museum directors in the United States to come to Montreal and immerse themselves in the microcosm of Miles. Imagine such resourceful, imaginative exhibitions on Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Jack Teagarden, John Coltrane, Pee Wee Russell—you can add the names. And throughout this country—with music classes expunged from so many schools by No Child Left Behind—fine arts museums correlating sight, sound and American history shaped by jazz could invite public school classes to learn more about swinging the arts.
The kids would also learn something about the thrust and the often-exhilarating surprise of creation, as shown in the catalog in these juxtaposed quotes:
Pablo Picasso: “In painting you can try anything. As long as you never do anything over again.
”Miles Davis: “Now, nothing in music and sounds is ‘wrong.’ You can hit anything, any kind of chord. … Music is wide open for anything.”
Pablo Picasso: “You see me here, and yet I’ve already changed. I’m already somewhere else.”
Miles Davis: “Nothing is out of the question the way I think and live my life. I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning.”The catalog further contributes permanently to jazz history with the deeply searching and knowledgeable text by, among others, Franck Bergerot, editor in chief of France’s Jazz magazine, writer of many Miles Davis liner notes, and coordinator of the first volumes of Miles’ complete works, released by the Masters of Jazz label.Among the photographs, most of which are new to me, are those depicting Miles as a boy and Miles as the youngest member of trumpeter Eddie Randle’s Blue Devils, the house band at the Rhumboogie Club in East St. Louis. The evolving Miles became music director of the Blue Devils and was in charge of organizing rehearsals.
From the text about a time in his life when Miles had seemed to stop growing: “a young white cat by the name of Chet Baker was named best trumpet player for 1953; and while in Detroit, Miles heard the playing of Clifford Brown, the rising black trumpet star. In March, 1954, Davis was back in New York determined to make … a fresh start.“However, once again his trumpet was in hock. He was playing Art Farmer’s trumpet, and Farmer accompanied him to make sure his trumpet did not vanish.”I’d never heard that before, but now I have, thanks to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. According to Tourism Montreal, “the Museum is Montreal’s top cultural destination … and close to 100,000 people take part annually in its educational and cultural activities.” Now it’s also a swinging institution, revealing that in a vital area of the arts, America’s museums are, by contrast, culturally disadvantaged. I hope Montreal’s “We Want Miles” becomes a traveling exhibition south of the border. Any museum directors interested?
http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2010/10/we-want-miles-miles-davis-vs-jazz.html
Friday, October 8, 2010
We Want Miles: MILES DAVIS VS. JAZZ
“The archetypal jazzman, as elegant as he was inaccessible, Miles Davis was considered the twentieth-century incarnation of cool, both in his attitude and in his playing. A ladies' man, an enigmatic personality touched by genius and by rage, this son of the African-American middle class established himself as one of the greatest innovators in jazz, a genre he never stopped confronting and de-compartmentalizing through various aesthetic revolutions. With exceptional photographs, handwritten scores, original record-cover art and expert biography, "We Want Miles" attempts to trace the legend of one of the most fascinating and extraordinary artists in the history of music.”
© -Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Just when you think that you won’t have anything further to do with the most merchandised Jazz musician in the history of the music, this book comes along.
The book is essentially a companion volume to a museum exhibition initiated and organized by the Cité de la musique, Paris, with the support of Miles Davis Properties, LLC, in association with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It is published by Skira Rizzoli in a 9.5 x 11.5” folio format.
The exhibition appeared at Musée de la Musique, Paris from October 16, 2009 to January 17, 2010 and then traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Jean-Noel Desmarais Pavilion for a showing from April 30 to August 29, 2010. The exhibition curator was Vincent Bessieres.
Vince Bessieres also serves as the editor of the book which has contributions from George Avakian, Laurent Cugny, Ira Gitler, David Liebman, Francis Marmande, John Szwed and Mike Zwerin.
Skira Rizzoli has done its usual fine job with the formatting of this work which includes a bevy of photographs. The book retails for $50.00 although some booksellers are offering up to a 40% discount with shipping included.
Here is the chapter breakdown:
We have included below the introductions from the book as provided by the two, museum curators. Sadly, the exhibit did not visit a museum in a city in the USA.
© -Laurent Bayle & Eric de Visscher, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
LAURENT BAYLE / GENERAL DIRECTOR, CITE DE LA MUSIQUE, PARIS ERIC DE VISSCHER / DIRECTOR, MUSEE DE LA MUSIQUE, PARIS
WE WANT MILES
“In 1980, after nearly five years of silence, Miles Davis began to play again in the studio and on stage. The snappy title of one of the first records heralding his comeback was the self-evident statement "We Want Miles" Who is this "we"? How do you explain that simply saying a first name can conjure up an artist's undeniable power? To understand the univer sal respect commanded by a figure of this stature, recognized for ele vating a fledgling musical genre to a global phenomenon, we need only call to mind the course of his career: Miles Davis got his start playing in big bands in his hometown of St. Louis, enthusiastically embraced bebop, initiated the cool, embarked on a quest for a third avenue between swing and free jazz, and subsequently immersed himself in electric jazz, with occasional forays into soul and rock. Could this also explain how his name became legend, with musicians of every stripe all over the world incessantly chanting "We want Miles" to encourage him to return to centre stage?—a stage he would now take by storm, with numerous records, television appearances, advertising and film projects that transformed him into a genuine media icon. First, Davis became aware of the legend of jazz, which had expanded into a worldwide genre, then of his own legend as a "global" artist who transcended styles, schools and genres to assert himself as a musician, creator and leader of one of the twentieth century's signature musical cur rents. Although he contributed to the history of jazz in much the same way as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, no other musician embraced its many developments with such boldness and ingenuity. He even anticipated its major turning points, transforming music meant for entertainment and dancing into music that had to be listened to, and he was subsequently criticized for some of his choices by those who shunned progress.
As with Serge Gainsbourg, whose name immediately came to mind when the Cite de la musique was considering a first temporary exhibition on French chanson, cult figure Miles Davis instantly occurred to us as soon as the topic of jazz was proposed. In addition to a record title [You're under Arrest], these two figures, born in the same year, shared the desire to avoid being confined to any one style, always seeking out new, innova tive—and sometimes unexpected—musical avenues. They were inspired by the sense of "the moment" both in the way they related to their era and in their work: Gainsbourg wrote fast, Davis created music on the spot, pushing the art of improvisation to the limit without ever losing the connection with his audience. To quote saxophonist David Liebman from one of the texts in this catalogue, "When Miles went on stage, past and future didn't exist. It was all about the present tense, the essence of true improvisation and what most jazz musicians strive for daily when playing."
It is undoubtedly this "mystery of the present moment" that Miles Davis never ceased to explore, developing both the sounds (his move to electric and amplified instruments is an example of this, as are his collaborative efforts with Gil Evans) and the language of jazz. To do so, he tapped into a fertile source of renewal by working with new musicians. From John Coltrane to Herbie Hancock, the long list of artists who worked with Davis demonstrates his openness to the influences of other sizeable talents—his contemporaries as well as younger musi cians. From Kind of Blue and Tutu to Porgy and Bess and Bitches Brew, Davis' great albums all bear witness, in various forms, to his quest for the perfect moment.
This is the exceptional journey related in this book—a faithful counter part to the exhibition first presented at the Musee de la musique and subsequently at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts—which presents a chronological account by Franck Bergerot supplemented with reminis cences by certain key figures of the time. As for the exhibition, the photographs were chosen with particular care, since it is true that jazz and photography share a common history. Both capture the moment and record contrasts, immortalizing the illustrious heroes and pivotal moments of a musical genre that is quintessentially ephemeral. Neither the exhibition nor this catalogue would have been possible without the tireless efforts and unfailing ingenuity of curator and editor Vincent Bessieres. The project received steadfast support from the Miles Davis Estate, especially Cheryl Davis, Erin Davis and Vince Wilburn, Jr. The many lenders, photographers and institutions that contributed to the exhibition not only made it possible but also ensured its originality. To them, and to the people at the Cite de la musique and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, who helped make it a reality, we offer our heartfelt thanks.”
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Miles Davis and the Making of Bitches Brew: Sorcerer’s Brew (1970)
From jazztimes.com
The story behind the seminal jazz-rock album Bitches Brew
Author and Miles Davis scholar Paul Tingen takes an in-depth look at the making of Bitches Brew, one of the most influential jazz albums of the 20th century.
August of 1969 marked Miles Davis’ boldest venture yet into undiscovered country. This time there was no more holding back, no more tentative experimentation, no more “walking on eggshells.” The album that emerged, Bitches Brew, was groundbreaking, beginning with its stark title and Abdul Mati Klarwein’s memorable cover painting. Made on Miles’ personal invitation, Klarwein’s expressionistic work captured the zeitgeist of free love and flower power, depicting a naked black couple looking expectantly at an ocean, a huge vibrant, red flower beside them. The background of the title is unknown, but a clue is provided by the absence of an apostrophe at the end of the word “bitches,” making “brew” a verb, not a noun.
Carlos Santana speculated that the album was a “tribute” to “the cosmic ladies” who surrounded Miles at the time and introduce him to some of the music, clothes, and attitudes of the ’60s counterculture. [Footnote 1] Gary Tomlinson, on the other hand, assumed that “bitches” referred to the musicians themselves. [2] Just like “motherfucker,” the term “bitch” can be used as an accolade in African-American vernacular. Whatever the title meant, it sounded provocative. Teo Macero remarked, “The word ‘bitches,’ you know, probably that was the first time a title like that was ever used. The title fit the music, the cover fit the music.” [3]
The music on Bitches Brew is indeed provocative, and extraordinary. For Miles it meant a point of no return for the musical direction he had initiated with the recording of “Circle in the Round” in December of 1967. Until August of 1969 he had remained close enough to the jazz aesthetic and to jazz audiences to allow for a comfortable return into the jazz fold. But Bitches Brew‘s ferocity and power carried a momentum that was much harder to turn around. The hypnotic grooves, rooted in rock and African music, heralded a dramatic new musical universe that not only gained Miles a new audience, but also divided it into two groups—each side looking at this new music from totally different, and seemingly unbridgeable, perspectives. In the words of Quincy Troupe, these two groups were like “oil and water.” [4]
Bitches Brew signaled a watershed in jazz, and had a significant impact on rock. In combination with Miles’ fame and prestige, the album gave the budding jazz-rock genre visibility and credibility, and was instrumental in promoting it to the dominant direction in jazz. The recording’s enormous influence on the jazz music scene was bolstered by the fact that almost all the musicians involved progressed to high-profile careers in their own right. In the early 1970s, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter (with percussionist Airto Moreira) were involved in Weather Report, Herbie Hancock and Bennie Maupin set up Mwandishi, John McLaughlin (with Billy Cobham) created Mahavishnu Orchestra and Chick Corea founded Return to Forever with Lenny White.
Bitches Brew was not a sudden dramatic move in a completely new direction for Miles, though. In line with his long-standing, step-by-step working methods, the recording was maybe a large, but nevertheless logical step forward on a course he had set almost two years earlier. In terms of personnel, musical conception, and sonic textures, the album was a direct descendant of its predecessor, In a Silent Way. Teo Macero remarked that with the latter album, the music “was just starting to jell. [In a Silent Way] was the one before [Bitches Brew]. Then all of a sudden all the elements came together.” [5]Volume 0%00:0100:01
Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way are both dominated by circular grooves, John McLaughlin’s angular guitar playing and the sound of the Fender Rhodes electric piano. However, Miles related in his autobiography how he wanted to expand the canvas on Bitches Brew in terms of the length of the pieces and the number of musicians. While In a Silent Way featured eight musicians and was recorded in one single session, Bitches Brew included 13 musicians and was the result of three days of recording. On the third day the rhythm section consisted of as many as 11 players: three keyboardists, electric guitar, two basses, four drummers/percussionists and a bass clarinet. Miles had pulled out the stops in his search for a heavier bottom end.
Rehearsal and Preparation
Uncharacteristically, Miles’ live quintet also influenced Bitches Brew. Miles’ live and studio directions were strongly diverging around this time, with the studio experiments pioneering new material-incorporated elements of rock, soul and folk that only gradually filtered through to the live stage. But in July of 1969 Miles’ live quintet began performing “Spanish Key,” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” and “Sanctuary,” all of which would appear on Bitches Brew. (“Sanctuary” had, of course, already been recorded by the second great quintet on February 15, 1968.)
Having broken in this new material, Miles felt confident enough to book three successive days of studio time. He began by calling in the same crew that had recorded In a Silent Way: Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin and Dave Holland; only Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock were missing. Miles gave preference to live-band drummer Jack DeJohnette because of his “deep groove,” [6] invited Lifetime organist Larry Young instead of Hancock, and also added session bassist and Columbia producer Harvey Brooks. Together with Zawinul and McLaughlin, Young and Brooks had played on a session Miles organized for his wife, Betty Mabry, a few weeks earlier to record her first and ultimately unsuccessful solo album, They Say I’m Different. Miles also summoned 19-year-old drummer Lenny White who, like Tony Williams, is reported to have been brought to his attention by saxophonist Jackie McLean. Drummer/percussionist Don Alias had been introduced to Miles by Tony Williams, and brought along percussionist Jim Riley, also known as “Jumma Santos.” Tenor saxophonist and bass clarinettist Bennie Maupin was recommended by Jack DeJohnette. A finishing touch, and a stroke of genius, was Miles’ instruction to Maupin to play only the bass clarinet, adding a very distinctive and enigmatic sound to the brew.
According to Miles, the approach he had developed of presenting musicians with musical sketches they had never seen before was also integral to the making of Bitches Brew: “I brought in these musical sketches that nobody had seen, just like I did on Kind of Blue and In a Silent Way.” [7] However, this contradicts the fact that three of the pieces had already been broken in during live concerts, as well as with his assertion that there had been rehearsals for the making of Bitches Brew, a fact that is confirmed by Joe Zawinul. “There was a lot of preparations for the sessions,” the keyboardist recalled. “I went to Miles’ house several times. I had 10 tunes for him. He chose a few and then made sketches of them.” [8]
“The night before the first studio session we rehearsed the first half of the track ‘Bitches Brew,’” drummer Lenny White recalled. “I think we just rehearsed that one track. Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Chick Corea and Wayne Shorter were all there. I had a snare drum, and Jack had a snare drum and a cymbal. I was a 19-year-old kid, and I was afraid of Miles. My head was in the clouds! I was in awe. But he was really cool with me; he encouraged me and I ended up spending time with him at his home in later months. He was a real positive influence.”
Since Miles was looking for more complex, larger-scale pieces, he probably felt that he needed some rehearsals to establish at least some structure and organization to keep more than a dozen musicians focused during three days of sessions. With none of the musicians aware of the whole picture, they would still react to the sessions with beginners’ minds.
The First Recordings
At 10 a.m. on Tuesday, August 19, 1969, 12 musicians, Teo Macero and engineer Stan Tonkel gathered at Columbia Studio B for the first day of the recordings of Bitches Brew. Miles described the sessions as follows: “I would direct, like a conductor, once we started to play, and I would either write down some music for somebody or would tell him to play different things I was hearing, as the music was growing, coming together. While the music was developing I would hear something that I thought could be extended or cut back. So that recording was a development of the creative process, a living composition. It was like a fugue, or motif, that we all bounced off of. After it had developed to a certain point, I would tell a certain musician to come in and play something else. I wish we had thought of video taping that whole session. That was a great recording session, man.” [9]
“As the music was being played, as it was developing, Miles would get new ideas,” Jack DeJohnette commented. “This was the beautiful thing about it. He’d do a take, and stop, and then get an idea from what had just gone before, and elaborate on it, or say to the keyboards, ‘Play this sound.’ One thing fed the other. It was a process, a kind of spiral, a circular situation. The recording of Bitches Brew was a stream of creative musical energy. One thing was flowing into the next, and we were stopping and starting all the time, maybe to write a sketch out, and then go back to recording. The creative process was being documented on tape, with Miles directing the ensemble like a conductor an orchestra.”
“During the session we’d start a groove, and we’d play,” Lenny White remembered. “And then Miles would point to John McLaughlin and John would play for a while, and then Miles would stop the band. Then we’d start up again and he’d point to the keyboards, and someone would do another solo. All tracks were done in segments like that, with only the piano players possibly having a few written sketches in front of them. Miles said that he wanted Jack DeJohnette to be the leader of the rhythm section, because he was wearing the sunglasses! I’m from Jamaica, Queens, and I had played with other drummers before. I was trying to be very aware of wanting the music to sound very organic and congruent, real tight and seamless, so that people couldn’t really hear that there were two drummers.”
“Bitches Brew was like a big pot and Miles was the sorcerer,” White continued. “He was hanging over it, saying, ‘I’m going to add a dash of Jack DeJohnette, and a little bit of John McLaughlin, and then I’m going to add a pinch of Lenny White. And here’s a teaspoonful of Bennie Maupin playing the bass clarinet.’ He made that work. He got the people together who he thought would make an interesting combination. Harvey Brooks said he didn’t know why he got the call, but he made an interesting pairing with Dave Holland on acoustic bass. It was a big, controlled experiment, and Miles had a vision that came true.”
“The idea of using two basses and two drummers was very interesting,” Dave Holland agreed. “The role division between Harvey and me depended on the piece, but as I remember it, Harvey was taking responsibility for laying down the main line on the electric bass, and I had a freer part embellishing things on the acoustic bass. Miles always gave the minimum amount of instructions. Usually he’d let you try and find something that you thought worked, and if it did, then that would be the end of it. His approach was that if he needed to tell someone what to do, he had the wrong musician. If we used any notation it was often a collage-type thing with a bass line and some chord movement, and maybe a melody related to that. But it was never something long or extended. It was always a fairly compact section, and then we’d move to another section. The recording of Bitches Brew was therefore often very fragmented. We’d have these sketches of ideas, and we’d play each for ten minutes or so, and then we’d sort of stop, come to an ending of sorts. And then we might do one more take like that, and then move on to the next thing. Often I didn’t know whether we were rehearsing or recording, but Miles had a policy of recording everything.”
“I think it was a lot of fun for him, with his favorite musicians on their respective instruments,” DeJohnette added. “It was different and it was fun. There wasn’t a lot said. Most of it was just directed with a word here and a word there. We were creating things and making them up on the spot, and the significant thing was that the tape recorder was always rolling and capturing it. Sometimes Miles said: ‘This is not working. That’s not it. Let’s try something else.’ But it was never because somebody had made a mistake or something. Miles was hearing the collective. He was trying to capture moods and feelings and textures. He always went for the essence of things, and that was much more important to him than going back and redoing a note that wasn’t perfect. Perfection for him was really capturing the essence of something, and being in the moment with it. And then he and Teo later edited all these moments and put them all together. Some of the edits surprised me, but overall they were seamless, and captured the feeling and the intensity of the music.”
Having been rehearsed the night before at Miles’ house, “Bitches Brew” was the first track recorded on that initial day in Columbia Studio B. A beautiful example of Miles’ directing and of the recording-in-sections approach can be heard at 7:28, when the ensemble appears to drift to a halt. Miles gives some indecipherable instructions, and the musicians carry on, clearly still not quite knowing where to go, because the music soon dissolves into entropy again. At this point, at 7:50, Miles simply says, “John.” McLaughlin begins to solo and the band picks up the groove again. Enough material was recorded in this way to create a separate track from an outtake (on which Miles did not play), titled “John McLaughlin.”
