2 Miles’s Mode, Part One

One night early in the 1980s, Miles was talking about his past work. This kind of reminiscing was rare for him because he preferred to live defiantly in the present, and he at least pretended to no longer care about his past accomplishments. He was irritated with anyone who harped continuously about his former achievements. He insisted that his only interest was in the work he was doing at the present time. The past, he told those who kept referring to it—especially journalists—was dead and buried. Sure, it was great back then. But that was then; he was living, and creating, in the here and now.

For whatever reason, Miles was willing to talk about the past on this particular evening. Perhaps the reason for this shift in behavior was that he was with only a couple of friends, one of whom had known him since the 1940s; or maybe it was simply that the hour was late, and it was one of those times when the past comes to haunt the mind. Miles admitted that some of the music he had created long ago was close to his heart. When the old friend asked him what the best music he had ever created was, he answered without a moment of thought: Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain. This was no surprise; he had collaborated on those albums with his closest friend, Gil Evans, and—after the great works of Ellington—those albums are without a doubt the finest orchestral pieces in all of jazz. His friend asked him which album meant the most to him from the dozens of classics he had recorded with small groups. Miles answered, just as quickly, “Kind of Blue.”

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Probably no jazz musician has been more written about (and photographed, for that matter) than Miles Davis. By the time he was thirty-two, when he recorded Kind of Blue, he was already something of a legend; yet a considerable number of his greatest achievements still lay in the future. His is such an enormous presence throughout the past fifty years of American music that it is almost impossible to write about any aspect of modern jazz without taking him into consideration. I have written about him in all four of my previous books; there is simply no way one can ignore him.

Despite all the books, including his autobiography (as well as my own book ’Round About Midnight: A Portrait of Miles Davis), he remains an enigma, a figure who both personally and artistically is so elusive that trying to define him is a bit like attempting to capture mercury. I believe that this is how Miles wanted it. Being the accomplished boxer that he was, he knew the importance of always being on your toes, ready to dance away from being cornered or held tight. One thing is certain: Miles was always calculating his odds, always working on his strategy as both an artist and a public figure. Perhaps Sonny Rollins is right when he says that improvising is largely intuitive—which does not mean, however, that strategy does not come into play. Except for Duke Ellington, no other jazz musician understood so well the importance of strategy in the creation of his music.

As many of my readers know, I had been friends with Miles for a while during the 1970s and early 1980s. My first book was based mainly on our conversations over the few years that I knew him. People often ask me what my favorite “Miles story” is, and I always choose this one: I was visiting Miles, and we had an argument about what day of the week it happened to be. This may sound strange, but at the time Miles was using massive amounts of cocaine and staying up for days at a time; then he would crash by taking barbiturates. All his friends, including me, tried unsuccessfully to make him refrain from such self-destructive behavior, but he was headstrong. Sadly, he felt that this was all he had left to live for. He was having painful health problems, and drugs were probably a kind of self-medication. Consistent with his image as the “Prince of Darkness,” he always kept his home dark; it was hard to tell whether it was three in the morning or three in the afternoon.

Anyway, Miles asked me what day it was. I told him it was Wednesday. He replied, using one of his favorite expressions, “You’re a lying motherfucker.” (He always put the emphasis on fuck in motherfucker, giving the line a personal lilt.) From there on, we debated which day of the week it was. Finally I remembered I had that day’s New York Times in my briefcase. I took it out and showed it to Miles; needless to say, it confirmed that the day actually was Wednesday. Miles shook his head and sat down. Then he said, “Do you see all those awards on my wall, Eric? The reason I won them is because I can’t remember anything worth a damn.”

Miles, like many jazzmen, had a fascinating and subtle way of talking in shorthand; often his words had layers of meaning that were not immediately apparent. It took me a few moments to figure out, metaphorically, exactly what he meant: not remembering his past work forced him to be constantly inventive in the moment of creation. The past was dead, buried, forgotten; as Bob Dylan put it, true artists “don’t look back.” (Miles was a great admirer of Dylan, incidentally.) When jazz fans wondered why he didn’t attempt, say, a Kind of Blue II, the reason is obvious: it was simply not possible. Miles’s own reply to those who asked him about playing music from his past was always, “Why do you want me to do that again? Didn’t I do it good the first time?”

