‘I don’t buy polish . . . Polished Negroes are acting the way they think white people want them to act, so they can be accepted.’1
Miles Davis
From the autumn of 1957, there began for Miles Davis a period of popularity in America and Europe that was accompanied by universal critical acclaim and even greater artistic achievements. After winning the Down Beat readers’ poll in 1955, Miles had come second to Dizzy Gillespie in 1956. But in 1957, he was back in first place, and in the following two or three years he also captured every coveted award in the USA and Europe: in America, the Metronome and Playboy polls; and in Europe, polls in Holland’s Muziek Espress, Hamburg’s Jazz Echo, Paris’s Jazz Hot, and London’s Melody Maker. Also, Miles Ahead was awarded France’s ‘L’Oscar du Disque de l’Académie du Jazz’, which was the equivalent of the American Grammy award. Although all this recognition must have been gratifying for Miles, he kept a fairly clear perspective, commenting drily: ‘I love wood. That’s why I hang up those Down Beat plaques I win. Otherwise, winning a poll doesn’t mean anything to me. Look at who some of the other poll winners are.’2 It became impossible to ignore Miles Davis. Up to this point he had been written about mostly in jazz magazines, with occasional reviews in the music columns of one or two dailies. In January 1958, however, he emerged from the underground cult level when there was a photograph and a feature on him in Time magazine. This gave a potted history of his career, contained the usual romantic ideas about artists (‘often lies awake nights rehearsing new arrangements in his head’), and let everyone know about his international reputation (‘In Europe he is perhaps the most widely imitated modern US jazzman’).3
Equally suddenly, Miles was elevated from being merely a great trumpet player and jazz musician, to being a representative of the black race. Seven months after the Time article, he was listed in Life International as one of the fourteen black people who ‘have contributed significantly to the fields of science, law, business, sports, entertainment, art, literature and the preservation of peace among men’,4 including Miles Davis in this group of people whom they termed: ‘Outstanding men of the Negro race [who] have in many areas of human achievement reached a stature that can only be defined as greatness’. Miles’s typically truculent comment was: ‘Why didn’t they put me in the domestic edition if they believed it?’ And it does seem that it was his prestige abroad which lay behind this recognition in his mother-country. Life International included a photograph of Miles with the caption:
The man of the moment in US jazz is a ‘cool’ trumpet player, Miles Davis, who has been foremost in creating the craze for the small band and more melodic ‘chamber’ jazz. Although trained in the ‘bop’ tradition, Davis moved musically to a muted horn style that has made him widely imitated at home and abroad.
Miles’s popularity and prestige coincided with, and of course contributed to, a general increased awareness of jazz on the national and international level. By 1957, there were glimmerings of academic recognition for jazz in the USA, and Brandeis University inaugurated a programme of commissioning jazz and jazz-oriented compositions. The first commissions, each of $350, were awarded to Jimmy Giuffre, Charles Mingus, George Russell, Milton Babbitt, Gunther Schuller and Harold Shapero. Also, Schuller and John Lewis collaborated to promote the idea of third-stream music, which purported to fuse European compositional techniques with jazz elements. But Miles Davis’s experiences with the Brass Ensemble, run by Lewis and Schuller, had merely prompted him to look for other solutions to the problem of musical development and to work with Gil Evans. Some time later he commented: ‘Somebody came to me . . . and asked me to play with that orchestra that Gunther and John have been working with. What do they call it? Orchestra USA? Anyway, I just told him, “Get outa here!” ’5 And at the other end of the spectrum from third-stream was the ‘funk’ trend, in which non-Western elements were exploited, often uncreatively, by musicians who reduced vocalized tone sometimes to the level of caricature, and concentrated on a kind of ethnic cliché and the indiscriminate use of blues ‘licks’. The really creative exponents of this approach were Miles’s old associates Horace Silver and the drummer, Art Blakey. Miles himself, whose 1954 recording of ‘Walkin’, had triggered off the renewed interest in black folk roots which resulted in funky jazz, was always too vital to be identified with the mere mannerisms of any trend. And finally, by 1957, while most jazz musicians were still eking out a precarious existence, for a few there were rich rewards: Brubeck and Garner could earn $3,000 per week in clubs, and up to $2,500 for a concert, and even a sideman could earn up to $20,000 a year. While the average jazz album sold fewer than 5,000 copies, the best sellers sold from 30,000 to 50,000. Jazz had become big business in America for the first time since the 1930s.
