ACCESS TO EACH ARTIST CAN BE FOUND IN THE 'BLOG ARCHIVE' (ARTISTS LISTED IN WEEKLY CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER) AND IN THE ‘LABELS’ SECTION (ARTIST NAMES, TOPICS, ETC.) ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE HOME PAGE. CLICK ON THESE RESPECTIVE LINKS TO ACCESS THEIR CONTENT:
https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/
https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2015/05/miles-davis 1926-1991-legendary-iconic_23.html
PHOTO: MILES DAVIS (1926-1991)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/miles-davis-mn0000423829
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.)
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.
![Ascenseur pour l'Échafaud [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]](https://rovimusic.rovicorp.com/image.jpg?c=j6HyfZqBzXvwVAH2TmrRKhyhM-OFI8zG4l-qVpXXB1I=&f=4)
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.
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.
Miles Davis
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
—Miles Davis
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
(Poem from: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS
by Kofi Natambu. Past Tents Press, 1991}
A Review of Miles Davis and American Culture
The New Journal
October, 2002
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.”
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
© -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.”
Classic Rock Review
The home of forgotten music…finding old reviews before they're lost….
Miles Davis and the Making of Bitches Brew: Sorcerer’s Brew (1970)
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."
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2009/08/kind_of_blue.html
Kind of Blue
Why the best-selling jazz album of all time is so great.
When Miles Davis came to New York in 1945, at the age of 19, he replaced Gillespie as Parker's trumpeter for a few years and played very much in their style. A decade later, he, too, was wondering what to do next.
Correction, Aug. 19, 2009: The article originally stated that a scale consists of 12 notes, which is true for chromatic scales (scales with all the notes—natural, flat, and sharp), but since Russell was talking about scales or "modes" that sound different from one another (meaning they include at least some different notes), this can be true only of scales with eight tones or eight notes.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/oct/13/miles-davis-second-great-quintet
50 great moments in jazz: How Miles Davis's second quintet changed jazz
But by the 60s, jazz was being shaken up by the fearless (some might say foolhardy, or even unlistenable) challenges of musicians such as Coltrane, Coleman and pianist Cecil Taylor. The exploratory artist in Davis drew him toward these liberating possibilities, but he needed the attention of a broader audience. His reaction to free jazz was to reinvent his quintet with untried talents to see what would happen. Davis hired 16-year-old drum prodigy Tony Williams, fast-rising pianist Herbie Hancock (whose jazz-improv and pop instincts appealed to Davis), plus the Coltrane-esque Wayne Shorter on sax and bass powerhouse Ron Carter.
The band quickly became Davis's finest group. Their solos were fresh and original, and their individual styles fused with a spontaneous fluency that was simply astonishing. The quintet's method came to be dubbed "time, no changes" because of their emphasis on strong rhythmic grooves without the dictatorial patterns of song-form chords. At times they veered close to free-improvisation, but the pieces were as thrilling and hypnotically sensuous as anything the band's open-minded leader had recorded before.
Davis employed such unruly young sidemen not to flatter his remarkable trumpet sound, but to challenge it. I interviewed Hancock for the Guardian some years ago, and he described Davis's demand that his talented new partners, respectfully nervous of their boss's legendary ego at first, should turn up the heat on him. "Tony and I had got into the habit of playing all kinds of mixed rhythms ... so we started playing some of those rhythm things behind Miles too, things that were hard to predict, would sometimes swing and sometimes float. The first night we did it he stopped a lot in his solos, jerked around as if he was uncomfortable, not sure what to do, trying to find his way. Next day, he was more at ease, playing longer phrases, but still not into it. Then by the last set on the next day, he wasn't struggling with it any more at all. In fact he played so many unexpected things himself that it was me that was jerking around! In less than 24 hours Miles had not just grabbed the ball, but run beyond us with it."
The "second great quintet" first indicated the bridges it would build between Davis's post Kind of Blue work and his subsequent enigmatic music on 1964's Miles in Berlin, made after Shorter joined. Then came the remarkable sequence of albums such as ESP, The Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky (hinting at the beginnings of jazz rock, with Hancock introducing the Fender Rhodes), Filles de Kilimanjaro and the stunning Live At the Plugged Nickel – but that's another story.
Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in a roughly five-decade career that kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz.[1]
Born in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis, Davis left to study at Juilliard in New York City, before dropping out and making his professional debut as a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker's bebop quintet from 1944 to 1948. Shortly after, he recorded the Birth of the Cool sessions for Capitol Records, which were instrumental to the development of cool jazz. In the early 1950s, Davis recorded some of the earliest hard bop music while on Prestige Records but did so haphazardly due to a heroin addiction. After a widely acclaimed comeback performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, he signed a long-term contract with Columbia Records, and recorded the album 'Round About Midnight in 1955.[2] It was his first work with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers, key members of the sextet he led into the early 1960s. During this period, he alternated between orchestral jazz collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, such as the Spanish music-influenced Sketches of Spain (1960), and band recordings, such as Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959).[3] The latter recording remains one of the most popular jazz albums of all time,[4] having sold over five million copies in the U.S.
Davis made several line-up changes while recording Someday My Prince Will Come (1961), his 1961 Blackhawk concerts, and Seven Steps to Heaven (1963), another mainstream success that introduced bassist Ron Carter, pianist Herbie Hancock, and drummer Tony Williams.[3] After adding saxophonist Wayne Shorter to his new quintet in 1964,[3] Davis led them on a series of more abstract recordings often composed by the band members, helping pioneer the post-bop genre with albums such as E.S.P (1965) and Miles Smiles (1967),[5] before transitioning into his electric period. During the 1970s, he experimented with rock, funk, African rhythms, emerging electronic music technology, and an ever-changing line-up of musicians, including keyboardist Joe Zawinul, drummer Al Foster, and guitarist John McLaughlin.[6] This period, beginning with Davis's 1969 studio album In a Silent Way and concluding with the 1975 concert recording Agharta, was the most controversial in his career, alienating and challenging many in jazz.[7] His million-selling 1970 record Bitches Brew helped spark a resurgence in the genre's commercial popularity with jazz fusion as the decade progressed.[8]
After a five-year retirement due to poor health, Davis resumed his career in the 1980s, employing younger musicians and pop sounds on albums such as The Man with the Horn (1981) and Tutu (1986). Critics were often unreceptive but the decade garnered Davis his highest level of commercial recognition. He performed sold-out concerts worldwide, while branching out into visual arts, film, and television work, before his death in 1991 from the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia and respiratory failure.[9] In 2006, Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,[10] which recognized him as "one of the key figures in the history of jazz".[10] Rolling Stone described him as "the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century,"[9] while Gerald Early called him inarguably one of the most influential and innovative musicians of that period.[11]
Early life
Davis was born on May 26, 1926, to an affluent African-American family in Alton, Illinois, 15 miles (24 kilometers) north of St. Louis.[12][13] He had an older sister, Dorothy Mae (1925–1996), and a younger brother, Vernon (1929–1999). His mother, Cleota Mae Henry of Arkansas, was a music teacher and violinist, and his father, Miles Dewey Davis Jr., also of Arkansas, was a dentist. They owned a 200-acre (81 ha) estate near Pine Bluff, Arkansas with a profitable pig farm. In Pine Bluff, he and his siblings fished, hunted, and rode horses.[14][15] Davis's grandparents were the owners of an Arkansas farm where he would spend many summers.[16]
In 1927, the family moved to East St. Louis, Illinois. They lived on the second floor of a commercial building behind a dental office in a predominantly white neighborhood. Davis's father would soon become distant to his children as the Great Depression caused him to become increasingly consumed by his job; typically working six days a week.[16] From 1932 to 1934, Davis attended John Robinson Elementary School, an all-black school,[13] then Crispus Attucks, where he performed well in mathematics, music, and sports.[15] Davis had previously attended Catholic school.[16] At an early age he liked music, especially blues, big bands, and gospel.[14]
In 1935, Davis received his first trumpet as a gift from John Eubanks, a friend of his father.[17] He took lessons from "the biggest influence on my life," Elwood Buchanan, a teacher and musician who was a patient of his father.[12][18] His mother wanted him to play the violin instead.[19] Against the fashion of the time, Buchanan stressed the importance of playing without vibrato and encouraged him to use a clear, mid-range tone. Davis said that whenever he started playing with heavy vibrato, Buchanan slapped his knuckles.[19][12][20] In later years Davis said, "I prefer a round sound with no attitude in it, like a round voice with not too much tremolo and not too much bass. Just right in the middle. If I can't get that sound I can't play anything."[21] The family soon moved to 1701 Kansas Avenue in East St. Louis.[16]
According to Davis, "By the age of 12, music had become the most important thing in my life."[18] On his thirteenth birthday his father bought him a new trumpet,[17] and Davis began to play in local bands. He took additional trumpet lessons from Joseph Gustat, principal trumpeter of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.[17] Davis would also play the trumpet in talent shows he and his siblings would put on.[16]
In 1941, the 15-year-old attended East St. Louis Lincoln High School, where he joined the marching band directed by Buchanan and entered music competitions. Years later, Davis said that he was discriminated against in these competitions due to his race, but he added that these experiences made him a better musician.[15] When a drummer asked him to play a certain passage of music, and he couldn't do it, he began to learn music theory. "I went and got everything, every book I could get to learn about theory."[22] At Lincoln, Davis met his first girlfriend, Irene Birth (later Cawthon).[23] He had a band that performed at the Elks Club.[24] Part of his earnings paid for his sister's education at Fisk University.[25] Davis befriended trumpeter Clark Terry, who suggested he play without vibrato, and performed with him for several years.[17][25]
With encouragement from his teacher and girlfriend, Davis filled a vacant spot in the Rhumboogie Orchestra, also known as the Blue Devils, led by Eddie Randle. He became the band's musical director, which involved hiring musicians and scheduling rehearsal.[26][25] Years later, Davis considered this job one of the most important of his career.[22] Sonny Stitt tried to persuade him to join the Tiny Bradshaw band, which was passing through town, but his mother insisted he finish high school before going on tour. He said later, "I didn't talk to her for two weeks. And I didn't go with the band either."[27] In January 1944, Davis finished high school and graduated in absentia in June. During the next month, his girlfriend gave birth to a daughter, Cheryl.[25]
In July 1944, Billy Eckstine visited St. Louis with a band that included Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker. Trumpeter Buddy Anderson was too sick to perform,[12] so Davis was invited to join. He played with the band for two weeks at Club Riviera.[25][28] After playing with these musicians, he was certain he should move to New York City, "where the action was".[29] His mother wanted him to go to Fisk University, like his sister, and study piano or violin. Davis had other interests.[27]
Career
1944–1948: New York City and the bebop years
.jpg)
In September 1944, Davis accepted his father's idea of studying at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City.[25] After passing the audition, he attended classes in music theory, piano and dictation.[30] Davis often skipped his classes.[31]
Much of Davis's time was spent in clubs seeking his idol, Charlie Parker. According to Davis, Coleman Hawkins told him "finish your studies at Juilliard and forget Bird [Parker]".[32][28] After finding Parker, he joined a cadre of regulars at Minton's and Monroe's in Harlem who held jam sessions every night. The other regulars included J. J. Johnson, Kenny Clarke, Thelonious Monk, Fats Navarro, and Freddie Webster. Davis reunited with Cawthon and their daughter when they moved to New York City. Parker became a roommate.[28][25] Around this time Davis was paid an allowance of $40 (equivalent to $660 in 2022[33]).[34]
In mid-1945, Davis failed to register for the year's autumn term at Juilliard and dropped out after three semesters[14][35][25] because he wanted to perform full-time.[36] Years later he criticized Juilliard for concentrating too much on classical European and "white" repertoire, but he praised the school for teaching him music theory and improving his trumpet technique.
