‘I spent my first week in New York and my first month’s allowance looking for Charlie Parker.”1
Miles Davis
Miles’s mother wanted him to go to Fisk University, which had a very good music department, but he managed to get his father’s permission to enrol at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. His father paid his tuition fees and gave him an allowance. From the moment he arrived in New York in September 1944, Miles Davis found himself living a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ existence. Officially, he was enrolled at Juilliard, an institution that taught established Western musical forms and techniques. But his unofficial interests – his real reason for being in the city – lay in the dives and seedy clubs of 52nd Street, where the revolutionary music, bebop, was being created. He thus had access to two very different worlds: at Juilliard he was a protected student with a private income of fifty dollars a week from his family; on 52nd Street, he was merely another competitor in the disreputable and laissez-faire world of jazz – a music with no real status. His attempts to reconcile these two musical worlds were to become a dominant theme in his life and music. He had arrived in New York in the middle of perhaps the most turbulent decade in the history of American music, when jazz itself was undergoing a radical transformation.
Jazz is often described as music that reconciles and blends two musical traditions – the non-Western (African) and the Western (European) – but this is a distortion of the truth. From its earliest beginnings, jazz has been dominated by the constant conflict of both traditions and by compromises that are precarious and finally disintegrate. Broadly speaking, in each of its phases the music has been created by black musicians and then taken up by whites and the music industry and turned into ‘easy-listening’ music. During the uneasy international peace of the 1930s, the jazz impulse had been diluted in big-band swing, culminating in the polished sterility of Glenn Miller. With World War II came a renewed interest in the blues, a growing racial pride (America needed black support for the war effort), and a resurgence of the virtuoso improviser. All these factors, plus the discoveries and experiments of some remarkable musicians, resulted in the creation of a new music: bebop. There were tendencies in this musical direction in many cities throughout the United States – particularly in St Louis and Kansas City – but in the vanguard of the movement was a handful of musicians centred in New York. In the early 1940s, at a club called Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, new ideas were pioneered by the pianist Thelonious Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. And in 1944, the new music hit 52nd Street when first Dizzy and later Charlie Parker began working there with small groups.
In bebop, several non-Western concepts of music were brilliantly reasserted. Its most striking characteristic is an intense, polyrhythmic drive to which even the melodies are subservient. In other words, the dynamic rhythms of the melodies are organically and intricately interwoven with the pulse and multiple accents of the rhythm section, which is typical of an African way of making music. In fast performances, the written or improvised melodies, with their streams of notes, wide interval leaps, displaced accents, and asymmetrical phrases, present a rhythmic vitality so foreign to American listeners that it drew frightened and hostile comments from all sides. Even established musicians – no doubt because they felt threatened – attacked it. But it is interesting to note that, with the exception of Louis Armstrong, who called it ‘this modern malice’, the most gifted members of the jazz establishment, such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins and some others, never derided the new music or its practitioners, but instead welcomed and encouraged them. As well as revitalizing melody and re-establishing polyrhythms, bebop also offered a contemporary restatement of the basic blues impulse. At all tempos – fast, medium and slow – the blues, with its tonal expressiveness, its deeply personal statements and its roots in the history of black America, was once more made central to jazz. On 52nd Street, every night of the week it was possible to hear the new music that was splitting musicians and public into two factions: the ‘hip’ people who understood it (or at least claimed to), and the ‘squares’ who reviled and abused it.
This was the explosive musical climate Miles Davis found when he arrived in New York and spent his first week and his first month’s allowance looking for Charlie Parker, initially without success. After some time, he read that Parker would be appearing at a jam session at a club in Harlem called the Heatwave. Miles turned up at the session and renewed the friendship. Typically, and no doubt to Miles’s great joy, Parker ‘didn’t have a place to stay at the time’, so he moved in with Davis, who had a room in a house at 147th Street and Broadway. When Irene and baby Cheryl arrived in December 1944, Miles found Parker another room in the house.
Miles was extremely fortunate in being able to spend his most formative period in the close company of the fountainhead of the new music, and he flung himself into a regime of study that was both exhausting and schizophrenic. By day, he would be at Juilliard, and at night hanging around Minton’s Playhouse or the clubs on 52nd Street. Parker gave him a great deal of encouragement: ‘ “Don’t be afraid,” he used to tell me, “go ahead and play.” Every night on matchbox covers I’d write down those chords I heard. Everybody helped me. Next day I’d play those chords all day in the practice room at Juilliard, instead of going to classes.’2 Other key musicians helped him too. Parker introduced him to Thelonious Monk, who wrote out chords for him, as did the pianist Tadd Dameron, who had been with Billy Eckstine as an arranger when Miles had played with the band in St Louis. Dizzy Gillespie advised Miles to study piano and use the keyboard for working out melodic shapes.
