2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault
AN OPEN LETTER TO MILES (& THE REST OF US)
by Kofi Natambu
"It’s always Night or we wouldn’t need Light.”
—Thelonious Monk
"Write what you know or write what you don’t know like everybody else.”
—Miles Davis
"Hell, if you understood everything I did you’d be me.”
—Miles Davis
So when did it begin Miles? Was it the spring of ’63 when a rather precocious 12 year black boy first saw that famous pose of yours on the cover of ‘Round About Midnight your royal chin held in a pensive yet nonchalant manner cupped in yr right hand, yr left hand, wrist and arm gently cradling a trumpet, yr magnificent tiger eyes hidden behind vintage "Charlie Greene" shades. You are bathed in smoky red light, a neon shroud enveloping yr entire head face and shoulders. You are staring straight into the lens masked forever behind those shades wearing what appears to be the most ambiguous smile or is it smirk or is it melancholy that I’ve ever seen in my life.
I recognize it immediately as yr "SO WHAT" demeanor. You look so goddamn cool and elegant and sexy and DANGEROUS and shy and sinister and sad and content and sweet and evil that my 12 year old eyes can’t believe it. After all then I hardly had a clue what many of those adjectives could have possibly meant.
But I did KNOW in some secret part of my very young and hungry soul what it was I saw and wanted so badly. It was that incredibly regal and majestic stance that you projected, so fucking HIP which is to say KNOWING which is to say painful which is to say exhilarating which is to say REAL, a realness that most of us never even got to feel, let alone experience. You reminded me (always) of my father & my Uncles and my father’s best friends wiry relaxed and intense black men who looked sounded and acted like lions tigers and bears (O MY!) everyday of their slick sly and wicked lives, so clean and HIP and stoic and magnanimous, so pleased and funny and angry & mean and clever and happy and miserable that it made you dizzy even to look at them. We couldn’t wait to see them laugh or cry or shout or whisper or flirt or dance or drink or smoke or talk or stare off into space. Miles was ALL of these men all at once and the only option you had if you loved endless style and rhythm and beauty and intelligence and Joy and women women women was to follow not him (after all he was US); so not to follow but to somehow Act upon and play wild imaginative variations on his glorious ever evolving melody which was his life and our lives simultaneously.
So there you are Miles staring directly into the lens. As always you are both visible and invisible. You are both there in HUDSON’S department store record bin and a billion light years away. You are in all my pre-adolescent dreams and future adult memories. I am humbled and plagued and transformed by that soaring and searing sound of yours, so luminous and lucid and hidden and lonely and loving that my 12 year old ears can only wonder why they sound like that. I mean I wanted to cry and I still didn’t know (yet) why. I wanted to laugh and I suspect or at least I have an inkling why I couldn’t stop myself from doing so. It is again that not-so-cosmic yet otherworldly connection to all the men in my life and in my dreams, in my head and in the streets, both above and below who I think I might be. As Gil Evans said you were a "sensational singer of Songs" and yr dedication to singing them so brilliantly made we aggressive and hungry ’60s kids only intensify our need to fight and change and grow and create an entirely New Life. But it was yr horn Miles that taught us that that life could only come seeping and sprouting out of the nurtured ground of the Old. It was yr sound that contained and improvised upon the clarion calls of all our mighty ancestors, the Armstrongs the Ellingtons the Holidays the Birds the Bechets the Kings the Smiths the Joplins the Sarahs the Gillespies the Youngs the Websters & the Boldens. Because that’s who you were and you knew it and that’s who we were and are and you taught us so clearly that it was our life and the lives of all those who had come before. So where was I Miles or rather where could I have been to talk to you so openly across the years?
I seem to remember now. It was in the aisle of LaGreen’s amazing Jazz record store in downtown Detroit that I first got up the $2.50 for the ‘Round About Midnight recording which I had saved for two months from the 25 cents weekly allowance that my father gave me and my brother in those dreamy days of Spring 1963 when my biggest concerns were baseball music and learning what it really meant to be a man, that is a human being, that is a singer of my own songs. As always you remain the unending soundtrack to the film I’m still shooting. As a great Auteur you would know all about that, wouldn’t you Miles? Now some 100 records later I am thumbing once again thru the precious canon of yr works as each magical recording reminds me of the most significant & banal parts of my quotidian existence, everything I’ve ever done or wanted to do, the Good Bad Ugly & Indifferent aspects of my entire life racing thru my (re)awakened consciousness allowing me to reflect & meditate & grin & grimace my way thru all the years holding the rapidly moving cadences & phrasings in my soul’s ear, pushing out with the dancing tempos in a thousand different shades of Blue the whole story of who & what we are & could have been. There in my listening room my whole life comes spilling out in yr aching cries & haunting whispers in yr sardonic asides & fierce exclamations, in yr reptilian slurs & soothing sighs, in yr jaunty playfulness & screaming complaints.