Davis began performing at clubs on 52nd Street with Coleman Hawkins and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis. He recorded for the first time on April 24, 1945, when he entered the studio as a sideman for Herbie Fields's band.[25][28] During the next year, he recorded as a leader for the first time with the Miles Davis Sextet plus Earl Coleman and Ann Baker, one of the few times he accompanied a singer.[37]
.jpg)
In 1945, Davis replaced Dizzy Gillespie in Charlie Parker's quintet. On November 26, he participated in several recording sessions as part of Parker's group Reboppers that also involved Gillespie and Max Roach,[25] displaying hints of the style he would become known for. On Parker's tune "Now's the Time", Davis played a solo that anticipated cool jazz. He next joined a big band led by Benny Carter, performing in St. Louis and remaining with the band in California. He again played with Parker and Gillespie.[38] In Los Angeles, Parker had a nervous breakdown that put him in the hospital for several months.[38][39] In March 1946, Davis played in studio sessions with Parker and began a collaboration with bassist Charles Mingus that summer. Cawthon gave birth to Davis's second child, Gregory, in East St. Louis before reuniting with Davis in New York City the following year.[38] Davis noted that by this time, "I was still so much into the music that I was even ignoring Irene." He had also turned to alcohol and cocaine.[40]
Davis was a member of Billy Eckstine's big band in 1946 and Gillespie's in 1947.[41] He joined a quintet led by Parker that also included Max Roach. Together they performed live with Duke Jordan and Tommy Potter for much of the year, including several studio sessions.[38] In one session that May, Davis wrote the tune "Cheryl", for his daughter. Davis's first session as a leader followed in August 1947, playing as the Miles Davis All Stars that included Parker, pianist John Lewis, and bassist Nelson Boyd; they recorded "Milestones", "Half Nelson", and "Sippin' at Bells".[42][38] After touring Chicago and Detroit with Parker's quintet, Davis returned to New York City in March 1948 and joined the Jazz at the Philharmonic tour, which included a stop in St. Louis on April 30.[38]
1948–1950: Miles Davis Nonet and Birth of the Cool
In August 1948, Davis declined an offer to join Duke Ellington's orchestra as he had entered rehearsals with a nine-piece band featuring baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and arrangements by Gil Evans, taking an active role on what soon became his own project.[43][38] Evans' Manhattan apartment had become the meeting place for several young musicians and composers such as Davis, Roach, Lewis, and Mulligan who were unhappy with the increasingly virtuoso instrumental techniques that dominated bebop.[44] These gatherings led to the formation of the Miles Davis Nonet, which included atypical modern jazz instruments such as French horn and tuba, leading to a thickly textured, almost orchestral sound.[31] The intent was to imitate the human voice through carefully arranged compositions and a relaxed, melodic approach to improvisation. In September, the band completed their sole engagement as the opening band for Count Basie at the Royal Roost for two weeks. Davis had to persuade the venue's manager to write the sign "Miles Davis Nonet. Arrangements by Gil Evans, John Lewis and Gerry Mulligan". Davis returned to Parker's quintet, but relationships within the quintet were growing tense mainly due to Parker's erratic behavior caused by his drug addiction.[38] Early in his time with Parker, Davis abstained from drugs, chose a vegetarian diet, and spoke of the benefits of water and juice.[45]
In December 1948, Davis quit, saying he was not being paid.[38] His departure began a period when he worked mainly as a freelancer and sideman. His nonet remained active until the end of 1949. After signing a contract with Capitol Records, they recorded sessions in January and April 1949, which sold little but influenced the "cool" or "west coast" style of jazz.[38] The line-up changed throughout the year and included tuba player Bill Barber, alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, pianist Al Haig, trombone players Mike Zwerin with Kai Winding, French horn players Junior Collins with Sandy Siegelstein and Gunther Schuller, and bassists Al McKibbon and Joe Shulman. One track featured singer Kenny Hagood. The presence of white musicians in the group angered some black players, many of whom were unemployed at the time, yet Davis rebuffed their criticisms.[46] Recording sessions with the nonet for Capitol continued until April 1950. The Nonet recorded a dozen tracks which were released as singles and subsequently compiled on the 1957 album Birth of the Cool.[31]
In May 1949, Davis performed with the Tadd Dameron Quintet with Kenny Clarke and James Moody at the Paris International Jazz Festival. On his first trip abroad Davis took a strong liking to Paris and its cultural environment, where he felt black jazz musicians and people of color in general were better respected than in the U.S. The trip, he said, "changed the way I looked at things forever".[47] He began an affair with singer and actress Juliette Gréco.[47]
1949–1955: Signing with Prestige, heroin addiction, and hard bop
After returning from Paris in mid-1949, he became depressed and found little work except a short engagement with Powell in October and guest spots in New York City, Chicago, and Detroit until January 1950.[48] He was falling behind in hotel rent and attempts were made to repossess his car. His heroin use became an expensive addiction, and Davis, not yet 24 years old, "lost my sense of discipline, lost my sense of control over my life, and started to drift".[49][38] In August 1950, Cawthon gave birth to Davis's second son, Miles IV. Davis befriended boxer Johnny Bratton which began his interest in the sport. Davis left Cawthon and his three children in New York City in the hands of one his friends, jazz singer Betty Carter.[48] He toured with Eckstine and Billie Holiday and was arrested for heroin possession in Los Angeles. The story was reported in DownBeat magazine, which led to a further reduction in work, though he was acquitted weeks later.[50] By the 1950s, Davis had become more skilled and was experimenting with the middle register of the trumpet alongside harmonies and rhythms.[31]
In January 1951, Davis's fortunes improved when he signed a one-year contract with Prestige after owner Bob Weinstock became a fan of the nonet. [51] Davis chose Lewis, trombonist Bennie Green, bassist Percy Heath, saxophonist Sonny Rollins, and drummer Roy Haynes; they recorded what became part of Miles Davis and Horns (1956). Davis was hired for other studio dates in 1951[50] and began to transcribe scores for record labels to fund his heroin addiction. His second session for Prestige was released on The New Sounds (1951), Dig (1956), and Conception (1956).[52]
Davis supported his heroin habit by playing music and by living the life of a hustler, exploiting prostitutes, and receiving money from friends. By 1953, his addiction began to impair his playing. His drug habit became public in a DownBeat interview with Cab Calloway, whom he never forgave as it brought him "all pain and suffering".[53] He returned to St. Louis and stayed with his father for several months.[53] After a brief period with Roach and Mingus in September 1953,[54] he returned to his father's home, where he concentrated on addressing his addiction.[55]
Davis lived in Detroit for about six months, avoiding New York City, where it was easy to get drugs. Though he used heroin, he was still able to perform locally with Elvin Jones and Tommy Flanagan as part of Billy Mitchell's house band at the Blue Bird club. He was also "pimping a little".[56] However, he was able to end his addiction, and, in February 1954, Davis returned to New York City, feeling good "for the first time in a long time", mentally and physically stronger, and joined a gym.[57] He informed Weinstock and Blue Note that he was ready to record with a quintet, which he was granted. He considered the albums that resulted from these and earlier sessions – Miles Davis Quartet and Miles Davis Volume 2 – "very important" because he felt his performances were particularly strong.[58] He was paid roughly $750 (equivalent to $8,200 in 2022[33]) for each album and refused to give away his publishing rights.[59]
Davis abandoned the bebop style and turned to the music of pianist Ahmad Jamal, whose approach and use of space influenced him.[60] When he returned to the studio in June 1955 to record The Musings of Miles, he wanted a pianist like Jamal and chose Red Garland.[60] Blue Haze (1956), Bags' Groove (1957), Walkin' (1957), and Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants (1959) documented the evolution of his sound with the Harmon mute placed close to the microphone, and the use of more spacious and relaxed phrasing. He assumed a central role in hard bop, less radical in harmony and melody, and used popular songs and American standards as starting points for improvisation. Hard bop distanced itself from cool jazz with a harder beat and music inspired by the blues.[61] A few critics consider Walkin' (April 1954) the album that created the hard bop genre.[21]
Davis gained a reputation for being cold, distant, and easily angered. He wrote that in 1954 Sugar Ray Robinson "was the most important thing in my life besides music", and he adopted Robinson's "arrogant attitude".[62] He showed contempt for critics and the press.
Davis had an operation to remove polyps from his larynx in October 1955.[63] The doctors told him to remain silent after the operation, but he got into an argument that permanently damaged his vocal cords and gave him a raspy voice for the rest of his life.[64] He was called the "prince of darkness", adding a patina of mystery to his public persona.[a]
1955–1959: Signing with Columbia, first quintet, and modal jazz
In July 1955, Davis's fortunes improved considerably when he played at the Newport Jazz Festival, with a line-up of Monk, Heath, drummer Connie Kay, and horn players Zoot Sims and Gerry Mulligan.[68][69] The performance was praised by critics and audiences alike, who considered it to be a highlight of the festival as well as helping Davis, the least well known musician in the group, to increase his popularity among affluent white audiences.[70][69] He tied with Dizzy Gillespie for best trumpeter in the 1955 DownBeat magazine Readers' Poll.[71]
George Avakian of Columbia Records heard Davis perform at Newport and wanted to sign him to the label. Davis had one year left on his contract with Prestige, which required him to release four more albums. He signed a contract with Columbia that included a $4,000 advance (equivalent to $43,700 in 2022[33]) and required that his recordings for Columbia remain unreleased until his agreement with Prestige expired.[72][73]
At the request of Avakian, he formed the Miles Davis Quintet for a performance at Café Bohemia. The quintet contained Sonny Rollins on tenor saxophone, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on double bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. Rollins was replaced by John Coltrane, completing the membership of the first quintet. To fulfill Davis' contract with Prestige, this new group worked through two marathon sessions in May and October 1956 that were released by the label as four LPs: Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet (1957), Relaxin' with the Miles Davis Quintet (1958), Workin' with the Miles Davis Quintet (1960) and Steamin' with the Miles Davis Quintet (1961). Each album was critically acclaimed and helped establish Davis's quintet as one of the best.[74][75][76]
The style of the group was an extension of their experience playing with Davis. He played long, legato, melodic lines, while Coltrane contrasted with energetic solos. Their live repertoire was a mix of bebop, standards from the Great American Songbook and pre-bop eras, and traditional tunes. They appeared on 'Round About Midnight, Davis's first album for Columbia.
In 1956, he left his quintet temporarily to tour Europe as part of the Birdland All-Stars, which included the Modern Jazz Quartet and French and German musicians. In Paris, he reunited with Gréco and they "were lovers for many years".[77][78] He then returned home, reunited his quintet and toured the US for two months. Conflict arose on tour when he grew impatient with the drug habits of Jones and Coltrane. Davis was trying to live a healthier life by exercising and reducing his alcohol. But he continued to use cocaine.[79] At the end of the tour, he fired Jones and Coltrane and replaced them with Sonny Rollins and Art Taylor.[80]
In November 1957, Davis went to Paris and recorded the soundtrack to Ascenseur pour l'échafaud.[41] directed by Louis Malle and starring Jeanne Moreau. Consisting of French jazz musicians Barney Wilen, Pierre Michelot, and René Urtreger, and American drummer Kenny Clarke, the group avoided a written score and instead improvised while they watched the film in a recording studio.