In this burgeoning economic climate, when Miles Davis was able to command the highest fees of his career to date, he chose not to work for over three months in the summer of 1957. This hiatus seems to have happened because he was artistically in limbo. When he disbanded his quintet in March, it was certainly in order to concentrate on preparing Miles Ahead. He and Gil Evans finished the recording sessions (but not the mixing and editing) for it by the end of May, and Miles then had a fallow period lasting until September. During this time he had throat surgery, and took stock of his general situation. There can be no doubt that he was somehow unsure of what to do next. When he did decide that he wanted to form a quintet again in the autumn of 1957, none of the original members was available.
At first, Miles used the drummer Art Taylor, who had played on Miles Ahead, pianist Tommy Flanagan, and the Belgian tenor saxophonist, Bobby Jaspar, who had immigrated to the States the previous year. Jaspar soon left, and Miles, looking once again for the kind of group balance he’d had with Parker and Coltrane – powerful, multi-noted saxophone and understated trumpet – managed to persuade alto saxophonist Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley to join him. Adderley had been leading a quintet with his brother Nat on trumpet, but had found the economics of running a group daunting. He said:
Nobody was really making it except for Miles, Chico [Hamilton] and Brubeck. I had gotten an offer from Dizzy to go with his small band. I was opposite Miles at the Bohemia, told him I was going to join Dizzy, and Miles asked me why I didn’t join him. I told him he’d never asked me . . . Well, Miles kept talking to me for two or three months to come with him, and when I finally decided to cut loose in October 1957, I joined Miles. I figured I could learn more than with Dizzy. Not that Dizzy isn’t a good teacher, but he played more commercially than Miles. Thank goodness I made the move I did.6
Cannonball was to stay with Miles until September 1959, and also helped with the organization of the group, collecting money and paying the musicians. The saxophonist had iron self-control and a genial disposition. He never, for example, touched drugs, and his reliability gave Miles solid moral (as well as musical) support. The relationship blossomed into a friendship that ended only with Cannonball’s untimely death in 1975.
Miles’s visits to Paris in 1949, and in 1956 with the package tour, had brought him a fairly big following in France. In 1957, he was still much more famous than the other members of his group, and so when he got an offer to go on his own to Paris towards the end of November, he accepted it. The plan was for him to work with a group comprising Kenny Clarke, now resident in Paris, and the French musicians Pierre Michelot (bass), René Urtreger (piano) and Barney Wilen (tenor sax). They were booked to play a concert at the Olympia Theatre followed by three weeks at the Club St Germain. At this time, the trombonist and ex-associate of Miles’s, Mike Zwerin, was staying in Paris, and he describes the atmosphere of that first theatre concert:
It was 1957, and Miles was the big man – his clothes, his girls, his new loose rhythm section, his fresh open playing. So all of us who hung out at the Old Navy (cafe) were excited about Miles’s arrival in Paris . . . The Olympia Theatre was sold out that night, but by curtain time Miles’s whereabouts were still a mystery. Finally, the curtain went up, revealing Barney Wilen, René Urtreger, Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clarke all set up. They started playing ‘Walkin’ ’ and sounded fine. But no Miles Davis. Barney took a tenor solo, and as he was finishing, backing away from the microphone, Miles appeared from the wings and arrived at the mike without breaking his stride, just in time to start playing – strong. It was an entrance worthy of Nijinsky. If his choreography was good, his playing was perfect that night. He had recently made his ‘comeback’ and was really putting the pots on. He was serious, and he was trying hard instead of just catting . . . For the first week of his stay at the Club, as we called the St Germain, I was down there almost every night.7
Miles Davis’s only other recording that year took place in Paris and was the opposite in every way of Miles Ahead. The latter was scored, premeditated, exquisitely realized. But his background music for Louis Malle’s film L’Ascenseur pour L’Echafaud, recorded in December 1957, happened almost by accident, and was totally improvised by a small group. The results, far from being a finished masterpiece, were in fact like sketches and notes for some bigger work. And in a sense, that is exactly what they were, because they pointed to a completely new direction, opening up avenues of exploration which seemed to offer inexhaustible possibilities for improvisation.