After recording “Bitches Brew,” the ensemble—without Maupin, Zawinul, McLaughlin, Brooks, and White [10]—performed “Sanctuary,” a Wayne Shorter composition already recorded in a more gentle, sparser version by the second great quintet in February 1968, with George Benson on guitar. Following this, the full complement of twelve musicians tried their hands on two Zawinul compositions, “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Orange Lady,” but these takes were rejected.
Shifting Personnel and Sounds
“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” (the title was a reference to Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile”) was recorded the next day. In this case the previous performances of the live quintet of the track led to problems with the studio rhythm section. The addition of seven other musicians significantly altered the feel and dynamics of the piece, and Jack DeJohnette’s medium-tempo, fairly loose live groove didn’t appear to work.
“Lenny and Jack were playing and somehow things didn’t jell,” Don Alias explained. “I think Miles really wanted that Buddy Miles sound; he was just getting into the funk thing. He counted off the second time, and it wasn’t happening. I couldn’t take it any longer. I had been practicing this drum rhythm while I was in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘I’ve got the perfect rhythm for this tune.’ I can’t take it any longer and Miles is about to count off for the third time and I interrupted and said, ‘Miles, I’ve got this rhythm and I think it would go with the tune.’ So he said: ‘Go over and play it.’ I sat down and played it, and he said: ‘Show Jack, show Jack.’ And it’s one of those kind of rhythms where you don’t need any chops. Jack couldn’t get it, so Miles said to me: ‘Just stay there’ [on Lenny White’s drumset]. That’s how I ended up being one of the drumset players on ‘Miles Runs the Voodoo Down.’” [11]
On the third and final recording day, White was back in his drum seat and Alias on congas. The 13th musician, Larry Young, was added to the ensemble on electric piano, creating once again a battery of three keyboard players, as on In a Silent Way. Two long tracks, “Spanish Key” and Zawinul’s “Pharaoh’s Dance,” were put to tape. Altogether, a wealth of material had been recorded over the three days.
“The sessions would go till about three or four in the afternoon, and once the three days were over we went to Miles’ house, and listened to all the unedited tapes,” White remembered. “Half a year later a record came out that was totally different, because they’d taken the front end of one tune and put that in the middle and so on. Basically Teo Macero had made a whole other thing out of it. I suspect that Miles said to Teo: ‘Go ahead and do what you think best,’ and that Miles then approved or disapproved what had been done.”
Enter Teo Macero
The tape editing on the two opening pieces of the album, “Pharaoh’s Dance” and the title track, is remarkably complex, and has a far-reaching effect on the music. In addition, Macero expanded his tool kit with studio effects like echo, reverb and slap (tape) delay, the latter courtesy of a machine called the Teo One, made by technicians at Columbia. This effect can most clearly be heard on the trumpet in the beginning section of “Bitches Brew” and “Pharaoh’s Dance” at 8:41.
Enrico Merlin’s research, as well as the 1998 release of the four-CD boxed set The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, has cast important new light on the album’s postproduction process. They show how Macero did not only use tape editing to glue together large musical sections, as on “Circle in the Round” or In a Silent Way, but extended his scope to editing tiny musical segments to create brand-new musical themes. Courtesy of both approaches, “Pharaoh’s Dance” contains an astonishing 17 edits. [12] Its famous stop-start opening theme was entirely constructed during postproduction, using repeat loops of 15- and 31-second fragments of tape, while thematic micro-edits occur between 8:53 and 9:00, where a one-second-long fragment appearing at 8:39 is repeated five times.
“I had carte blanche to work with the material,” Macero explained. “I could move anything around and what I would do is record everything, right from beginning to end, mix it all down and then take all those tapes back to the editing room and listen to them and say: ‘This is a good little piece here, this matches with that, put this here,’ etc., and then add in all the effects—the electronics, the delays and overlays. [I would] be working it out in the studio and take it back and re-edit it—front to back, back to front and the middle somewhere else and make it into a piece. I was a madman in the engineering room. Right after I’d put it together I’d send it to Miles and ask, ‘How do you like it?’ And he used to say, ‘That’s fine,’ or ‘That’s OK,’ or ‘I thought you’d do that.’ He never saw the work that had to be done on those tapes. I’d have to work on those tapes for four or five weeks to make them sound right.” [13]
It appears that Macero found part of his inspiration for his postproduction treatments on Bitches Brew in classical music. The English composer Paul Buckmaster pointed out that on “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Bitches Brew” the producer created structures that have echoes of the sonata form that was at the heart of late-18th- and 19th-century instrumental music. The basic elements of the sonata form, employed by composers like Mozart and Beethoven, are an opening exposition with two themes, a middle section called a development (in which the exposition material is worked through in many variations), a recapitulation (which contains a repetition of the two themes of the exposition), and a final coda.Volume 0%00:0100:01
In “Pharaoh’s Dance” the section 00:00 to 02:32 can be called the exposition, since it contains two basic themes, with theme number one first played between 00:00 and 00:15 and theme number two at 00:46. Starting at 02:32 is a solo section, or “development,” containing references to the material of the “exposition” at 02:54 and 07:55. A dramatic section is edited in between 08:29 and 08:42, with tape delay added to Miles’ horn, then repeated at 08:44 to 08:53, and followed by a one-second tape loop that repeats five times between 8:53 and 9:00. When Miles at long last plays Zawinul’s stirring main theme (referred to earlier in the track, but never actually played), at 16:38, it can be considered the coda.
The influence of the sonata form on the structure of “Bitches Brew” is not as clear-cut, but still apparent. Enrico Merlin’s analysis notes 15 edits in the piece, including (as in “Pharaoh’s Dance”) several short tape loops that create a new theme (in this case at 03:01, 03:07, 03:12, 03:17, and 03:27). Another section that leaps out at the listener is the tape loop from 10:36 to 10:52, where Macero creates excitement by looping a short trumpet phrase, making it sound like a precomposed theme. The section from 00:00 to 03:32 can be called the exposition, with the first theme appearing at 00:00 (the bass vamp) and at 00:41 (the corresponding melodic theme). The second theme is pasted in at 02:50. The development occurs between 03:32 and 14:36, with solos by Miles, McLaughlin, Shorter and Corea. At 14:36 there’s a recapitulation of the first theme, followed by another development, beginning at 17:20. The final recapitulation, a literal repeat of the first 02:50, can be interpreted as a coda.
Macero’s strong editorial involvement in “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Bitches Brew,” as well as his selection of “John McLaughlin” for inclusion on the album, may well have to do with the fact that these were the tracks that had not been broken in by the live band. Miles most likely did not have a clear vision for the final structure. By contrast, “Spanish Key,” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” and “Sanctuary” had all been played live, giving Miles time to develop a functional structure. Only “Sanctuary” contains an edit, at 05:13, at which point Macero pasted in another take. It also seems likely that Macero was influenced in his edits by the form Miles had given to these three tracks, especially “Spanish Key,” which has a circular structure, with Miles stating the main theme at 00:36, 09:17 and 16:48, and the solo section containing several references to the main theme.
“There’s very little dialogue between Miles and myself,” Macero elaborated on his working relationship with Miles. “If we say 20 words in the course of a three-hour session, that’s a lot. But there’s no mystery. I spend as much time listening to it as he spent creating it. He may have gone over a composition in his mind, mentally, for weeks, and that’s exactly what I do when I listen to the tape. One thing about Miles and his music, in working with Miles you can experiment as much as you wish. You can take his music, you can cut it up, you can put the filters in, you can do anything you want to it as long as he knows who it is. I mean, he’s not going to let just anyone do it. I don’t take liberties on my own, unless I check with him. The final decision is up to the artist, because he has to live with the record.” [14]
The genius of Macero’s editing on Bitches Brew, and his role in Miles’ electric music in general, can be compared to that of George Martin’s work with the Beatles. Like Martin, Macero often added a classical sensibility to his protégé’s music, and worked with him over a long period of time (from 1958 to 1983). Yet his influence, especially in the case of Davis, has not been widely recognized. [15]
Publicly, Miles rarely acknowledged Macero’s role. He mentioned the producer just a few times in his autobiography, and only in passing. It’s not hard to suspect that this may have had to do with their love-hate relationship, exemplified by Miles’ refusal to talk to Macero for more than two years after the producer was involved in the release of Quiet Nights in 1964. Huge rows, as well as Macero’s assertion that their relationship was like “matrimony,” [16] confirm the picture of a creatively fruitful but personally tension-filled connection.
In Macero’s view, “Miles always wanted to take the credit for everything—on a lot of albums he didn’t want the names of the musicians on the cover.” [17] Once, when Macero asked for a bonus, he claims that Miles responded, “I don’t think you deserve it. Anybody could have done it.” [18] The most likely reason for Miles’ reluctance to openly credit Macero was that he saw at several stages during his life how white men would take, or be given, the credit for black men’s creative achievements. In his autobiography Miles stated, “Some people have written that doing Bitches Brew was Clive Davis’ [head of Columbia at the time] or Teo Macero’s idea. That’s a lie, because they didn’t have nothing to do with none of it. Again, it was white people trying to give some credit to other white people where it wasn’t deserved, because the record became a breakthrough concept, very innovative. They were going to rewrite history after the fact like they always do.” [19] And in a 1973 interview Miles complained, “As long as I’ve been playing, they never say I done anything. They always say that some white guy did it.” [20] (This was the reason why he had the text “Directions in Music by Miles Davis” placed on the covers of Filles de Kilimanjaro and In a Silent Way. Bitches Brew was his last recording to carry the legend.)
But just like the enormous influence of George Martin doesn’t detract from the genius of the Beatles, emphasizing the importance of Macero in no way diminishes Miles’ greatness. In reality, the freedom Miles gave to Macero is an illustration of the trumpeter’s greatness. Many modern artists tend to want to control every aspect of record-making, producing and sometimes engineering their own albums. This does not necessarily lead to better results. Macero once noted, “Miles would leave it up to me to make all the fucking decisions. People today, they want to be producer, writer, they want to do everything. I’m saying, Jesus Christ, then do it yourself. Save yourself some money.” [21]
Great art has more chance of emerging when artists are acutely aware of their strengths and limitations. As an improvisational, here-and-now musician pur sang, Miles did not have the inclination, the patience or the skills to get deeply involved in the time-consuming, laborious postproduction process. Moreover, one of Miles’ main strengths was the freedom he allowed the musicians with whom he worked. Delegating responsibility for the postproduction process to Macero reflects the same attitude. Given how sacrosanct music was to Miles, he must have trusted Macero deeply.
“Both of us have learned something from the things we’ve done together,” Macero remarked. “I learned from the standpoint of editing, shifting the compositions around. It’s a creative process being a producer with Miles. In fact, it’s more of a creative process than it is with any other artist. You have to know something about the music. You really need to be a composer, because for a lot of it he relies on you and your judgment. I’m going through them as a composer, Miles as a composer-musician-performer. You must be very creative along with the artist, because if you’re not as creative as he is—forget it.” [22]
It seems that Miles and Macero wanted to force attention on the collaborative nature of their work by placing the two most-edited and experimental tracks, “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Bitches Brew,” at the beginning of the album. They are like a declaration of intent. Macero’s edits are not immediately apparent, but create a subliminal sense of both unrest and structure, something that’s initially hard to grasp, but immediately lifts the music out of the level of a jam. The edits are also successful in that they do not detract from the interaction between Miles and the ensemble. Although McLaughlin, the keyboardists, Maupin, Shorter and Holland all take solos, they are mixed in a way that makes them float momentarily on top of the brew. Unlike Miles, they do not rise above it. This has led some jazz critics to complain that Bitches Brew doesn’t really contain any solos, thereby not only missing the solos that were actually there, but more importantly the point that the musical essence of the album is not about sequences of solos, but about the interplay between Miles and his ensemble.
Miles’ trumpet is mixed much further to the front, like a singer. This makes it possible to hear the strength and range of his playing, the way he phrases his notes and guided the other musicians. After five years of being pushed to his limit in the second great quintet, and being in good health, he was at the peak of his trumpet-playing powers. Miles’ sound is round, full and powerful, and the way he drives the ensemble with often declamatory phrases that have predominantly a rhythmic rather than a melodic function is remarkable. A good example is his solo in “Pharaoh’s Dance” starting at 03:34, where he sounds like he’s wrestling, or perhaps boxing, with the band, pushing it, pulling it, steering it and creating constant tension and release. Rather than a soloist playing over changes, Miles creates contrast, interest and excitement in relation to a large mass of players that on their own could easily have sunk into amorphous anonymity.
Billy Cobham, an up-and-coming drummer at the time, played on the additional material on The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions. [23] Cobham still had the sound of awe in his voice when he remembered: “Miles was just coming out of the greatest band that he’d ever had, the second great quintet, and his trumpet playing was at a peak. He always played the ultimate musical phrase, even if it wasn’t technically correct. It was unbelievable! When you listen to Freddie Hubbard you hear trumpet proficiency par excellence, and then you hear Miles and he had a way of taking what Freddie did and compacting it in five notes. Those five notes said it all. The air around them became musical, and the silence became more profound and important. You just don’t learn that. Miles somehow could just do that. He was like Merlin the magician. It was based on Miles’ innate ability to use space. Not playing became more important than playing. But it had to be the right spaces at the right time! It was uncanny how he’d play one note, and that note would carry through five or eight bars of changes. That note would be the note.”
A major piece of work by any definition, “Pharaoh’s Dance” was never performed live, and one wonders whether Miles had any doubts about the track’s success. The title track, on the other hand, was a staple of the live band for more than two years, until October of 1971. It was invariably played at about half the length of the album time (26:58), thereby raising the issue of the extreme length of the two opening tracks of the album. (“Pharaoh’s Dance” clocks in at 20:05.) There are two ways of looking at this. If one relates to the music as an “abstract,” ambient atmosphere, a jungle environment that one can enter and roam, the length of these tracks becomes a significant aspect of their attraction. But from a more traditional, figurative perspective, in which the focus is on solos, themes, grooves, variety, development, “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Bitches Brew” are too long, and would both work better if cut substantially. The drastic cut in the length of “Bitches Brew” during live performances was partly due to the smaller size of the live band, but also suggests that Miles shared this opinion.
As with “Circle in the Round,” Macero’s editing was only partly successful. This is demonstrated by “John McLaughlin,” the outtake from the track “Bitches Brew.” It is only 04:22 long and sustains interest from beginning to end, making it a good example of how this music works in a much tighter format. Moreover, the major tracks that weren’t edited, “Spanish Key” and “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” are much more focused, and contain Miles’ best solos. “Spanish Key,” a revisiting of the Spanish influences Miles had explored on Sketches of Spain and “Flamenco Sketches” on Kind of Blue, is a flowing, fluent boogie based around several different scales and tonal centers. Enrico Merlin has pointed out that the track employs what he calls “coded phrases,” meaning musical cues with which the band is steered towards the next musical section. “[The] modulations are always initiated by the soloist who performs a phrase in the new key, thus signaling his own wish to change the tonal center,” Merlin wrote. “This device was used for the first time in ‘Flamenco Sketches.’ I believe that Davis was trying, and he succeeded brilliantly, to adapt the idea of ‘Flamenco Sketches’ to the musical experimentation of that time [the late ’60s].” [24] Sweltering and riveting throughout, “Spanish Key” would have been even stronger had it ended around 13 minutes, when the music appears to come to a natural halt. “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” is probably the most successful track on Bitches Brew, courtesy of a beautiful, deep bass line, Alias’ slow-burning, driving New Orleans drum groove, a tight structure, and excellent solos by Miles, McLaughlin, Shorter and Zawinul. It remained a favorite in live performance until August 1970. Finally, the version of “Sanctuary” on Bitches Brew is expressive and muscular, but lacks the subtlety of the first recording with the second great quintet in February of 1968.
Regardless of how the quality of the music on Bitches Brew is judged, it is important to recognize the astonishing concoction of influences that had gone into Miles’ cauldron. Miles had combined improvisational working methods that he developed in the late ’50s with musical influences such as rock, folk, soul and African music. Moreover, the ensemble’s collective improvisation, based on the working methods developed by the second great quintet, and the call-and-response structure between Miles and the ensemble, both find their roots in early jazz. In his autobiography Miles likened Bitches Brew‘s collective improvisations to the jam sessions he attended at Minton’s in Harlem in the late ’40s. Like many writers, Miles also made comparisons between the recording’s kaleidoscopic sound world and the noises of New York City. Then, in the words of Lenny White, he mixed in a “dash” of this musician and that composer, not only skillfully blending their qualities, but also enlarging jazz and rock’s sonic palette with bass clarinet and extensive percussion. Both were novel sounds in jazz and rock music around 1969.
To this explosive mixture Teo Macero added mid-20th-century studio trickery, a 19th-century classical-music awareness of structure, and a way of looking at music as abstract blocks of sound, which he freely cut and moved around. In other words, the two most heavily edited tracks on Bitches Brew were hybrids of figurative and abstract art. They combined, respectively, the traditional musical line of something akin to a sonata form with the cut-and-paste ideas that had come out of musique concrète, serial music and studio technology, which later influenced ambient and dance music. Add to this the strongly chromatic improvising of the keyboard players, which has echoes of classical atonal music, and it is clear that an impressive amount of influences went into the making of Bitches Brew. This is no doubt one of the major reasons for the recording’s immense success and influence. Virtually anyone willing to listen to it with an open mind is able to recognize something familiar in the music, despite the fact that it contains few easily identifiable melodies, hooks or vamps.
Bitches Brew encompasses about every musical polarity of the late ’60s, whether jazz and rock, classical and African, improvised and notated music, live playing and postproduction editing. Its greatness lies in how it managed to bridge these polarities, including and transcending all the disparate ingredients into a completely new whole, and ended up with much more than the sum of its components. Bitches Brew explores a new, intangible musical universe, and any attempt to fully explain or define its concept and its music will inevitably diminish it to some degree. If one must find a label for the music, Lenny White probably had a good stab at it when he called it “African-American classical music—a combination of the harmonic language developed in the West over several hundreds of years, played from an African-American perspective, with an African-American approach to rhythm.”
How Bitches Brew opened up a new, unknown musical paradigm is humorously illustrated by an anecdote told by Joe Zawinul that mirrors John McLaughlin’s incomprehension during the In a Silent Way sessions. The keyboardist had been so baffled by the Bitches Brew sessions that he didn’t even recognize the resulting music when he heard it later in another context. “I didn’t really like the sessions at the time,” Zawinul reminisced. “I didn’t think they were exciting enough. But a short while later I was at the CBS offices, and a secretary was playing this incredible music. It was really smoking. So I asked her, ‘Who the hell is this?’ And she replied, ‘It’s that Bitches Brew thing.’ I thought, Damn, that’s great.” [25]
Of course, the recording also had its era on its side. The late ’60s and early ’70s were full of music that people didn’t necessarily understand, but that made them feel alive, that spoke to them. It was a time when audiences were prepared to go out of their way to enjoy the unusual and the controversial. The energy and mystery of the music, the title, the eye-catching and ultra-hip cover and the stream-of-consciousness liner notes by Ralph J. Gleason all perfectly expressed the zeitgeist. All elements came together in one seamless package, and the effect was powerful: The recording sold 400,000 copies in its first year, and earned Miles a Grammy for Best Jazz Performance, Soloist with Large Group. As a result, Gleason’s showy words sounded prescient rather than hyped-up: “This music will change the world like Cool and Walkin’ did and now that communication is faster and more complete it may change it more deeply and quickly.”[26]
In addition to the music recorded during August of 1969, The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions also contains material from sessions in November of 1969, and January and February of 1970. The total amount of music is dramatically extended from the 94 minutes of the original album to almost 266 minutes. Some of the additional material had already been issued on the albums Big Fun, Circle in the Round and Live-Evil, but there are also nine previously unreleased tracks, totaling about 86 minutes of music.