Miles was in perfect condition for learning fast. He was in control of himself – neither smoking nor drinking – and he knew exactly which people could help him most. He had a very high regard for his mentors, but the mild-mannered and industrious young trumpeter was also beginning to develop a healthy self-respect. Coming from the Midwest, he expected to be upstaged and outclassed by every musician in New York: ‘When I got to New York, I thought everybody knew as much as I did, and I was surprised. Wasn’t nobody playing but Dizzy and Roy [Eldridge] and Joe [Guy] – long-haired Joe. The guys who were playing, you didn’t even know or hear of.’3
At Juilliard, he attended classes to find out if there was anything worth learning there. As far as general theory was concerned, he felt they had nothing to teach him: ‘All that shit I had already learned in St Louis.’4 He also found the pace of lessons too slow: ‘I did all the homework for summer school in one day.’ But he did follow Dizzy Gillespie’s advice and take some piano lessons at Juilliard. He also took trumpet lessons from symphonic players, which meant that even as he steeped himself in the new jazz, he was still subject to strong Western instrumental concepts. But in 1945 Miles found another trumpet player who was to have a powerful influence: Freddie Webster. He frequently showed up at the sessions at Minton’s in Harlem, and he had all the qualities of the St Louis school of trumpeters – the big, singing sound and the marmoreally sculpted phrases. He did not play a lot of notes, nor did he play at very fast tempos; he was at his best on medium-tempo pieces and on ballads. Given these qualities, it is not surprising that Miles and he became very close, and that Webster had a lasting influence on Davis. Miles says of him:
I used to love what he did to a note. He didn’t play a lot of notes; he didn’t waste any. I used to try to get his sound. He had a great big tone, like Billy Butterfield, but without vibrato. Freddie was my best friend. I wanted to play like him. I used to teach him chords, whatever I learned at Juilliard. He didn’t have any money to go. And in return, I’d try to get his tone.5
Over one point Miles’s memory may have been playing him tricks: Webster played with a fairly wide vibrato.
A block of brownstone buildings between Fifth and Sixth Avenues constituted 52nd Street. Earlier in the century each building had housed a single affluent family, but by the end of Prohibition, they were already split up into small businesses and basement clubs. By the mid-1940s the Street had reached a peak with such clubs as the Three Deuces, the Downbeat, the Famous Door, the Spotlite, Kelly’s Stables, the Yacht Club and the Onyx. The warren-like basements were too small for big bands and so small combos flourished everywhere. Apart from the new generation of musicians, some of the older and more established stars worked there regularly. It was to this shabby area with its fast-living pimps, hipsters, drug-pushers and small-time operators that the reticent Miles Davis came to listen and learn at the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945. It occupied the other end of the spectrum from Juilliard, with its elegant building, unhurried atmosphere and reverence for the past, a world in which the composer was god. The two worlds proceeded on parallel lines, but when Miles played his first ever recording session (4 May 1945), the bandleader, saxophonist Herbie Fields, was an ex-Juilliard student. The group was a quintet accompanying vocalist Rubberlegs Williams, whose singing was reminiscent of Fats Waller’s. Indeed, the loose treatment of the four pieces they recorded was similar to the method of the ‘Fats Waller and his Rhythm’ series. Miles has said of this occasion: ‘I was too nervous to play, and I only performed in the ensembles – no solos.’6 But, in fact, his muted horn is strongly in evidence, improvising fleet and pungent obbligati behind the voice.
Later in May, Coleman Hawkins started a residency at the Downbeat Club, with Joe Guy on trumpet. Billie Holiday was the featured attraction of the evening and she and Guy had just been married. In the first flush of marital bliss, Guy often missed some of the sets with Hawkins, and Miles would sit in on those occasions. It was a golden opportunity and Miles made the most of it, checking the Downbeat every night to see if he was needed. Hawkins had met Miles when the latter first came to New York and seemed to take a fatherly interest in him; the young trumpeter worked with him a few other times that year when Thelonious Monk was the pianist. On this particular occasion, if Joe Guy did appear, then Miles would go over to the Spotlite and sit in with Lockjaw Davis and alto saxophonist Rudy Williams. Lockjaw must have been impressed by Miles, because shortly after this he hired the young trumpeter for a month at the Spotlite. Miles Davis had got his first real employment as a trumpet player in New York.
After this, he began to get regular work on the Street, and by the early autumn of 1945 he had joined Charlie Parker’s group at the Three Deuces. The rest of the quintet comprised pianist Al Haig, bassist Curley Russell and drummer Stan Levey. Miles was still nervous, but Parker showed great kindness in coaxing him along:
Bird used to make me play. He used to lead me up on the bandstand. I used to quit every night. The tempos were so fast, the challenge so great. I used to ask, ‘What do you need me for?’ I used to play under Bird all the time. When Bird would play a melody, I’d play just under him and let him lead the note, swing the note. The only thing that I’d add would be a larger sound.7
It was around this time that Miles finally left Juilliard. He’d been spending less time there and more on the Street, and his acceptance by leading musicians gave him enough confidence to burn his boats. As Miles puts it:
Originally I went there (Juilliard) to see what was happening, but when I found out nothing was happening, I told my father to save his money . . . I realized I wasn’t going to get in any symphony orchestra. And I had to go down the Street at night to play with Bird or Coleman Hawkins, so I decided to go that way – all the way.8
His decision was final, and with it he irrevocably turned his back on the life his mother wanted for him. But he took the train back to St Louis to explain to his father what he was doing and why. His father understood the situation immediately, giving Miles his blessing and a promise of continued financial support, and warning him to get his own sound, to be his own man and nobody else.
After his stint at the Three Deuces, Parker went into the Spotlite, again taking Miles with him. The rest of the group included Dexter Gordon on tenor saxophone, Bud Powell or Sir Charles Thompson alternating at the piano, bassist Curley Russell, Max Roach (or sometimes Stan Levey) on drums, and tap dancer Baby Lawrence. Dexter Gordon recalls: ‘Baby was the floor show, taking fours and eights with the band. Bird would leave Miles and me with our mouths open every night.’9 The residency was cut short, however, when members of the narcotics squad and vice detectives raided the Street, rounding up ‘vicious’ elements and closing several clubs, including the Spotlite. Miles then went into Minton’s with Sir Charles Thompson and a drummer for a while, after which he was hired again by Coleman Hawkins for a brief residency.