After returning to New York, Davis revived his quintet with Adderley[41] and Coltrane, who was clean from his drug habit. Now a sextet, the group recorded material in early 1958 that was released on Milestones, an album that demonstrated Davis's interest in modal jazz. A performance by Les Ballets Africains drew him to slower, deliberate music that allowed the creation of solos from harmony rather than chords.[81]
By May 1958, he had replaced Jones with drummer Jimmy Cobb, and Garland left the group, leaving Davis to play piano on "Sid's Ahead" for Milestones.[82] He wanted someone who could play modal jazz, so he hired Bill Evans, a young pianist with a background in classical music.[83] Evans had an impressionistic approach to piano. His ideas greatly influenced Davis. But after eight months of touring, a tired Evans left. Wynton Kelly, his replacement, brought to the group a swinging style that contrasted with Evans's delicacy. The sextet made their recording debut on Jazz Track (1958).[83]
1957–1963: Collaborations with Gil Evans and Kind of Blue
By early 1957, Davis was exhausted from recording and touring and wished to pursue new projects. In March, the 30-year-old Davis told journalists of his intention to retire soon and revealed offers he had received to teach at Harvard University and be a musical director at a record label.[84][85] Avakian agreed that it was time for Davis to explore something different, but Davis rejected his suggestion of returning to his nonet as he considered that a step backward.[85] Avakian then suggested that he work with a bigger ensemble, similar to Music for Brass (1957), an album of orchestral and brass-arranged music led by Gunther Schuller featuring Davis as a guest soloist.
Davis accepted and worked with Gil Evans in what became a five-album collaboration from 1957 to 1962.[86] Miles Ahead (1957) showcased Davis on flugelhorn and a rendition of "The Maids of Cadiz" by Léo Delibes, the first piece of classical music that Davis recorded. Evans devised orchestral passages as transitions, thus turning the album into one long piece of music.[87][88] Porgy and Bess (1959) includes arrangements of pieces from George Gershwin's opera. Sketches of Spain (1960) contained music by Joaquín Rodrigo and Manuel de Falla and originals by Evans. The classical musicians had trouble improvising, while the jazz musicians couldn't handle the difficult arrangements, but the album was a critical success, selling over 120,000 copies in the US.[89] Davis performed with an orchestra conducted by Evans at Carnegie Hall in May 1961 to raise money for charity.[90] The pair's final album was Quiet Nights (1963), a collection of bossa nova songs released against their wishes. Evans stated it was only half an album and blamed the record company; Davis blamed producer Teo Macero and refused to speak to him for more than two years.[91] The boxed set Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings (1996) won the Grammy Award for Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes in 1997.
In March and April 1959, Davis recorded what some consider his greatest album, Kind of Blue. He named the album for its mood.[92] He called back Bill Evans, as the music had been planned around Evans's piano style.[93] Both Davis and Evans were familiar with George Russell's ideas about modal jazz.[94][95] But Davis neglected to tell pianist Wynton Kelly that Evans was returning, so Kelly appeared on only one song, "Freddie Freeloader". [93] The sextet had played "So What" and "All Blues" at performances, but the remaining three compositions they saw for the first time in the studio.
Released in August 1959, Kind of Blue was an instant success, with widespread radio airplay and rave reviews from critics.[92] It has remained a strong seller over the years. In 2019, the album achieved 5× platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over five million copies in the US, making it one of the most successful jazz albums in history.[96] In 2009, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution that honored it as a national treasure.[97][98]
In August 1959, during a break in a recording session at the Birdland nightclub in New York City, Davis was escorting a blonde-haired woman to a taxi outside the club when policeman Gerald Kilduff told him to "move on".[99][100] Davis said that he was working at the club, and he refused to move.[101] Kilduff arrested and grabbed Davis as he tried to protect himself. Witnesses said the policeman hit Davis in the stomach with a nightstick without provocation. Two detectives held the crowd back, while a third approached Davis from behind and beat him over the head. Davis was taken to jail, charged with assaulting an officer, then taken to the hospital where he received five stitches.[100] By January 1960, he was acquitted of disorderly conduct and third-degree assault. He later stated the incident "changed my whole life and whole attitude again, made me feel bitter and cynical again when I was starting to feel good about the things that had changed in this country".[102]
Davis and his sextet toured to support Kind of Blue.[92] He persuaded Coltrane to play with the group on one final European tour in the spring of 1960. Coltrane then departed to form his quartet, though he returned for some tracks on Davis's album Someday My Prince Will Come (1961). Its front cover shows a photograph of his wife, Frances Taylor, after Davis demanded that Columbia depict black women on his album covers.[103]
1963–1968: Second quintet
.jpg)
In December 1962, Davis, Kelly, Chambers, Cobb, and Rollins played together for the last time as the first three wanted to leave and play as a trio. Rollins left them soon after, leaving Davis to pay over $25,000 (equivalent to $241,900 in 2022[33]) to cancel upcoming gigs and quickly assemble a new group. Following auditions, he found his new band in tenor saxophonist George Coleman, bassist Ron Carter, pianist Victor Feldman, and drummer Frank Butler.[104] By May 1963, Feldman and Butler were replaced by 23-year-old pianist Herbie Hancock and 17-year-old drummer Tony Williams who made Davis "excited all over again".[105] With this group, Davis completed the rest of what became Seven Steps to Heaven (1963) and recorded the live albums Miles Davis in Europe (1964), My Funny Valentine (1965), and Four & More (1966). The quintet played essentially the same bebop tunes and standards that Davis's previous bands had played, but they approached them with structural and rhythmic freedom and occasionally breakneck speed.
In 1964, Coleman was briefly replaced by saxophonist Sam Rivers (who recorded with Davis on Miles in Tokyo) until Wayne Shorter was persuaded to leave Art Blakey. The quintet with Shorter lasted through 1968, with the saxophonist becoming the group's principal composer. The album E.S.P. (1965) was named after his composition. While touring Europe, the group made its first album, Miles in Berlin (1965).[106]
Davis needed medical attention for hip pain, which had worsened since his Japanese tour during the previous year.[107] He underwent hip replacement surgery in April 1965, with bone taken from his shin, but it failed. After his third month in the hospital, he discharged himself due to boredom and went home. He returned to the hospital in August after a fall required the insertion of a plastic hip joint.[108] In November 1965, he had recovered enough to return to performing with his quintet, which included gigs at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago. Teo Macero returned as his record producer after their rift over Quiet Nights had healed.[109][110]
In January 1966, Davis spent three months in the hospital with a liver infection. When he resumed touring, he performed more at colleges because he had grown tired of the typical jazz venues.[111] Columbia president Clive Davis reported in 1966 his sales had declined to around 40,000–50,000 per album, compared to as many as 100,000 per release a few years before. Matters were not helped by the press reporting his apparent financial troubles and imminent demise.[112] After his appearance at the 1966 Newport Jazz Festival, he returned to the studio with his quintet for a series of sessions. He started a relationship with actress Cicely Tyson, who helped him reduce his alcohol consumption.[113]
Material from the 1966–1968 sessions was released on Miles Smiles (1966), Sorcerer (1967), Nefertiti (1967), Miles in the Sky (1968), and Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968). The quintet's approach to the new music became known as "time no changes"—which referred to Davis's decision to depart from chordal sequences and adopt a more open approach, with the rhythm section responding to the soloists' melodies.[114] Through Nefertiti the studio recordings consisted primarily of originals composed by Shorter, with occasional compositions by the other sidemen. In 1967, the group began to play their concerts in continuous sets, each tune flowing into the next, with only the melody indicating any sort of change. His bands performed this way until his hiatus in 1975.
Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro—which tentatively introduced electric bass, electric piano, and electric guitar on some tracks—pointed the way to the fusion phase of Davis's career. He also began experimenting with more rock-oriented rhythms on these records. By the time the second half of Filles de Kilimanjaro was recorded, bassist Dave Holland and pianist Chick Corea had replaced Carter and Hancock. Davis soon took over the compositional duties of his sidemen.
1968–1975: The electric period
In a Silent Way was recorded in a single studio session in February 1969, with Shorter, Hancock, Holland, and Williams alongside keyboardists Chick Corea and Josef Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin. The album contains two side-long tracks that Macero pieced together from different takes recorded at the session. When the album was released later that year, some critics accused him of "selling out" to the rock and roll audience. Nevertheless, it reached number 134 on the US Billboard Top LPs chart, his first album since My Funny Valentine to reach the chart. In a Silent Way was his entry into jazz fusion. The touring band of 1969–1970—with Shorter, Corea, Holland, and DeJohnette—never completed a studio recording together, and became known as Davis's "lost quintet", though radio broadcasts from the band's European tour have been extensively bootlegged.[115][116]
For the double album Bitches Brew (1970), he hired Jack DeJohnette, Airto Moreira, and Bennie Maupin. The album contained long compositions, some over twenty minutes, that were never played in the studio but were constructed from several takes by Macero and Davis via splicing and tape loops amid epochal advances in multitrack recording technologies.[117] Bitches Brew peaked at No. 35 on the Billboard Album chart.[118] In 1976, it was certified gold for selling over 500,000 records. By 2003, it had sold one million copies.[96]
In March 1970, Davis began to perform as the opening act for rock bands, allowing Columbia to market Bitches Brew to a larger audience. He shared a Fillmore East bill with the Steve Miller Band and Neil Young with Crazy Horse on March 6 and 7.[119] Biographer Paul Tingen wrote, "Miles' newcomer status in this environment" led to "mixed audience reactions, often having to play for dramatically reduced fees, and enduring the 'sell-out' accusations from the jazz world", as well as being "attacked by sections of the black press for supposedly genuflecting to white culture".[120] The 1970 tours included the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival on August 29 when he performed to an estimated 600,000 people, the largest of his career.[121] Plans to record with Hendrix ended after the guitarist's death; his funeral was the last one that Davis attended.[122] Several live albums with a transitional sextet/septet including Corea, DeJohnette, Holland, Moreira, saxophonist Steve Grossman, and keyboardist Keith Jarrett were recorded during this period, including Miles Davis at Fillmore (1970) and Black Beauty: Miles Davis at Fillmore West (1973).[10]
By 1971, Davis had signed a contract with Columbia that paid him $100,000 a year (equivalent to $722,600 in 2022[33]) for three years in addition to royalties.[123] He recorded a soundtrack album (Jack Johnson) for the 1970 documentary film about heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, containing two long pieces of 25 and 26 minutes in length with Hancock, McLaughlin, Sonny Sharrock, and Billy Cobham. He was committed to making music for African-Americans who liked more commercial, pop, groove-oriented music. By November 1971, DeJohnette and Moreira had been replaced in the touring ensemble by drummer Leon "Ndugu" Chancler and percussionists James Mtume and Don Alias.[124] Live-Evil was released in the same month. Showcasing bassist Michael Henderson, who had replaced Holland in 1970, the album demonstrated that Davis's ensemble had transformed into a funk-oriented group while retaining the exploratory imperative of Bitches Brew.
In 1972, composer-arranger Paul Buckmaster introduced Davis to the music of avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, leading to a period of creative exploration. Biographer J. K. Chambers wrote, "The effect of Davis' study of Stockhausen could not be repressed for long ... Davis' own 'space music' shows Stockhausen's influence compositionally."[125] His recordings and performances during this period were described as "space music" by fans, Feather, and Buckmaster, who described it as "a lot of mood changes—heavy, dark, intense—definitely space music".[126][127] The studio album On the Corner (1972) blended the influence of Stockhausen and Buckmaster with funk elements. Davis invited Buckmaster to New York City to oversee the writing and recording of the album with Macero.[128] The album reached No. 1 on the Billboard jazz chart but peaked at No. 156 on the more heterogeneous Top 200 Albums chart. Davis felt that Columbia marketed it to the wrong audience. "The music was meant to be heard by young black people, but they just treated it like any other jazz album and advertised it that way, pushed it on the jazz radio stations. Young black kids don't listen to those stations; they listen to R&B stations and some rock stations."[129] In October 1972, he broke his ankles in a car crash. He took painkillers and cocaine to cope with the pain.[130] Looking back at his career after the incident, he wrote, "Everything started to blur."[131]
After recording On the Corner, he assembled a group with Henderson, Mtume, Carlos Garnett, guitarist Reggie Lucas, organist Lonnie Liston Smith, tabla player Badal Roy, sitarist Khalil Balakrishna, and drummer Al Foster. Only Smith was a jazz instrumentalist; consequently, the music emphasized rhythmic density and shifting textures instead of solos. This group was recorded live in 1972 for In Concert, but Davis found it unsatisfactory, leading him to drop the tabla and sitar and play keyboards. He also added guitarist Pete Cosey. The compilation studio album Big Fun contains four long improvisations recorded between 1969 and 1972.