Macero was invited by Columbia/Sony to participate in the creation of the boxed set, but declined after a first meeting. The long collaboration between Miles and Macero created a deep bond between the two men, and it’s understandable that since Miles’ passing, Macero sees himself as a custodian of his legacy. In assuming this role he has loudly declared to anyone who wanted to listen that he disagrees with the way Sony/Columbia is reissuing the Miles Davis back catalog in general, and The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions in particular. He boldly stated that “Miles Davis would never have agreed to the unreleased material being released, nor to the way the original material has been remixed and remastered,” and that’s to quote one of his milder exhortations. Macero has also supported the argument that the boxed set is a misnomer.
The original Bitches Brew sessions took place over the course of three days in August of 1969, and were complete in themselves. It appears a commercially inspired stretch to include material recorded several months later, with different personnel and a radically different musical feel, and declare it part of the Bitches Brew sessions. Reissue producer Bob Belden and executive producer Michael Cuscuna have reason to argue in the boxed set that Miles entered a new musical phase in March of 1970, when he started to work with a small, guitar-based group. However, the boxed set, awarded another Grammy in 1999 for “Best Boxed Recording Package,” could have been called something like The Bitches Brew Era, since the additional material can easily be seen as a phase in itself, typified by the addition of Indian instruments like sitar, tamboura and tabla. Most of this material has a pastoral atmosphere completely at odds with the storm of the original Bitches Brew sessions.
With regard to the issues that Macero raised concerning remixing and remastering, much of the Miles Davis music issued on CD by Sony during the late ’90s has undergone this process, including all four boxed sets released to date. The triple-Grammy-winning Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, as well as Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings, 1955-1961, were remixed from three tracks, and The Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-1968 from four tracks by Sony staff engineer Mark Wilder. The small amount of tracks meant that Wilder’s freedom to change the nature of the music was limited. However, Bitches Brew was recorded on eight-track, and involved multitudes of complex edits and intricate sound effects. This made it more difficult to reconstruct the original version in a remix, and gave the remixer much more freedom to impose his own vision. In addition, some of the original effect equipment, like the Teo One, was not available anymore, making an exact replication even harder. Finally, Wilder and Belden decided to make some fundamental changes to the sound and nature of the mix, leaving themselves open to accusations similar to those aimed at one time at the restorers of the Sistine Chapel.
“Let me make clear that when Sony told me that they wanted me to recreate the whole album, I knew immediately that we couldn’t do any tinkering or release alternative takes or extend pieces,” Belden explained in response. “I did not want to play Teo Macero. Instead, we wanted the boxed set to flow seamlessly. That is why we had to remix all the material. The two-track masters for the original Bitches Brew album were in bad shape, and there was a lot of disparity between them and the other material, whereas the previously unreleased stuff had not been mixed at all. Moreover, for the original LP they boosted the bottom and cut out the high end, taking out a lot of clarity. We put that clarity back in. We also decided to try to recreate what the musicians would have heard in the studio. There were always two distinct Fender Rhodes players, so we wanted to make sure that Chick Corea was always on the right and the guest on the left. That gives a sense of continuity. And we wanted to bring out the sound of Miles’ trumpet and make it sound more in the pocket, the way you would have heard it during studio playbacks. We wanted to bring out the natural interplay between the musicians. At the same time we followed Teo’s edits as faithfully as we could.”
“Of course it’s much more of a challenge to remix eight-tracks,” Wilder agreed. “But I was able to get a very accurate approximation of the original mixes. We tried to pay homage to Teo’s original edits and mixes as much as we could, but we also tried to bring out the musicality of the sessions. Those guys played some killing stuff that got a little lost in the technology of the mix and the postproduction. So yes, we tried to create a feeling of people playing music together. The musicality of what occurred during these sessions was paramount for us, and we wanted to remove some of the original mix technology to bring this out. They had made some very wild fader movements during the mix that we couldn’t replicate anyway. But at the same time there are those signature things that were done during the mix, the slap [tape] echoes on Miles’ trumpet, that we tried to replicate as best as we could. We would run my mixes and edits against the original LP version, and sometimes we’d compare with my version in one speaker and the original in the other to make sure that there were no edits that we had missed or mistimed. We worked amazingly hard on this.”
Phrases like “removing some of the original mix technology” or “recreate what the musicians would have heard in the studio” will alarm purists. But as always, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and from this perspective the work of Belden and Wilder is more than vindicated. All original edits are retained (although the new version of “Pharaoh’s Dance” curiously loses four seconds that were in the original version, 08:29 to 08:33) and the instrumental balance of the mixes on The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions does not sound significantly different from those of the original album. The sound is greatly improved, however, displaying more aliveness, depth, and detail, partly because the Dolby that suppressed the high end (as well as the hiss) in the original is removed. There’s a pleasant roundness to the new sound that was missing in the sometimes thin and abrasive-sounding original.
Belden and Wilder also succeeded in their aim of bringing out the interplay between the musicians. The improved high end especially has added a transparency that makes it easier to distinguish between the various percussion instruments, and to imagine oneself in the studio with the musicians. It seems like a cloud has lifted from the recordings, and some extra hiss is a small price to pay. Macero strongly criticized the new mixes, complaining that Miles sounded only “one inch tall,” but the overall consensus, including from the musicians who played on the sessions, is that the new mixes sound excellent. The parallel with the restoration of the Sistine Chapel that appears apt is that of the brighter colors that emerged, which initially shocked traditionalists.
The additional material included in The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions begins with four tracks recorded on November 19. Wayne Shorter was replaced by the eighteen-year-old saxophonist Steve Grossman, Dave Holland with Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette with Billy Cobham. Guest musicians Bennie Maupin, Harvey Brooks and John McLaughlin returned, and Herbie Hancock sat in as second keyboard player. Miles also added the exotic sounds of Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira, plus Khalil Balakrishna on sitar and Bihari Sharma on tabla. Corea was the only musician from the live band at these sessions, and there is some historical confusion with regards to the reasons.
In his autobiography, Miles stated that Wayne Shorter left the band “in late fall 1969” and that he then “broke up the band to find replacements.” [27] This is incorrect, because Shorter played with the live band until early March of 1970. Miles’ assertion that Shorter had “told me ahead of time when he was leaving” and that he wanted to try out new musicians (thereby adding to his growing list of stock company players) was probably closer to the mark.
The size of the band may suggest a direct line to the Bitches Brew sessions three months earlier, but the introduction of the Brazilian and Indian elements took things into a totally different direction. Indian music influences had become popular in the late ’60s, mainly through the Beatles’ and the counterculture’s interest in Eastern mysticism, and sitars were occasionally employed in Western popular music, especially psychedelic rock. Miles was one of the few jazz musicians who did more than just flirt with this influence, and Indian instruments intermittently played an important part in his music from 1969 to 1973.
During this stage in his career Miles appeared almost obsessed with incorporating as many disparate musical influences as possible, seemingly using anything or anyone he could lay his hands on. The question has often been asked whether Miles had a vision for the end result or was just randomly throwing things into his cauldron, and was as surprised by the results as anyone else.
“I think that Miles definitely had a vision,” Dave Holland commented. “But when you put together improvised music, you’re dealing with musicians and their approach and style of playing. One of the things I learnt from Miles is that you don’t come in with a fixed vision. The vision is there, but it is not finished. The composition a classical composer writes is finished, and all musicians do is interpret it. Improvised music is different. Part of your palette is the musicians you’re working with, and so with this group it will come out one way, and with that group it will come out another way. So if you ask me, ‘Did Miles have a vision?’ I’ll say ‘Yes.’ But ask, ‘Did he know what the end result would sound like?’ and I’d have to say ‘No.’ He couldn’t. When he was putting something together, he was listening and selecting what he liked. To me this is the great art of putting together improvised music. Miles worked in the tradition where you create a form that’s clear, but that also has enough room for the musicians to be creative with. Miles was giving us a context for the music, and then we found what we could do within that context.”
Still, throwing different musicians together to see what will happen is a risky approach, and this was demonstrated in a series of failures. The track “Great Expectations,” recorded on November 19, is an example. It was first released on Big Fun in 1974, and has a structure similar to that of “Nefertiti” in June of 1967, with a repeating main melody underpinned by an ever-varying drum section. The bass relentlessly plays a rock riff not dissimilar to that of “Peter Gunn,” and the Brazilian and Indian elements add some color and variation. But it’s not enough to save the rather dreary and repetitive effort, which is weak on the figurative side (an unengaging melody and little melodic development) and offers little on the abstract side (the atmosphere is feeble and unfocused).
Zawinul’s “Orange Lady,” recorded on the same day and also first released on Big Fun, is better, partly because the melodic line is more interesting, and partly because it is reasonably successful as a tone poem, an exercise in creating a mood. The other two tracks recorded during this session were previously unreleased, and, as Macero argued, with good reason. “Yaphet” sounds like it starts where “Orange Lady” left off, meanders for nearly 10 minutes, and adds nothing significant whatsoever. “Corrado” is no more than a directionless 13-minute jam. Apart from Miles’ incisive playing, it has no engaging features.
Things didn’t get much better at the next session nine days later on November 28, with a similar ensemble. Organist Larry Young joined Hancock and Corea, and possibly to inject some energy from tried-and-tested elements, Miles reinstated his live band rhythm section: Holland played bass, and DeJohnette was on drums next to Cobham. The previously unreleased “Trevere” is a kernel of an idea that never takes off, and halfway through the band comes to a halt, from the sound of it because they had no clue where to take things next.
The same problems also apply to “The Big Green Serpent,” which is basically a group of musicians trying out an idea and getting nowhere. Belden sounds almost apologetic about the inclusion of “The Little Blue Frog,” and its alternate take (“A jam in G. That’s all it really is. Just a jam.”) [28], but at least the musicians sound as if they’re having fun, and McLaughlin and the rhythm section lay down a satisfactory groove. A 02:42 section of “The Little Blue Frog” was released as a single in the United States in April of 1970, before the release of Bitches Brew, and in France in 1973, and must have left listeners completely at a loss. “What were they (and who were they?) thinking?” [29] indeed.
The Impact of the Shooting Incident
The question arises why these two sessions were such failures. One explanation may be the shooting incident that occurred in October of 1969. The Birdland affair in August of 1959, when Miles had been beaten and arrested by two New York police officers, had shown how devastating the impact of extramusical dramas on Miles’ musical progress could be. It abruptly cut short the rising creative curve that culminated in Kind of Blue and marked the beginnings of a three-and-a-half-year creative wasteland. Although less directly related to racial issues, and therefore emotionally less close to the bone, the episode in October of 1969 was shocking enough, and it would not be surprising if it caused a creative dip in the months following.
In Miles’ memory, he and Marguerite Eskridge were unexpectedly shot at when they were talking and kissing in front of her apartment. [30] Eskridge remembered the incident differently. “Miles was playing at the Blue Coronet Club in Brooklyn,” she recounted. “He had supposedly been getting calls that he should not be playing there unless he booked through a particular agency. I had a premonition that night at the club that something was going to happen. At one stage I literally felt blood trickling down the side of my face, even though I was never shot. After the gig Miles drove me home in his Ferrari, and he kept looking in the rearview mirror. At one point he said, ‘There’s a gypsy cab following us.’ He tried to lose it a few times, and then we pulled in next to the building where I lived in Brooklyn. A few moments later he saw the car coming in from the rear, and said, ‘Duck down.’ We both ducked. At that point a lot of shots were fired from the car, and then it drove away. We were still sitting in the car because I had been taking my time pulling out my keys and everything. If I had gotten right out and gotten up to the outside door I would have been standing unprotected, and I would clearly have been shot. Miles had been grazed slightly at his side, a bullet had gone through his leather jacket. The car had trapped a lot of the bullets. We went to the hospital and at about 5 a.m. the police came out and read me my rights! I mean, we were the victims! They wouldn’t say what we were being charged for, but they took us to the police station, and then finally I found out that they believed that there was marijuana in the car. Later on, all charges were dropped because they found that it was nothing but herbal teas.”
Miles said that he had been shot at because some black promoters were angry with him for using white promoters to do his bookings, but saxophonist Dave Liebman claimed it was the result of a drug deal gone wrong. “He was definitely involved in something, you know—questionable characters, that’s for sure.” [31] The unfounded suspicions of the police also give this story a race-related slant, and may well have heightened the impact the incident had on Miles. Whatever its background, in the end the link between the shooting and the failure of the November sessions is speculative. If we are to look for musical reasons, a possible explanation is that the many new, young musicians felt inhibited by Miles’ presence, and disoriented by his unorthodox working methods.
The Magical Miles Presence
“When [the musicians] are in that studio it’s like God coming—oh, oh, here he comes,” Macero recalled. “They stop talking, they don’t fool around, they tend to business and they listen, and when he stops, they stop. He is the teacher, he is the one who’s sort of pulling the strings. He’s the professor. He’s the God that they look up to and they never disagreed, to my knowledge, in the studio. If they did, they got a goddamn drumstick over their head, and I’ve seen that happen, too.” [32]
“As far as I was concerned, all the people around me were light years ahead of what I was capable of doing,” Cobham explained. “So all I could do was shut up and absorb and hope that something would stick. For me it was like school time, ten times graduate school. Far beyond any institution. Everything was experimentation. There was not one moment when whatever was on a piece of paper was not changed. That’s why there were no stems on the notes. Nothing was tied. There might be three notes and then a space and then four tones, and then a space, and then two notes. You’d have to generally know how it was phrased, but it didn’t necessarily mean that it was going to stay like that. His instructions were very minimal, almost Zen. He would give me very little to work with. The very rare times he talked to me, it was something like: ‘I need something from you. Give me something between the Latin and the jazz vein.’ I was blown away by the fact that he even acknowledged that he liked what I did. I was just like, eyes open, ears open, absorbing as much as I could.”
Cobham clearly was in awe, and this feeling was shared by several of the other new musicians, possibly causing them to play inhibited. Miles’ darker side was surely a contributing factor. According to many eyewitnesses he could be ruthless in the way he handled people, taking advantage of them if they allowed it, testing them to see how far he could go. He respected those who stood up to him, but musicians who couldn’t, didn’t last long. For this reason some musicians were not only in awe, but actively scared of him.
“His perceptions of people were so intuitive,” explained Lydia DeJohnette. “In one second he would know who you were and what you wanted. And if he felt where you were coming from wasn’t centered, if you couldn’t look him in the eye, if he didn’t think he could treat you as an equal, he would just put you away. He could destroy people emotionally.”
“There was always a lot of magic in working with him,” Jack DeJohnette added. “Always a lot of challenges. You always had to be prepared for the unexpected. You had to be on your toes and alert. He kept you thinking all the time, and that was fun. You never knew what was going to happen, and that made it exciting, but also very challenging. Personally I was never afraid of Miles, but I’ve seen people who were. He had a bitter side and a very loving side. He was a visionary and very intuitive, and he could read people like he could read music. He immediately knew your vulnerabilities and could press your buttons.”
Steve Grossman elaborated on the same theme when he remarked that, even though it was an incredible break for him to be playing with Miles at such a young age, it was also nerve-racking. “Miles was just such a great person and very encouraging. He really tried to make me feel at ease. But he was one of my favorite musicians since I was eight years old, so it was difficult. Also, I was used to playing straight-ahead jazz and to suddenly go into this environment where everyone had a lot more experience, I would say I was inhibited.”
“I was terrified for the first month,” Airto Moreira recalled. [33] The air of danger and the unexpected that always hung around Miles was one way in which he kept his musicians on their toes, fully alive to the present moment and to music. But it could be counterproductive. Perhaps this was the case in November of 1969, when several of the new musicians played “inhibited,” and/or “scared of Miles.” A pointer in this direction is the fact that the following sessions, on January 27 and 28 and February 6, were far superior. The new musicians may well have become accustomed to Miles’ presence, gaining in confidence, and daring to open up more. In addition, Miles seemed to have come to the conclusion that the experiments with a large group of musicians had run their course, because his studio ensembles were getting smaller, and the music better.
Back to the Studio
On January 27, 1970, Grossman was absent and Shorter returned on soprano sax, Zawinul replaced Hancock and Young, and McLaughlin, Brooks and Sharma were dropped. This reduced the ensemble from 14 to 10 players. “Lonely Fire,” first released on Big Fun, starts in a similar ambient mood as “Orange Lady.” Zawinul’s theme sets up a powerful atmosphere, and is repeated over and over again with the rhythm section playing variations underneath, as in “Nefertiti” and “Great Expectations.” “Lonely Fire” threatens to meander too long for its own good as a tone poem, but entices again when Holland embarks on a driving rhythm around the 11-minute mark, with Chick Corea throwing in Eastern-sounding scales. It works, but it’s not a great track, and overly long at more than 21 minutes.
“Guinnevere” was first released in 1979 as part of the Circle in the Round set. A composition by David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, it is another showcase for Miles’ interest in American folk music. Little happens in the 21-minute-long track, and for much of the time the melody is played over a very slow four-note bass line. But the atmosphere is nevertheless gripping, probably due to the focus and simplicity of the playing. Contrary to the music on the two sessions in November, the musicians sound as if they’re playing with a unified purpose. It may be a “period piece,” [34] but its pastoral atmosphere still carries some power decades later.
The session of January 28, with the same group as the day before, but with McLaughlin instead of Balakrishna, was another improvement. Perhaps Miles also felt that his compositional ideas had not been giving him the results he wanted, because for this session and the session of February 6, he did not use his own material, but tried his hand at one composition by Shorter, and four by Zawinul.
Shorter’s “Feio” is performed in a similar way as “Guinnevere,” with Holland playing a slow, three-note bass line, the horns somberly blowing the top line, and the spaces being filled up by drums, Moreira’s percussion, and some screaming electric guitar splashes by McLaughlin. It works still better than “Guinnevere,” perhaps because the track is only half as long, and McLaughlin, Moreira, and DeJohnette create considerable interest as well as a potent atmosphere. Zawinul’s “Double Image” completed the day’s work in a version that’s more straightforward and less raw than the one recorded on February 6 and released in 1971 on Live-Evil.
On February 6 Bennie Maupin was replaced by a sitar player, not credited on The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, but named as Balakrishna on the liner notes for Live-Evil. Suddenly and inexplicably everything fell into place. The track “Recollections,” based on a Zawinul folk composition not dissimilar to “In a Silent Way,” is simply gorgeous. It is beautifully executed, with a similarly compelling, frozen-in-time atmosphere as Miles’ version of said song, all the musicians perfectly aligned with each other, and McLaughlin plays some graceful and elegant folk-influenced fills that are very different from the stabbing staccato riffs that sharpened “In a Silent Way.” “Recollections” is among the most pastoral pieces Miles ever recorded and entirely successful as an ambient piece of music. The same applies to the short “Take It or Leave It,” actually the middle section of Zawinul’s “In a Silent Way.”