Parker was booked for a recording session for Savoy on 26 November, and he asked Miles to do the date. The rhythm section comprised Curley Russell, Max Roach and pianist Argonne Thornton (later known as Sadik Hakim; the pianist should have been Thelonious Monk, but he failed, at the last moment, to turn up). The session became a special occasion with several other musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, turning up for the event, and the usual hipsters and hangers-on drifting in and out of the studio. There were long breaks for refreshments, and in the middle of the proceedings, Miles Davis took a thirty-minute nap on the studio floor. Despite all this chaos, the results were such that the record company, Savoy, later referred to the occasion as ‘the greatest recording session in modern jazz history’.
Savoy’s claims may have been rather extravagant, but nevertheless, the session did produce the first definitive recordings of bebop. Parker and Gillespie had twice recorded together earlier in the year, with swing drummers Cozy Cole and Big Sid Catlett, but the November session for Savoy had, at last, the right drummer for the music: Max Roach. Only a year older than Miles, he had grown up with the new music and understood exactly the kind of rhythms that were needed: the shimmering top-cymbal pulse, the snare-drum accents, and the use of the bass drum only for emphasis and punctuation. Another reason for the success of the occasion was, paradoxically, that instead of five confident and fully rehearsed virtuosi, the basic group was a nucleus of three musicians: Parker, then at the full height of his magnificent powers, Curley Russell and Roach. For most of the pieces, Dizzy Gillespie, the leading trumpeter of that time, played piano, and the trumpet player was the nineteen-year-old and still immature Miles Davis.
The material ultimately released from the session comprised two incomplete fragments with beautiful solos by Parker (‘Warming Up a Riff’ and ‘Meandering’), two blues in F (‘Billie’s Bounce’ and ‘Now’s the Time’), one complete performance based on the chord structure of Gershwin’s ‘I Got Rhythm’ (‘Thriving on a Riff’), and ‘Koko’, a fast performance based on the chord sequence of Ray Noble’s ‘Cherokee’. Dizzy Gillespie knew enough of the keyboard to be able to ‘comp’ – to play the right chords in the right rhythmic manner – but he was not enough of a pianist to be able to play a solo. At that time, he and Parker were very close, and Bird obviously knew he would get the kind of accompaniment he wanted on the medium and slow pieces from Dizzy rather than from Argonne Thornton. The latter, however, played on ‘Thriving on a Riff’ and revealed himself as an inventive and original stylist. With Dizzy on piano, in a purely supportive role, Parker would have to play longer solos, and Miles, as the only other solo voice, would also have to shoulder more responsibility. Lack of virtuosity at the piano and on the trumpet thus became a key factor in the quality, the poise, the sheer depth of feeling of the performances. Every note, every phrase of Parker’s was made to tell, given its full weight, and even at fast tempos he seemed unhurried. Miles, too, could not afford to waste a note.
The ensemble passages at the beginning and end of ‘Koko’ were simply too difficult at that time for Miles, and so they were played on trumpet by Gillespie. Either because of contractual difficulties, or because Savoy did not want to pay a sixth musician on the quintet date, Dizzy’s contribution to the whole session – which was considerable – had to be anonymous. On the original 78 r.p.m. issues, the pianist is listed as one Hen Gates. Miles has solos only on the two blues and ‘Thriving on a Riff’. On the latter, the tempo is brisk and there is no theme statement at the beginning. After Thornton’s piano introduction, the first chorus is a solo by Miles with a cup mute, and it is astonishingly fluent and assured. There’s no great individuality in his phrasing – indeed he sounds rather like Dizzy – but the long melodic lines and the way he rounds off his phrases are very impressive. After Parker’s two choruses, and Thornton’s solo, the difficult ‘Anthropology’ theme is played to conclude the piece, and this is a perfect example of how Miles used to ‘play under’ Parker at that time. The theme is played by the alto and the edge of its magnificent sound is just tinged by the muted trumpet, so that when Miles fails to make the convoluted phrases at the end of the second and the last eight bars, the omission is barely noticeable.
‘Billie’s Bounce’ is taken at an easy tempo, with Miles playing open horn on equal terms with Parker, and the ensemble has a relaxed, funky edge. Parker’s solo stretches for four choruses, and Miles takes two, playing some beautifully poised wide intervals with oblique notes to the chords, and getting a lyrical, singing quality in some of his longer notes. After his solo he goes straight into the theme, which is played twice – strongly the first time, and very quietly for the last time. During the final chorus Miles plays a ‘clinker’ – not a fluff, but an actual wrong note which is clearly audible, and this probably resulted simply from a failure of nerve. In the middle 1940s, recordings couldn’t be edited and had to be done in complete ‘takes’. If the first theme statement was good and the solos were acceptable, the worst ordeal for a nervous musician was always the final theme statement . . . would he or would he not ruin the whole take by botching it?
Apart from ‘Koko’, on which Miles didn’t play, the other masterpiece from that day’s recording was the fourth take of ‘Now’s the Time’. Dizzy’s piano introduction, with its relaxed but insistent dissonances, sets up an eerie, contemplative mood which is sustained throughout the performance. The theme, one of Parker’s many blues compositions, builds tension by the repetition of a rhythmic phrase (riff) in the middle register, punctuated by stabs from the piano and drums. In the last four bars, the tension is brilliantly released when the trumpet rises an octave and a minor 3rd to play a phrase which paraphrases and answers the initial riff. This theme has exactly the same structure and essence as the earliest and most fundamental vocal blues in which a line is sung twice, with perhaps minor variations the second time, over eight bars, and then the punchline is sung over the last four bars. Parker’s innovations did not negate the past or invalidate it; instead, they contained it, reshaped it and revitalized it. This example of progressing without losing contact with the roots of the music was not to be wasted on Miles.