Louis Malle was an avid Miles Davis fan, and when he heard Miles was coming to Paris to play at the Club St Germain, he met the trumpeter at the airport and asked him to play the background music for the film. Miles agreed to try. Lift to the Scaffold (American title: Elevator to the Gallows) was a thriller with Jeanne Moreau as the main star, and although the story line was fairly banal – a murder is committed and the killer gets stuck in a lift on the way out of the building where he committed the crime – the atmosphere is heightened by the brilliant use of contemporary locations: buildings, motels, lifts, limousines, powerful mechanisms created by man but which end up suffocating him.
Using the group working with him at the Club St Germain, Miles improvised the music in a studio, watching shots from the film and conferring with Malle. The entire music was realized one December night between midnight and morning, and although the resulting ten short pieces are really no more than fragments, they afford several insights into Miles’s development. For perhaps the first time, it became clear to him that it was possible to create absorbing music with neither formally written themes nor any real harmonic movement. The tracks were at first released in France on a ten-inch LP, and later in America on one side of a twelve-inch LP, and this was the first time that Miles’s own composing had filled up so much space on an album. The music had grown out of minimal predetermined material, each track having a tempo, a tonal centre, and perhaps one or two other factors, and yet it had a complete identity; it was very much Miles’s music, and quite different from anyone else’s. Several of the tracks have a strong modal flavour, hovering ambiguously around D minor and F. Miles probably felt free to experiment so audaciously because he was producing applied music intended to point the action and atmosphere of a film.
The music also threw into new relief the two polarities which were noticed first in Charlie Parker, and which gradually became more obvious in Miles’s work: the quiet, brooding aspect on the one hand, and the furious aggression on the other. The only two fast pieces, (‘Sur L’Autoroute’ and ‘Diner au Motel’), feature his aggressive playing, and for both he uses the Harmon mute, which buzzes furiously up and down like a fly on a window pane, producing the claustrophobic, bottled-in rage which mirrors brilliantly the action of the film. On the medium and slow tracks, the tonal beauty of the open horn and the extreme spareness of the phrases give an unearthly resonance to this reflective music. On the final piece, ‘Chez le Photographe du Motel’, Miles plays the first half with open horn, and then towards the end puts in the Harmon mute and the music concludes with a magnificent repeated and sustained high A (G concert) with the legato phrases leading to it also being repeated, until the legato figures at last descend and the sustained note is played down the octave (Appendix A, Fig. 5b). Louis Malle commented: ‘I must say that in the last sequence of Scaffold Miles’s commentary – which is of extreme simplicity – gives a really extraordinary dimension to the visual image.’8 And Jean-Louis Ginibre, writing in Jazz Magazine, commented:
Ascenseur pour L’Echafaud would have remained a relatively minor film without the music of Miles Davis . . . [he] knew how to give tragic dimensions to this banal enough drama, and I think that Miles, in helping Louis Malle’s film, also raised himself to greater heights, and became aware of the tragic character of his music which, until then, had been only dimly expressed. In this sense, Scaffold . . . marks a decisive turning point in the work of Miles Davis.9
A year or two later, Miles told Louis Malle that the experience of making the music for the film had enriched him.