Finally, the version of “Double Image” recorded on this day is a triumph. The rhythm is opened up from the fairly standard way it had been played when the same track was recorded a week earlier and transformed into a funky stop-start affair, with a screaming electric guitar filling the gaps. It’s a format that Miles would explore several times during the early ’70s. Although there is still a lot of improvisation going on, the role of the rhythm section is tightly circumscribed. The track is more firmly in rock territory than anything Miles had done up to this point, echoing rock avant-garde rather than free jazz. This is the first sign of Miles formulating a new, rockier, guitar-centered studio direction, which he would bring to fruition in the months following on A Tribute to Jack Johnson.
Endnotes
1. Carlos Santana, “Remembering Miles and Bitches Brew,” in The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions (Columbia/Legacy, 1998): 7–8.
2. Tomlinson, “Musical Dialogician,” in Kirchner, Miles Davis Reader, 247.
3. Greg Hall. “Teo: The Man Behind the Scene,” Down Beat, (July 1974): 14.
4. Quincy Troupe, “Overview Essay—Bitches Brew,” in The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, 92.
5. Hall, “Man Behind the Scene,” 14.
6. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 302.
7. Ibid., 289.
8. Ouellette, “Bitches Brew,” 34. Miles also claimed in his autobiography to have met and been influenced by Paul Buckmaster, an English composer and cellist with a classical music background who was exploring jazz and rock at the time. However, Buckmaster does not remember meeting Miles until November 1, 1969, after the trumpeter’s concert at Hammersmith Odeon in London. Given that the Bitches Brew sessions happened two-and-a-half months earlier, it is difficult to see how the then little-known Buckmaster could have influenced Miles. Miles must have misconstrued the sequence of events in his memory. These inconsistencies demonstrate that not everything the book contains can unquestionably be accepted as the definitive truth.
9. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 289–290.
10. Lenny White claimed that he played on this new version, but only Jack DeJohnette is credited, and the aural evidence only reveals one drummer.
11. Bob Belden, “Session-by-Session Analysis,” The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, (Columbia/Legacy, 1998): 125.
12. Strangely, Bob Belden’s annotations in The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions make mention of nineteen edits, but only list sixteen in the detailed editing chart (see page 129). Enrico Merlin distinguishes seventeen edits in his sessionography, page 335. Incidentally, all track timings in this chapter refer to The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions.
13. Joel Lewis, “Running the Voodoo Down,” The Wire (December 1994): 24.
14. Hall, “Man Behind the Scene,” 14–15.
15. This may be the reason Teo Macero displayed a certain bitterness upon reaching old-age--he “knows how to hold a grudge” noted Eric Olsen et al in The Encyclopedia of Record Producers (see page 485)--and why he refused to be interviewed unless paid substantial sums of money. Although he graciously took this writer out for lunch and answered some brief questions over the phone, since no funds were available, many valuable observations and anecdotes sadly remained off the record.
16. Hall, “Miles: Today’s Most Influential Contemporary Musician,” Down Beat (July 1974): 14.
17. Lewis, “Voodoo Down,” 24.
18. Eric Olsen et al, Encyclopedia of Record Producers, 486.
19. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 290.
20. Davis, “Good Rhythm Section,” in Carner, Miles Davis Companion, 155.
21. Olsen et al, Encyclopedia of Record Producers, 487.
22. Hall, “Man Behind the Scene,” 13.
23. There has been some controversy around Billy Cobham’s claims that he played on the original Bitches Brew sessions, something that was hotly denied by Lennie White. When asked about this, Cobham answered that he felt that the whole issue was blown out of all proportion, because he’s not sure what sessions he played on at all. Apparently Miles gave him a copy of Bitches Brew with his compliments. Since the album came out several months after the November 1969 and January and February 1970 sessions, of which Cobham had been a part, and the music was radically altered through editing, the drummer genuinely believed for a long time that he had played on the original album. Mindful of how Joe Zawinul did not recognize Bitches Brew when it was played to him, such confusions are understandable. Many musicians had no idea on which sessions they had actually played, and when and whether and how the material was released. Cobham also doesn’t remember playing triangle, although he is credited as having played the instrument on the session of February 6, 1970. As so often, the mists of time appear to have covered a lot of historical detail.
24. Merlin elaborated on his concept of “coded phrases” in a lecture called “Code MD: Coded Phrases in the First ‘Electric Period,’” which was given during a conference called Miles Davis and American Culture II, at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, on May 10 and 11, 1996. A transcript, including musical examples and a details analysis of “Spanish Key,” is available on Pete Losin’s Miles Ahead site, at www.wam.umd.edu/
~losinp/music/code_md.html
25. Ouellette, “Bitches Brew,” 37.
26. Ralph J. Gleason, “Original LP Liner Notes to Bitches Brew,” in The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, (Columbia/Legacy, 1998): 35.
27. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 301.
28. Belden, “Session-by-Session Analysis,” 135.
29. Ibid., 135.
30. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 296–297.
31. Fisher, Davis and Liebman, 78.
32. Hall, “Man Behind the Scene,” 15.
33. Lee Underwood, “Airto and his Incredible Gong Show,” Down Beat, (April 1978): 16; quoted by Chambers, Milestones, 192.
34. James Isaacs, liner notes for CD re-issue of Circle in the Round, (Columbia, 1979): 9.
"As a musician and as an artist, I have always wanted to reach as many people as I could through my music. And I have never been ashamed of that. Because I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all other dead things that were once considered artistic. I always thought it should reach as many people as it could, like so-called popular music, and why not? I never was one of those people who thought less was better: the fewer who hear you, the better you are, because what you're doing is just too complex for a lot of people to understand. A lot of jazz musicians say in public that they feel this way, that they would have to compromise their art to reach a whole lot of people. But in secret they want to reach as many people as they can, too. Now, I'm not going to call their names. It's not important. But I always thought that music had no boundaries, no limits to where it could grow and go, no restrictions on its creativity. Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is. And I always hated categories. Always. Never thought it had any place in music."
by Lee Mergner
Miles Davis was always known as a jazz artist for whom image was important. He was also one of the music’s most photogenic figures. And he was a restless and creative artist who changed his music with the times. Finally, he was an artist who loved to paint large canvases of slightly abstract figures in bold bright colors. So it’s no surprise that a large-scale exhibit of photography, art and artifacts dedicated to the legendary trumpeter has been organized. The show, “We Want Miles” opened on April 30 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, Quebec in Canada. The show had previously been mounted at the Musee de la Musique in Paris.
The exhibit was curated by Vincent Bessieres, who wrote about Miles: “More than the archetype of the cool musician—deliberate, distant, elegant, uncompromising—Davis is the incarnation of audacity and invention.” The exhibit certainly has gone to great lengths to capture his mercurial brilliance.
Included in this first North American multimedia exhibition on Davis are:
• Paintings by Davis and works contemporary artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Niki de Saint Phalle, among others;
• Original manuscripts and musical scores including the composition for Birth of the Cool;
• Musical instruments including horns that he played, and initial pressings of his records;
• Intimate portraits taken by such legendary photographers as Annie Leibovitz, Lee Friedlander, Anton Corbijn, and Irving Penn, among others;
• Video clips of and full length live concert footage, and stage clothes.
Naturally, it would impossible to appreciate the art without hearing the music, and so the museum has gone to great lengths to insure that visitors get to hear the Prince of Darkness in all his glory. Speakers shaped like trumpet mutes are scattered throughout the exhibit and there will be twenty listening stations, as well as a series of large scale projections of various performances and clips.
In addition, a companion book has also been published by the fine art publisher Rizzoli Press. The lavish coffee-table book with the provocative if somewhat contradictory title, We Want Miles: Miles Davis vs. Jazz, was written by Franck Bergerot, the editor-in-chief of Jazz Magazine in France. In addition to the text by Bergerot, the book includes remembrances of Davis by David Liebman, John Szwed, Ira Gitler, George Avakian and others. However, the images comprise the main attraction here. Included are nearly every iconic image of the trumpeter—from Don Hunstein’s photos of Miles in the studio recording Kind of Blue to Irving Penn’s stark and dramatic portrait for the Tutu album cover.
The exhibit and book are the subject of an upcoming Final Chorus column by Nat Hentoff in the July/August issue of JazzTimes.
http://jazztimes.com/articles/26262-a-fine-arts-museum-s-tribute-to-nonpareil-miles
July/August 2010 • By Nat Hentoff
A Fine Arts Museum’s Tribute to Nonpareil Miles
Nat Hentoff on We Want Miles Exhibit and Book
When I lived in Boston eons ago, the Museum of Fine Arts was within walking distance, and I often visited to get high on such paintings as a Renoir of a young couple in what looked like a New Orleans-style slow dance. I’d stand there fantasizing about taking the man’s place in the painting, but I never expected to find anything of jazz in this legendary museum’s exhibitions. Nor have I heard of jazz as a fine art in any of the other museums around the country. I have been at jazz concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but there’s nothing of Louis, Duke, Pres, Bix or Trane in the galleries there.
Suddenly, however, in a very prestigious museum of fine arts—having opened in April and continuing until Aug. 29—there is a stunning media exhibition on someone the museum accurately calls “one of the jazz world’s greatest innovators.”Coinciding with the event is a very large-size, hardback catalog, on the cover of which—characteristically sizing you up skeptically—is Miles Davis. The book and exhibition are titled “We Want Miles: Miles Davis vs. Jazz.” And nowhere else have I seen so much of Miles, from his boyhood on.Miles and I were friends—until Bitches Brew. He never forgave me for not turning handsprings over his venture into electronics. I felt Miles was electrifying without the added wattage. But since he was always trying something new, and always expecting attention, I’m sure he would have been delighted by this polyrhythmic, visual and sonic odyssey of his life.This tribute to the always-alive music of Miles is not in an American museum; the ones here are not yet hip to jazz as an art. This awakening challenge to our treasures of high art is mounted by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It’s the first one there, but it has been brewing for a long time. The MMFA’s director, Nathalie Bondil, has a long-term relationship with the Musée de la Musique in Paris, which originally conceived the exhibit, and Bondil is much involved, as she puts it, in “cross-roading visual art and music.”Miles was a painter, and the exhibition shows some of his visual improvisations. Also, along with his original manuscripts and scores, there are horns he played. And dig this from Cecilia Bonn, the museum’s communications consultant: “Small chambers placed throughout the installation in the form of the ‘mutes’ Miles used are among the design initiatives to ensure optimal acoustic conditions. And twenty listening stations will enable visitors to immerse themselves in Miles’ multiple musical currents.” Also, you’ll be able to hear Miles “live” in “a series of large-screen projections featuring clips and full-length footage from such concert performances as the 1985 Montreal International Jazz Festival.”My unsolicited suggestion to Nathalie Bondil is that she invite museum directors in the United States to come to Montreal and immerse themselves in the microcosm of Miles. Imagine such resourceful, imaginative exhibitions on Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Jack Teagarden, John Coltrane, Pee Wee Russell—you can add the names. And throughout this country—with music classes expunged from so many schools by No Child Left Behind—fine arts museums correlating sight, sound and American history shaped by jazz could invite public school classes to learn more about swinging the arts.
The kids would also learn something about the thrust and the often-exhilarating surprise of creation, as shown in the catalog in these juxtaposed quotes:
Pablo Picasso: “In painting you can try anything. As long as you never do anything over again.
”Miles Davis: “Now, nothing in music and sounds is ‘wrong.’ You can hit anything, any kind of chord. … Music is wide open for anything.”
Pablo Picasso: “You see me here, and yet I’ve already changed. I’m already somewhere else.”
Miles Davis: “Nothing is out of the question the way I think and live my life. I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning.”The catalog further contributes permanently to jazz history with the deeply searching and knowledgeable text by, among others, Franck Bergerot, editor in chief of France’s Jazz magazine, writer of many Miles Davis liner notes, and coordinator of the first volumes of Miles’ complete works, released by the Masters of Jazz label.Among the photographs, most of which are new to me, are those depicting Miles as a boy and Miles as the youngest member of trumpeter Eddie Randle’s Blue Devils, the house band at the Rhumboogie Club in East St. Louis. The evolving Miles became music director of the Blue Devils and was in charge of organizing rehearsals.
From the text about a time in his life when Miles had seemed to stop growing: “a young white cat by the name of Chet Baker was named best trumpet player for 1953; and while in Detroit, Miles heard the playing of Clifford Brown, the rising black trumpet star. In March, 1954, Davis was back in New York determined to make … a fresh start.“However, once again his trumpet was in hock. He was playing Art Farmer’s trumpet, and Farmer accompanied him to make sure his trumpet did not vanish.”I’d never heard that before, but now I have, thanks to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. According to Tourism Montreal, “the Museum is Montreal’s top cultural destination … and close to 100,000 people take part annually in its educational and cultural activities.” Now it’s also a swinging institution, revealing that in a vital area of the arts, America’s museums are, by contrast, culturally disadvantaged. I hope Montreal’s “We Want Miles” becomes a traveling exhibition south of the border. Any museum directors interested?
http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2010/10/we-want-miles-miles-davis-vs-jazz.html
Friday, October 8, 2010
We Want Miles: MILES DAVIS VS. JAZZ
“The archetypal jazzman, as elegant as he was inaccessible, Miles Davis was considered the twentieth-century incarnation of cool, both in his attitude and in his playing. A ladies' man, an enigmatic personality touched by genius and by rage, this son of the African-American middle class established himself as one of the greatest innovators in jazz, a genre he never stopped confronting and de-compartmentalizing through various aesthetic revolutions. With exceptional photographs, handwritten scores, original record-cover art and expert biography, "We Want Miles" attempts to trace the legend of one of the most fascinating and extraordinary artists in the history of music.”
© -Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Just when you think that you won’t have anything further to do with the most merchandised Jazz musician in the history of the music, this book comes along.
The book is essentially a companion volume to a museum exhibition initiated and organized by the Cité de la musique, Paris, with the support of Miles Davis Properties, LLC, in association with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It is published by Skira Rizzoli in a 9.5 x 11.5” folio format.
The exhibition appeared at Musée de la Musique, Paris from October 16, 2009 to January 17, 2010 and then traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Jean-Noel Desmarais Pavilion for a showing from April 30 to August 29, 2010. The exhibition curator was Vincent Bessieres.
Vince Bessieres also serves as the editor of the book which has contributions from George Avakian, Laurent Cugny, Ira Gitler, David Liebman, Francis Marmande, John Szwed and Mike Zwerin.
Skira Rizzoli has done its usual fine job with the formatting of this work which includes a bevy of photographs. The book retails for $50.00 although some booksellers are offering up to a 40% discount with shipping included.
Here is the chapter breakdown:
We have included below the introductions from the book as provided by the two, museum curators. Sadly, the exhibit did not visit a museum in a city in the USA.
© -Laurent Bayle & Eric de Visscher, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
LAURENT BAYLE / GENERAL DIRECTOR, CITE DE LA MUSIQUE, PARIS ERIC DE VISSCHER / DIRECTOR, MUSEE DE LA MUSIQUE, PARIS
WE WANT MILES
“In 1980, after nearly five years of silence, Miles Davis began to play again in the studio and on stage. The snappy title of one of the first records heralding his comeback was the self-evident statement "We Want Miles" Who is this "we"? How do you explain that simply saying a first name can conjure up an artist's undeniable power? To understand the univer sal respect commanded by a figure of this stature, recognized for ele vating a fledgling musical genre to a global phenomenon, we need only call to mind the course of his career: Miles Davis got his start playing in big bands in his hometown of St. Louis, enthusiastically embraced bebop, initiated the cool, embarked on a quest for a third avenue between swing and free jazz, and subsequently immersed himself in electric jazz, with occasional forays into soul and rock. Could this also explain how his name became legend, with musicians of every stripe all over the world incessantly chanting "We want Miles" to encourage him to return to centre stage?—a stage he would now take by storm, with numerous records, television appearances, advertising and film projects that transformed him into a genuine media icon. First, Davis became aware of the legend of jazz, which had expanded into a worldwide genre, then of his own legend as a "global" artist who transcended styles, schools and genres to assert himself as a musician, creator and leader of one of the twentieth century's signature musical cur rents. Although he contributed to the history of jazz in much the same way as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, no other musician embraced its many developments with such boldness and ingenuity. He even anticipated its major turning points, transforming music meant for entertainment and dancing into music that had to be listened to, and he was subsequently criticized for some of his choices by those who shunned progress.
As with Serge Gainsbourg, whose name immediately came to mind when the Cite de la musique was considering a first temporary exhibition on French chanson, cult figure Miles Davis instantly occurred to us as soon as the topic of jazz was proposed. In addition to a record title [You're under Arrest], these two figures, born in the same year, shared the desire to avoid being confined to any one style, always seeking out new, innova tive—and sometimes unexpected—musical avenues. They were inspired by the sense of "the moment" both in the way they related to their era and in their work: Gainsbourg wrote fast, Davis created music on the spot, pushing the art of improvisation to the limit without ever losing the connection with his audience. To quote saxophonist David Liebman from one of the texts in this catalogue, "When Miles went on stage, past and future didn't exist. It was all about the present tense, the essence of true improvisation and what most jazz musicians strive for daily when playing."
It is undoubtedly this "mystery of the present moment" that Miles Davis never ceased to explore, developing both the sounds (his move to electric and amplified instruments is an example of this, as are his collaborative efforts with Gil Evans) and the language of jazz. To do so, he tapped into a fertile source of renewal by working with new musicians. From John Coltrane to Herbie Hancock, the long list of artists who worked with Davis demonstrates his openness to the influences of other sizeable talents—his contemporaries as well as younger musi cians. From Kind of Blue and Tutu to Porgy and Bess and Bitches Brew, Davis' great albums all bear witness, in various forms, to his quest for the perfect moment.
This is the exceptional journey related in this book—a faithful counter part to the exhibition first presented at the Musee de la musique and subsequently at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts—which presents a chronological account by Franck Bergerot supplemented with reminis cences by certain key figures of the time. As for the exhibition, the photographs were chosen with particular care, since it is true that jazz and photography share a common history. Both capture the moment and record contrasts, immortalizing the illustrious heroes and pivotal moments of a musical genre that is quintessentially ephemeral. Neither the exhibition nor this catalogue would have been possible without the tireless efforts and unfailing ingenuity of curator and editor Vincent Bessieres. The project received steadfast support from the Miles Davis Estate, especially Cheryl Davis, Erin Davis and Vince Wilburn, Jr. The many lenders, photographers and institutions that contributed to the exhibition not only made it possible but also ensured its originality. To them, and to the people at the Cite de la musique and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, who helped make it a reality, we offer our heartfelt thanks.”
https://classicrockreview.wordpress.com/2021/08/31/miles-davis-and-the-making-of-bitches-brew-sorcerers-brew-1970/
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Miles Davis and the Making of Bitches Brew: Sorcerer’s Brew (1970)
From jazztimes.com
The story behind the seminal jazz-rock album Bitches Brew
Author and Miles Davis scholar Paul Tingen takes an in-depth look at the making of Bitches Brew, one of the most influential jazz albums of the 20th century.