The overall shape of ‘Now’s the Time’ follows the classic structure of small-group jazz performances. The theme is played at the beginning and end, and the solos take place in the middle. This again harks back to the roots of jazz: the theme is like the ‘call’ of the preacher or chain-gang leader, and the solos are the ‘response’ to that call – replies to it and variations on it. It is an extrapolation from non-Western rituals and habits of communal music-making.
After the initial theme statement, Parker plays three choruses, creating and releasing tension by the masterful way he varies the attack and the length of his phrases and by his dramatic use of pauses. The whole solo is shot through with blues feeling – all the expressive inflexions, the vocalized tone, the fluid use of grace notes as a prelude to long melodic statements. Imaginatively and technically it is a virtuoso performance, and yet it never loses contact with the black folk tradition – the direct cry from the heart is always evident. There are also several striking qualities in Miles’s solo, which covers two choruses – twenty-four bars. First, its overall structure exactly mirrors the structure of the written twelve-bar theme, in that the tension is steadily built up until it reaches a peak with the phrase he plays over the seventeenth and eighteenth bars culminating in his high B flat (concert A flat). After two beats’ rest in the nineteenth bar, the tension is marvellously released when he hits his top D (concert C) and descends with the most flowing and unbroken line of the solo over the following five bars. In the earlier part of the solo the tension is built by playing short phrases in the middle register and alternating them with long, singing notes which project rich tonal quality. He also stresses weak notes such as the second step of the scale (G over an F chord) and the flattened 5th, all of which further increases the tension by implying bitonality and tugging the ear away from the tonic. All this tension is resolved with the final descent from the high register, which is rhythmically symmetrical and diatonic – going, in fact, straight down the F major scale.
The emotional climate Miles’s solo generates is very akin to that of Parker: a buoyant feel with an intensely melancholy edge. And yet, unlike Parker’s, Miles’s phrases have very little of the blues in them at this stage in his career. The long periods of formal instruction in Western instrumental techniques seem to have drained the tonal inflexions of the blues from his playing. His sound in this solo, however, is by no means a ‘straight’ one, because his phrases hang together very well rhythmically – in short, he swings, albeit ponderously. It is an extremely full trumpet sound, almost a massive one. In the early 1950s he was to cite this particular solo as one of his favourites because he ‘sounded like Freddie Webster’, and other musicians have made the same comment. As with Webster, the solo is economical; every note tells and there are none of the idiomatic grace notes with which Parker often began his phrases. Finally, the powerful inner logic of his improvisation comes out of his intense feeling and is an expression of it. But the most important point of all is that this solo revealed an original conception of trumpet playing. Trumpeter Red Rodney said later: ‘The first time we really ever heard Miles was on that . . . “Now’s the Time” . . . it was a new sound . . . it was a young guy that didn’t play the trumpet very well, but had discovered a whole new way of treating it and playing it.’
Once a musician starts playing and recording he becomes, of course, a public figure whose work will be talked about and evaluated by sages and idiots alike. Miles got his first taste of critics and their wisdom when the 78 r.p.m. record, with ‘Billie’s Bounce’ on one side and ‘Now’s the Time’ on the other, was released. It was universally condemned. The Down Beat reviewer wrote:
These two sides are excellent examples of the other side of the Gillespie craze – the bad taste and ill-advised fanaticism of Dizzy’s uninhibited style. Only Charlie Parker, who is a better musician and who deserves more credit than Dizzy for the style anyway, saves these from a bad fate. At that he’s far off form – a bad reed and inexcusable fluffs do not add up to good jazz. The trumpet man, whoever the misled kid is, plays Gillespie in the same manner as a majority of kids who copy their idol do – with most of the faults, lack of order and meaning, the complete adherence to technical acrobatics.10
This critique is typical of the kind of abuse with which bebop was greeted in the middle 1940s, and Miles’s lifelong mistrust and dislike of critics (with a few exceptions) may well date from this period.
In that whole recording session on 26 November 1945, both Parker and Miles revealed their essential difference from everyone else in jazz. Although still embryonic, Miles’s musical identity was clearly evident. Parker, on the other hand, was fully mature and gloriously expressed the two opposite poles of his artistic nature: the furious brilliance and aggression of ‘Koko’, and the contemplative brooding of the nocturnal and bluesy ‘Now’s the Time’, a prophetic title. Both pieces are small masterpieces – perfect expressions of the duality which is found in all Parker’s subsequent work. Miles, in his mature work, was to bring both aspects to greater peaks of expression, and on a much larger scale. The introspective and contemplative side would be sustained for whole long-playing records, reaching its fullest realization in the albums Kind of Blue (1959) and In a Silent Way (1969). The furiously aggressive side was to reach one peak in the ‘live’ albums of the early 1960s and another – of almost frightening power – in 1969 and the early 1970s, when Miles was using electronics and multiple rhythm sections.
Another aspect of Charlie Parker’s character also revealed itself at this recording session. He had been a heroin addict for some years by then, and was always short of money. In the studio, needing ready cash, he sold the rights to his composition, ‘Now’s the Time’, for a mere $50 dollars. In later years, Miles would guard his own compositions jealously, but before the 1940s were over he was to make many of Parker’s mistakes.