Back in New York at the end of the year, Miles found himself once more without a band, but with some new musical ideas, and he began trying to coax back Coltrane, Red Garland and Philly Joe Jones. If the year had been crucial for Miles, it had been even more important for Coltrane. During it, he had freed himself from drug addiction, and finished his musical apprenticeship by spending several months with Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot, learning and playing Monk’s pieces. Coltrane describes this process:
I’d go by his house and get him out of bed. He’d get up and go over to the piano and start playing. He’d play one of his tunes and he’d look at me. So I’d get my horn out and start trying to find what he was playing. We’d go over and over the thing until we had most of it worked out. If there were any parts that I had a lot of difficulty with he’d get his portfolio out and show me the thing written out. He would rather a guy would learn without reading because you feel it better and quicker that way. Sometimes we’d get just one tune a day.10
Twelve years previously, Monk had used the same methods when he was giving lessons to the nineteen-year-old Miles Davis.
The quartet which Monk led at the Five Spot throughout the summer of 1957 became a legendary unit, and among the many visitors was Miles Davis, who could witness everything he’d suspected about Trane coming true – ‘the best since Bird’ – so he asked Coltrane to rejoin him, and the saxophonist accepted immediately. By this time, Miles’s groups were the most prestigious in jazz, and Coltrane could be sure of wide exposure and good money. He would also have plenty of freedom to develop his ideas. From his short-lived group of the previous autumn, Miles kept on Cannonball Adderley, and from the original quintet, he succeeded in persuading Paul Chambers, Red Garland and Philly Joe Jones to rejoin him. The group was now a sextet, and with the bigger line-up came a very different musical climate. Coltrane has said:
On returning . . . I found Miles in the midst of another stage of his musical development. There was one time in his past that he devoted to multi-chorded structures. He was interested in chords for their own sake. But now it seemed that he was moving in the opposite direction, to the use of fewer and fewer chord changes in songs. He used tunes with free-flowing lines and chordal directions. This approach allowed the soloist the choice of playing chordally [vertically] or melodically [horizontally]. In fact, due to the direct and free-flowing lines in his music, I found it easy to apply the harmonic ideas that I had. I could stack up chords – say, on a C7, I sometimes superimposed an E flat 7, up to an F sharp 7, down to an F. That way I could play three chords on one. Miles’s music gave me plenty of freedom. It’s a beautiful approach.11
Cannonball Adderley’s alto saxophone sound was full, his techniques – his speed – was brilliant, and his phrases were shot through with the inflexions of the blues. Like Coltrane, he learned a great deal from observing and listening to Miles:
I was with Miles from October 1957 to September 1959. Musically, I learned a lot while with him. About spacing, for one thing, when playing solos. Also, he’s a master of understatement. And he taught me more about the chords, as Coltrane did too. Coltrane knows more about chords than anyone . . . From a leader’s viewpoint, I learned by watching Miles, how to bring new material into a band without changing the style of the band. And when it was necessary at times to change the style somewhat, Miles did it so subtly so that no one knew it. As for rehearsals, we had maybe five in the two years I was there, two of them when I first joined the band. And the rehearsals were quite direct, like, ‘Coltrane, show Cannonball how you do this. All right, now let’s do it.’ Occasionally, Miles would tell us something on the stand. ‘Cannonball, you don’t have to play all those notes. Just stay close to the sound of the melody. Those substitute chords sound funny.’ . . . I certainly picked up much advantage as a potential leader from the exposure of being with Miles . . . He would tell us to leave the stand if we had nothing to do up there.12
Musically, and in human terms, this period with the sextet seems to have been an exceptionally happy one for Miles Davis. He obviously loved the two saxophonists, both as musicians and as people. In March 1958, he paid Cannonball a great compliment by agreeing to appear as a sideman on the saxophonist’s own album, Somethin’ Else. Not surprisingly, Miles dominates the album musically, soloing with more aggression and power than was usual at that time. Also, the general method of Adderley’s quintet, which included Hank Jones (piano), Sam Jones (bass) and Art Blakey (drums), was exactly like that of Miles’s middle-1950s quintet. And in June that same year, Miles appeared for the last time as a sideman on someone else’s album. Legrand Jazz was made by a ten-piece group which included Miles and Trane, and featured arrangements by the French composer Michel Legrand. Miles soloed on Fats Waller’s ‘Jitterbug Waltz’, ‘Wild Man Blues’ (composed by Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton), ‘’Round Midnight’ (Monk) and John Lewis’s ‘Django’. Coltrane, despite the acclaim he was getting from musicians, had still not acquired the same kind of confidence as Miles, and when his turn came to play a solo, he asked Legrand how he wanted the solo played. He was told, naturally, to play it the way he felt it. It was this lack of confidence which kept Coltrane a sideman in Miles’s band, and it would take him another eighteen months to build up enough self-assurance to leave and form his own groups.