August of 1969 marked Miles Davis’ boldest venture yet into undiscovered country. This time there was no more holding back, no more tentative experimentation, no more “walking on eggshells.” The album that emerged, Bitches Brew, was groundbreaking, beginning with its stark title and Abdul Mati Klarwein’s memorable cover painting. Made on Miles’ personal invitation, Klarwein’s expressionistic work captured the zeitgeist of free love and flower power, depicting a naked black couple looking expectantly at an ocean, a huge vibrant, red flower beside them. The background of the title is unknown, but a clue is provided by the absence of an apostrophe at the end of the word “bitches,” making “brew” a verb, not a noun. Carlos Santana speculated that the album was a “tribute” to “the cosmic ladies” who surrounded Miles at the time and introduce him to some of the music, clothes, and attitudes of the ’60s counterculture. [Footnote 1] Gary Tomlinson, on the other hand, assumed that “bitches” referred to the musicians themselves. [2] Just like “motherfucker,” the term “bitch” can be used as an accolade in African-American vernacular. Whatever the title meant, it sounded provocative. Teo Macero remarked, “The word ‘bitches,’ you know, probably that was the first time a title like that was ever used. The title fit the music, the cover fit the music.” [3]
The music on Bitches Brew is indeed provocative, and extraordinary. For Miles it meant a point of no return for the musical direction he had initiated with the recording of “Circle in the Round” in December of 1967. Until August of 1969 he had remained close enough to the jazz aesthetic and to jazz audiences to allow for a comfortable return into the jazz fold. But Bitches Brew‘s ferocity and power carried a momentum that was much harder to turn around. The hypnotic grooves, rooted in rock and African music, heralded a dramatic new musical universe that not only gained Miles a new audience, but also divided it into two groups—each side looking at this new music from totally different, and seemingly unbridgeable, perspectives. In the words of Quincy Troupe, these two groups were like “oil and water.” [4]
Bitches Brew signaled a watershed in jazz, and had a significant impact on rock. In combination with Miles’ fame and prestige, the album gave the budding jazz-rock genre visibility and credibility, and was instrumental in promoting it to the dominant direction in jazz. The recording’s enormous influence on the jazz music scene was bolstered by the fact that almost all the musicians involved progressed to high-profile careers in their own right. In the early 1970s, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter (with percussionist Airto Moreira) were involved in Weather Report, Herbie Hancock and Bennie Maupin set up Mwandishi, John McLaughlin (with Billy Cobham) created Mahavishnu Orchestra and Chick Corea founded Return to Forever with Lenny White.
Bitches Brew was not a sudden dramatic move in a completely new direction for Miles, though. In line with his long-standing, step-by-step working methods, the recording was maybe a large, but nevertheless logical step forward on a course he had set almost two years earlier. In terms of personnel, musical conception, and sonic textures, the album was a direct descendant of its predecessor, In a Silent Way. Teo Macero remarked that with the latter album, the music “was just starting to jell. [In a Silent Way] was the one before [Bitches Brew]. Then all of a sudden all the elements came together.” [5]Volume 0%00:0100:01
Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way are both dominated by circular grooves, John McLaughlin’s angular guitar playing and the sound of the Fender Rhodes electric piano. However, Miles related in his autobiography how he wanted to expand the canvas on Bitches Brew in terms of the length of the pieces and the number of musicians. While In a Silent Way featured eight musicians and was recorded in one single session, Bitches Brew included 13 musicians and was the result of three days of recording. On the third day the rhythm section consisted of as many as 11 players: three keyboardists, electric guitar, two basses, four drummers/percussionists and a bass clarinet. Miles had pulled out the stops in his search for a heavier bottom end.
Rehearsal and Preparation
Uncharacteristically, Miles’ live quintet also influenced Bitches Brew. Miles’ live and studio directions were strongly diverging around this time, with the studio experiments pioneering new material-incorporated elements of rock, soul and folk that only gradually filtered through to the live stage. But in July of 1969 Miles’ live quintet began performing “Spanish Key,” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” and “Sanctuary,” all of which would appear on Bitches Brew. (“Sanctuary” had, of course, already been recorded by the second great quintet on February 15, 1968.)
Having broken in this new material, Miles felt confident enough to book three successive days of studio time. He began by calling in the same crew that had recorded In a Silent Way: Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin and Dave Holland; only Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock were missing. Miles gave preference to live-band drummer Jack DeJohnette because of his “deep groove,” [6] invited Lifetime organist Larry Young instead of Hancock, and also added session bassist and Columbia producer Harvey Brooks. Together with Zawinul and McLaughlin, Young and Brooks had played on a session Miles organized for his wife, Betty Mabry, a few weeks earlier to record her first and ultimately unsuccessful solo album, They Say I’m Different. Miles also summoned 19-year-old drummer Lenny White who, like Tony Williams, is reported to have been brought to his attention by saxophonist Jackie McLean. Drummer/percussionist Don Alias had been introduced to Miles by Tony Williams, and brought along percussionist Jim Riley, also known as “Jumma Santos.” Tenor saxophonist and bass clarinettist Bennie Maupin was recommended by Jack DeJohnette. A finishing touch, and a stroke of genius, was Miles’ instruction to Maupin to play only the bass clarinet, adding a very distinctive and enigmatic sound to the brew.
According to Miles, the approach he had developed of presenting musicians with musical sketches they had never seen before was also integral to the making of Bitches Brew: “I brought in these musical sketches that nobody had seen, just like I did on Kind of Blue and In a Silent Way.” [7] However, this contradicts the fact that three of the pieces had already been broken in during live concerts, as well as with his assertion that there had been rehearsals for the making of Bitches Brew, a fact that is confirmed by Joe Zawinul. “There was a lot of preparations for the sessions,” the keyboardist recalled. “I went to Miles’ house several times. I had 10 tunes for him. He chose a few and then made sketches of them.” [8]
“The night before the first studio session we rehearsed the first half of the track ‘Bitches Brew,’” drummer Lenny White recalled. “I think we just rehearsed that one track. Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Chick Corea and Wayne Shorter were all there. I had a snare drum, and Jack had a snare drum and a cymbal. I was a 19-year-old kid, and I was afraid of Miles. My head was in the clouds! I was in awe. But he was really cool with me; he encouraged me and I ended up spending time with him at his home in later months. He was a real positive influence.”
Since Miles was looking for more complex, larger-scale pieces, he probably felt that he needed some rehearsals to establish at least some structure and organization to keep more than a dozen musicians focused during three days of sessions. With none of the musicians aware of the whole picture, they would still react to the sessions with beginners’ minds.
The First Recordings
At 10 a.m. on Tuesday, August 19, 1969, 12 musicians, Teo Macero and engineer Stan Tonkel gathered at Columbia Studio B for the first day of the recordings of Bitches Brew. Miles described the sessions as follows: “I would direct, like a conductor, once we started to play, and I would either write down some music for somebody or would tell him to play different things I was hearing, as the music was growing, coming together. While the music was developing I would hear something that I thought could be extended or cut back. So that recording was a development of the creative process, a living composition. It was like a fugue, or motif, that we all bounced off of. After it had developed to a certain point, I would tell a certain musician to come in and play something else. I wish we had thought of video taping that whole session. That was a great recording session, man.” [9]
“As the music was being played, as it was developing, Miles would get new ideas,” Jack DeJohnette commented. “This was the beautiful thing about it. He’d do a take, and stop, and then get an idea from what had just gone before, and elaborate on it, or say to the keyboards, ‘Play this sound.’ One thing fed the other. It was a process, a kind of spiral, a circular situation. The recording of Bitches Brew was a stream of creative musical energy. One thing was flowing into the next, and we were stopping and starting all the time, maybe to write a sketch out, and then go back to recording. The creative process was being documented on tape, with Miles directing the ensemble like a conductor an orchestra.”
“During the session we’d start a groove, and we’d play,” Lenny White remembered. “And then Miles would point to John McLaughlin and John would play for a while, and then Miles would stop the band. Then we’d start up again and he’d point to the keyboards, and someone would do another solo. All tracks were done in segments like that, with only the piano players possibly having a few written sketches in front of them. Miles said that he wanted Jack DeJohnette to be the leader of the rhythm section, because he was wearing the sunglasses! I’m from Jamaica, Queens, and I had played with other drummers before. I was trying to be very aware of wanting the music to sound very organic and congruent, real tight and seamless, so that people couldn’t really hear that there were two drummers.”
“Bitches Brew was like a big pot and Miles was the sorcerer,” White continued. “He was hanging over it, saying, ‘I’m going to add a dash of Jack DeJohnette, and a little bit of John McLaughlin, and then I’m going to add a pinch of Lenny White. And here’s a teaspoonful of Bennie Maupin playing the bass clarinet.’ He made that work. He got the people together who he thought would make an interesting combination. Harvey Brooks said he didn’t know why he got the call, but he made an interesting pairing with Dave Holland on acoustic bass. It was a big, controlled experiment, and Miles had a vision that came true.”
“The idea of using two basses and two drummers was very interesting,” Dave Holland agreed. “The role division between Harvey and me depended on the piece, but as I remember it, Harvey was taking responsibility for laying down the main line on the electric bass, and I had a freer part embellishing things on the acoustic bass. Miles always gave the minimum amount of instructions. Usually he’d let you try and find something that you thought worked, and if it did, then that would be the end of it. His approach was that if he needed to tell someone what to do, he had the wrong musician. If we used any notation it was often a collage-type thing with a bass line and some chord movement, and maybe a melody related to that. But it was never something long or extended. It was always a fairly compact section, and then we’d move to another section. The recording of Bitches Brew was therefore often very fragmented. We’d have these sketches of ideas, and we’d play each for ten minutes or so, and then we’d sort of stop, come to an ending of sorts. And then we might do one more take like that, and then move on to the next thing. Often I didn’t know whether we were rehearsing or recording, but Miles had a policy of recording everything.”
“I think it was a lot of fun for him, with his favorite musicians on their respective instruments,” DeJohnette added. “It was different and it was fun. There wasn’t a lot said. Most of it was just directed with a word here and a word there. We were creating things and making them up on the spot, and the significant thing was that the tape recorder was always rolling and capturing it. Sometimes Miles said: ‘This is not working. That’s not it. Let’s try something else.’ But it was never because somebody had made a mistake or something. Miles was hearing the collective. He was trying to capture moods and feelings and textures. He always went for the essence of things, and that was much more important to him than going back and redoing a note that wasn’t perfect. Perfection for him was really capturing the essence of something, and being in the moment with it. And then he and Teo later edited all these moments and put them all together. Some of the edits surprised me, but overall they were seamless, and captured the feeling and the intensity of the music.”
Having been rehearsed the night before at Miles’ house, “Bitches Brew” was the first track recorded on that initial day in Columbia Studio B. A beautiful example of Miles’ directing and of the recording-in-sections approach can be heard at 7:28, when the ensemble appears to drift to a halt. Miles gives some indecipherable instructions, and the musicians carry on, clearly still not quite knowing where to go, because the music soon dissolves into entropy again. At this point, at 7:50, Miles simply says, “John.” McLaughlin begins to solo and the band picks up the groove again. Enough material was recorded in this way to create a separate track from an outtake (on which Miles did not play), titled “John McLaughlin.”
After recording “Bitches Brew,” the ensemble—without Maupin, Zawinul, McLaughlin, Brooks, and White [10]—performed “Sanctuary,” a Wayne Shorter composition already recorded in a more gentle, sparser version by the second great quintet in February 1968, with George Benson on guitar. Following this, the full complement of twelve musicians tried their hands on two Zawinul compositions, “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Orange Lady,” but these takes were rejected.
Shifting Personnel and Sounds
“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” (the title was a reference to Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile”) was recorded the next day. In this case the previous performances of the live quintet of the track led to problems with the studio rhythm section. The addition of seven other musicians significantly altered the feel and dynamics of the piece, and Jack DeJohnette’s medium-tempo, fairly loose live groove didn’t appear to work.
“Lenny and Jack were playing and somehow things didn’t jell,” Don Alias explained. “I think Miles really wanted that Buddy Miles sound; he was just getting into the funk thing. He counted off the second time, and it wasn’t happening. I couldn’t take it any longer. I had been practicing this drum rhythm while I was in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘I’ve got the perfect rhythm for this tune.’ I can’t take it any longer and Miles is about to count off for the third time and I interrupted and said, ‘Miles, I’ve got this rhythm and I think it would go with the tune.’ So he said: ‘Go over and play it.’ I sat down and played it, and he said: ‘Show Jack, show Jack.’ And it’s one of those kind of rhythms where you don’t need any chops. Jack couldn’t get it, so Miles said to me: ‘Just stay there’ [on Lenny White’s drumset]. That’s how I ended up being one of the drumset players on ‘Miles Runs the Voodoo Down.’” [11]
On the third and final recording day, White was back in his drum seat and Alias on congas. The 13th musician, Larry Young, was added to the ensemble on electric piano, creating once again a battery of three keyboard players, as on In a Silent Way. Two long tracks, “Spanish Key” and Zawinul’s “Pharaoh’s Dance,” were put to tape. Altogether, a wealth of material had been recorded over the three days.
“The sessions would go till about three or four in the afternoon, and once the three days were over we went to Miles’ house, and listened to all the unedited tapes,” White remembered. “Half a year later a record came out that was totally different, because they’d taken the front end of one tune and put that in the middle and so on. Basically Teo Macero had made a whole other thing out of it. I suspect that Miles said to Teo: ‘Go ahead and do what you think best,’ and that Miles then approved or disapproved what had been done.”
Enter Teo Macero
The tape editing on the two opening pieces of the album, “Pharaoh’s Dance” and the title track, is remarkably complex, and has a far-reaching effect on the music. In addition, Macero expanded his tool kit with studio effects like echo, reverb and slap (tape) delay, the latter courtesy of a machine called the Teo One, made by technicians at Columbia. This effect can most clearly be heard on the trumpet in the beginning section of “Bitches Brew” and “Pharaoh’s Dance” at 8:41.
Enrico Merlin’s research, as well as the 1998 release of the four-CD boxed set The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, has cast important new light on the album’s postproduction process. They show how Macero did not only use tape editing to glue together large musical sections, as on “Circle in the Round” or In a Silent Way, but extended his scope to editing tiny musical segments to create brand-new musical themes. Courtesy of both approaches, “Pharaoh’s Dance” contains an astonishing 17 edits. [12] Its famous stop-start opening theme was entirely constructed during postproduction, using repeat loops of 15- and 31-second fragments of tape, while thematic micro-edits occur between 8:53 and 9:00, where a one-second-long fragment appearing at 8:39 is repeated five times.
“I had carte blanche to work with the material,” Macero explained. “I could move anything around and what I would do is record everything, right from beginning to end, mix it all down and then take all those tapes back to the editing room and listen to them and say: ‘This is a good little piece here, this matches with that, put this here,’ etc., and then add in all the effects—the electronics, the delays and overlays. [I would] be working it out in the studio and take it back and re-edit it—front to back, back to front and the middle somewhere else and make it into a piece. I was a madman in the engineering room. Right after I’d put it together I’d send it to Miles and ask, ‘How do you like it?’ And he used to say, ‘That’s fine,’ or ‘That’s OK,’ or ‘I thought you’d do that.’ He never saw the work that had to be done on those tapes. I’d have to work on those tapes for four or five weeks to make them sound right.” [13]
It appears that Macero found part of his inspiration for his postproduction treatments on Bitches Brew in classical music. The English composer Paul Buckmaster pointed out that on “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Bitches Brew” the producer created structures that have echoes of the sonata form that was at the heart of late-18th- and 19th-century instrumental music. The basic elements of the sonata form, employed by composers like Mozart and Beethoven, are an opening exposition with two themes, a middle section called a development (in which the exposition material is worked through in many variations), a recapitulation (which contains a repetition of the two themes of the exposition), and a final coda.Volume 0%00:0100:01
In “Pharaoh’s Dance” the section 00:00 to 02:32 can be called the exposition, since it contains two basic themes, with theme number one first played between 00:00 and 00:15 and theme number two at 00:46. Starting at 02:32 is a solo section, or “development,” containing references to the material of the “exposition” at 02:54 and 07:55. A dramatic section is edited in between 08:29 and 08:42, with tape delay added to Miles’ horn, then repeated at 08:44 to 08:53, and followed by a one-second tape loop that repeats five times between 8:53 and 9:00. When Miles at long last plays Zawinul’s stirring main theme (referred to earlier in the track, but never actually played), at 16:38, it can be considered the coda.
The influence of the sonata form on the structure of “Bitches Brew” is not as clear-cut, but still apparent. Enrico Merlin’s analysis notes 15 edits in the piece, including (as in “Pharaoh’s Dance”) several short tape loops that create a new theme (in this case at 03:01, 03:07, 03:12, 03:17, and 03:27). Another section that leaps out at the listener is the tape loop from 10:36 to 10:52, where Macero creates excitement by looping a short trumpet phrase, making it sound like a precomposed theme. The section from 00:00 to 03:32 can be called the exposition, with the first theme appearing at 00:00 (the bass vamp) and at 00:41 (the corresponding melodic theme). The second theme is pasted in at 02:50. The development occurs between 03:32 and 14:36, with solos by Miles, McLaughlin, Shorter and Corea. At 14:36 there’s a recapitulation of the first theme, followed by another development, beginning at 17:20. The final recapitulation, a literal repeat of the first 02:50, can be interpreted as a coda.
Macero’s strong editorial involvement in “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Bitches Brew,” as well as his selection of “John McLaughlin” for inclusion on the album, may well have to do with the fact that these were the tracks that had not been broken in by the live band. Miles most likely did not have a clear vision for the final structure. By contrast, “Spanish Key,” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” and “Sanctuary” had all been played live, giving Miles time to develop a functional structure. Only “Sanctuary” contains an edit, at 05:13, at which point Macero pasted in another take. It also seems likely that Macero was influenced in his edits by the form Miles had given to these three tracks, especially “Spanish Key,” which has a circular structure, with Miles stating the main theme at 00:36, 09:17 and 16:48, and the solo section containing several references to the main theme.
“There’s very little dialogue between Miles and myself,” Macero elaborated on his working relationship with Miles. “If we say 20 words in the course of a three-hour session, that’s a lot. But there’s no mystery. I spend as much time listening to it as he spent creating it. He may have gone over a composition in his mind, mentally, for weeks, and that’s exactly what I do when I listen to the tape. One thing about Miles and his music, in working with Miles you can experiment as much as you wish. You can take his music, you can cut it up, you can put the filters in, you can do anything you want to it as long as he knows who it is. I mean, he’s not going to let just anyone do it. I don’t take liberties on my own, unless I check with him. The final decision is up to the artist, because he has to live with the record.” [14]
The genius of Macero’s editing on Bitches Brew, and his role in Miles’ electric music in general, can be compared to that of George Martin’s work with the Beatles. Like Martin, Macero often added a classical sensibility to his protégé’s music, and worked with him over a long period of time (from 1958 to 1983). Yet his influence, especially in the case of Davis, has not been widely recognized. [15]
Publicly, Miles rarely acknowledged Macero’s role. He mentioned the producer just a few times in his autobiography, and only in passing. It’s not hard to suspect that this may have had to do with their love-hate relationship, exemplified by Miles’ refusal to talk to Macero for more than two years after the producer was involved in the release of Quiet Nights in 1964. Huge rows, as well as Macero’s assertion that their relationship was like “matrimony,” [16] confirm the picture of a creatively fruitful but personally tension-filled connection.