The November raids on 52nd Street by detectives and members of the vice squad had been instigated by the military authorities. The war was coming to an end, but there was still concern about the numbers of servicemen rendered unfit for duty after a night or two on the Street. Several clubs were closed, and others declared out-of-bounds for military personnel. Parker and Gillespie consequently found themselves out of work in New York, and left early in December for an eight-week engagement in California. Shortly after they’d gone, Miles took Irene and daughter Cheryl back to East St Louis in time for Christmas. Irene was pregnant with their second child, Gregory, who was born in 1946. But having decided to ‘go all the way’ and identify totally with the new musical revolutionaries, Miles certainly didn’t want to stay in East St Louis. It may have been pleasant to revisit old friends, to sit in with local groups, and perhaps to enjoy the ‘local-boy-makes-good’ reputation, but this was no longer enough. By a stroke of good fortune, Benny Carter’s band was working locally at the Riviera, and they were about to go to the West Coast. This was too good an opportunity to miss; Miles joined the trumpet section of the band and informed Parker that he would be coming to Los Angeles.
At the beginning of February 1946, the Parker/Gillespie quintet finished its West Coast residency and a few days later the group flew back to New York – all, that is, except for Parker, who had cashed in his plane ticket. By this time Ross Russell had started his record label, Dial, which was concentrating on bebop, and some time in mid-February Parker went along to talk to him. According to Russell, Bird didn’t want to record with Gillespie any more:
It was time for new modes. The trumpet player of his choice would not be a virtuoso capable of fireworks, but a different sort of musician, someone who played a relaxed legato style, with a warm tone, in the lower and middle registers, someone like Miles Davis, who would be arriving in Los Angeles within a week or two.11
The Benny Carter band arrived to play at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, and Miles was already unhappy with the job. It was a big band playing mostly old-fashioned arrangements. Parker was appearing at the Finale Club in the black quarter of the city, and Miles was soon doubling up jobs by slipping down there every night when the Carter gig was over. Having two paid jobs was against the tenets of the musicians’ union, and when the authorities caught up with him, Miles was fined, after which he left the Carter band and appeared with Bird until the Finale closed because of poor business. Although most of the best local musicians came along to hear Parker and the group, there was, as yet, no audience for the new music on the West Coast.
The rhythm section with Parker and Miles at the Finale comprised pianist Joe Albany, bassist Addison Farmer (brother of trumpeter Art) and drummer Chuck Thompson, and in late February and early March some of the club sessions were recorded. They showed Miles to be much more confident, but to have lost much of his individuality. The influence of Gillespie is evident in his phrases and in his use of the higher registers of the trumpet. His technique seems much improved, but he still fails to make the same phrases on the ‘Anthropology’ theme. These were, of course, public performances and there was, necessarily, only one take of each piece.
Parker’s first studio recording session for Ross Russell’s Dial label took place at Radio Recorders on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, on 28 March 1946. This was Miles’s second time in the studios with Parker, and the occasion uncannily resembled the ‘Now’s the Time’ session in its lack of preparation. On the present occasion, four months later, there had been almost no rehearsal at all, and Bird had reshuffled his personnel the night before the recording was due to take place. He went into the studio with a septet which included Miles, tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson, pianist Dodo Marmarosa, guitarist Arvin Garrison, bassist Vic McMillan and Roy Porter on drums. Everything – melodies, harmonies, formats and solo lengths – had to be worked out in the studio in recording time. Nothing was written down: Parker simply played the melodies on his alto, taught them to the other horns, demonstrated harmonies – occasionally actually naming a chord – and talked out various routines. His whole approach was thus spontaneous, instinctual, and non-Western. It was diametrically opposed to the entire Western conception of written musical symbols, of music that can be seen even when not heard. Parker preferred this approach to recording, and, once again, the lesson was not lost on Miles Davis. In his later career, often the most brilliant and lasting of his small-group recordings would be done in the studio, on the day, with no prior rehearsal.
Miles used his cup mute throughout the session, and still sounds like Dizzy. In fact, his approach is antithetical to the persona he revealed on the 1945 session, and on various takes he is often prodigal with notes, and frequently sounds ill at ease. Furthermore, as all four of the tunes recorded that day were either medium-fast or fast, we have no opportunity to hear Miles at the tempos he favoured then: slow to medium. Uncertain though his contribution was later in the year he won an award as Down Beat’s New Star on Trumpet for 1946. Dodo Marmarosa and Lucky Thompson got similar awards in their respective instrumental categories. Recording with Parker was the sure way of getting noticed fast, and the critics began to be more favourable to Miles.
The Finale Club closed suddenly without any warning. The musicians turned up for work one night only to find the club in darkness, the doors locked, and themselves out of a job. Parker disappeared and could not be found, even by his closest associates, for several days. This was Miles’s first real taste of the insecurity and unpredictability of the music profession. Work for modern jazz musicians was now very hard to come by in California. Things were getting desperate for Bird, who had no money to live on and who couldn’t afford the fare back to New York, but Miles still had an allowance from his father.
The trumpeter Howard McGhee and his wife, who were living in Los Angeles, took care of Parker and reopened the defunct Finale Club in May. It was a co-operative venture, and the door takings were simply divided between the members of the house band, which comprised Bird, McGhee, Marmarosa, bassist Red Callender and Roy Porter. Under these circumstances, there was no place for Miles Davis in Parker’s group, and perhaps Miles was content to be out of the way because it was becoming increasingly clear that the saxophonist was physically and emotionally very ill. Parker’s complete breakdown occurred in late July and, suspected of being insane, he was committed to Camarillo State Hospital for a minimum period of six months.