All the Love all the Hate all the Desire all the Joy all the Pain. Everything that both dreams & nightmares are made of. Because yr Music tells us this eternal story, the one yr good friend Jimmy Baldwin called "the only story to tell in all this madness" because you told it so well & with so much grace & so much insight & so much truth & so much beauty I will always love you & it for the purely selfish & selfless reason that it is my story and the story of all Others who Dare to listen.
Love,
I recognize it immediately as yr "SO WHAT" demeanor. You look so goddamn cool and elegant and sexy and DANGEROUS and shy and sinister and sad and content and sweet and evil that my 12 year old eyes can’t believe it. After all then I hardly had a clue what many of those adjectives could have possibly meant.
But I did KNOW in some secret part of my very young and hungry soul what it was I saw and wanted so badly. It was that incredibly regal and majestic stance that you projected, so fucking HIP which is to say KNOWING which is to say painful which is to say exhilarating which is to say REAL, a realness that most of us never even got to feel, let alone experience. You reminded me (always) of my father & my Uncles and my father’s best friends wiry relaxed and intense black men who looked sounded and acted like lions tigers and bears (O MY!) everyday of their slick sly and wicked lives, so clean and HIP and stoic and magnanimous, so pleased and funny and angry & mean and clever and happy and miserable that it made you dizzy even to look at them. We couldn’t wait to see them laugh or cry or shout or whisper or flirt or dance or drink or smoke or talk or stare off into space. Miles was ALL of these men all at once and the only option you had if you loved endless style and rhythm and beauty and intelligence and Joy and women women women was to follow not him (after all he was US); so not to follow but to somehow Act upon and play wild imaginative variations on his glorious ever evolving melody which was his life and our lives simultaneously.
So there you are Miles staring directly into the lens. As always you are both visible and invisible. You are both there in HUDSON’S department store record bin and a billion light years away. You are in all my pre-adolescent dreams and future adult memories. I am humbled and plagued and transformed by that soaring and searing sound of yours, so luminous and lucid and hidden and lonely and loving that my 12 year old ears can only wonder why they sound like that. I mean I wanted to cry and I still didn’t know (yet) why. I wanted to laugh and I suspect or at least I have an inkling why I couldn’t stop myself from doing so. It is again that not-so-cosmic yet otherworldly connection to all the men in my life and in my dreams, in my head and in the streets, both above and below who I think I might be. As Gil Evans said you were a "sensational singer of Songs" and yr dedication to singing them so brilliantly made we aggressive and hungry ’60s kids only intensify our need to fight and change and grow and create an entirely New Life. But it was yr horn Miles that taught us that that life could only come seeping and sprouting out of the nurtured ground of the Old. It was yr sound that contained and improvised upon the clarion calls of all our mighty ancestors, the Armstrongs the Ellingtons the Holidays the Birds the Bechets the Kings the Smiths the Joplins the Sarahs the Gillespies the Youngs the Websters & the Boldens. Because that’s who you were and you knew it and that’s who we were and are and you taught us so clearly that it was our life and the lives of all those who had come before. So where was I Miles or rather where could I have been to talk to you so openly across the years?
I seem to remember now. It was in the aisle of LaGreen’s amazing Jazz record store in downtown Detroit that I first got up the $2.50 for the ‘Round About Midnight recording which I had saved for two months from the 25 cents weekly allowance that my father gave me and my brother in those dreamy days of Spring 1963 when my biggest concerns were baseball music and learning what it really meant to be a man, that is a human being, that is a singer of my own songs. As always you remain the unending soundtrack to the film I’m still shooting. As a great Auteur you would know all about that, wouldn’t you Miles? Now some 100 records later I am thumbing once again thru the precious canon of yr works as each magical recording reminds me of the most significant & banal parts of my quotidian existence, everything I’ve ever done or wanted to do, the Good Bad Ugly & Indifferent aspects of my entire life racing thru my (re)awakened consciousness allowing me to reflect & meditate & grin & grimace my way thru all the years holding the rapidly moving cadences & phrasings in my soul’s ear, pushing out with the dancing tempos in a thousand different shades of Blue the whole story of who & what we are & could have been. There in my listening room my whole life comes spilling out in yr aching cries & haunting whispers in yr sardonic asides & fierce exclamations, in yr reptilian slurs & soothing sighs, in yr jaunty playfulness & screaming complaints.
All the Love all the Hate all the Desire all the Joy all the Pain. Everything that both dreams & nightmares are made of. Because yr Music tells us this eternal story, the one yr good friend Jimmy Baldwin called "the only story to tell in all this madness" because you told it so well & with so much grace & so much insight & so much truth & so much beauty I will always love you & it for the purely selfish & selfless reason that it is my story and the story of all Others who Dare to listen.
Love,
Kofi
10/15/91
NOTE: This prose poem was written in honor of Miles Davis (1926-1991) who died September 28, 1991. It initially appeared in 'The World' literary magazine (issue #44, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, NYC) in March 1992.