In Macero’s view, “Miles always wanted to take the credit for everything—on a lot of albums he didn’t want the names of the musicians on the cover.” [17] Once, when Macero asked for a bonus, he claims that Miles responded, “I don’t think you deserve it. Anybody could have done it.” [18] The most likely reason for Miles’ reluctance to openly credit Macero was that he saw at several stages during his life how white men would take, or be given, the credit for black men’s creative achievements. In his autobiography Miles stated, “Some people have written that doing Bitches Brew was Clive Davis’ [head of Columbia at the time] or Teo Macero’s idea. That’s a lie, because they didn’t have nothing to do with none of it. Again, it was white people trying to give some credit to other white people where it wasn’t deserved, because the record became a breakthrough concept, very innovative. They were going to rewrite history after the fact like they always do.” [19] And in a 1973 interview Miles complained, “As long as I’ve been playing, they never say I done anything. They always say that some white guy did it.” [20] (This was the reason why he had the text “Directions in Music by Miles Davis” placed on the covers of Filles de Kilimanjaro and In a Silent Way. Bitches Brew was his last recording to carry the legend.)
But just like the enormous influence of George Martin doesn’t detract from the genius of the Beatles, emphasizing the importance of Macero in no way diminishes Miles’ greatness. In reality, the freedom Miles gave to Macero is an illustration of the trumpeter’s greatness. Many modern artists tend to want to control every aspect of record-making, producing and sometimes engineering their own albums. This does not necessarily lead to better results. Macero once noted, “Miles would leave it up to me to make all the fucking decisions. People today, they want to be producer, writer, they want to do everything. I’m saying, Jesus Christ, then do it yourself. Save yourself some money.” [21]
Great art has more chance of emerging when artists are acutely aware of their strengths and limitations. As an improvisational, here-and-now musician pur sang, Miles did not have the inclination, the patience or the skills to get deeply involved in the time-consuming, laborious postproduction process. Moreover, one of Miles’ main strengths was the freedom he allowed the musicians with whom he worked. Delegating responsibility for the postproduction process to Macero reflects the same attitude. Given how sacrosanct music was to Miles, he must have trusted Macero deeply.
“Both of us have learned something from the things we’ve done together,” Macero remarked. “I learned from the standpoint of editing, shifting the compositions around. It’s a creative process being a producer with Miles. In fact, it’s more of a creative process than it is with any other artist. You have to know something about the music. You really need to be a composer, because for a lot of it he relies on you and your judgment. I’m going through them as a composer, Miles as a composer-musician-performer. You must be very creative along with the artist, because if you’re not as creative as he is—forget it.” [22]
It seems that Miles and Macero wanted to force attention on the collaborative nature of their work by placing the two most-edited and experimental tracks, “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Bitches Brew,” at the beginning of the album. They are like a declaration of intent. Macero’s edits are not immediately apparent, but create a subliminal sense of both unrest and structure, something that’s initially hard to grasp, but immediately lifts the music out of the level of a jam. The edits are also successful in that they do not detract from the interaction between Miles and the ensemble. Although McLaughlin, the keyboardists, Maupin, Shorter and Holland all take solos, they are mixed in a way that makes them float momentarily on top of the brew. Unlike Miles, they do not rise above it. This has led some jazz critics to complain that Bitches Brew doesn’t really contain any solos, thereby not only missing the solos that were actually there, but more importantly the point that the musical essence of the album is not about sequences of solos, but about the interplay between Miles and his ensemble.
Miles’ trumpet is mixed much further to the front, like a singer. This makes it possible to hear the strength and range of his playing, the way he phrases his notes and guided the other musicians. After five years of being pushed to his limit in the second great quintet, and being in good health, he was at the peak of his trumpet-playing powers. Miles’ sound is round, full and powerful, and the way he drives the ensemble with often declamatory phrases that have predominantly a rhythmic rather than a melodic function is remarkable. A good example is his solo in “Pharaoh’s Dance” starting at 03:34, where he sounds like he’s wrestling, or perhaps boxing, with the band, pushing it, pulling it, steering it and creating constant tension and release. Rather than a soloist playing over changes, Miles creates contrast, interest and excitement in relation to a large mass of players that on their own could easily have sunk into amorphous anonymity.
Billy Cobham, an up-and-coming drummer at the time, played on the additional material on The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions. [23] Cobham still had the sound of awe in his voice when he remembered: “Miles was just coming out of the greatest band that he’d ever had, the second great quintet, and his trumpet playing was at a peak. He always played the ultimate musical phrase, even if it wasn’t technically correct. It was unbelievable! When you listen to Freddie Hubbard you hear trumpet proficiency par excellence, and then you hear Miles and he had a way of taking what Freddie did and compacting it in five notes. Those five notes said it all. The air around them became musical, and the silence became more profound and important. You just don’t learn that. Miles somehow could just do that. He was like Merlin the magician. It was based on Miles’ innate ability to use space. Not playing became more important than playing. But it had to be the right spaces at the right time! It was uncanny how he’d play one note, and that note would carry through five or eight bars of changes. That note would be the note.”
A major piece of work by any definition, “Pharaoh’s Dance” was never performed live, and one wonders whether Miles had any doubts about the track’s success. The title track, on the other hand, was a staple of the live band for more than two years, until October of 1971. It was invariably played at about half the length of the album time (26:58), thereby raising the issue of the extreme length of the two opening tracks of the album. (“Pharaoh’s Dance” clocks in at 20:05.) There are two ways of looking at this. If one relates to the music as an “abstract,” ambient atmosphere, a jungle environment that one can enter and roam, the length of these tracks becomes a significant aspect of their attraction. But from a more traditional, figurative perspective, in which the focus is on solos, themes, grooves, variety, development, “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Bitches Brew” are too long, and would both work better if cut substantially. The drastic cut in the length of “Bitches Brew” during live performances was partly due to the smaller size of the live band, but also suggests that Miles shared this opinion.
As with “Circle in the Round,” Macero’s editing was only partly successful. This is demonstrated by “John McLaughlin,” the outtake from the track “Bitches Brew.” It is only 04:22 long and sustains interest from beginning to end, making it a good example of how this music works in a much tighter format. Moreover, the major tracks that weren’t edited, “Spanish Key” and “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” are much more focused, and contain Miles’ best solos. “Spanish Key,” a revisiting of the Spanish influences Miles had explored on Sketches of Spain and “Flamenco Sketches” on Kind of Blue, is a flowing, fluent boogie based around several different scales and tonal centers. Enrico Merlin has pointed out that the track employs what he calls “coded phrases,” meaning musical cues with which the band is steered towards the next musical section. “[The] modulations are always initiated by the soloist who performs a phrase in the new key, thus signaling his own wish to change the tonal center,” Merlin wrote. “This device was used for the first time in ‘Flamenco Sketches.’ I believe that Davis was trying, and he succeeded brilliantly, to adapt the idea of ‘Flamenco Sketches’ to the musical experimentation of that time [the late ’60s].” [24] Sweltering and riveting throughout, “Spanish Key” would have been even stronger had it ended around 13 minutes, when the music appears to come to a natural halt. “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” is probably the most successful track on Bitches Brew, courtesy of a beautiful, deep bass line, Alias’ slow-burning, driving New Orleans drum groove, a tight structure, and excellent solos by Miles, McLaughlin, Shorter and Zawinul. It remained a favorite in live performance until August 1970. Finally, the version of “Sanctuary” on Bitches Brew is expressive and muscular, but lacks the subtlety of the first recording with the second great quintet in February of 1968.
Regardless of how the quality of the music on Bitches Brew is judged, it is important to recognize the astonishing concoction of influences that had gone into Miles’ cauldron. Miles had combined improvisational working methods that he developed in the late ’50s with musical influences such as rock, folk, soul and African music. Moreover, the ensemble’s collective improvisation, based on the working methods developed by the second great quintet, and the call-and-response structure between Miles and the ensemble, both find their roots in early jazz. In his autobiography Miles likened Bitches Brew‘s collective improvisations to the jam sessions he attended at Minton’s in Harlem in the late ’40s. Like many writers, Miles also made comparisons between the recording’s kaleidoscopic sound world and the noises of New York City. Then, in the words of Lenny White, he mixed in a “dash” of this musician and that composer, not only skillfully blending their qualities, but also enlarging jazz and rock’s sonic palette with bass clarinet and extensive percussion. Both were novel sounds in jazz and rock music around 1969.
To this explosive mixture Teo Macero added mid-20th-century studio trickery, a 19th-century classical-music awareness of structure, and a way of looking at music as abstract blocks of sound, which he freely cut and moved around. In other words, the two most heavily edited tracks on Bitches Brew were hybrids of figurative and abstract art. They combined, respectively, the traditional musical line of something akin to a sonata form with the cut-and-paste ideas that had come out of musique concrète, serial music and studio technology, which later influenced ambient and dance music. Add to this the strongly chromatic improvising of the keyboard players, which has echoes of classical atonal music, and it is clear that an impressive amount of influences went into the making of Bitches Brew. This is no doubt one of the major reasons for the recording’s immense success and influence. Virtually anyone willing to listen to it with an open mind is able to recognize something familiar in the music, despite the fact that it contains few easily identifiable melodies, hooks or vamps.
Bitches Brew encompasses about every musical polarity of the late ’60s, whether jazz and rock, classical and African, improvised and notated music, live playing and postproduction editing. Its greatness lies in how it managed to bridge these polarities, including and transcending all the disparate ingredients into a completely new whole, and ended up with much more than the sum of its components. Bitches Brew explores a new, intangible musical universe, and any attempt to fully explain or define its concept and its music will inevitably diminish it to some degree. If one must find a label for the music, Lenny White probably had a good stab at it when he called it “African-American classical music—a combination of the harmonic language developed in the West over several hundreds of years, played from an African-American perspective, with an African-American approach to rhythm.”
How Bitches Brew opened up a new, unknown musical paradigm is humorously illustrated by an anecdote told by Joe Zawinul that mirrors John McLaughlin’s incomprehension during the In a Silent Way sessions. The keyboardist had been so baffled by the Bitches Brew sessions that he didn’t even recognize the resulting music when he heard it later in another context. “I didn’t really like the sessions at the time,” Zawinul reminisced. “I didn’t think they were exciting enough. But a short while later I was at the CBS offices, and a secretary was playing this incredible music. It was really smoking. So I asked her, ‘Who the hell is this?’ And she replied, ‘It’s that Bitches Brew thing.’ I thought, Damn, that’s great.” [25]
Of course, the recording also had its era on its side. The late ’60s and early ’70s were full of music that people didn’t necessarily understand, but that made them feel alive, that spoke to them. It was a time when audiences were prepared to go out of their way to enjoy the unusual and the controversial. The energy and mystery of the music, the title, the eye-catching and ultra-hip cover and the stream-of-consciousness liner notes by Ralph J. Gleason all perfectly expressed the zeitgeist. All elements came together in one seamless package, and the effect was powerful: The recording sold 400,000 copies in its first year, and earned Miles a Grammy for Best Jazz Performance, Soloist with Large Group. As a result, Gleason’s showy words sounded prescient rather than hyped-up: “This music will change the world like Cool and Walkin’ did and now that communication is faster and more complete it may change it more deeply and quickly.”[26]
In addition to the music recorded during August of 1969, The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions also contains material from sessions in November of 1969, and January and February of 1970. The total amount of music is dramatically extended from the 94 minutes of the original album to almost 266 minutes. Some of the additional material had already been issued on the albums Big Fun, Circle in the Round and Live-Evil, but there are also nine previously unreleased tracks, totaling about 86 minutes of music.
Macero was invited by Columbia/Sony to participate in the creation of the boxed set, but declined after a first meeting. The long collaboration between Miles and Macero created a deep bond between the two men, and it’s understandable that since Miles’ passing, Macero sees himself as a custodian of his legacy. In assuming this role he has loudly declared to anyone who wanted to listen that he disagrees with the way Sony/Columbia is reissuing the Miles Davis back catalog in general, and The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions in particular. He boldly stated that “Miles Davis would never have agreed to the unreleased material being released, nor to the way the original material has been remixed and remastered,” and that’s to quote one of his milder exhortations. Macero has also supported the argument that the boxed set is a misnomer.
The original Bitches Brew sessions took place over the course of three days in August of 1969, and were complete in themselves. It appears a commercially inspired stretch to include material recorded several months later, with different personnel and a radically different musical feel, and declare it part of the Bitches Brew sessions. Reissue producer Bob Belden and executive producer Michael Cuscuna have reason to argue in the boxed set that Miles entered a new musical phase in March of 1970, when he started to work with a small, guitar-based group. However, the boxed set, awarded another Grammy in 1999 for “Best Boxed Recording Package,” could have been called something like The Bitches Brew Era, since the additional material can easily be seen as a phase in itself, typified by the addition of Indian instruments like sitar, tamboura and tabla. Most of this material has a pastoral atmosphere completely at odds with the storm of the original Bitches Brew sessions.
With regard to the issues that Macero raised concerning remixing and remastering, much of the Miles Davis music issued on CD by Sony during the late ’90s has undergone this process, including all four boxed sets released to date. The triple-Grammy-winning Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, as well as Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings, 1955-1961, were remixed from three tracks, and The Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-1968 from four tracks by Sony staff engineer Mark Wilder. The small amount of tracks meant that Wilder’s freedom to change the nature of the music was limited. However, Bitches Brew was recorded on eight-track, and involved multitudes of complex edits and intricate sound effects. This made it more difficult to reconstruct the original version in a remix, and gave the remixer much more freedom to impose his own vision. In addition, some of the original effect equipment, like the Teo One, was not available anymore, making an exact replication even harder. Finally, Wilder and Belden decided to make some fundamental changes to the sound and nature of the mix, leaving themselves open to accusations similar to those aimed at one time at the restorers of the Sistine Chapel.
“Let me make clear that when Sony told me that they wanted me to recreate the whole album, I knew immediately that we couldn’t do any tinkering or release alternative takes or extend pieces,” Belden explained in response. “I did not want to play Teo Macero. Instead, we wanted the boxed set to flow seamlessly. That is why we had to remix all the material. The two-track masters for the original Bitches Brew album were in bad shape, and there was a lot of disparity between them and the other material, whereas the previously unreleased stuff had not been mixed at all. Moreover, for the original LP they boosted the bottom and cut out the high end, taking out a lot of clarity. We put that clarity back in. We also decided to try to recreate what the musicians would have heard in the studio. There were always two distinct Fender Rhodes players, so we wanted to make sure that Chick Corea was always on the right and the guest on the left. That gives a sense of continuity. And we wanted to bring out the sound of Miles’ trumpet and make it sound more in the pocket, the way you would have heard it during studio playbacks. We wanted to bring out the natural interplay between the musicians. At the same time we followed Teo’s edits as faithfully as we could.”
“Of course it’s much more of a challenge to remix eight-tracks,” Wilder agreed. “But I was able to get a very accurate approximation of the original mixes. We tried to pay homage to Teo’s original edits and mixes as much as we could, but we also tried to bring out the musicality of the sessions. Those guys played some killing stuff that got a little lost in the technology of the mix and the postproduction. So yes, we tried to create a feeling of people playing music together. The musicality of what occurred during these sessions was paramount for us, and we wanted to remove some of the original mix technology to bring this out. They had made some very wild fader movements during the mix that we couldn’t replicate anyway. But at the same time there are those signature things that were done during the mix, the slap [tape] echoes on Miles’ trumpet, that we tried to replicate as best as we could. We would run my mixes and edits against the original LP version, and sometimes we’d compare with my version in one speaker and the original in the other to make sure that there were no edits that we had missed or mistimed. We worked amazingly hard on this.”
Phrases like “removing some of the original mix technology” or “recreate what the musicians would have heard in the studio” will alarm purists. But as always, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and from this perspective the work of Belden and Wilder is more than vindicated. All original edits are retained (although the new version of “Pharaoh’s Dance” curiously loses four seconds that were in the original version, 08:29 to 08:33) and the instrumental balance of the mixes on The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions does not sound significantly different from those of the original album. The sound is greatly improved, however, displaying more aliveness, depth, and detail, partly because the Dolby that suppressed the high end (as well as the hiss) in the original is removed. There’s a pleasant roundness to the new sound that was missing in the sometimes thin and abrasive-sounding original.
Belden and Wilder also succeeded in their aim of bringing out the interplay between the musicians. The improved high end especially has added a transparency that makes it easier to distinguish between the various percussion instruments, and to imagine oneself in the studio with the musicians. It seems like a cloud has lifted from the recordings, and some extra hiss is a small price to pay. Macero strongly criticized the new mixes, complaining that Miles sounded only “one inch tall,” but the overall consensus, including from the musicians who played on the sessions, is that the new mixes sound excellent. The parallel with the restoration of the Sistine Chapel that appears apt is that of the brighter colors that emerged, which initially shocked traditionalists.
The additional material included in The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions begins with four tracks recorded on November 19. Wayne Shorter was replaced by the eighteen-year-old saxophonist Steve Grossman, Dave Holland with Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette with Billy Cobham. Guest musicians Bennie Maupin, Harvey Brooks and John McLaughlin returned, and Herbie Hancock sat in as second keyboard player. Miles also added the exotic sounds of Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira, plus Khalil Balakrishna on sitar and Bihari Sharma on tabla. Corea was the only musician from the live band at these sessions, and there is some historical confusion with regards to the reasons.
In his autobiography, Miles stated that Wayne Shorter left the band “in late fall 1969” and that he then “broke up the band to find replacements.” [27] This is incorrect, because Shorter played with the live band until early March of 1970. Miles’ assertion that Shorter had “told me ahead of time when he was leaving” and that he wanted to try out new musicians (thereby adding to his growing list of stock company players) was probably closer to the mark.
The size of the band may suggest a direct line to the Bitches Brew sessions three months earlier, but the introduction of the Brazilian and Indian elements took things into a totally different direction. Indian music influences had become popular in the late ’60s, mainly through the Beatles’ and the counterculture’s interest in Eastern mysticism, and sitars were occasionally employed in Western popular music, especially psychedelic rock. Miles was one of the few jazz musicians who did more than just flirt with this influence, and Indian instruments intermittently played an important part in his music from 1969 to 1973.
During this stage in his career Miles appeared almost obsessed with incorporating as many disparate musical influences as possible, seemingly using anything or anyone he could lay his hands on. The question has often been asked whether Miles had a vision for the end result or was just randomly throwing things into his cauldron, and was as surprised by the results as anyone else.