During his time on the West Coast, Miles had become friendly with bassist Charles Mingus, another Bird devotee, who lived in Los Angeles. In the late spring, Miles had played third trumpet on a record session under Mingus’s leadership, but the two tracks they made were never released. The experience left Miles with a lasting admiration and affection for Mingus and his music. In August, both Miles and Mingus played in a group led by Lucky Thompson three nights a week at Elk’s Ballroom on Central Avenue in Los Angeles. An announcement in the music press stated that the key member of Thompson’s small group would be ‘the brilliant young trumpet player, Miles Davis, last heard here with Benny Carter’.12 But this group soon broke up because Thompson accepted an offer to join the Boyd Raeburn orchestra. By now, Miles was anxious to leave the West Coast, and a way out presented itself when the Billy Eckstine band arrived in Los Angeles during September. Eighteen months previously, the trumpeter Fats Navarro had joined the band, replacing Dizzy Gillespie, but when Eckstine went out to California. Navarro wanted to stay in New York. Miles was hired and spent five months with the band, going east with it in late autumn. Mingus never forgave him for leaving Los Angeles when Parker was still in hospital, but Mingus’s attitude arose from a misunderstanding of the situation. He was a sentimental outsider who had not spent much time in close proximity with Parker who was, in any case, now safely in medical custody. Miles was not Bird’s keeper, and his duty was to look out for himself and his family. While with the Eckstine band, however, Miles began dabbling in drugs, snorting cocaine and even trying heroin, but he wasn’t yet addicted. After the Eckstine band broke up in the spring of 1947, Miles spent some time in Chicago, appearing on the south side at Jumptown with saxophonists Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons for the jam session nights.
Then he returned to New York, and after a short stint and a recording with saxophonist Illinois Jacquet in March, he joined the trumpet section of Dizzy Gillespie’s big band, which included Freddie Webster, Kenny Dorham, Fats Navarro and Dizzy himself. Charlie Parker came back to New York in April, just in time to join Gillespie’s band on its first gig at the McKinley Theatre in the Bronx. Parker had got out of the Camarillo State Hospital in February, free of drugs, but had stayed on in Los Angeles and started using them again. He was also consuming large quantities of alcohol, possibly in an effort to limit his heroin intake. The result was that on that first night with Dizzy’s big band, Parker played solos, but wouldn’t play the written parts and kept falling asleep. Dizzy fired him on the spot, and no amount of pleading by the other musicians made him change his mind. He wanted a ‘clean’ band with responsible and reliable musicians.
Parker realized, however, that the new music had at last made a big impact on the general public, that Dizzy Gillespie was already famous, and that it was now possible not only to work regularly, but also to earn reasonable money. He was immediately offered a contract for four weeks with a quintet at the Three Deuces. The fee for the group was $800 a week. This meant that Parker could afford to recruit the musicians he wanted and employ them on a steady basis. He chose Miles Davis and Max Roach; the bassist was Tommy Potter, who had played with the Eckstine band, and the pianist was a comparative unknown called Duke Jordan. Miles left the Gillespie band in order to work with this new quintet, which was to stay together as a unit for over eighteen months; with it, Parker reached the zenith of his career. His sidemen could have worked for better wages elsewhere, but they wanted to be with Bird. According to Ross Russell, Jordan and Potter, the two newcomers, were paid $125 a week, and Bird’s old associates, Max and Miles, received $135. Parker had the difference – the best wage he had received in his entire career to date – $280 clear. The quintet opened at the Three Deuces in April, opposite the Lennie Tristano Trio, and the club was so well attended that Parker’s residency was extended indefinitely.
Parker was physically and psychologically buoyant, and at the height of his creative powers. Night after night, he pushed his great ability to the limits, never playing anything the same way twice. The inexhaustible wealth of ideas and the powerful feeling with which he invested them kept the rest of the group on their mettle. Miles Davis recalls:
Bird used to play forty different styles. He was never content to remain the same. I remember how at times he used to turn the rhythm section around. Like we’d be playing the blues, and Bird would start on the eleventh bar, and as the rhythm section stayed where they were and Bird played where he was it sounded as if the rhythm section was on one and three instead of two and four. Every time that would happen, Max Roach used to scream at Duke Jordan not to follow Bird, but to stay where he was. Then, eventually it came round as Bird had planned and we were together again.13
Parker’s continual extending of boundaries, his invasion of unexplored territory, and the element of creative surprise which he generated, made a deep impression on Miles. Over twenty years later, Davis was to say: ‘That’s what I tell my musicians; I tell them to be ready to play what you know and above what you know. Anything might happen above what you’ve been used to playing – you’re ready to get into that, and above that, and take that out.’14
Parker also continued to inspire and direct his group by example rather than by explicit verbal instructions. Someone had to verbalize, however, and one of the chores Miles had to take on, because of Bird’s default, was that of musical director. His experiences with the Eddie Randle band in St Louis had, of course, prepared him for this to some extent: ‘I was nervous . . . but I had to get out of being nervous fast because he [Bird] was never there and I had to rehearse the band.’15 And: ‘He never did talk about music. I always even had to show Duke Jordan, the pianist in the band, the chords.’16 Miles also recalls:
The only time I ever heard Bird talk about music was an argument he had with a classical musician friend of mine about the naming of chords. That was the night Bird said you could do anything with chords. And I disagreed. ‘You can’t play D natural in the fifth bar of a B flat blues.’ ‘Yes you can,’ said Bird. Well one night in Birdland, I heard Lester Young do it, and it sounded good. But he bent it.17
On 8 May 1947, the quintet, with Bud Powell replacing Duke Jordan at the piano, recorded for the Savoy label, and the results show a major change in Miles’s thinking. The Gillespie influence and the forays into the upper register are gone; the sound is smaller than on the ‘Now’s the Time’ recording, but it is broad, rounded and beginning to project a greater lyricism. Although not yet twenty-one, Miles has achieved some wisdom, some self-knowledge:
I asked Dizzy, ‘Why can’t I play high like you?’ ‘Because you can’t hear up there,’ he said. ‘You hear in the middle register.’ And that’s true. There are times when I can’t even tell what chords Dizzy is working on when he’s up high; and yet he told me what he’s playing is just an octave above what I do.18
Although Miles’s solos on this session are often much shorter than Parker’s, we can detect the germs of a highly individual style. The sense of strain is gone, though he does occasionally sound a little unsteady rhythmically, and his middle register work is already showing a good grasp of harmony, original melodic lines, and unusual intervals. This growing identity was to become an integral part of the group idea Parker had conceived a year previously on the West Coast. Instead of sparks being created by the competition of two virtuoso horns, as had been the case when Dizzy was with the band, Parker was looking for the dynamism of contrast. His own gargantuan abilities would be offset against the understatement and lyricism of Miles’s horn. The music of the quintet was to become subtly dramatic and, perhaps paradoxically, more potent. This concept was to be a major factor in Miles’s own definitive quintet recordings of the middle 1950s.