This was music that polarized audiences, provoking boos and walk-outs amid the ecstasy of others. The length, density, and unforgiving nature of it mocked those who said that Miles was interested only in being trendy and popular. Some have heard in this music the feel and shape of a musician's late work, an egoless music that precedes its creator's death. As Theodor Adorno said of the late Beethoven, the disappearance of the musician into the work is a bow to mortality. It was as if Miles were testifying to all that he had been witness to for the past thirty years, both terrifying and joyful.
— John Szwed on Agharta (1975) and Pangaea (1976)[132]
Studio sessions throughout 1973 and 1974 led to Get Up with It, an album which included four long pieces alongside four shorter recordings from 1970 and 1972. The track "He Loved Him Madly", a thirty-minute tribute to the recently deceased Duke Ellington, influenced Brian Eno's ambient music.[133] In the United States, it performed comparably to On the Corner, reaching number 8 on the jazz chart and number 141 on the pop chart. He then concentrated on live performance with a series of concerts that Columbia released on the double live albums Agharta (1975), Pangaea (1976), and Dark Magus (1977). The first two are recordings of two sets from February 1, 1975, in Osaka, by which time Davis was troubled by several physical ailments; he relied on alcohol, codeine, and morphine to get through the engagements. His shows were routinely panned by critics who mentioned his habit of performing with his back to the audience.[134] Cosey later asserted that "the band really advanced after the Japanese tour",[135] but Davis was again hospitalized, for his ulcers and a hernia, during a tour of the US while opening for Herbie Hancock.
After appearances at the 1975 Newport Jazz Festival in July and the Schaefer Music Festival in New York in September, Davis dropped out of music.[136][137]
1975–1980: Hiatus
In his autobiography, Davis wrote frankly about his life during his hiatus from music. He called his Upper West Side brownstone a wreck and chronicled his heavy use of alcohol and cocaine, in addition to sexual encounters with many women.[138] He also stated that "Sex and drugs took the place music had occupied in my life." Drummer Tony Williams recalled that by noon (on average) Davis would be sick from the previous night's intake.[139]
In December 1975, he had regained enough strength to undergo a much needed hip replacement operation.[140] In December 1976, Columbia was reluctant to renew his contract and pay his usual large advances. But after his lawyer started negotiating with United Artists, Columbia matched their offer, establishing the Miles Davis Fund to pay him regularly. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz was the only other musician with Columbia who had a similar status.[141]
In 1978, Davis asked fusion guitarist Larry Coryell to participate in sessions with keyboardists Masabumi Kikuchi and George Pavlis, bassist T. M. Stevens, and drummer Al Foster.[142] Davis played the arranged piece uptempo, abandoned his trumpet for the organ, and had Macero record the session without the band's knowledge. After Coryell declined a spot in a band that Davis was beginning to put together, Davis returned to his reclusive lifestyle in New York City.[143][144] Soon after, Marguerite Eskridge had Davis jailed for failing to pay child support for their son Erin, which cost him $10,000 (equivalent to $44,870 in 2022[33]) for release on bail.[142][140] A recording session that involved Buckmaster and Gil Evans was halted,[145] with Evans leaving after failing to receive the payment he was promised. In August 1978, Davis hired a new manager, Mark Rothbaum, who had worked with him since 1972.[146]
1980–1985: Comeback
Having played the trumpet little throughout the previous three years, Davis found it difficult to reclaim his embouchure. His first post-hiatus studio appearance took place in May 1980.[147] A day later, Davis was hospitalized due to a leg infection.[148] He recorded The Man with the Horn from June 1980 to May 1981 with Macero producing. A large band was abandoned in favor of a combo with saxophonist Bill Evans and bassist Marcus Miller. Both would collaborate with him during the next decade.
The Man with the Horn received a poor critical reception despite selling well. In June 1981, Davis returned to the stage for the first time since 1975 in a ten-minute guest solo as part of Mel Lewis's band at the Village Vanguard.[149] This was followed by appearances with a new band.[150][151] Recordings from a mixture of dates from 1981, including from the Kix in Boston and Avery Fisher Hall, were released on We Want Miles,[152] which earned him a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist.[153]
In January 1982, while Tyson was working in Africa, Davis "went a little wild" with alcohol and suffered a stroke that temporarily paralyzed his right hand.[154][155] Tyson returned home and cared for him. After three months of treatment with a Chinese acupuncturist, he was able to play the trumpet again. He listened to his doctor's warnings and gave up alcohol and drugs. He credited Tyson with helping his recovery, which involved exercise, piano playing, and visits to spas. She encouraged him to draw, which he pursued for the rest of his life.[154] Takao Ogawa, a Japanese jazz journalist who befriended Davis during this period, took pictures of his drawings and put them in his book along with the interviews of Davis at his apartment in New York. Davis told Ogawa: "I'm interested in line and color, line is like phrase and coating colors is like code. When I see good paintings, I hear good music. That is why my paintings are the same as my music.They are different than any paintings."[156]
Davis resumed touring in May 1982 with a line-up that included percussionist Mino Cinelu and guitarist John Scofield, with whom he worked closely on the album Star People (1983). In mid-1983, he worked on the tracks for Decoy, an album mixing soul music and electronica that was released in 1984. He brought in producer, composer, and keyboardist Robert Irving III, who had collaborated with him on The Man with the Horn. With a seven-piece band that included Scofield, Evans, Irving, Foster, and Darryl Jones, he played a series of European performances that were positively received. In December 1984, while in Denmark, he was awarded the Léonie Sonning Music Prize. Trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg had written "Aura", a contemporary classical piece, for the event which impressed Davis to the point of returning to Denmark in early 1985 to record his next studio album, Aura.[157] Columbia was dissatisfied with the recording and delayed its release.
In May 1985, one month into a tour, Davis signed a contract with Warner Bros. that required him to give up his publishing rights.[158][159] You're Under Arrest, his final album for Columbia, was released in September. It included cover versions of two pop songs: "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson's "Human Nature". He considered releasing an album of pop songs, and he recorded dozens of them, but the idea was rejected. He said that many of today's jazz standards had been pop songs in Broadway theater and that he was simply updating the standards repertoire.
Davis collaborated with a number of figures from the British post-punk and new wave movements during this period, including Scritti Politti.[160] This period also saw Davis move from his funk inspired sound of the early 1970s to a more melodic style.[34]
1986–1991: Final years
After taking part in the recording of the 1985 protest song "Sun City" as a member of Artists United Against Apartheid, Davis appeared on the instrumental "Don't Stop Me Now" by Toto for their album Fahrenheit (1986). Davis collaborated with Prince on a song titled "Can I Play With U," which went unreleased until 2020.[161] Davis also collaborated with Zane Giles and Randy Hall on the Rubberband sessions in 1985 but those would remain unreleased until 2019.[162] Instead, he worked with Marcus Miller, and Tutu (1986) became the first time he used modern studio tools such as programmed synthesizers, sampling, and drum loops. Released in September 1986, its front cover is a photographic portrait of Davis by Irving Penn.[159] In 1987, he won a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist. Also in 1987, Davis contacted American journalist Quincy Troupe to work with him on his autobiography.[163] The two men had met the previous year when Troupe conducted a two-day-long interview, which was published by Spin as a 45-page article.[163]
In 1988, Davis had a small part as a street musician in the Christmas comedy film Scrooged starring Bill Murray. He also collaborated with Zucchero Fornaciari in a version of Dune Mosse (Blue's), published in 2004 in Zu & Co. of the Italian bluesman. In November 1988 he was inducted into the Sovereign Military Order of Malta at a ceremony at the Alhambra Palace in Spain[164][165][166] (this was part of the reasoning for his daughter's decision to include the honorific "Sir" on his headstone).[167] Later that month, Davis cut his European tour short after he collapsed and fainted after a two-hour show in Madrid and flew home.[168] There were rumors of more poor health reported by the American magazine Star in its February 21, 1989, edition, which published a claim that Davis had contracted AIDS, prompting his manager Peter Shukat to issue a statement the following day. Shukat said Davis had been in the hospital for a mild case of pneumonia and the removal of a benign polyp on his vocal cords and was resting comfortably in preparation for his 1989 tours.[169] Davis later blamed one of his former wives or girlfriends for starting the rumor and decided against taking legal action.[170] He was interviewed on 60 Minutes by Harry Reasoner. In October 1989, he received a Grande Medaille de Vermeil from Paris mayor Jacques Chirac.[171] In 1990, he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[172] In early 1991, he appeared in the Rolf de Heer film Dingo as a jazz musician.