Of course, there was more to his genius than simply “forgetting” the past. I have a friend who cannot understand why Miles is so admired, why he is considered to be on the highest tier of jazz achievement when he was obviously not a great virtuoso like Clifford Brown or Dizzy Gillespie. The answer is simple—Miles’s music deeply affects people; he is able to reach a part of us that other musicians, no matter how accomplished their technique, cannot touch. This quality is part of the mix that accounts for the album’s seemingly ageless popularity. Isn’t that a prime goal of art—to communicate one’s deepest feelings to the audience? Kind of Blue does just that, communicating not only Miles’s feelings but also the mood usually associated with him.

What is that mood? It is dark, melancholy, bluesy, introspective, yet with a rare kind of joy at its center. I am tempted to say also that the mood is “innocent,” by which I mean that the expression of emotion has a yearning quality and a simple straightforwardness that, despite its sophistication, seems almost childlike. The closest any other musician has come to achieving this mood is Louis Armstrong in “West End Blues” and Charlie Parker in “Parker’s Mood.” I believe that it is a deeply spiritual expression, although Miles never claimed to have any interest in spirituality. He had lost all interest in religion when he discovered, as a boy, that the churches in East St. Louis were racially segregated. Nevertheless, Miles’s expressiveness, at least to me, embodies the sound of hope: no matter how dark our journey, there is always a light to lead our way. Perhaps that hopefulness in itself is childlike, but how can anyone who has experienced life’s pain fail to find solace in the levels of emotion expressed on Kind of Blue?

Where and how did this mood originate? I believe that looking even briefly at Miles’s life, we can clearly trace the emotional geography that he translated into music. We can also see how Miles became a kind of existentialist hero, insisting always on making his own choices, always finding his own route, and committed to being the exact person and artist that he strove to be without making allowances for the expectations of others. If he was an innovator, it was always in the service of his effort to understand who he was and who he was becoming, and to create the music that reflected his own evolution. We cannot understand Kind of Blue without attempting to grasp the sometimes elusive identity of Miles Davis, both as a man and as an artist.

Miles Davis (he was actually Miles Davis III) was born in Alton, Illinois, on May 24, 1926. Both his father and grandfather had been prominent in the black community. When the family moved to East St. Louis, his father became a very successful dentist and dental surgeon. Unlike so many black jazzmen, Miles did not grow up in poverty. His family was well-to-do, wealthy enough for his father to buy a ranch on which he raised hogs.

Miles was spoiled by his parents; he wore only the best clothes and early on had his own car. He first started playing the trumpet at the age of thirteen, when his father bought him a horn. One of Miles’s father’s patients was a trumpeter and music teacher named Elwood Buchanan, who became the young musician’s mentor. Buchanan instructed his students to play with as little vibrato as possible: “You’ll wind up getting old and start shaking anyway.” Miles quickly became proficient on the instrument, but when he participated in music contests at his school, he inevitably lost to white players who, at least according to Miles, were clearly not as accomplished as he was. This experience helped forge his distinctive personality and his strength of will. As Miles told an interviewer: “It made me so mad that I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn. If I hadn’t met that prejudice, I probably wouldn’t have had as much drive in my work. I’ve thought about that a lot. Prejudice and curiosity have been responsible for what I’ve done in music.”1 If some people wonder where Miles got his supposed “arrogance,” this statement should make the answer obvious.

Miles became close to a number of other trumpeters in St. Louis (which at that time was known in the jazz world as a trumpet man’s city), including Clark Terry, whose quick, vibrato-free style was a key influence on Miles. According to Miles, even in his early years as a musician, he was fascinated with the evolution of jazz. Despite his youth, he displayed an unusual farsightedness about the future of the music, and he was always curious about the latest innovations. When he discovered that Billy Eckstine was bringing his big band to St. Louis, he was overjoyed to be able to see and listen to two jazzmen he had heard so much about through the musicians’ grapevine: the alto saxophonist Charlie “Yardbird” Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Miles knew that these two men were the leaders of the burgeoning bebop revolution, although Miles himself had at this point never heard bop. On the opening night of the Eckstine band, one of the trumpeters became sick, and Miles, mainly because he had a union card, was hired on the spot to replace the ailing sideman while Eckstine was in the area. Billy Eckstine would later say in an interview: “When I first heard Miles, I let him sit in so as not to hurt his feelings, but he sounded terrible; he couldn’t play at all.”2 This contradicts Miles’s insistence that at the time, he was an accomplished musician. Nevertheless, Bird was impressed enough by the youngster to invite him to New York, offering to take him under his wing.