The 8 May recording session produced two blues (‘Cheryl’ and ‘Buzzy’), a variation of the ‘I Got Rhythm’ sequence (‘Chasin’ the Bird’), and ‘Donna Lee’, based on the harmonies of the standard, ‘Indiana’. The first three were composed by Parker, but although ‘Donna Lee’ was attributed to him, it was in fact written by Miles. This was the trumpeter’s debut on record as a composer, and it was an impressive one. The piece is fast, difficult, and typical bebop in its rhythmic drive and the way the melodic line flows through the chord changes. Only the symmetry of the phrases suggests that Miles, and not Bird, was the composer.
It was probably the chaos of Parker’s own affairs that gave Miles his next big chance. Bird was still under contract to record for Dial, and after the May session for Savoy there was much infighting behind the scenes. It was discovered that Parker was also under contract to Savoy, having signed with them at the ‘Now’s the Time’ session. Savoy offered him another recording date on 14 August, and in order to avoid further complications, Miles was made the leader for that event. Either for further camouflage, or at Miles’s instigation, Parker abandoned his alto and played tenor saxophone for the occasion. The rest of the group comprised pianist John Lewis, bassist Nelson Boyd, and Max Roach. The four tunes they recorded (‘Milestones’, ‘Little Willie Leaps’, ‘Half Nelson’ and ‘Sippin’ at Bell’s’) were all composed by Miles but, although they show marked originality, these themes are rather over-written. The melodic lines are long, convoluted and full of surprises, but they are so lacking in space that they sometimes create a breathless feeling. Also, the underlying harmonies are much denser than those of Parker’s usual material. ‘Sippin’ at Bell’s’, for example, is a twelve-bar blues, but there are eighteen chords in each chorus.
The most striking feature of this session is the way Miles has imposed his own personality on it. The music is unlike Parker’s own recordings in that the themes and the way they are played are much more relaxed and ‘laid back’. The use of the tenor sax may have something to do with the smoother sound of the ensemble, but the essence of the music goes deeper than that. The liquid spirit of Lester Young hangs over it. The solos too – and for the first time, Miles shares the honours on equal terms with Parker – echo the smooth fluency of the themes. Miles is poised and assured, tending to understate and imply melodic ideas. The self-editing process is already functioning, and there is a subtle tension between the apparent simplicity of his improvised lines and the complexity of the harmonic structures. All in all, the session is not as powerful as the rest of Parker’s recordings in the period, but it offers a new and refreshing dimension – a cooler urbanity – and it gives intimations of Miles’s future development.
That year, 1947, proved to be a marvellous one for Miles. He was beginning to find a solid musical identity, he was working steadily, and his progress was well documented. There were three further recording sessions with Parker for Dial, each one showing increasing musicianship and greater maturity in Miles’s work, and on 21 December there was another date for Savoy. On this final one, Miles is in magnificent form, playing with perfect rhythmic poise, using space with drama and delicacy, and revealing an abundance of new ideas. He plays confidently at breakneck speed on ‘Bird Gets the Worm’, but even in this piece his group role, as a foil for Parker, is important. Wilfrid Mellers points out: ‘Parker’s reedy, anguished tone is highlighted in contrast with Miles Davis’s muted trumpet, which mutes the anger as well as the sonority.’19
It was also in 1947 that Miles, looking for further musical outlets, began to show some independence of Parker. He became established as one of the four trumpet players who dominated 52nd Street. Another of these was Red Rodney who remembers:
I worked on 52nd Street all the time . . . I went from one club to the other . . . Miles did also . . . We were sort of rivals in a way, I guess. There was Miles, and there was Fats Navarro, myself, Kenny Dorham, and the four of us were all friendly and, well, we were competitive towards each other because we were the ones who were working, and I was the only white trumpeter. But you know, back then there was no problem of being white or black – among us anyway . . . Inasmuch as we liked each other, we didn’t consider colour.
Rodney also worked with the Claude Thornhill band in 1947 when Gerry Mulligan and Lee Konitz were with it, and Gil Evans was writing the arrangements. Miles’s lifelong friendship with Evans dates from that year. Gil had heard the Parker recording of ‘Donna Lee’ and he approached Miles:
He was asking for a release on my tune ‘Donna Lee’. He wanted to make an arrangement for a government electrical transcription of it. I told him he could have it and asked him to teach me some chords and let me study some of the scores he was doing for Claude Thornhill . . . I used to write and send Gil my scores for evaluation. Gil used to say they were good, but cluttered up with too many notes. I used to think you had to use a lot of notes and stuff to be writing.20
The improvising and the writing were developing on parallel lines. The excesses and the inessentials were being pared away. But also in 1947, in addition to snorting cocaine, Miles had started drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes, though he wasn’t using heroin.