Davis followed Tutu with Amandla (1989) and soundtracks to four films: Street Smart, Siesta, The Hot Spot, and Dingo. His last albums were released posthumously: the hip hop-influenced Doo-Bop (1992) and Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux (1993), a collaboration with Quincy Jones from the 1991 Montreux Jazz Festival where, for the first time in three decades, he performed songs from Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain.[173]
On July 8, 1991, Davis returned to performing material from his past at the 1991 Montreux Jazz Festival with a band and orchestra conducted by Quincy Jones.[174] The set consisted of arrangements from his albums recorded with Gil Evans.[175] The show was followed by a concert billed as "Miles and Friends" at the Grande halle de la Villette in Paris two days later, with guest performances by musicians from throughout his career, including John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, and Joe Zawinul.[175] In Paris he was awarded a knighthood, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour by French Culture Minister, Jack Lang, who called him "the Picasso of Jazz."[172] After returning to America, he stopped in New York City to record material for Doo-Bop and then returned to California to play at the Hollywood Bowl on August 25, his final live performance.[174][176]
In October 1969, Davis was shot at five times while in his car with one of his two lovers, Marguerite Eskridge. The incident left him with a graze and Eskridge unharmed.[119] In 1970, Marguerite gave birth to their son Erin. By 1979, Davis rekindled his relationship with actress Cicely Tyson, who helped him to overcome his cocaine addiction and regain his enthusiasm for music. The two married in November 1981,[194][195] but their tumultuous marriage ended with Tyson filing for divorce in 1988, which was finalized in 1989.[196]
In 1984, Davis met 34-year-old sculptor Jo Gelbard.[197] Gelbard would teach Davis how to paint; the two were frequent collaborators and were soon romantically involved.[197][163] By 1985, Davis was diabetic and required daily injections of insulin.[198] Davis became increasingly aggressive in his final year due in part to the medication he was taking,[197] and his aggression manifested as violence towards Gelbard.[197]
Death
In early September 1991, Davis checked into St. John's Hospital near his home in Santa Monica, California, for routine tests.[200] Doctors suggested he have a tracheal tube implanted to relieve his breathing after repeated bouts of bronchial pneumonia. The suggestion provoked an outburst from Davis that led to an intracerebral hemorrhage followed by a coma. According to Jo Gelbard, on September 26, Davis painted his final painting, composed of dark, ghostly figures, dripping blood and "his imminent demise."[139] After several days on life support, his machine was turned off and he died on September 28, 1991, in the arms of Gelbard.[201][163] He was 65 years old. His death was attributed to the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia, and respiratory failure.[10] According to Troupe, Davis was taking azidothymidine (AZT), a type of antiretroviral drug used for the treatment of HIV and AIDS, during his treatments in the hospital.[202] A funeral service was held on October 5, 1991, at St. Peter's Lutheran Church on Lexington Avenue in New York City[203][204] that was attended by around 500 friends, family members, and musical acquaintances, with many fans standing in the rain.[205] He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City, with one of his trumpets, near the site of Duke Ellington's grave.[206][205]
At the time of his death, Davis's estate was valued at more than $1 million (equivalent to roughly $2.1 million in 2022[33]). In his will, Davis left 20 percent to his daughter Cheryl Davis; 40 percent to his son Erin Davis; 10 percent to his nephew Vincent Wilburn Jr. and 15 percent each to his brother Vernon Davis and his sister Dorothy Wilburn. He excluded his two sons Gregory and Miles IV.[207]
Views on his earlier work
Late in his life, from the "electric period" onwards, Davis repeatedly explained his reasons for not wishing to perform his earlier works, such as Birth of the Cool or Kind of Blue. In his view, remaining stylistically static was the wrong option.[208] He commented: "'So What' or Kind of Blue, they were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It's over ... What I used to play with Bill Evans, all those different modes, and substitute chords, we had the energy then and we liked it. But I have no feel for it anymore, it's more like warmed-over turkey."[209] When Shirley Horn insisted in 1990 that Miles reconsider playing the ballads and modal tunes of his Kind of Blue period, he said: "Nah, it hurts my lip."[209] Bill Evans, who played piano on Kind of Blue, said: "I would like to hear more of the consummate melodic master, but I feel that big business and his record company have had a corrupting influence on his material. The rock and pop thing certainly draws a wider audience."[209] Throughout his later career, Davis declined offers to reinstate his 1960s quintet.[139]
Many books and documentaries focus on his work before 1975.[139] According to an article by The Independent, from 1975 onwards a decline in critical praise for Davis's output began to form, with many viewing the era as "worthless": "There is a surprisingly widespread view that, in terms of the merits of his musical output, Davis might as well have died in 1975."[139] In a 1982 interview in DownBeat, Wynton Marsalis said: "They call Miles's stuff jazz. That stuff is not jazz, man. Just because somebody played jazz at one time, that doesn't mean they're still playing it."[139] Despite his contempt for Davis' later work, Marsalis' work is "laden with ironic references to Davis' music of the '60s".[34] Davis did not necessarily disagree; lambasting what he saw as Marsalis's stylistic conservatism, Davis said "Jazz is dead ... it's finito! It's over and there's no point apeing the shit."[210] Writer Stanley Crouch criticized Davis's work from In a Silent Way onwards.[139]
Legacy and influence
Miles Davis is considered one of the most innovative, influential, and respected figures in the history of music. Based on professional rankings of his albums and songs, the aggregate website Acclaimed Music lists him as the 16th most acclaimed recording artist in history.[211] The Guardian described him as "a pioneer of 20th-century music, leading many of the key developments in the world of jazz."[212] He has been called "one of the great innovators in jazz",[213] and had the titles Prince of Darkness and the Picasso of Jazz bestowed upon him.[214] The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll said, "Miles Davis played a crucial and inevitably controversial role in every major development in jazz since the mid-'40s, and no other jazz musician has had so profound an effect on rock. Miles Davis was the most widely recognized jazz musician of his era, an outspoken social critic and an arbiter of style—in attitude and fashion—as well as music."[215]
William Ruhlmann of AllMusic wrote, "To examine his career is to examine the history of jazz from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s, since he was in the thick of almost every important innovation and stylistic development in the music during that period ... It can even be argued that jazz stopped evolving when Davis wasn't there to push it forward."[1] Francis Davis of The Atlantic noted that Davis's career can be seen as "an ongoing critique of bebop: the origins of 'cool' jazz..., hard bop, or 'funky'..., modal improvisation..., and jazz-rock fusion... can be traced to his efforts to tear bebop down to its essentials."[216]
His approach, owing largely to the African-American performance tradition that focused on individual expression, emphatic interaction, and creative response to shifting contents, had a profound impact on generations of jazz musicians.[217] In 2016, digital publication The Pudding, in an article examining Davis's legacy, found that 2,452 Wikipedia pages mention Davis, with over 286 citing him as an influence.[218]
On November 5, 2009, U.S. Representative John Conyers of Michigan sponsored a measure in the United States House of Representatives to commemorate Kind of Blue on its 50th anniversary. The measure also affirms jazz as a national treasure and "encourages the United States government to preserve and advance the art form of jazz music".[219] It passed with a vote of 409–0 on December 15, 2009.[220] The trumpet Davis used on the recording is displayed on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It was donated to the school by Arthur "Buddy" Gist, who met Davis in 1949 and became a close friend. The gift was the reason why the jazz program at UNCG is named the Miles Davis Jazz Studies Program.[221]
In 1986, the New England Conservatory awarded Davis an honorary doctorate for his contributions to music.[222] Since 1960 the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) honored him with eight Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and three Grammy Hall of Fame Awards.
In 2001, The Miles Davis Story, a two-hour documentary film by Mike Dibb, won an International Emmy Award for arts documentary of the year.[223] Since 2005, the Miles Davis Jazz Committee has held an annual Miles Davis Jazz Festival.[224] Also in 2005, a London exhibition was held of his paintings, The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis, 1980–1991' was released detailing his final years and eight of his albums from the 1960s and 1970s were reissued in celebration of the 50th anniversary of his signing to Columbia Records.[139] In 2006, Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[225] In 2012, the U.S. Postal Service issued commemorative stamps featuring Davis.[225]
Miles Ahead was a 2015 American music film directed by Don Cheadle, co-written by Cheadle with Steven Baigelman, Stephen J. Rivele, and Christopher Wilkinson, which interprets the life and compositions of Davis. It premiered at the New York Film Festival in October 2015. The film stars Cheadle, Emayatzy Corinealdi as Frances Taylor, Ewan McGregor, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Lakeith Stanfield.[226] That same year a statue of him was erected in his home city, Alton, Illinois and listeners of BBC Radio and Jazz FM voted Davis the greatest jazz musician.[227][224] Publications such as The Guardian have also ranked Davis amongst the best of all jazz musicians.[228]
In 2018, American rapper Q-Tip played Miles Davis in a theatre production, My Funny Valentine.[229] Q-Tip had previously played Davis in 2010.[229] In 2019, the documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, directed by Stanley Nelson, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.[230] It was later released on PBS' American Masters series.[231]
Discography
The following list intends to outline Davis' major works, particularly studio albums. A more comprehensive discography can be found at the main article.
- The New Sounds (1951)
- Young Man with a Horn (1952)
- Blue Period (1953)
- The Compositions of Al Cohn (1953)
- Miles Davis Volume 2 (1954)
- Miles Davis Volume 3 (1954)
- Miles Davis Quintet (1954)
- With Sonny Rollins (1954)
- Miles Davis Quartet (1954)
- All-Stars, Volume 1 (1955)
- All-Stars, Volume 2 (1955)
- All Star Sextet (1955)
- The Musings of Miles (1955)
- Blue Moods (1955)
- Miles Davis, Vol. 1 (1956)
- Miles Davis, Vol. 2 (1956)
- Dig (1956)
- Miles: The New Miles Davis Quintet (1956)
- Quintet/Sextet (1956)
- Collectors' Items (1956)
- Birth of the Cool (1957)
- 'Round About Midnight (1957)
- Walkin' (1957)
- Cookin' (1957)
- Miles Ahead (1957)
- Relaxin' (1958)
- Milestones (1958)
- Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants (1959)
- Porgy and Bess (1959)
- Kind of Blue (1959)
- Workin' (1959)
- Sketches of Spain (1960)
- Steamin' (1961)
- Someday My Prince Will Come (1961)
- Seven Steps to Heaven (1963)
- Quiet Nights (1963)
- E.S.P. (1965)
- Miles Smiles (1967)
- Sorcerer (1967)
- Nefertiti (1968)
- Miles in the Sky (1968)
- Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968)
- In a Silent Way (1969)
- Bitches Brew (1970)
- Jack Johnson (1971)
- Live-Evil (1971)
- On the Corner (1972)
- In Concert (1973)
- Big Fun (1974)
- Get Up with It (1974)
- Agharta (1975)
- Pangaea (1975)
- Dark Magus (1977)
- The Man with the Horn (1981)
- We Want Miles (1982)
- Star People (1983)
- Decoy (1984)
- You're Under Arrest (1985)
- Tutu (1986)
- Amandla (1989)
- Aura (1989)
- Doo-Bop (1992)
- Rubberband (2019)
Awards and honors
Grammy Awards
- Miles Davis won eight Grammy Awards and received thirty-two nominations.[234]
Other awards
External links
- MilesDavis.com official website
- Miles-Davis.com official Sony Music website at the Wayback Machine (archived April 24, 2006)
- Miles Davis collected news and commentary at The New York Times
- Miles Davis collected news and commentary at The Guardian
- Miles Davis discography at Discogs
- Miles Davis at IMDb
Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis (Musicians in Their Own Words) Hardcover – November 1, 2008
http://www.furious.com/perfect/milesdavisgetupwithit.html
MILES DAVIS
Get Up With It (Columbia, 1974)
(June 2013)
As with most of Miles' post-1958 output, Teo Macero is the producer/conductor/editor and all around general glue holding the shit together. His technical mastery in assembling seamless edits from disparate sessions, jams and versions deserves its very overdue tip of the hat from the music industry. Fuck the Grammys and lifetime achievement awards and all that, Buildings and institutions should be erected and dedicated in his honor. Check out a list sometime of the records he's worked on. You'll see what I'm saying.
And the list of players on this particular platter are no slouches. One of the few constants throughout these jams is Michael Henderson on the Fender bass. His solid lines anchor the madness occurring around him, be it a tranquil modal wander like the epic "Maiysha" or the Stockhausen inspired breakbeat organ-voodoo of stunner "Rated X." Mtume's hand percussion is a layer present on all of these songs too and deserves attention for the shine he gives, pushing the performances upwards and onwards- not for nothing does he get a track named for him. Reggie Lucas and Pete Cosey ply their guitars with attention to shimmer and attack, but stand at the ready to ramp up the volume and hit some dirt noise and angular funk with slack-jawed glee. Miles' Bitches Brew compatriot John McLaughlin shows up as well on the aforementioned "Rated X" to scour and preen. Al Foster, Bill Cobham and Bernard Purdie hit the skins to rude effect. With rhythm kings like those dudes at your disposal, you can relax and stretch out knowing something's gonna happen.
The one single defining factor effecting this collection is Davis' adoption of organ and piano textures, played by the man himself, in addition to his jittery wah-wah trumpet bleats. Opening up the songs with his minimal vamps (excepting "Rated X," which sounds like he jammed coke straws in all the keys, just to let it wail). Yeah, as loathe as I am to drop it like that, this is a VERY seventies cocaine record, albeit scoured of a lot of twaddle thanks to Mr. Macero's scissor job. Interesting to note that shortly after the record's release, Miles disappeared into his apartment, his Ferrari and various elevators and broom closets, babbling and brooding to himself and no-one else for close to ten years of paranoia chants.
That's what makes this double record, which is essentially a salvage job, so alien and, let it be noted, more interesting than the rest of his seventies albums by a long shot. Drug addiction and general burnout had made Miles a basket case and the record company (Columbia) was quite ready to get something else out before he shut down. It's stature over the years as one of his most maligned and misunderstood releases makes sense due chiefly to the fact that there is no over-arching concept to it, nothing to tie it together conceptually like say, On the Corner or Bitches Brew. This is the the 1970-1975 Miles Davis mixtape that you can throw on randomly and find something strange and funky at any point. The fact that it was released as just another album only adds to its weird contours and textures. True head music for the people, only the people weren't listening by this point. So it was simply released and forgotten about quickly.