“I think that Miles definitely had a vision,” Dave Holland commented. “But when you put together improvised music, you’re dealing with musicians and their approach and style of playing. One of the things I learnt from Miles is that you don’t come in with a fixed vision. The vision is there, but it is not finished. The composition a classical composer writes is finished, and all musicians do is interpret it. Improvised music is different. Part of your palette is the musicians you’re working with, and so with this group it will come out one way, and with that group it will come out another way. So if you ask me, ‘Did Miles have a vision?’ I’ll say ‘Yes.’ But ask, ‘Did he know what the end result would sound like?’ and I’d have to say ‘No.’ He couldn’t. When he was putting something together, he was listening and selecting what he liked. To me this is the great art of putting together improvised music. Miles worked in the tradition where you create a form that’s clear, but that also has enough room for the musicians to be creative with. Miles was giving us a context for the music, and then we found what we could do within that context.”
Still, throwing different musicians together to see what will happen is a risky approach, and this was demonstrated in a series of failures. The track “Great Expectations,” recorded on November 19, is an example. It was first released on Big Fun in 1974, and has a structure similar to that of “Nefertiti” in June of 1967, with a repeating main melody underpinned by an ever-varying drum section. The bass relentlessly plays a rock riff not dissimilar to that of “Peter Gunn,” and the Brazilian and Indian elements add some color and variation. But it’s not enough to save the rather dreary and repetitive effort, which is weak on the figurative side (an unengaging melody and little melodic development) and offers little on the abstract side (the atmosphere is feeble and unfocused).
Zawinul’s “Orange Lady,” recorded on the same day and also first released on Big Fun, is better, partly because the melodic line is more interesting, and partly because it is reasonably successful as a tone poem, an exercise in creating a mood. The other two tracks recorded during this session were previously unreleased, and, as Macero argued, with good reason. “Yaphet” sounds like it starts where “Orange Lady” left off, meanders for nearly 10 minutes, and adds nothing significant whatsoever. “Corrado” is no more than a directionless 13-minute jam. Apart from Miles’ incisive playing, it has no engaging features.
Things didn’t get much better at the next session nine days later on November 28, with a similar ensemble. Organist Larry Young joined Hancock and Corea, and possibly to inject some energy from tried-and-tested elements, Miles reinstated his live band rhythm section: Holland played bass, and DeJohnette was on drums next to Cobham. The previously unreleased “Trevere” is a kernel of an idea that never takes off, and halfway through the band comes to a halt, from the sound of it because they had no clue where to take things next.
The same problems also apply to “The Big Green Serpent,” which is basically a group of musicians trying out an idea and getting nowhere. Belden sounds almost apologetic about the inclusion of “The Little Blue Frog,” and its alternate take (“A jam in G. That’s all it really is. Just a jam.”) [28], but at least the musicians sound as if they’re having fun, and McLaughlin and the rhythm section lay down a satisfactory groove. A 02:42 section of “The Little Blue Frog” was released as a single in the United States in April of 1970, before the release of Bitches Brew, and in France in 1973, and must have left listeners completely at a loss. “What were they (and who were they?) thinking?” [29] indeed.
The Impact of the Shooting Incident
The question arises why these two sessions were such failures. One explanation may be the shooting incident that occurred in October of 1969. The Birdland affair in August of 1959, when Miles had been beaten and arrested by two New York police officers, had shown how devastating the impact of extramusical dramas on Miles’ musical progress could be. It abruptly cut short the rising creative curve that culminated in Kind of Blue and marked the beginnings of a three-and-a-half-year creative wasteland. Although less directly related to racial issues, and therefore emotionally less close to the bone, the episode in October of 1969 was shocking enough, and it would not be surprising if it caused a creative dip in the months following.
In Miles’ memory, he and Marguerite Eskridge were unexpectedly shot at when they were talking and kissing in front of her apartment. [30] Eskridge remembered the incident differently. “Miles was playing at the Blue Coronet Club in Brooklyn,” she recounted. “He had supposedly been getting calls that he should not be playing there unless he booked through a particular agency. I had a premonition that night at the club that something was going to happen. At one stage I literally felt blood trickling down the side of my face, even though I was never shot. After the gig Miles drove me home in his Ferrari, and he kept looking in the rearview mirror. At one point he said, ‘There’s a gypsy cab following us.’ He tried to lose it a few times, and then we pulled in next to the building where I lived in Brooklyn. A few moments later he saw the car coming in from the rear, and said, ‘Duck down.’ We both ducked. At that point a lot of shots were fired from the car, and then it drove away. We were still sitting in the car because I had been taking my time pulling out my keys and everything. If I had gotten right out and gotten up to the outside door I would have been standing unprotected, and I would clearly have been shot. Miles had been grazed slightly at his side, a bullet had gone through his leather jacket. The car had trapped a lot of the bullets. We went to the hospital and at about 5 a.m. the police came out and read me my rights! I mean, we were the victims! They wouldn’t say what we were being charged for, but they took us to the police station, and then finally I found out that they believed that there was marijuana in the car. Later on, all charges were dropped because they found that it was nothing but herbal teas.”
Miles said that he had been shot at because some black promoters were angry with him for using white promoters to do his bookings, but saxophonist Dave Liebman claimed it was the result of a drug deal gone wrong. “He was definitely involved in something, you know—questionable characters, that’s for sure.” [31] The unfounded suspicions of the police also give this story a race-related slant, and may well have heightened the impact the incident had on Miles. Whatever its background, in the end the link between the shooting and the failure of the November sessions is speculative. If we are to look for musical reasons, a possible explanation is that the many new, young musicians felt inhibited by Miles’ presence, and disoriented by his unorthodox working methods.
The Magical Miles Presence
“When [the musicians] are in that studio it’s like God coming—oh, oh, here he comes,” Macero recalled. “They stop talking, they don’t fool around, they tend to business and they listen, and when he stops, they stop. He is the teacher, he is the one who’s sort of pulling the strings. He’s the professor. He’s the God that they look up to and they never disagreed, to my knowledge, in the studio. If they did, they got a goddamn drumstick over their head, and I’ve seen that happen, too.” [32]
“As far as I was concerned, all the people around me were light years ahead of what I was capable of doing,” Cobham explained. “So all I could do was shut up and absorb and hope that something would stick. For me it was like school time, ten times graduate school. Far beyond any institution. Everything was experimentation. There was not one moment when whatever was on a piece of paper was not changed. That’s why there were no stems on the notes. Nothing was tied. There might be three notes and then a space and then four tones, and then a space, and then two notes. You’d have to generally know how it was phrased, but it didn’t necessarily mean that it was going to stay like that. His instructions were very minimal, almost Zen. He would give me very little to work with. The very rare times he talked to me, it was something like: ‘I need something from you. Give me something between the Latin and the jazz vein.’ I was blown away by the fact that he even acknowledged that he liked what I did. I was just like, eyes open, ears open, absorbing as much as I could.”
Cobham clearly was in awe, and this feeling was shared by several of the other new musicians, possibly causing them to play inhibited. Miles’ darker side was surely a contributing factor. According to many eyewitnesses he could be ruthless in the way he handled people, taking advantage of them if they allowed it, testing them to see how far he could go. He respected those who stood up to him, but musicians who couldn’t, didn’t last long. For this reason some musicians were not only in awe, but actively scared of him.
“His perceptions of people were so intuitive,” explained Lydia DeJohnette. “In one second he would know who you were and what you wanted. And if he felt where you were coming from wasn’t centered, if you couldn’t look him in the eye, if he didn’t think he could treat you as an equal, he would just put you away. He could destroy people emotionally.”
“There was always a lot of magic in working with him,” Jack DeJohnette added. “Always a lot of challenges. You always had to be prepared for the unexpected. You had to be on your toes and alert. He kept you thinking all the time, and that was fun. You never knew what was going to happen, and that made it exciting, but also very challenging. Personally I was never afraid of Miles, but I’ve seen people who were. He had a bitter side and a very loving side. He was a visionary and very intuitive, and he could read people like he could read music. He immediately knew your vulnerabilities and could press your buttons.”
Steve Grossman elaborated on the same theme when he remarked that, even though it was an incredible break for him to be playing with Miles at such a young age, it was also nerve-racking. “Miles was just such a great person and very encouraging. He really tried to make me feel at ease. But he was one of my favorite musicians since I was eight years old, so it was difficult. Also, I was used to playing straight-ahead jazz and to suddenly go into this environment where everyone had a lot more experience, I would say I was inhibited.”
“I was terrified for the first month,” Airto Moreira recalled. [33] The air of danger and the unexpected that always hung around Miles was one way in which he kept his musicians on their toes, fully alive to the present moment and to music. But it could be counterproductive. Perhaps this was the case in November of 1969, when several of the new musicians played “inhibited,” and/or “scared of Miles.” A pointer in this direction is the fact that the following sessions, on January 27 and 28 and February 6, were far superior. The new musicians may well have become accustomed to Miles’ presence, gaining in confidence, and daring to open up more. In addition, Miles seemed to have come to the conclusion that the experiments with a large group of musicians had run their course, because his studio ensembles were getting smaller, and the music better.
Back to the Studio
On January 27, 1970, Grossman was absent and Shorter returned on soprano sax, Zawinul replaced Hancock and Young, and McLaughlin, Brooks and Sharma were dropped. This reduced the ensemble from 14 to 10 players. “Lonely Fire,” first released on Big Fun, starts in a similar ambient mood as “Orange Lady.” Zawinul’s theme sets up a powerful atmosphere, and is repeated over and over again with the rhythm section playing variations underneath, as in “Nefertiti” and “Great Expectations.” “Lonely Fire” threatens to meander too long for its own good as a tone poem, but entices again when Holland embarks on a driving rhythm around the 11-minute mark, with Chick Corea throwing in Eastern-sounding scales. It works, but it’s not a great track, and overly long at more than 21 minutes.
“Guinnevere” was first released in 1979 as part of the Circle in the Round set. A composition by David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, it is another showcase for Miles’ interest in American folk music. Little happens in the 21-minute-long track, and for much of the time the melody is played over a very slow four-note bass line. But the atmosphere is nevertheless gripping, probably due to the focus and simplicity of the playing. Contrary to the music on the two sessions in November, the musicians sound as if they’re playing with a unified purpose. It may be a “period piece,” [34] but its pastoral atmosphere still carries some power decades later.
The session of January 28, with the same group as the day before, but with McLaughlin instead of Balakrishna, was another improvement. Perhaps Miles also felt that his compositional ideas had not been giving him the results he wanted, because for this session and the session of February 6, he did not use his own material, but tried his hand at one composition by Shorter, and four by Zawinul.
Shorter’s “Feio” is performed in a similar way as “Guinnevere,” with Holland playing a slow, three-note bass line, the horns somberly blowing the top line, and the spaces being filled up by drums, Moreira’s percussion, and some screaming electric guitar splashes by McLaughlin. It works still better than “Guinnevere,” perhaps because the track is only half as long, and McLaughlin, Moreira, and DeJohnette create considerable interest as well as a potent atmosphere. Zawinul’s “Double Image” completed the day’s work in a version that’s more straightforward and less raw than the one recorded on February 6 and released in 1971 on Live-Evil.
On February 6 Bennie Maupin was replaced by a sitar player, not credited on The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, but named as Balakrishna on the liner notes for Live-Evil. Suddenly and inexplicably everything fell into place. The track “Recollections,” based on a Zawinul folk composition not dissimilar to “In a Silent Way,” is simply gorgeous. It is beautifully executed, with a similarly compelling, frozen-in-time atmosphere as Miles’ version of said song, all the musicians perfectly aligned with each other, and McLaughlin plays some graceful and elegant folk-influenced fills that are very different from the stabbing staccato riffs that sharpened “In a Silent Way.” “Recollections” is among the most pastoral pieces Miles ever recorded and entirely successful as an ambient piece of music. The same applies to the short “Take It or Leave It,” actually the middle section of Zawinul’s “In a Silent Way.”
Finally, the version of “Double Image” recorded on this day is a triumph. The rhythm is opened up from the fairly standard way it had been played when the same track was recorded a week earlier and transformed into a funky stop-start affair, with a screaming electric guitar filling the gaps. It’s a format that Miles would explore several times during the early ’70s. Although there is still a lot of improvisation going on, the role of the rhythm section is tightly circumscribed. The track is more firmly in rock territory than anything Miles had done up to this point, echoing rock avant-garde rather than free jazz. This is the first sign of Miles formulating a new, rockier, guitar-centered studio direction, which he would bring to fruition in the months following on A Tribute to Jack Johnson.
Endnotes
1. Carlos Santana, “Remembering Miles and Bitches Brew,” in The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions (Columbia/Legacy, 1998): 7–8.
2. Tomlinson, “Musical Dialogician,” in Kirchner, Miles Davis Reader, 247.
3. Greg Hall. “Teo: The Man Behind the Scene,” Down Beat, (July 1974): 14.
4. Quincy Troupe, “Overview Essay—Bitches Brew,” in The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, 92.
5. Hall, “Man Behind the Scene,” 14.
6. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 302.
7. Ibid., 289.
8. Ouellette, “Bitches Brew,” 34. Miles also claimed in his autobiography to have met and been influenced by Paul Buckmaster, an English composer and cellist with a classical music background who was exploring jazz and rock at the time. However, Buckmaster does not remember meeting Miles until November 1, 1969, after the trumpeter’s concert at Hammersmith Odeon in London. Given that the Bitches Brew sessions happened two-and-a-half months earlier, it is difficult to see how the then little-known Buckmaster could have influenced Miles. Miles must have misconstrued the sequence of events in his memory. These inconsistencies demonstrate that not everything the book contains can unquestionably be accepted as the definitive truth.
9. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 289–290.
10. Lenny White claimed that he played on this new version, but only Jack DeJohnette is credited, and the aural evidence only reveals one drummer.
11. Bob Belden, “Session-by-Session Analysis,” The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, (Columbia/Legacy, 1998): 125.
12. Strangely, Bob Belden’s annotations in The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions make mention of nineteen edits, but only list sixteen in the detailed editing chart (see page 129). Enrico Merlin distinguishes seventeen edits in his sessionography, page 335. Incidentally, all track timings in this chapter refer to The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions.
13. Joel Lewis, “Running the Voodoo Down,” The Wire (December 1994): 24.
14. Hall, “Man Behind the Scene,” 14–15.
15. This may be the reason Teo Macero displayed a certain bitterness upon reaching old-age--he “knows how to hold a grudge” noted Eric Olsen et al in The Encyclopedia of Record Producers (see page 485)--and why he refused to be interviewed unless paid substantial sums of money. Although he graciously took this writer out for lunch and answered some brief questions over the phone, since no funds were available, many valuable observations and anecdotes sadly remained off the record.
16. Hall, “Miles: Today’s Most Influential Contemporary Musician,” Down Beat (July 1974): 14.
17. Lewis, “Voodoo Down,” 24.
18. Eric Olsen et al, Encyclopedia of Record Producers, 486.
19. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 290.
20. Davis, “Good Rhythm Section,” in Carner, Miles Davis Companion, 155.
21. Olsen et al, Encyclopedia of Record Producers, 487.
22. Hall, “Man Behind the Scene,” 13.
23. There has been some controversy around Billy Cobham’s claims that he played on the original Bitches Brew sessions, something that was hotly denied by Lennie White. When asked about this, Cobham answered that he felt that the whole issue was blown out of all proportion, because he’s not sure what sessions he played on at all. Apparently Miles gave him a copy of Bitches Brew with his compliments. Since the album came out several months after the November 1969 and January and February 1970 sessions, of which Cobham had been a part, and the music was radically altered through editing, the drummer genuinely believed for a long time that he had played on the original album. Mindful of how Joe Zawinul did not recognize Bitches Brew when it was played to him, such confusions are understandable. Many musicians had no idea on which sessions they had actually played, and when and whether and how the material was released. Cobham also doesn’t remember playing triangle, although he is credited as having played the instrument on the session of February 6, 1970. As so often, the mists of time appear to have covered a lot of historical detail.
24. Merlin elaborated on his concept of “coded phrases” in a lecture called “Code MD: Coded Phrases in the First ‘Electric Period,’” which was given during a conference called Miles Davis and American Culture II, at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, on May 10 and 11, 1996. A transcript, including musical examples and a details analysis of “Spanish Key,” is available on Pete Losin’s Miles Ahead site, at www.wam.umd.edu/
~losinp/music/code_md.html
25. Ouellette, “Bitches Brew,” 37.
26. Ralph J. Gleason, “Original LP Liner Notes to Bitches Brew,” in The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, (Columbia/Legacy, 1998): 35.
27. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 301.
28. Belden, “Session-by-Session Analysis,” 135.
29. Ibid., 135.
30. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 296–297.
31. Fisher, Davis and Liebman, 78.
32. Hall, “Man Behind the Scene,” 15.
33. Lee Underwood, “Airto and his Incredible Gong Show,” Down Beat, (April 1978): 16; quoted by Chambers, Milestones, 192.
34. James Isaacs, liner notes for CD re-issue of Circle in the Round, (Columbia, 1979): 9.
"As a musician and as an artist, I have always wanted to reach as many people as I could through my music. And I have never been ashamed of that. Because I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all other dead things that were once considered artistic. I always thought it should reach as many people as it could, like so-called popular music, and why not? I never was one of those people who thought less was better: the fewer who hear you, the better you are, because what you're doing is just too complex for a lot of people to understand. A lot of jazz musicians say in public that they feel this way, that they would have to compromise their art to reach a whole lot of people. But in secret they want to reach as many people as they can, too. Now, I'm not going to call their names. It's not important. But I always thought that music had no boundaries, no limits to where it could grow and go, no restrictions on its creativity. Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is. And I always hated categories. Always. Never thought it had any place in music."
--Miles Davis on jazz and popular music, from Miles: The Autobiography (1989), p. 205
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/16/magazine/miles-davis.html
Miles Davis
by Amiri Baraka
June 16, 1985
New York Times
FOR MANY YEARS OF MY LIFE, MILES DAVIS was my ultimate culture hero: artist, cool man, bad dude, hipster, clear as daylight and funky as revelation. His influence and effect on the music called jazz and its players is still somewhat astonishing.
Davis, as composer and musician, has been at the center of one stream of African-American music and its variations and performers for 40 years - since he first arrived in New York City in 1944 from East St. Louis, Ill., to look for Charlie (Yardbird) Parker, the saxophone genius, and enroll at Juilliard.
But like the music itself, Davis's influence has not been limited to jazz musicians. Davis is almost as well known by contemporary European and Euro-American classical composers and followers; he was the recipient of Denmark's Sonning Prize for lifetime achievement, the first time a jazz musician has received the award. Blues people, rock folk, reggae runners, gospel chanters, neoclassical or neoromantic revelers and on out - all know his music. And the most sensitive have been directly changed by it.
Davis, who helps open the Kool Jazz Festival this Friday at Avery Fisher Hall, is perceived by a wide cross section of artists as a creative artist of the highest and most intense level. Few artists of my generation, whether writers, painters or dancers, do not know the trumpeter's work. Few, too, remain uninfluenced in some way by his work. Many, for instance, sculpted or painted while ''Kind of Blue'' intoned its modal hipness. Many used such pieces as ''Sketches of Spain'' or ''Round About Midnight'' to create their dances. Many stayed up all night whacking away at the typewriter while ''Walkin' '' or ''Steamin' '' made the darkness give up its lonely esthetic to art.
The prospect of finally doing a piece on the man, of having to interview him, meet him up close, was very important to me for these reasons and more. I remember one night in 1960 when I was a little boy of 25 trying to be a jazz critic. I had gone without benefit of a sponsor to the Village Vanguard where Davis was playing.