By the beginning of 1948, Charlie Parker and his group had gained international fame and recognition. Parker had won his first poll in Metronome, and Miles and Max Roach had gained places in their respective instrumental categories. Miles had won the 1947 critics’ poll in Esquire, and had tied first with Dizzy in the critics’ Down Beat poll. But although things looked good, the quintet was not going to stay together. Throughout the year there was growing alienation between Parker and his two strongest sidemen, Miles and Max Roach. Back in the autumn of 1947, Bird had started taking drugs again, and as the addiction progressed, the old instability reappeared. He became unpredictable and unreliable. This was aggravated by the fact that he was now in great demand as a soloist, and would go off on his own to record or to tour. The rest of Parker’s group, who had all made sacrifices in order to stay with him, were bitterly resentful when they found themselves out of work. The quintet’s morale sank very low and when, in late 1948, Parker deliberately behaved childishly during an engagement (doing such things as expelling the air from a balloon into the microphone and firing a cap pistol at the pianist), and seemed to be trying to humiliate his musicians, it was the last straw for Miles. He walked out of the club, saying, ‘Bird makes you feel one foot high.’21 He continued with the quintet for a few more gigs, but let Parker know that he definitely wanted to leave, and after a while, both he and Max Roach did leave. Although Bird and Miles were to play together once or twice afterwards, and record together again in the early 1950s, that evening marked the end of their close association.
Charlie Parker’s influence on Miles Davis is incalculable. Even Bird’s behaviour on the bandstand seems to have made a deep impression. Parker, for example, hardly ever made announcements. According to one regular witness of the evenings on 52nd Street, the communications between Parker and his musicians seemed to be on a telepathic level. Time after time, he would count in and begin playing without apparently having even told the group what piece they were going to play. At the end of a set, he occasionally back-announced some of the themes, but usually he announced only the names of the musicians. When he’d finished playing his solos, he didn’t look round at the band, or offer any directions, but simply walked off the stand. During the 1950s and 1960s, Miles’s own behaviour was to magnify this pattern. During performances with his groups, he would make no announcements at all, and would not only walk off the stand after his solos, but would actually disappear for several minutes.
Parker was rejecting the idea of the black musician as entertainer; he wanted his music to be taken on its own merits, to speak for itself. His behaviour, always unpredictable, often acted as a short-circuit which burned out the fuses of normal thought patterns; he was readjusting the whole relationship of performing artist and audience. The listeners, onlookers, witnesses were privileged eavesdroppers on the act of creation. His music, his behaviour, his gargantuan appetites for food, drugs, sex, jolted audiences, musicians and himself into reappraisals of values. His determination to inhabit the frontiers of experience was both magnificently heroic and magnificently foolhardy.
Charlie Parker was a supremely tragic figure in that the creative and destructive sides of his nature were interdependent. His great genius was for improvisation in both music and in life. In his quest for self-renewal, he had to be unpredictable and perpetually surprising. He had to flout the tenets of the white society that dominated American life because it demanded that: to be accepted, a person had to be a known quantity. Because of his defiance, and the way he revitalized black music, Parker was a genuine cultural hero for urban black people of his generation. Artistically, he embodied an apparently massive contradiction: he was the most advanced musician of his generation, yet he never lost touch with the people – with his folk roots. He had the admiration of his peers, and he had the power of communication with the audiences. Dizzy Gillespie described one occasion when this power of Parker’s was revealed in a live performance:
I saw something remarkable one time. He didn’t show up for a dance he was supposed to play in Detroit. I was in the town, and they asked me to play instead. I went up there, and we started playing. Then I heard this big roar, and Charlie Parker had come in and started playing. He’d play a phrase, and people might never have heard it before. But he’d start it, and the people would finish it with him, humming. It would be so lyrical and simple that it just seemed the most natural thing to play.22
When bookers, agents, managements, entrepreneurs at last realized that they could expect only the unexpected from Parker, they were reluctant to take on the responsibility of finding him work. He was doomed to despair and drugs, and to scuffling around for small-time gigs in obscure clubs. In 1946 he had described his vision of an ordered life to Ross Russell. It included a settled home with a library, paintings, a piano and a superb record collection. It was a vision of stability and permanence that implied a withdrawal from the transient world of improvisation and jazz. He wanted to listen to the works of twentieth-century European composers and to compose ‘seriously’ himself. But that dream was to become more and more remote.
Even in his most creative act – playing music – Parker seemed to be destroying himself, because he always pushed his abilities to the limits. During long engagements, he would become physically and emotionally exhausted, and then he would rely heavily on heroin and alcohol. Sometimes survival would depend on simply not turning up to play; but this physical and psychological self-preservation was also economic suicide. A jazz musician was once quoted as saying: ‘People wonder why we get paid relatively well. Man, we take people’s chances for them.’23 Parker lived always with what Ross Russell has described as the ‘sense of peril’. He took people’s chances for them – musical chances for the new generation of musicians, lifestyle chances for the hipsters, racial chances for the blacks – he took them all, and paid the price for being larger than life: premature death.
Throughout his association with Bird, Miles Davis was a quiet, polite, reasonably self-controlled young man. He was also exceptionally intelligent and sensitive, and could see clearly how Parker was destroying himself. It was obvious that there was a direct relationship between the risks taken and the power of the music produced. Playing safe led to creative death. To survive, Miles would have to look for some sort of balance. But first, like Bird, he would have to experience excess – he would have to go over the edge.