But let's not get side tracked. This here album rewards many repeated listens, strictly due to the power of the collective improvisations boiling and simmering with a leisurely violence never too far from the surface. Opener "He Loved Him Madly," for Duke Ellington, rolls along like at a fittingly stately crawl, ambient before there was such a thing. Fucking Eno(!!) has expressed as much, publicly saying this particular track had a hand in pushing him along the path of creating some truly vague system music. When the high priest of drool rock says that, you'd best recognize. After all is said and done, this track is one of the highest examples one could proffer of true majesty, a slow burn for the heavy-lidded and the spiritually gifted. Bow down to the exit sign, someone said at some point.
My favorite jam of the bunch has to be the Latin-tinged "Maiysha." A relaxed yet dissonant stroll that unfurls itself slowly over its near fifteen minute running time. Miles switches between the organ and the trumpet here, never hurrying things along too much. At times almost too unbearably gorgeous to believe, the first three quarters floats on a gentle breeze before it changes gears into some more jagged funk, Miles' organ smears itself over the proceedings at random points, with some nice parry and thrust guitar workouts rebounding before the edit silences the whole thing quickly. Again, it cannot be overemphasized how much the edits shape and color this album. Random cut-offs bump the pastoral into the visceral. The modus operandi here seeming to be that there is none, other than grabbing the best bits and throwing them together and weaving a patchwork that loosely hangs together. BANG! GET IT OUT THERE! The commercial imperative to get some more Miles product on the shelves being the number one goal for everyone involved.
This is not a bad thing though. When I say the commerce imperative is not a bad thing in this (and many other cases), I mean that there was just a desire to put some physical product out there. But it also helps that Miles had pretty much absolute creative control at this point due to his very favorable contract with Columbia. "Honky Tonk"'s afterburner bar room blues fuckery sitting astride the afore-mentioned "Rated X"'s jittery bleat? A stretch for anyone to pull off on the most inspired of days but here it works in the most casual of ways. Take it or leave it. It's just another album. If only.
Being one of the truly experimental albums of the 1970's to my ears, Get Up With It can only be truly be explained by being brushed by some kind of accidental magic. Teo going through some tapes and splicing together takes of half-together jams to satisfy Miles and the suits. That's alright though. Why stress it too much and microscope the shit to death? There's some hot grooves there, wacked noise wig-outs and tropical back rubs to calm a guy down. Miles commands them to get the fucker out and so it happens. Done.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/19359/genius-miles-davis-explained
The Genius of Miles Davis: Explained!
by Ransom Riggs
Mental Floss
Music icon Miles Davis has long been revered as a jazz pioneer -- but what exactly did he pioneer? To some purists, jazz music can be broken into two distinct eras: Before Miles and After Miles. A student and bandmate of Bebop legends Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, Miles' musical education took place occasionally at the Julliard School of Music but mostly in the smoky clubs of 52nd street, where he was trained in the esoteric art of "hot jazz," a hyper-complex, acrobatic style of playing torrential melodies at breakneck tempos. Miles was a quick study, but after a year touring as a rising star in Charlie Parker's band, he dropped out in 1958. Miles found that the "hot" stuff didn't speak to his soul; instead, he was captivated by the pensive, intimate sounds of pianist Thelonious Monk, singer Billie Holiday and composer Gil Evans. Their songs cut deeper and played more slowly than popular "hot jazz" tunes, and with those musicians' help and influence, he pioneered a style known as "cool jazz," which focused the genre's intensity into a laser beam of sound. Here are some clips that help illustrate the "birth of the cool," as music historians have dubbed it.
A quiet fire: the early years
From early in his career, Miles was obsessed with the idea that a single note could convey all the beauty of music.That idea started to take form in his one-off recordings from the late 1940s, when to most Americans he was nothing special -- just another fast-blowing sideman who'd once played with Charlie Parker. Jobs were scarce and he drifted around, on the cusp of celebrity but not truly finding it until he moved to Paris in 1949, where he was hailed as a jazz god. When he returned to he U.S., the contrast was unbearable, and Miles' career almost went permanently off the rails. Broke, bored and frustrated by a lack of creative momentum, he turned to heroin -- a period in his life he would later call "a four-year horror show."
By 1954, the junk was threatening everything he held dear. Shunned by even his closest friends, he returned to his hometown of St. Louis, where he locked himself in his family's guest house for two months and kicked the habit cold-turkey. After that, his resolve to find a new sound grew stronger than ever, and his playing became richer. It was imbued with a deep loneliness and heartache that hadn't been there before -- on full display in his 1955 release 'Round About Midnight, which put Davis back on the map. Here's a clip from the title track, "'Round Midnight," a song written by Thelonious Monk:
On this album, he pared down his solos and found drama in moments of silence; Miles' "cool" aesthetic dominates the beginning of the song. Here, Miles trumpet has a depth of feeling and starkness that never errs on the side of sentimentality. (The clip is from a performance in Stockholm, 1967, and features Wayne Shorter on sax and Herbie Hancock on the piano.) He now had all the tools he needed to construct his masterpiece, Kind of Blue.
Miles' "Blue" Period
Sessions for Kind of Blue commenced on March 2, 1959 in a converted Greek Orthodox church in Manhattan. Together with his sextet, which included pianist Bill Evans and saxophonist John Coltrane, Davis was creating beautiful compositions spontaneously. He abandoned the usual chord progressions that govern jazz and supplied only outlines for his pieces. To capture the spirit of discovery, he gave his band vague directions: telling them to "play this pretty" or make it "Latin-flavored." After just nine-hours in the studio, they were finished, and the resulting album tracks are all first takes; "First-take feelings -- they're generally the best," remarked pianist Evans. Here clips from a few tracks on this classic album.So What?
The five tracks on Kind of Blue may have been improvised, but they didn't come out of nowhere. "So What" isn't just the name of a song -- it was one of Miles' favorite expressions. Whenever someone would challenge him on an idea or decision, he would respond in his raspy voice: "so what?" You can hear his motto in the sassy two-note phrases that run throughout the song.
Freddie Freeloader
This tune was named after a guy who often tried to sneak into Miles' gigs without paying, and the groove captures Freddie's slippery personality. It also features what many feel are some of the best solos on the album, a part of Miles' musical legacy that went on to influence lots of other musicians; you can hear it in the free-roaming solos of guitarist Duane Allman and the keyboard works of the Doors' Ray Manzarek.
Ken has his say
Ken Burns' Jazz is a great film that has a segment devoted to the making of Kind of Blue. It's worth watching just for the interviews; the reverence with which critics and other musicians talk about Miles speaks volumes.
Miles: the later years
After briefly touring behind Kind of Blue, Miles set off on new adventures. During the next 30 years, until his death in 1991, he pioneered the use of electric instruments in jazz and experimented with rock, funk and pop. Some jazz purists felt that Miles went from birthing the cool to chasing it -- they point to his final album, You're Under Arrest, which includes covers (excuse me, "jazz reinterpretations") of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" and Michael Jackson's "Human Nature". Check out this strange, very 80s video for "Decoy," a soul-electronica hybrid which sounds about as far from "Freddie Freeloader" as you can get while still playing the trumpet:Despite critics of his later work, however, it could be argued that, having perfected his vision of "cool jazz," it was natural for Davis to move on to other styles and musical expressions. No matter: even if he'd released five Michael Jackson cover albums, Kind of Blue ensured he'd always be known as the Father of the Cool; it was moment in musical history when his spare phrasing and sense of melodic space found an answer to the eternal question: "What is the sound of one note swinging?"
August 15, 2008
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
http://www.furious.com/perfect/miles.html
Miles Davis : The "Electric" Years
by Scott McFarland (August 1997)
By the time 1969 rolled around, Miles had been looking towards and striving for new sounds for a while. His famed 60’s quintet had been together with only one personnel change for a five year-plus run; this band had consisted of Tony Williams on drums, Herbie Hancock on keyboard, Ron Carter on bass, and Wayne Shorter (who replaced George Coleman in 1964) on saxophone. Five years is a long time for a jazz unit to be together. What once seemed inventive and exciting had probably started to sound like cliché to Miles. That band featured great tone and instrumental virtuosity - but by Miles’ own account simplicity and directness had been lost. One can compare the straightforward, soulful reading of Wayne Shorter’s "Footprints" done on his own Adam’s Apple album (it’s also available on Blue Note’s excellent The Best of Wayne Shorter) with the version done by Miles’ quintet on Miles Smiles, where the tune becomes a backdrop for the usual pseudo-Spanish tinkling around and theatrical flourishes that characterized that band’s sound, at the tune’s expense, for an example of this.
Miles had been moving in a simpler, more "modal" (a term that he helped to popularize during the 50’s) direction for a while. Miles In The Sky from 1968 started with a brilliant, 16-minutes plus track "Stuff" which cycled and floated in a gentle soulful manner and sounded unlike anything that anyone else was up to at the time. Filles de Killemanjaro from 1968 marked the end of the old quintet, with Chick Corea and Dave Holland coming into the band partway through the album - the music occasionally rumbled and exploded, but was also marked by long, rather lovely modal sections. To me it sounds like ambient jazz. The buzz on this album in retrospect is that Miles was "flirting with rock forms". (This is actually one heck of an album - well worth purchasing. In addition to its other charms, and great playing by all concerned, Chick Corea’s lovely, peaceful cycling through the lengthy "Mademoiselle Mabry" is more than worth the price of admission).
Miles continued to flirt with what were certainly different forms, perhaps related to rock, or to soul. His next LP, In A Silent Way, was hailed as a groundbreaking effort although I feel it’s a bit overrated. The music was somewhat hypnotic and repetitive. Joe Zawinul and John McLaughlin had been recruited to play on the album, and their presence together with the restraint shown by the other musicians (for once, Tony Williams does not run rampant on the drums - he plays simple "rock" rhythms primarily) yielded what was again a very "ambient" album.
Miles wanted his music to get more basic, more in touch with a blues feeling. In his autobiography he states "See, when I used to listen to Muddy Waters in Chicago down on 33rd and Michigan every Monday when he played there and I would be in town, I knew I had to get some of what he was doing up in my music. You know, the sound of the $1.50 drums and the harmonicas and the two-chord blues". At this point he started to focus in on the more modern and aggressive sounds that would inform the rest of his works. His girlfriend Betty Mabry introduced him to Jimi Hendrix, and the two of them hit it off immediately. Miles appreciated the power in what Jimi was doing, as well as appreciating its grounding in blues and other black forms. Sly Stone and James Brown were also by Miles’ account big influences on what was about to become his new sound. Things were about to get a lot more African. "My Funny Valentine" was about to go out the window.
In August of 1969 Miles assembled numerous massively talented musicians into a New York City studio for the Bitches Brew project. He brought in "musical sketches" moreso than tunes - as he had 10 years previously during the Kind Of Blue sessions. The musicians would jam on themes according to Miles’ direction (during three "all-day" sessions), and the jams would be edited into pieces. It was an abstract way of working, a bit different than anything done previously by an artist with commercial viability - the tape recorder would deliberately be used, in "artistic" fashion, to shape the pieces after the fact. Hence musicians could explore ideas at length, without a burden of knowing that everything that they played during a "take" would necessarily be presented to the public with their name on it.
What makes the album superb is the playing. The music swings gently, in multiple directions at once. It is a new kind of swing. Jack DeJohnette and the other drummers on this recording deserve a world of credit for their subtle, tugging playing. Multiple electric keyboards, usually two per track, swing and swagger across this musical landscape (Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, and Larry Young are at the keys). John McLaughlin contributes electric guitar playing which is occasionally possessed of brilliance. Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet, Wayne Shorter’s sax, Airto’s percussion, and the basses of Dave Holland and Harvey Brooks also contribute towards the music’s tonal palette. On top of it all we have Miles. His playing had always been minimalistic, and he had always been comfortable playing blues-based forms. Here he found his most natural expression, and contributed forcefully to the music. He laid down the real stuff, the essence of music, on his trumpet and topped the whole thing off brilliantly.