After Legrand Jazz, Miles’s days as a sideman were over. People were beginning to realize that his attitude to music was unlike that of anyone else in jazz. He told Nat Hentoff: ‘I never work steady. I work enough to do what I want to do. I play music more for pleasure than for work.’13 This method of working, with frequent rest periods, served two main purposes. Firstly, the music was always fresh and rarely suffered from the staleness induced by uninterrupted strings of dates; and secondly, it enabled him to avoid the over-exposure that may well have accompanied the group’s popularity. He was well aware of the importance of scarcity-value.
As he became more successful both artistically and financially, Miles was concerned to maintain control over his own affairs. In particular, he wanted to be free of the usual pressures of the music business. Hentoff tells one typical story:
When a powerful entrepreneur once asked Miles to let a protégé sit in with his combo while Miles was working at his club, Miles refused. The potentate, paternalistically amiable only so long as his demands were being met, threatened Davis: ‘You want to work here?’ Miles said with literally obscene gusto that he didn’t care and told the man he was going home. The club owner tried to smooth over the hassle, and asked Miles to return to the stand. Later that night, however, the protégé nevertheless was sent up to the band. Miles and his men walked off.14
By now, however, Miles Davis had surrounded himself with a team of people whom he coached to look after his interests. There was his personal manager, Harold Lovett, there was Jack Whittemore of the Shaw Artists’ Corporation who booked his work, and there was Columbia Records. Whittemore tried to arrange a work schedule that gave Miles long periods at home to recharge his batteries. He also tried to get the maximum fees for Miles’s dates, and the trumpeter took a hand in the negotiations if things were difficult. At this time, Miles was doing one-show concerts for $1,000, and he was offered a Town Hall contract for two performances on the same night. Whittemore told Davis that he might be able to get the price up to $1,500 for the two shows. Miles then said: ‘I’ll take $1,000 for the first show and $500 for the second, but you tell the promoter to rope off half the house for the second show and sell tickets for just the half that’s left.’15 Miles received $2,000 for the two performances.
On some occasions, Miles even had to resort to fisticuffs to protect himself. One night during a package tour run by jazz promoter Don Friedman, Davis arrived late for a concert in Chicago – although still long before he was scheduled to perform. Friedman came up to him announcing that he was going to fine Miles $100 for being late. It was at that point that Friedman, to coin Sinatra’s phrase, ‘became punched’. When a reporter asked Davis why he’d done it, Miles said only, ‘I should have hit him in Detroit yet.’16 Don Friedman tells a slightly different story:
I once went two rounds with Miles Davis in 1959. We fought, and it was about even, then Cannonball Adderley pulled us apart. I turned away and Miles hit me – knocked me out. I couldn’t go home for a week because I didn’t want my wife to see what my face looked like. But Miles couldn’t play for a week either!