I don't remember the exact group he had with him then, but John Coltrane, the brilliant tenor saxophonist, was gone. Sax man Hank Mobley, one of my road buddies whom I'd met in Newark, was with Davis.
When I went into the back room, which still passes as a dressing room, the musicians were spread out, casually rapping, Davis all the way to the rear like a point. He waved off my timid request, mumbling something, I guess, about how he didn't want to be bothered.
With that youthful mixture of angry rejection and bold daring, I spat back, saying he would have talked had I been a big-name jazz critic.
The prospect of an interview raised the memory of that history and made me smile a little. Now, coming into the well-appointed, mirror-sparkling bar at the United Nations Plaza Hotel, I wondered would he remember.
My very first impression, watching this beautiful man moving gracefully yet walking with a cane and talking to waiters he knew, is that Miles Davis, who recently turned 59, looks like a real celebrity. His dress sets the rest of him off -as he means it to. His deep, black-brown skin is still a marvel of the African esthetic. At once, his old sobriquet - the Black Prince - comes back. He handles the gold-topped cane like a casual guidon of elegance. The cane becomes the focus, rather than the condition that once required it. Davis wears an unbelievably hip fisherman's cap made of what looks like black raffia, a black military-style jacket, ballooning, black pants and black clogs - along with some extremely expensive-looking sunglasses and the cane.
Old-time Miles Davis worshippers have always dug Davis's ''vines'' (clothing) -whether the cap pulled down around his ears on the hot 1950's ''Dig'' album, or the green button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up, and the impenetrable shades on ''Milestones.'' He was always stylish. Although - and this is instructive as to our perception of the whole esthetic - as Davis got more into the music called ''fusion'' (the merging of cool jazz lines with rhythm-and-blues), he began to wear some wild, Sly and the Family Stone-styled threads we old-time neo-Ivy intellectuals thought of as frankly out. (''Red brightens you up,'' Davis says at a later point. ''Audiences love you even if you ain't doing nothing - even if you're terrible.'' Then he adds, ''If I don't have on something I like, I can't play.'') What I got from Miles Davis in conversation and from his manner is a man always, as the writer Richard Wright said the intellectual and artist must be, ''at the top of his time,'' aware of who he is and what they are and astride them both.
Dizzy Gillespie recently told me the night the Blue Note jazz club celebrated the famed trumpeter's birthday, as well as its own, that Davis ''was like a man who had made a pact with himself . . . to never repeat himself.'' Davis himself has said it is like a ''curse'' to constantly change. But change is a manifestation of his deep sensitivity, forever impressed with the real, and the real is in constant motion.
The introductions are going round as Davis sits. We shake hands; he says, ''The mystery man.'' Me!, a ''mystery man'' - you never know how people perceive each other across the clouds of time and distance, what they look like to each other, what they mean to each other.
A quiet, soft-spoken, even gentle man with a bright, quick sense of humor, Davis does not appear the overbearing ogre some have made him out to be. He banters with the waiters as he eats poached salmon and drinks Perrier.
I had said I only needed an hour. Most people dislike drawn-out interviews - I know I do. I also thought I knew so much about Miles Davis over the years. But being there with the man, the herd of questions his presence occasioned was actually embarrassing. I knew I couldn't ask most of them, coldly probe someone who had in one sense actually given me consciousness.
How did he get to here, to playing ''The Man With the Horn'' and ''Star People,'' albums I do not care very much for? What brought him from the sublime heights of ''Ornithology'' and ''Venus De Milo,'' or the myriad other anthems of the deep hip, to an overheavy back beat blocking the light, whirring, metal ideas?
It was not only in the asking and the telling that something changed for me. His latest albums, ''You're Under Arrest'' and ''Decoy'' (particularly the title tune), are a clear return to a much higher level of performance, more competent technically, more emotionally rewarding esthetically.
The reasons behind his development became clearer to me as we talked (and we would talk for four hours). I went back to his music to test and confirm the understanding his words compelled me toward. WHAT CAN YOU say about Miles?''
Gillespie says. ''He's always changing - you never know what he's going to do next. Plus he's got . . . a kind of . . .''
Another younger musician breaks in, ''an aura.''
''Naw,'' says Gillespie, ''I don't know about that. It sounds too much like some other word.''
''Mystique,'' the younger man rejoinders.
''Yeh,'' he replies, ''that's it. Miles got a mystique about him - plus he's at the top of his profession.'' Gillespie begins his hoarse laughter. ''And he's got way, way, way, way more money.''
He sums it up as only the Diz can: Davis constantly changes; he possesses a mystique that sometimes threatens to obscure his music yet is created in part by the deepness of that music as well as by his legendary personality. Davis, who earns between $30,000 and $50,000 per concert, may have even snatched a few coins in tribute to his ''topness'' and longevity.
For me, his music has always had that single vulnerable feeling, like a person, beautiful and solitary, moving gracefully, sometimes arrogantly, through the night. What does he think of his own music, from those first records and residence with Charlie Parker to his later changes?
''We were always playing way up there,'' says Davis, referring to the tempo. ''It was all so fast, nobody knew what we were playing. Blam. It was over. I thought people needed a bottom, something to refer to.''
He is recalling the 1945-to-1949 tenure with Parker around 52d Street - where the revolutionary music of be-bop and the hottest of the swing players merged downtown after the initial experimental developments uptown. Be-bop was the rebellion against the stiff swing arrangements of the 1940's. It re-emphasized small groups, improvisation, the restoration of African polyrhythms and the primacy of the blues. Such sound scientists as Parker, Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell and Kenny (Klook) Clarke led the charge.
Miles Davis was a young, middle-class intellectual seeking high art - a student of the hottest new musical innovations, yet a product of a conservative, professional, land-owning class. He could study at Juilliard by day and hang out with the artistically brilliant but socially incorrigible Parker the rest of the time. They lived on a weekly allowance sent by his father, an East St. Louis dentist. ''I thought everybody in New York was hip,'' he says. ''I came to New York City expecting everybody was sounding like Dizzy!''
When I ask Davis how he knew it was music he wanted and why the trumpet, his answer has that confirming yet mystifying near-rationalism. ''Basically, it was how they looked when they were playing,'' he says. ''I liked that. I wanted to look like that, too. I liked the way they held the horn, the way they stood. I wanted to do that.'' (It reminded me again of myself, a neophyte trumpet player imitating Davis in the ancient 1950's, a leather gig bag in my hand.) ''I have to hold my horn a certain way,'' explains Davis, who was performing with professional groups by the age of 16. ''When I went to St. Louis with my boys, to check out how a band looked, I could tell by the way a musician holds his horn. If he don't hold his horn right, he can't play.''
The photographs of Davis during the be-bop period show a young blood swimming in New York drape suits, his hair ''gassed'' (straightened), standing next to Bird - in the eye of the hurricane. His cracked notes and flubs from the period are legendary, alongside the awesomely articulate Parker, soaring past the stratosphere into the musical ''way-gonesphere.'' Davis was a striking contrast - anxious, young, archly lyrical, his sprouting musical voice as much a question as a statement.
A few minutes later, Davis had hooked up with Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan, and some of the young white players drawn by Evans's arranging for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra. Evans's cool, lush harmonies and even the innovative use of brass and Ellingtonian scoring (reeds) had a profound effect on Davis. A number of Davis's major successes commercially and artistically, including ''Sketches of Spain'' and ''Porgy and Bess,'' make use of Evans's orchestral approach and arrangements.
Later, the 12 sides on ''Birth of the Cool'' became the first important result of the Davis-Evans collaboration, the symphonic quality transferred to a small group. For me, ''Venus De Milo,'' ''Move,'' ''Godchild,'' ''Budo'' and ''Darn That Dream'' were the highest art I had ever contemplated, and they still are inestimable road signs of mastery.
I asked him how he got from the very hot of bop to ''the cool,'' the prototype setting a whole musical, social and commercial movement in motion. Davis says Thornhill's music drew him because he wanted a music with more melodic access and a ''cushion'' (bottom) of harmonies that made his own simple voice an elegant, somewhat detached ''personality'' effortlessly perceiving and expressing.
What seems subdued in him, as his middle-register light-vibrato tone would seem to confirm, shows up elsewhere as tension, which is dramatic and rhythmically very funky, earthy. That undercurrent of tension comes with the smallest sound of his horn. He can wail with one or two notes placed, dropped, fired, drawled, sung, whispered, as light, reason, sweetness, regard, elation. His solos are extensions of the rhythm yet divide it, as time can be divided, even seemingly obliterated, but be as abstract and as unpredictable as our hearts.
After talking to Davis, I viewed his music video, ''Decoy,'' and an interview filmed by Columbia Records, for whom Davis has recorded since the mid-1950's. Both gave aspects of Davis's abiding passions and his most recent pursuits. ''I'm doing a video because I can,'' he said in the interview. ''I'm gearing the video to all colors. Not just white. I won't be acting silly. I don't look silly and I don't act silly.''
The video is Davis, playing, somewhat exaggerated in his gestures, his tongue pushing out. He seems whirled slowly in place, electronic graphics -much like his own spare drawings - bouncing from his horn.
In the interview, Davis, with his usual clarity and understated hilarity, talked about hiring white musicians, which he has increasingly done over the years and which once generated negative response from black musicians and fans. He explained that he wants to play ''today music.'' Over the years, he has had to tell many musicians - black and white, ''Don't play what you know but what you hear.
''White musicians usually are overtrained, and black musicians sometimes are undertrained,'' he said. ''You have to mix the two. A black musician has his own sound, but if you want it played straight, mix in a white musician and the piece will still be straight, only you'll get feeling and texture - up, down, around, silly, wavy, slow, fast - you have more to work with. There's funky white musicians. But after classical training, you have to learn to play social music. You have to learn to underplay. I tell 'em, 'Don't practice all the time or you'll sound like that.' ''
Davis described how he went ''with his feelings'' in playing, how much he loved music. ''I always play the blues . . . my body's full of rhythm. I like broken rhythm - strong melodies, chords on the synthesizer. I use the DX 7. It's a whole other attitude. It's like sketching.'' The film showed Miles drawing and painting (an example of which appears on the inside jacket of ''Decoy'’).
THE COOLNESS OF the early 1950's gave way to a stomping sound; people marching, the assertion of gospel music and Africa expanded the music stylistically. These developments in the music coincided with a rising national consciousness among the African-American people characterized by the civil-rights movement.
Horace Silver, the pianist and composer, introduced contemporary gospel into postbop jazz. It was a quick, funky music, with a sharper eye on arrangement, in reponse to the cool. It had a free, screaming, rhythmic emphasis, even whispered. Miles Davis became its most sophisticated master. He developed a new black, postbop, postcool ensemble and solo style: He was laid back yet hot, melodic yet tense -searching. The next few years of his work were a measure of all the music of that period.
In 1955, Davis assembled a group that included the pianist Red Garland, the drummer Philly Joe Jones, the bassist Paul Chambers and, most important, the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. The quintet -without peers during that period - combined the finger-popping urban funk blues of the hard-bop era with a harmonic cushion and Davis's gorgeous melodic invention. It caused a sensation among jazz people. Later, the alto saxophonist Julian (Cannonball) Adderley would join Davis.
''I used to tell them, 'The bass got the tonic. Don't play in the same register as the sax. Lay out. Don't play' '' - the Milesian esthetic for his band. When he listens to his own music, Davis says: ''I always listen to what I can leave out.''
Davis's quintet and sextet, the most popular jazz groups of the times, carried the sound and image of the contemporary, urban American intellectual and artist. The albums ''Milestones'' and ''Round About Midnight'' were great social events as well as artistic triumphs. ''Kind of Blue'' led us into new formal and intellectual vistas. So powerful and broadly expressive was the classic group - with Adderley the formalist on one side and Coltrane the expressionist on the other - that it contained the elements for establishing or redefining two significant jazz styles that have dominated to one degree or another the music for the last 30 years. And though Adderley's later band and the music and the musicians he developed were prototypes for fusion, Miles Davis is the music's real originator.
Coltrane's direction and legacy were to redefine avant-garde - to transform the social upsurge to a musical revolution.
Davis talks about the two directions Coltrane and Adderley represented. ''I showed Trane all that,'' he says, casually accepting credit for the chordal experimentation and chromatic lyricism that the saxophonist began to be identified with, and which in turn revolutionized the music. ''Cannonball just played funk. But he could interpret any feeling.''
DAVIS WAS NOT ONLY the cool hipster of my be-bop youth, but also the embodiment of a black attitude that had grown steadily more ubiquitous in the 1950's -defiance. All the stories about Davis, who shook off a four-year heroin addiction during this time, told us he was ''bad.'' He even had the unfortunate but spiritually-in-tune-with-the-times experience in 1959 of being beaten by racist policemen outside Birdland as he took a breather between sets. Black newspapers called it a ''Georgia head whipping,'' comparing it directly with the beatings black activists got marching against ''Jim Crow.''
My road buddies and I knew he regularly went to the gym and boxed. We had even been close enough a couple of times when the quintet opened at the Bohemia in Greenwich Village to hear the fog-horn bass that was his voice. That was the way he was supposed to sound: hip and somewhat mysterious with a touch of street toughness. ''When I think of Davis's influence, I think he's had a positive influence on black people in general,'' says Steve McCall, drummer and an elder statesmen of the new music. ''He transcended the slave mentality. I remember when he was setting all kinds of styles. The artist. He had class. Good taste. His music had a density.''
By the time he recorded ''Miles Ahead'' in 1957, Davis understood enough about the entire American esthetic - its lushness and pretension -to make the cool statements on a level that was truly popular and which had the accents of African America included not as contrasting anxiety or tension but as an equal sensuousness.
''Sketches of Spain'' and ''Porgy and Bess'' are high American musical statements, their tension being between a functional impressionism, serious in its emotional detail, and mood without significance. It is the bluesiness of the Miles Davis conception, even submerged in all the lushness, that gives these moods an intelligence and sensitivity. His horn probes like a dowser for beauty. The horn itself is so beautiful the listener feels that, maybe, all is a dream.
''Miles just shows several aspects of being creative,'' says Max Roach, the drummer and another of the genius teen-agers to hook up with Parker to create the explosion of be-bop. ''If you're being creative, you can't be like you were yesterday. Miles exemplifies it. The record industry keeps reading us out . . . ,'' categorizing the music as an antiquated music form.
''But Miles will step out. Lester Young did that . . . always looking. It's the law of everything. Miles is that way . . . Ella'' - Fitzgerald - ''and Miles breathed new life into the record companies. I think what Miles is doing is in keeping with our creative people today.''
The classic 1950's Davis group expressed both the soul and the rage. The 60's restatement with such future fusion stars as Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter does not carry the balance. Yet Davis says he told them the same thing, told them what ''not to do too much of.'' Davis's group became the vehicle for the increasing use of the pop-commercial aspect of his mind.
By the end of the 1960's, his music had begun to take on a somber, somewhat formal tone. He was still trying to move, as always, trying to develop new forms, use different materials. The cushion and the use of electrified instruments - once thought to be the exclusive property of rhythm and blues -were also gradually rising.
Davis was moving to change his music and, one would suppose, himself once more. In my own mind, the album ''In A Silent Way'' in 1969 is the beginning of the elaboration of what came to be known as fusion. Davis had come up with a new direction. The music is contradictory, subdued yet bright. Now cushion and soloist - background and foreground seemingly exchanged places constantly.
''Bitches Brew'' was made the same year and demonstrated not only that Davis's music had changed, but that he was ready to elaborate on the changes. The result - the incorporation of a definite back beat and electric instruments - was controversial.
The long passage of the 1960's had worked its magic on Davis. When he came out of his conservative, neo-Ivy threads in the 70's, it was not for loose, flowing African dress; it was for the fringed leather that the Black Panther or the hippie might wear. Davis identified more completely with what finally is the more secular, more ''integrated'' and ultimately more popular and commercial consciousness of rhythm and blues or rock or fusion that led him to the music he is making today. The ''new'' infusion of such white musicians as Joe Zawinul and Keith Jarrett on a ''permanent'' basis in Davis's bands in the early 1970's was akin to the coalition politics of the Panthers. What is clear, though, is Davis carried them and many, many others in his direction. But by 1975, Davis had dropped out of sight, neither recording nor touring. He had consistent health problems, one leading to the insertion of a prosthetic hip joint in 1983.
By the time of his ''cooling out,'' lasting from 1975 until 1981, Davis had made still more personnel changes -adding a permanent electric bass and guitars: Mike Henderson, Pete Cosey, Reggie Lucas, Larry Coryell, and young players such as the drummer Al Foster or the percussionist Mtume. The albums recorded in this period were musically less than dynamic, but their song titles had a politically evocative mood - ''Red China Blues,'' ''Calypso Frelimo'' and ''Zimbabwe.''
The new star trumpeter, Olo Dura, tries to assess Miles Davis's concept and contributions: ''Miles bridged the gap to both Americas. He's hip to the whole culture here. He is playing it in his music. Miles was dealing with all that America had to say. He makes you a true American. He's off the Mississippi River,'' a reference to Miles's Midwest birthplace. ''He's like the center of the pendulum. He goes where the history is - East, West, North, South. He's a consummate musical scientist.'' Davis, both in print and in person, seems a man not only anxious to be appreciated and celebrated by blacks, but sensitive to the tragedy of race in this country, particularly as it relates to his musical and social life. His wife, the actress Cicely Tyson, appears to be like-minded. Davis has had run-ins with the critics, mostly white, particularly about their opinions over the years about his playing. Down beat, the magazine viewed by many as the official jazz chronicle, published new favorable reviews of the Bird-Miles records (the original review was uniformly negative). In a down beat readers' poll, ''Decoy'' was voted the jazz album of 1984.
''I don't pay no attention to these white critics about my music,'' he says. ''Be like somebody from Europe coming criticizing Chinese music. They don't know about that. I've lived what I played.''
Of late, Davis has been trying to reconnect jazz with its most popular and commercial forms, r & b and blues. A great deal of outcry has come from people who revered classical Davis, charging that since ''Bitches Brew,'' he has sold out. Yet jazz is impossible without blues - it is the child of the blues, Langston Hughes told us. The business world, however, categorizes life for the marketplace, and an artificial separation has resulted.
Reggie Workman, the bassist, points out that Davis is doing the same thing, just using the electronics to reach people. ''Miles's music is what he's always been playing,'' he says. ''He's surrounded himself with electronics as a mediator between himself and today's market.''
The results - ''You're Under Arrest'' and ''Decoy'' - clearly stand head and shoulders above his earlier ''out of retirement'' efforts. Most important, Davis is getting his ''chops'' back. One cannot lay off the trumpet, a notoriously taxing instrument, and pop up crackling. The latest recordings show Davis stronger, piercing through the electronic environment tellingly.
''Miles survived,'' explains Craig Harris, the trombonist. ''He kept his mind open. He understands business, and he's doing what he wants to do. Miles don't care who agrees or disagrees with him. Miles says, 'This is what I'm gonna do.' And he sticks by his guns. And everybody follows Miles.''
A version of this article appears in print on June 16, 1985, Section 6, Page 24 of the National edition with the headline: MILES DAVIS. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is a playwright, essayist, critic, novelist, and poet. His latest book is ''The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (1984)