A rough guide to the Bitches Brew album - Side 1, "Pharoah’s Dance", is an abstract keyboard-oriented piece. Due to its absence of a memorable central theme, it’s a strange choice to open the album with, but it is a nice slice of music and of subtle swing. Side 2, "Bitches Brew", is massive. The composition, a combination of ambient theme and deep groove, comes together perfectly. Side 3 features the deeply rhythmic, gently bouncing "Spanish Key" (built on an interesting drum figure) and the shorter, slightly chaotic "John McLaughlin" (McLaughlin claims to have been as surprised as anyone when the LP came out and he saw that Miles had named this tune after him). Side 4 features the gritty, juke-joint-ish, artfully extended funk of "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" and the album’s closer "Sanctuary" which builds towards a frightening climax. The pieces provide landscape portraits more than they do traditional tunes or "featured player" improvisation. It was a new way of playing, based on cooperative effort which was centralized and focused on rhythm. In that regard the album reminds one of African cultures and of their music.
It was one heck of a record and was promoted as being such. Miles proceeded to put out a couple of live 2-LP sets during the next year. Black Beauty was the first (I’m not sure that it was released in the U.S. at the time). It’s a fairly honest and straightforward recording of his band in April of 1970 with Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Airto, and Steve Grossman. The sound is a bit cacaphonous; it’s the sound of jazz players raising flashy, energetic hell on electronic instruments. The band keeps things swinging along throughout the whole set. Chick Corea fans will especially want to hear this as his electronic keyboard is the most prominent voice in much of the music, and as always he plays extremely well. The recording gets a bit "psychedelic" in part through his use of effects. It reminds me a bit of the German rock scene from the early 70’s; it’s easy to imaging getting stoned to this record and digging it. I consider it a good but not great album.
At Fillmore came out next and drew some attention. It documents a 4-night stint opening for Laura Nyro at the Fillmore West; each 25-40 minute set is edited down to an approximately 20-minute album side. The intention was apparently to show that the band had an organic flow and that even when they played the same material night after night that it would be a "unique" experience. In retrospect the approach seems silly; who wants to hear the same basic set, chopped and diced different ways, four times in a row? The band sound is a bit difficult and cacaphonous and the editing only makes things more confusing. Of course there are some good moments; I always love it when that keyboard riff (sounds like a clavoline, usually) kicks in to start off the deep Bitches Brew groove. However, I believe that this album is basically a mess.
At this point in time Miles was opening for rock performers, dressing in his flashy manner of the time, and was generally thought to be courting a rock audience. The majority of critics, pundits, and listeners didn’t seem to understand what was going on with him. Miles was occasionally criticized from this point on for deserting jazz, and for "losing the beauty which had been present in his music".
The intended follow-up to Bitches Brew was Live-Evil. The majority of this 2 LP set consists of some lengthy jams done at the Cellar Door in Washington DC (these were augmented with a few new studio recordings). The live tracks are oriented around Jack DeJohnette’s aggressive and energetic funky drumming, Keith Jarrett’s pulsing, squealing, and frequently soulful keyboards (for a guy who has since gone on to decry the popularization of electronic instruments, Jarrett could really raise some hell when he was in the mood to), Michael Henderson’s repetitive basslines (Henderson had just joined the band - his playing here is not as dead-on as it later became), guest star John McLaughlin playing some fantastic electric guitar solos, and Airto putting some funky percussion on in places. Davis and sax player Gary Bartz play (and play well), but also lay out for huge periods of time while this band grooves. This, to me, really does sound like a "fusion" of rock (and soul) and jazz. The aggression and form of rock are present, but the players still have a tendency to meander and show off in the general style of jazz players. If you are in the mood for extended jam pieces (and it seems as if in the early 70’s, everybody was), these are pretty good for the most part. The opening track, "Sivad", might burn a hole through your stereo system with its relentless funk for a while before it moves into the soulful, minimalist piece later known as "Honky Tonk". "What I Say" is a nice 21-minute slice of frenetic modality, too. Sides 3 and 4 feature a band grooving at length in a manner that has its charms, but probably isn’t the kind of thing that you’d want to start your morning with every day.
Miles cut what I regard as his next masterpiece in 1970, during five sessions which were fused into 2 sidelong pieces. A Tribute to Jack Johnson was done as a soundtrack for a film about the legendary heavyweight boxing champion. Side 1, "Right Off", is an extraordinary jam. In addition to some bouncing bass (Michael Henderson, I believe), rock-solid drums (Billy Cobham, I believe), and some rollicking organ (I won’t hazard a guess), John McLaughlin’s electric rhythm guitar playing is right on the mark. Imagine Keith Richards crossed with Jimi Hendrix crossed with a classically trained guitarist - he sounds something like that. The rhythm of the piece is deep and constant, and greatly hypnotic. Just try to shut the music off in the middle - see if it keeps playing in your head. Each member of the group displays a perfect, close-to-the-bone devotion to the groove and the whole things rocks massively. Side 2, "Yesternow", is spacier. It seems put together from a few different takes (it actually includes some of the "In A Silent Way" music towards the end). It generates some ghostly groove and eventually makes way for a memorable freak-out guitar solo by Sonny Sharrock (with Chick Corea working Sonny’s echoplex box, apparently).
Sharrock remained uncredited on this album, as did many other of the players present on the sessions. For some reason, only the players signed to Columbia received credit on the cover. I was told some of the participants by Sharrock once - I probably don’t remember everyone that he mentioned to me, but I do remember the names Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, and himself as participants in addition to the musicians listed on the cover (Davis, Steve Grossman, Michael Henderson, Billy Cobham, John McLaughlin, and Herbie Hancock).
Miles continued to play and continued to record. His music was starting to bewilder the buying public, who had been confronted with a stream of 2-LP sets that didn’t conform to their expectations of what Miles Davis should be doing (namely, playing lyrical trumpet over a jazz background). Some of his sessions, like the ones which eventually came out in 1974 on Big Fun, had to wait for years before being released. Big Fun has 4 side-long pieces : "Great Expectations/Mother Laranja" which is a 27 ½ minute slice of almost prototypical Miles, based on a repeating phrase over a flowing backdrop; "Ife", a long static piece with a repetitive bassline which is really a drag (it sounds more like an experiment in audience tolerance than it does music); "Go Ahead John" which is a small-band jam featuring John McLaughlin on guitar (playing choppy strokes with wah-wah, just like Reggie Lucas & Pete Cosey would go on to do), with some nice soloing over Jack DeJohnette’s busy drumming (which is heavily phased for the sake of funkiness); and "Lonely Fire" which is a bit aimless. The music throughout this album is not Miles’ best, but Teo Macero’s production here is quite creative, and the record ends up being a decent ambient-styled listening experience thanks to the strength of Sides 1 & 3.
Some other early 70’s sessions came out even later, in the early 1980’s, on a couple of 2-LP sets : Circle in the Round and Directions. Among the highlights to be found on those sets are the killer McLaughlin/Cobham-fueled funk of "Duran", the impressionistic, multiple keyboard-based floating of "Ascent", an alternate take of "Sanctuary", and an extended take on the David Crosby tune "Guenneviere" which flows wonderfully and sounds like the missing fifth side to Bitches Brew. Both are good collections with some important stuff on them (lined up alongside a lot of moderately interesting stuff).
Next up was another change of direction : 1972’s On The Corner. Now this is abrasive stuff. It grooves, and it grooves hard, and it makes no apology for doing so. Miles was getting deeply into funk and also more deeply into dissonance. The album plays like one continuous suite of chattering funky percussion and deep bass topped with sitar, trumpet, and whatever else was on hand as a vehicle for self-expression. It is a "black thing" for sure, and a deep dark one at that. I’ve always felt that this album was a primary influence on the Public Enemy sound which started in the late 80’s and has had a large effect on popular music ever since (even the most "popular" artists these days are prone to augmenting their songs’ chorus structures with screeching background noise, or at least with light abrasion. I hear it all over the place). Miles was simultaneously interested in deep funk ala Sly Stone and James Brown, and musical abstraction ala Stockhausen. The end result was a fairly startling album. The cover art, with a funky "street" illustration by Corky McCoy, and a complete absence of personnel listings, was also a notable departure from the norm.
The album was not promoted heavily by Columbia and was not embraced heartily by the listening public or by critical reaction. Miles was not going to be "the next big thing" commercially, was not going to outsell the ranks of white boys playing electrified blues guitar which is what a lot of people were into at the time. Fortunately, he kept at his music anyway (rather than backtracking or waiting for the general populace to catch up with him), because the best was yet to come.
Miles’ staffed his next working band with musicians whose backgrounds were in the kind of funky music that Miles wanted to be working with, rather than in a jazz tradition. Michael Henderson was still on bass, and Al Foster came on to augment him with his fat, rock-steady drumming style. Mtume (who now lays down those funky soundtracks for the TV show "New York Undercover"), the son of Miles’ old pal saxophonist Jimmy Heath, came in on percussion (and managed to outdo his well-known predecessor, Airto). A band with these players, plus Reggie Lucas on guitar (it’s been said that he managed to play guitar "like a water drum" - his playing was perfect for this band - think choppy strokes and wah-wah pedal), Dominique Gaumont on guitar, Carlos Garnett (a sax player who seemed to understand what was going on and could fit into the music well), Cedric Lawson (a keyboard player), and a sitarist and tabla player augmenting things, toured in 1972 and had the live In Concert released subsequently. It showed a band which had dispensed with any perceived need for the bop-like chatter of jazz and would get down deeply into groove for extended periods of time. They jam on pieces which Miles had cut or would soon cut on "studio" albums, energetically and loosely. It’s like On The Corner come to life (the instrumentation is similar), but longer and with different themes. It’s not a perfect album; the music gets interesting and kicks out jams for a few minutes at a time, but tends to stay in one place for longer than might be preferable. It alternates between impressing the listener and annoying the listener. Fidelity is limited, too. Still, it’s an uncompromising furtherance of something that was new, and documents this period well. It’s just come back into general U.S. release.
1973 saw more touring, and the occasional bit of studio recording by Miles’ band. In 1974 a unit of Davis, Henderson, Foster, Mtume, Lucas, and Gaumont, plus new feedback-freakout-oriented guitarist Pete Cosey, with Dave Liebman and/or Sonny Fortune on sax and flute, cut the majority of tracks to be released on Get Up With It. (Some sessions from preceding years were used as well). This record could be seen as the culmination of Miles’ career; it’s some serious business. The key to the album is Henderson’s bass - his playing is perfect and huge. Foster’s drumming provides the perfect foil to him, and you’ve got a thoroughly grounded musical maze starting already. Then add Mtume’s shifting, inventive percussion to that, and stack two rhythmic guitar players on along with one feedback-oriented player (who does some nice soloing on this album) - now you’ve got some great shifting funk going on. Then put Miles on in a surly mood, playing some serious, no-frills trumpet and raising some hell on organ too. It’s quite a trip. I shouldn’t forget Dave Liebman’s contributions - there are some who say that he was partially responsible for "Mayishia", a thoroughly perfect musical act in two parts on here. And Sonny Fortune plays well, and some other names pop up on the recordings as well. Side 1 of this record is a bit strange, a tone-poem dedicated to Duke Ellington who had recently passed away. Side 2 contains "Mayishia" and the strong, deeply funky "Honky Tonk" (actually recorded years previously with a whole host of famous musicians), as well as the bizarre "Rated X". Side 3 is an out-of-control madhouse piece called "Calypso Frelimo" which shows this band at their most anarchic, but clears way for another killer bassline after a while. Side 4 features the dense, energetic "Mtume" (an amazing cut which typifies this band’s sound) and the funky "Billy Preston", along with a relatively traditional piece, "Red China Blues". Each side is about 30 minutes long. If I had to describe this record with one word, the word I would choose would be "massive". This is one that you’ll be taking the measure of for years and years..