Actually, Parker’s invitation does not necessarily contradict Eckstine’s statement. I think there is little doubt that Bird had his own reasons for wanting Miles to come to New York besides whatever musical ability Bird detected. Having a young man who idolized him and who had a constant supply of cash was of great importance to Bird, because even this early, Parker had a heavy drug habit that could be maintained only with a reliable source of money. I am sure that the saxophonist was able to hear Miles’s incipient musical talent, but he certainly had other motives, which Miles would soon discover.

After he graduated from high school in 1944, Miles moved to New York, supposedly to attend the Juilliard School of Music; at least that is what he told his father. He wound up spending very little time at the school, however. His real “school” was hanging out with Charlie Parker and spending most of his time on Fifty-second Street—“Swing Street” to the musicians who performed there. In a single block there were small jazz clubs, one after another, in which some of the greatest of all jazz artists regularly played: Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, Billie Holiday, Roy Eldridge, Don Byas, even Count Basie’s band somehow managed to fit onto the tiny stage of one of the clubs.

Whatever ulterior motives Bird might have had for his relationship with Miles, he was genuinely dedicated to the education of the young trumpeter. For example, he brought him to the home of Thelonious Monk. Monk had been termed “the high priest of behop.” (And this was true in more than one way—Monk’s love for a variety of illicit substances was notorious.) From Monk, Miles was given early training in what not to play, a lesson that would eventually be crucial to his own mature musical conception.

I believe, however, that Miles learned an even more valuable lesson from Monk. Monk’s piano style has at times been derided for its purported lack of technique. Upon hearing Monk, my father once said, “A four-year-old could play better than that.” Certainly, Monk’s style would have shocked most piano teachers. He did not use the balls of his fingers; he played with his fingers flat on the keyboard. He often used his elbows and never displayed the technique of, say, Art Tatum or Oscar Peterson. However, Monk’s sound is as immediately identifiable as that of Ben Webster, Lester Young, or Miles himself. There are those who have heard Monk play, when he wants to, in what may be called a “legitimate” style, performing with surprisingly conventional technique. But Monk understood that the most important thing in jazz is to establish your own distinctive sound, one that is uniquely yours. Technique exists for one reason only—to create a sound that reflects the musician’s inner self. The rest is extraneous. In order to be a great jazz artist, you must find out who you really are; only then can you create music that expresses your truest self.

This perspective is markedly different from that of European music, in which for each instrument there is a standard set of techniques that a musician must try to master. Nobody with a style as idiosyncratic as Monk’s would ever have made it in that world. Monk really reinvented the piano, twisting the entire technique and approach to the instrument until it fit his personal conception. Of course, this was nothing new. Louis Armstrong reinvented the trumpet, using a broad vibrato previously unheard on the horn. Coleman Hawkins was dubbed the “inventor of the tenor saxophone.” Of course, he did not really “invent” his instrument, but he did create a way of playing the tenor sax—previously used mainly for slap-tongued vaudeville effects—that turned it into a perfect instrument for personal jazz expression. These were vital lessons for the young Miles Davis, ones that he took to heart. They are the lessons that saved him as a musician and eventually helped to make him as a man.

Besides creating a personal sound, Monk was also subverting a Western instrument for his own purposes. The piano is simply not made to be played the way Monk played it. Most of the greatest jazzmen, in the service of creating a personal sound, have similarly subverted the traditional techniques associated with their instruments. Certainly this is true for every musician who plays on Kind of Blue.

In 1945 Miles played on Charlie Parker’s first recording date under his own leadership for Savoy Records. It is one of the classic recording sessions in the annals of jazz. Parker, bursting with ideas, creates one astonishing solo after another, climaxing in the fast-tempoed “Ko Ko,” perhaps his single greatest achievement—although Bird played so many brilliant solos that it is difficult to choose one such highlight. At this time, Miles’s ability certainly bears out Billy Eckstine’s earlier opinion (rather than Miles’s own memory of his skill at handling the trumpet). His playing is barely adequate and often sounds shaky and uncertain, hardly swinging at all. When Dizzy Gillespie sits in for the introductory passages of “Ko Ko,” the contrast between the two trumpeters is almost embarrassing.

It is here that we come upon a mystery: How did this basically incompetent trumpeter eventually become such a brilliant artist? Within four years or so, he could keep pace with virtually any player in jazz. With such poor soloing on the 1945 Bird session, it is a miracle that he did not turn tail and head right back to East St. Louis. I think it says something quite remarkable about Miles that he did not. In 1946 Parker went to California as part of a group that included Dizzy and the vibist Milt Jackson, a group supposedly arriving as bearers of the bebop gospel. Parker wound up staying in Los Angeles and eventually had a nervous breakdown due to his inability to score heroin and his attempt to use alcohol as a way of preventing a violent withdrawal from the drug. In 1946 Miles joined Benny Carter’s band in New York for the express purpose of getting to the West Coast and hooking up with Bird again. Miles recorded some sides with Parker for the small Dial label. Although he sounds better than he had on the 1945 “Ko Ko” date, it is nevertheless hardly the work of a convincing soloist.