The novelist James Baldwin’s description of Miles as a ‘miraculously tough and tender man’ begins to make sense when examined in the light of his survival in this artistic, social and economic climate. Miles Davis was well aware that his reputation for fireworks, his unpredictable behaviour, allied to the trappings of success – flashy cars, expensive clothes, etc. – made him seem a mysterious and glamorous figure. In the late 1950s, he once remarked innocently: ‘They say people come to see me just because they’ve heard I’m so bad. Ain’t that a bitch!’17 He had never forgotten that many people went to see Charlie Parker for the same reason. This is not to say that the whole of Miles Davis’s behaviour was a calculated pose culled from Parker; it was a much deeper phenomenon than that. Harold Lovett, for example, who must have been closer to Miles than most people were, was totally fascinated by him, even to the extent of aping his dress and mannerisms. The bonds that made Lovett a fanatical protector of Miles’s interests were far stronger than those between a mere manager and his star. Lovett was playing John the Baptist to Miles’s Jesus. He expounded, preached, cajoled and fought for Miles and his music. He even attempted to describe the Davis charisma:
Miles is just a brand-new Negro in his thinking. He knows what he wants and is getting it. He has prepared himself for it. He can direct his group from off-stage with his presence. He can go to the dressing-room and they know he’s listening. He’s as much a composer as he is a bandleader and he doesn’t write anything down. His group rehearses on the date and musically it’s as well organized as the Modern Jazz Quartet. It isn’t luck with Miles, it’s training.18
As if to prove the potency of his presence even in absentia, on the first album with the new sextet, Miles didn’t play at all on one track, and on a second track he played no solo. The album was called Milestones, and it showed several changes in Miles’s thinking. It was recorded on two consecutive days in April 1958, and this was the first small-group album he’d made for some sixteen months. The first striking change is that there are no standard tunes on it. In fact, the nearest thing to a standard is the old folk song, ‘Billy Boy’, which is a feature for the rhythm section only. It had been recorded by Ahmad Jamal a few years previously, and Red Garland’s version faithfully follows Jamal’s. The other pieces on the album are all composed by Miles or by friends of his. There are three blues in the key of F: a fast one, ‘Dr Jekyll’, composed by altoist Jackie McLean, and first recorded by Miles in 1955; a slow one, ‘Sid’s Ahead’, which is a variation on Miles’s own early blues, ‘Weirdo’; and the medium-paced ‘Straight No Chaser’, by Monk. The two other tunes on the album are ‘Two Bass Hit’, by John Lewis, and a new piece by Davis called ‘Miles’ on the album label, but ‘Milestones’ everywhere else.
Milestones takes the art of small-group jazz to a very high level indeed. In the context of Miles’s career, it is very much a transitional album. With three horns in the front-line, the old loose Davis quintet method, as exemplified on Cannonball’s Somethin’ Else the previous month, had to be modified. All the themes on Milestones (except, of course, for the trio track) are played by all three, or by two of the horns in unison and harmony. Miles is particularly concerned to show off and contrast his two saxophonists, and so there are only two piano solos on the whole album; one on ‘Straight No Chaser’, and the one on the trio track. In fact, on the second day of recording, Red Garland, furious with Miles for telling him how to play, stormed out of the session before they had recorded ‘Sid’s Ahead’, the longest track on the album. The pianist playing the rich, harmonically ambiguous chords behind Coltrane and Adderley is Miles Davis himself. The theme is stated by the three horns in harmony over a rhythm section of bass and drums, and Miles plays his own solo with just those two instruments backing him.
Three of Miles’s solos on this album are classics, and each is totally different in character. They occur on ‘Sid’s Ahead’, ‘Straight No Chaser’ and ‘Milestones’. They are all open horn solos, because on this album, as on Miles Ahead, Davis does not use the Harmon mute at all. His open sound is particularly sonorous, and its glowing, luminous quality is accompanied by an apparently effortless plasticity of inflexion which imbues every phrase, every idea with intense life. So soft and full is his sound on the title track, ‘Milestones’, that it suggests he may be playing flugelhorn rather than trumpet. These three horn solos are the expressions of a powerfully original mind, and Miles’s self-editing process functions relentlessly.