That band (more or less - different sax players came through the band, and Gaumont left) cut a number of live albums. Dark Magus from early 1974 is a pretty good one. It’s only with the current wave of Miles reissues actually come into print in America. The sound is starting to center on Al Foster’s fat and flexible drumming, which is in a class of its own. Side 1 opens with a hot theme which turns up again on next year’s Pangaea as "Zimbabwe". There are large chunks on the album where the band starts improvising around some fairly flat figure, but through their now-patented "collective improvisation" method manage to build the sound up into something nice. It makes you aware, though, of how truly awesome they could be when they got themselves wrapped around memorable material. It’s amazing how contemporary this music sounds, all the more so as it comes from a live concert. It could be heard as a stream of sublime drum’n’bass music being DJ’d on stage by Miles Davis using real players instead of records.
Miles and the boys played at Osaka Festival Hall in Japan on February 1, 1975, one set in the daytime and one at night. The daytime set was issued on 2 LPs as Agharta. I’ve never been totally crazy about Agharta as a whole; to me most of the second half sounds a bit flat and directionless. However, the opening 33 minutes or so of "Prelude" (thanks to compact disc technology, we can now hear this continuously without having to flip a record over partway through) is a great extended exploration of funk and soul, and I rank it with my favorite Miles live performances. I love the whole of the nighttime set, Pangaea, which remained unissued in the U.S. until some kind soul rectified this in 1991. It’s consists of two lengthy pieces, each of which is the length of an LP. The first, "Zimbabwe", lays down a thick groove and plays around that. The second, "Gondwana", is built around a peaceful, circular figure. It flows lazily and naturally for a great length of time, and contains some rather nice flute playing by Sonny Fortune. The CD liner notes accurately note that this piece is reminiscent of some of Sun Ra’s music.
To me, this music (especially Pangaea) has a real naturalistic flow to it. He and his band had found their niche. The same type of "collective improvisation" which had been used to create Bitches Brew was being used to create natural, straight-forward music (groove music, really). These guys put up a nice, thick wall of sound which could be easy to get into, and easy to stay with for a while.
After that, Miles retreated into his house and rarely came out of it for the next 5 Years, making no new music and no formal appearances. Miles was suffering from health problems, didn’t feel like making new music, and spent much of his time doing drugs.
Miles died in 1991 after making a comeback in the early '80s (most impressively on a live set from '82 We Want Miles, where the compositions contain brilliance and the playing is dead-on). He left behind him an amazing legacy of music, and an interesting autobiography (done with Quincy Troupe) entitled "Miles: The Autobiography" where he explains himself, his life, and his music in a straightforward manner (I recommend the book highly for anyone interested in any of Miles’ music, or in jazz history, or just in interesting stories). He was a funny guy and the book reflects this, while touching on his relationships with some of the most significant figures in 20th Century music. The key to understanding Miles is to realize that he was a reserved individual and a minimalist. He would just as soon not say anything unless he had something he really wanted to say, and when he did speak, he tended to tell the truth regardless of how anyone might react to it. And his music reflected this aspect of his personality totally.
In closing, why do I love Miles’ electric music so much? Why do I consider it the greatest music yet made on this planet? Well, of course one’s enjoyment of music is entirely subjective, but I present for your consideration the following virtues regarding Miles’ music :
- You can dance to it. (Try "Black Satin" on On The Corner).
- You can relax and unwind to it. (Try "Mayishia" on Get Up With It).
- You can use it to get your adrenaline pumping. (Try "Fast Track" on We Want Miles).
- You can sit and reflect on it. (Try "Gondwana" on Pangaea).
- You can nod your head to it. (Try the bass break in "Calypso Frelimo", on Get Up With It. If even more head-nodding is desired, try Sides 2 & 4 of that album as well).
- You can make love to it. (Try "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" on Bitches Brew. If your partner doesn’t dig it you can always masturbate to it. Or try "Ascent" from the Directions collection for something a bit more romantic, in its own strange way).
- It reflects the black experience and consolidates previously disparate musics into a coherent whole. (Try Bitches Brew and On The Corner).
- So many artists have been influenced by this music that you may as well cut out the middle-man and go straight to the source, for the real deal.
- It’s timeless; you can still listen to it decades from now without shame. In fact, it may make more sense to most of us decades down the line.
- It’s genuine art, created through an individual’s (considerable) experience, intellect, and desire for self-expression. Plus it’s lovely and it swings like a mother.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/oct/13/miles-davis-second-great-quintet
50 great moments in jazz: How Miles Davis's second quintet changed jazz
But by the 60s, jazz was being shaken up by the fearless (some might say foolhardy, or even unlistenable) challenges of musicians such as Coltrane, Coleman and pianist Cecil Taylor. The exploratory artist in Davis drew him toward these liberating possibilities, but he needed the attention of a broader audience. His reaction to free jazz was to reinvent his quintet with untried talents to see what would happen. Davis hired 16-year-old drum prodigy Tony Williams, fast-rising pianist Herbie Hancock (whose jazz-improv and pop instincts appealed to Davis), plus the Coltrane-esque Wayne Shorter on sax and bass powerhouse Ron Carter.
The band quickly became Davis's finest group. Their solos were fresh and original, and their individual styles fused with a spontaneous fluency that was simply astonishing. The quintet's method came to be dubbed "time, no changes" because of their emphasis on strong rhythmic grooves without the dictatorial patterns of song-form chords. At times they veered close to free-improvisation, but the pieces were as thrilling and hypnotically sensuous as anything the band's open-minded leader had recorded before.
Davis employed such unruly young sidemen not to flatter his remarkable trumpet sound, but to challenge it. I interviewed Hancock for the Guardian some years ago, and he described Davis's demand that his talented new partners, respectfully nervous of their boss's legendary ego at first, should turn up the heat on him. "Tony and I had got into the habit of playing all kinds of mixed rhythms ... so we started playing some of those rhythm things behind Miles too, things that were hard to predict, would sometimes swing and sometimes float. The first night we did it he stopped a lot in his solos, jerked around as if he was uncomfortable, not sure what to do, trying to find his way. Next day, he was more at ease, playing longer phrases, but still not into it. Then by the last set on the next day, he wasn't struggling with it any more at all. In fact he played so many unexpected things himself that it was me that was jerking around! In less than 24 hours Miles had not just grabbed the ball, but run beyond us with it."
The "second great quintet" first indicated the bridges it would build between Davis's post Kind of Blue work and his subsequent enigmatic music on 1964's Miles in Berlin, made after Shorter joined. Then came the remarkable sequence of albums such as ESP, The Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky (hinting at the beginnings of jazz rock, with Hancock introducing the Fender Rhodes), Filles de Kilimanjaro and the stunning Live At the Plugged Nickel – but that's another story.
—Thelonious Monk
"Hell, if you understood everything I did you’d be me.”
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 Natambu
10/15/91
1958 Miles - Miles Davis:
Tracklist:
1. On Green Dolphin Street
2. Fran Dance
3. Stella By Starlight
4. Love For Sale
5. Straight No Chaser
6. My Funny Valentine
7. Oleo
MILES DAVIS SEXTET:
Miles Davis (tr)
John Coltrane (ts)
Julian "Cannonball" Adderley (as)
Bill Evans (p),
Paul Chambers (b)
Jimmy Cobb (d)
Miles Davis - "So What" - The Robert Herridge Theater, New York - April 2, 1959
(Composition by Miles Davis)
Miles Davis - trumpet
Miles Davis & John Coltrane, "All Blues", live in Stockholm, 1960
(Composition by Miles Davis)
Miles Davis. trumpet
John Coltrane, tenor saxophone
Paul Chambers, bass
Jimmy Cobb, drums
Wynton Kelly, piano
Setlist:
1. So What2. Fran-Dance
3. All Blues
4. On Green Dolphin Street
5. Walkin' / The Theme
Live at Konserthuset, Stockholm, Sweden, March 22, 1960
MILES DAVIS - 'Kind Of Blue' - Full Album
Columbia label, 1959:
Tracklist:
So What 0:00
Freddie Freeloader 9:26
Blue In Green 19:13
All Blues 24:51
Flamenco Sketches 36:34
On Green Dolphin Street 45:46
Fran - Dance 55:40
Stella by Starlight 1:01:28
Love for Sale 1:06:14
Miles Davis- September 20, 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival:
Miles Davis Quintet:
Miles Davis (tpt); George Coleman (ts); Herbie Hancock (p); Ron Carter (b); Tony Williams (d)
Setlist:
Band setting up 0:00 Autumn Leaves (J. Prevert-J. Mercer-J. Kosma) 0:41
So What (M. Davis) 12:06
Stella by Starlight (N. Washington-V. Young) 23:26
Walkin' (R. Carpenter) 38:02
The Theme (M. Davis) 50:50
Miles Davis Seven Steps: The Complete Columbia Recordings Of Miles Davis 1963-1964:
"Joshua"
(Composition by Victor Feldman)
Drums: Frank ButlerPiano: Victor Feldman
Bass: Ron Carter
Tenor Saxophone: George Coleman
Miles Davis "Four" and More
Recorded live in concert, 1964 at Philharmonic Hall, New York, NY - February 1964-- (2022 Remaster)
Columbia label release, 1966:
Setlist:
So What Walkin'
Joshua
Go-Go (Theme And Announcement)
Four
Seven Steps To Heaven
There Is No Greater Love
Go-Go (Theme And Announcement)
MILES DAVIS QUINTET:
Bass – Ron Carter Drums – Tony Williams
Piano – Herbie Hancock
Tenor Saxophone – George Coleman
Trumpet – Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quintet - Live performance: 1964-10-11, Teatro dell' Arte, Milano, Italy (Jazz Video):
MILES DAVIS QUINTET:
Miles Davis - trumpet
Herbie Hancock - piano
Wayne Shorter -tenor sax
Tony Williams - drums
Ron Carter - bass
Miles Davis Quintet- Live performance
December 22, 1965 Plugged Nickel Club, Chicago (1st set):
Miles Davis Quintet--"E.S.P."--Full album
Columbia label, 1965
(Composition by Miles Davis):
Miles Davis Quintet
Miles Smiles--full album
Columbia label, 1966:
Tracklist:
1) 0:00 - Orbits
2) 4:40 - Circle
3) 10:34 - Footprints
4) 20:23 - Dolores
5) 27:03 - Freedom Jazz Dance
6) 34:16 - Gingerbread Boy
Miles Davis Quintet - Nefertiti, 1967 (Full Album 2023 Remaster):
Tracklist:
NefertitiFall
Hand Jive
Madness
Riot
Pinocchio
MILES DAVIS - 'Sorcerer LP' --Full Album
Columbia, 1967:
Tracklist:
A1 Prince Of Darkness 00:00
A2 Pee Wee 06:24
A3 Masqualero 11:12
A4 The Sorcerer 20:14
B1 Limbo 25:28
B2 Vonetta 32:52
Major recordings (1967-1975)
Columbia label:
Miles in the Sky
In a Silent Way
Filles De Kilimanjuro
Jack Johnson
Live-Evil
On The Corner
Big Fun
Get Up with It
Water Babies
Miles Davis 'Bitches Brew' 1970--Full Album
Columbia, 1970:
Musicians
|
"Bitches Brew" "Sanctuary" (omit McLaughlin, Maupin, Brooks and White)
|
"Spanish Key"
|
"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."
"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."
"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.
"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
