Miles Runs the Voodoo Down
Trumpeter Miles Davis was the quintessence of cool. He was immaculate in tailored Italian suits and shades. But Davis was also outspoken in his bitterness about American racism. His macho front concealed a tender art.
Miles on Miles, edited by Paul Maher Jr. and Michael K. Dorr, is a sloppy m?lange of interviews and ?encounters? that persistently confuses Davis? music and image. The interviews include astute conversations with Nat Hentoff, Leonard Feather and Michael Zwerin, Al Aronowitz and Mary Bringle's inconsequential pieces and Lionel Olay's self-indulgent garbage.
Davis wasn't known to be an easy subject. But some interviewers have trouble contending with his taciturn image and aura of menace and mystique, which Zwerin said, ?He went to some length to encourage.? At the same time, it's quite apparent that there's a relationship between interview quality and Davis? estimation of his inquisitor. Hentoff and Feather were among the few jazz critics that Davis respected. Others were obviously hack journalists on assignment, writing for dubious publications such as Cavalier, a ?Men's magazine.? The editors failed to obtain permission rights to interviews by Playboy and 60 Minutes.
Davis grew up in East St. Louis. The son of a dentist, he moved to New York to attend Juilliard School of Music, but wound up in 52nd Street clubs, jamming with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. As he admits, he didn't have Gillespie's facility or speed, so instead he wound up a sort of anti-Diz, an innovator of necessity that incorporated the use of space, seeking, ?The note that fertilizes the sound? and giving each note poignancy and weight. Davis? round-toned sound was often soft, spare and haunting, with, to use a pugilistic metaphor, an occasional piercing upper-register jab. From the 1950s through the mid-1960s, he led two classic quintets, the first with John Coltrane and produced the modal masterpiece, Kind of Blue.
But in the late ?60s, he initiated a jazz-rock fusion inspired by Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone. Bitches Brew is the breakthrough album. Though critically assailed, Davis? jazz-rock has an abrasive density of textures, polyrhythms and funk riffs that sounds like nothing else of the time.
In 1964's Winner Take All, Olay makes the ridiculous claims that modern musicians owe nothing to the past and that Davis is ?overpraised.? In fact, arranger Gil Evans, who collaborated with Davis on Birth of the Cool and other sessions, said correctly that Davis was the first to change the sound of the trumpet since Louis Armstrong.
It's disturbing to read some of these interviews, because the ignorance they betray is shameful. Unlike Zwerin, some journalists seem clueless about Davis? need to cultivate an image, or that forms of media, such as album covers, perpetuated that mystique. When Davis emerged on the scene in the 1940s, Jim Crow still existed, African-American musicians faced segregated facilities in the South and even sympathetic critics like Andr? Hodeir alluded to the romantic ?primitivism of the American Negro.? Clearly, Davis? protective mask was a consequence of racial and economic inequities. In fact, he recounts a brutal beating by a white cop outside New York City jazz venue Birdland.
As for the trumpeter's contempt for the audience, turning his back on them and the like, any jazz aficionado should know that musicians pay a high cost reinventing themselves nightly on the bandstand. As leader, Davis was listening intently to the band, ?deeply concentrating,? Chris Albertson writes, assimilating it all. With his quintet featuring saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams, the collective improvisation onstage was so empathetic as to seem a form of telepathy. The music they created was as complex as Abstract Expressionism or particle physics. Feather is excellent about this period.
Still, it would be wrong to ignore Davis? own human contradictions and failings. He talks contemptuously of a ?white sound,? yet professes admiration for white musicians like Bill Evans and Gil Evans (no relation), Stan Getz and John McLaughlin. His physical abuse of women was inexcusable. ?Draft all the bitches,? Davis proposed, ?and send them to Vietnam.? As Greg Tate wrote, when it came to women, Davis ?swung like a cockroach.?
In their introduction, the editors dismiss Davis? autobiography Miles, co-authored by poet Quincy Troupe. In fact, that book's strengths are a consistent voice, however profane and a coherent narrative, both of which Miles on Miles lacks. Francis Davis wrote that Davis is, ?His own most perceptive critic.? The quality of this anthology's writings is maddeningly uneven and poorly edited, full of redundancies. Read Miles on Miles, which complements the memoir, if you can stomach bad prose.
But the trumpet was the perfect instrument of Miles Davis? expression. For the autobiography of his finest self, listen to the records. Miles said, ?I make the kind of music the day recommends.?