After drying out at California’s Camarillo State Hospital, Parker returned to New York and quickly put together a quintet that included Miles. According to Miles, he himself was the one who rehearsed the band and kept it together because Parker was so involved in his chaotic lifestyle. For Miles the challenge of playing next to Bird, one of the most magnificent virtuosos in jazz history, was so great that, in his own words, “I used to quit every night.” We can only imagine how harrowing an experience this must have been for the young trumpeter. There are stories of Parker literally pushing Miles onstage; he was paralyzed with fright at the thought of attempting, once again, to keep pace with the saxophonist. Miles was forced to either find a way to survive this trial by fire or give up the whole idea of being a jazzman. To Miles, no doubt, the thought of going back to East St. Louis and working on his father’s hog farm or becoming a music teacher (a quite horrifying thought from a kid’s point of view) must have been soul-withering.

During this experience he was compelled to face the hardest truths about himself, and he had to either forge his own way through sheer willpower or simply surrender. Undoubtedly this is when Miles, both as a man and as an artist, intuitively gravitated toward an existentialist perspective of life. It is possible that he was drawn in this direction during his first trip to Paris, where he became friends with both Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Though he had not read their philosophical works, he understood the crucial idea that one does not come into the world with a ready-made identity or essence; one must create oneself. Thus, Miles Davis was forced to reinvent himself, to decide who and what he wanted to be and then actually bring that self into being.

It was in this period that Miles developed his tough exterior, his “arrogance.” The part of him that was shy and vulnerable had to be protected by a thick skin. He had been quite the opposite when he first arrived in New York—something of an innocent who did not use any drugs, did not drink, and didn’t even chase women. (In fact, Miles was actually married at the time, although he had left his wife behind in East St. Louis.) So, out of the welter of complications in his life, he made a conscious choice to develop some of what would later became known as the more notorious aspects of his personality: the use of invectives and hard language, the cynical (and often hilarious) sense of humor, the quickness to anger. In the world he had chosen for himself—the fractious and often down-and-dirty New York jazz scene—this external hardness was the only way to survive for someone as deeply sensitive as Miles. He allowed only those who understood his artifice to get close to him. Those who saw only his surface and believed, for example, that he was an antiwhite racist or a vicious bastard, he did not want to deal with anyway.

Miles once told me, “If they took away my legs, my arms, even my cock, as long as they left me my mind, I would find a way to get everything back.” It was his brilliant mind and his stubborn determination that enabled him to weather the ordeal he went through in his early days with Parker. Through this searing apprenticeship, Miles developed into a persuasive and stylistically original soloist. The sides that this group recorded in 1947–48 for both Savoy and Dial (including the first date led by Miles, in which Bird played tenor instead of his customary alto sax) reveal that Miles had greatly improved and was developing the style for which he would become famous. Although he clearly had a long way to go, the melodic inventiveness and flowing logic, the use of the middle register, and the introverted lyricism are all in evidence.

Miles eventually left Parker’s group, frustrated by both the battles he and Max Roach went through to get Parker to pay them and dealing with Parker’s out-of-control lifestyle. After Bird died, Miles said to Roach, “The motherfucker died before we could get even, Max.”

Miles gigged around as much as he could. He had become a well-known musician on the Fifty-second Street scene and began leading his own groups. During this period he increasingly wanted to learn how to compose and arrange. He chose another perfect mentor for learning these crafts: Gil Evans. Evans had been writing arrangements for years, and Miles especially appreciated Evans’s ingenious arrangement of “Donna Lee” for the Claude Thornhill band, a tune that the trumpeter had written for the Parker group.

Evans had a basement one-room apartment near Fifty-second Street, and it eventually became the place for a kind of jazz Bloomsbury. Musicians would squeeze into this small apartment and discuss the latest directions of the modern jazz scene. Among those who hung out there, in addition to Miles and Evans, were the baritone saxophonist and composer Gerry Mulligan, alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, pianist-composer (and eventually musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet) John Lewis, the great bop drummer Max Roach, the composer John Benson Brooks, and a composer-arranger and onetime drummer named George Russell. At times, Bird himself would take a breather from his tangled life and join the group.

Years later this is how Gerry Mulligan remembered the scene: “With all the great bands that were around [New York], big and little, it was an exciting time musically. And everybody seemed to gravitate to Gil’s place. Everybody influenced everybody else, and Bird was the number-one influence on us all. Gil lived in a basement on Fifty-seventh Street near Fifth Avenue. Actually, it was behind a Chinese laundry, and had all the pipes for the building as well as a sink, a bed, a piano, a hot-plate and no heat.”3

It was in this funky environment that ideas were hatched, ideas that would have a profound influence on the course of jazz for years to come. Many years later Kind of Blue would indirectly become one of the important fruits of the relationships germinated in this group.

By this time, the late 1940s, many musicians had climbed on the bop bandwagon, and jazz was inundated by imitators of Bird and Dizzy, and bop clichés could be heard in most of the clubs on Fifty-second Street. The more forward-looking musicians, including Miles, were working in the direction of new ideas to be built on the beachhead that bop had established.

In one of my books, Blue: The Murder of Jazz, I wrote that there is a “Miles myth” that goes something like this: Miles Davis personally invented cool jazz, then created hard bop, modal jazz, freebop, and fusion. But Miles really “invented” none of these movements. All innovation in jazz can be traced to far more than one “inventor.” Certainly, Miles found ways to incorporate the ideas of the more progressive musicians into a convincing and personal music. I believe there were key reasons that Miles was such a continually restless artist. Some have already been touched upon—his refusal to “look back,” the “art of forgetfulness” in which he forced himself to find fresh musical territory, and his indefatigable curiosity. But perhaps the most important and overriding factor was his disdain for musical platitudes and easy licks. If nothing else, changing the ground rules of the music forced the soloists to come up with new conceptions, which is what Miles lived for. Whenever a style became stale, musicians often trotted out shopworn phrases or even whole solos rather than create fresh ideas. But if the ground was constantly shifting beneath their feet, they were forced to approach their improvisations from novel directions, to go deeper and play more inventively. This kind of strategy is a constant throughout Miles’s career, one that, as we shall see, was very much a force behind the creation of Kind of Blue.

Miles’s restlessness, both for him and his colleagues in the jazz Bloomsbury, led to the first development that emerged directly from the caucuses in Evans’s apartment: a band led by Miles that would explore new musical areas and eventually become one of the chief influences for an entire jazz movement destined to dominate the early 1950s.

Its founders wanted this band to be large enough to accommodate intricate arrangements, with as much room for tonal color as possible without forfeiting the intimacy, and freedom for improvisation, of a combo. Miles liked the lush arrangements that Evans had done for the Claude Thornhill band; he especially enjoyed Evans’s use of dense tonal colors. It was decided that a nine-piece group would be ideal. However, Evans became sick and was able to do only a couple of the arrangements. Most of the others were done by John Lewis and Gerry Mulligan (although one of the most famous tunes composed for the group, “Israel,” was written by the trumpeter John Carisi).

The sound that this group produced was unlike anything else in jazz history, although its ambience bore a slight resemblance to that of the Claude Thornhill band. Unlike orthodox bebop, the rhythmic thrust was mainly behind the beat, and the tonal colors were more pastel than those of red-hot bebop. The solos, although as harmonically sophisticated as bop, had a detached and more reflective quality than the burning intensity of the music created by the boppers.

Years later Gerry Mulligan wrote the liner notes for a reissue of Birth of the Cool. This is how he characterized Miles: “Miles [was] the bandleader. He took the initiative and put the theories to work. He called the rehearsals, hired the halls, called the players, and generally cracked the whip.”

Miles, befitting a leader, is the most prominent soloist on these sides. One can clearly hear the mature style that we all associate with him. In particular, his work on “Israel” is a perfectly constructed solo, and in years to come Miles’s solo would often be used as part of the arrangement when big bands played the tune. This is the Miles we are all familiar with, the Miles whose virtuosity is replaced by lyricism and depth of emotion. In addition, his tone has a burry quality, not nearly as brassy as that of most jazz trumpeters. Some critics have denigrated Miles for virtually turning the trumpet’s sonic quality into something closer to a woodwind.

Unfortunately, this band was truly ahead of its time. It was not able to find an audience and had only a single stand at a jazz club, the Royal Roost. However, they did record several sides for Capitol Records that, when they were eventually collected into a single LP, were titled Birth of the Cool. This was not just record-company hype—the band was to an extent instrumental in the advent of the cool, or West Coast, jazz movement. Despite being one of the founders of the cool jazz movement, Miles would soon go on to new, and fiercer, areas of music-making.