His solo on the slow blues, ‘Sid’s Ahead’, has an emotional depth that is almost unbearable. Here, Miles develops and expands ideas that had their germ in the Scaffold music. The solo (Appendix A, Fig. 6) is seven choruses long, and apart from its sparseness and severity, there are also quite specific references back to the film music. For example, the skeletal repetitions of some of that music are echoed in the last eight bars of his third chorus and culminate in a phrase in the last bar which closely mirrors the leap from F (concert) to D above the stave and down to A flat, which Miles played at the beginning of ‘Florence sur les Champs-Élysées’ (Appendix A, Fig. 5a). And the solo rises remorselessly to the repetitions, for the first seven bars of the final chorus, of high A flat (concert) which is, of course, the flattened 3rd of the blues scale, and the descent in bar eight leading to the stoic conclusion. This also harks back to the final section of the film music, ‘Chez le Photographe du Motel’ (Appendix A, Fig. 5b) where Miles repeats high G (concert) for several bars before descending. This was the passage which drew ecstatic murmurs from Louis Malle: ‘A really extraordinary dimension to the visual image.’ On ‘Sid’s Ahead’, the music is not applied, but pure, and the extraordinary dimension is given, not to a visual image, but to the emotional power of the solo. After the initial theme statement, Coltrane plays the first solo, accompanied by bass, drums and Miles’s moody piano chords. Trane’s solo has a similar emotional depth and he sustains the atmosphere of brooding set up by the elemental blues theme. Miles then follows, supported only by bass and drums, so that even the instrumentation is pared down to the three basics: drums, bass and horn.
Cannonball Adderley, magnificent saxophonist though he was, seems to have realized that he couldn’t hope to match the power of the two solos he had to follow. He simply could not sustain the mood set up by Coltrane and Miles, and he meanders aimlessly, quoting phrases from standard tunes and producing a few bluesy licks. This particular area was just not his bag, but the medium-paced blues, ‘Straight No Chaser’, was, and on this Cannonball solos first. At this bright and bouncy tempo he is in his element, and plays an excellent solo, bubbling along joyfully. He is followed by Miles, who plays a very different blues solo. This time, although the underlying sadness is always present, his phrases dance and sing along with a kind of impish delight. As is usual with Miles Davis, the past is ever-present, and in one chorus he actually quotes the first phrase of the old traditional tune, ‘When the Saints Go Marching in’, repeating it and then putting it in a minor key to fit the chord changes. But this quote is organic to his racy reinterpretation of the past, and is brilliantly woven into the fabric of the solo. After Miles, Coltrane roars in with wild verbosity. Under his onslaught it seems that the blues/jazz tradition is creaking at the seams. He piles chord on chord, plays across, through, against, alongside the pulse. Then suddenly he finishes and the rhythm section creams out in a simple groove with Red Garland’s piano solo. Philly Joe ticks off the bars with a rimshot on every fourth beat – 1-2-3-tick – reassuring everyone, and Garland plays the first half of his solo with single-note lines, and the second half with block chords, but with this tremendous surprise in store: the melody which he underpins with the block chords is none other than the trumpet solo Miles played in November 1945 on Parker’s historic recording of ‘Now’s the Time’. Garland had paid a similar tribute to Miles in November 1957 when he recorded with his own quintet, but his own album was not issued until two years later.
The piece which most obviously opens up new territory, and points to future developments, is the title track, ‘Milestones’. Once more, this explores areas touched on in the Scaffold film music. The structure, which is forty bars long, is based on only two scales and they are closely related. The first sixteen bars are based on the G minor 7th chord which implies the scale (once again) of F major, or the Dorian mode; the second sixteen bars are based on the chord of A minor 7th and the implied scale is that of C major (Aeolian mode). The final eight bars go back to the first scale. The whole piece is thus built on only two separate scales, with harmony now becoming decorative rather than functional. In other words, when each scale is used, different chords can be picked out from the notes of that scale; the chords may thus change while the scale (and key) remains constant. This is similar to the harmonic ambiguity which was a strong feature of one or two of the film tracks. The second sixteen bars of ‘Milestones’, for example, have E and A roots played by the bass, but they sound like suspensions on D minor.
But even more important than this reduction of harmonic movement are the rhythms of the piece and the way the structure builds and releases tension. The written theme and its structure (which is rigorously preserved for each soloist) are a brilliant refashioning of the old call-and-response idea. The first sixteen bars are the ‘call’, and they set up a superbly springy rhythmic pulse. Here Miles the composer, by using extremely simple devices with immense subtlety, has created an entirely fresh feel, a new rhythmic dynamism and springboard. The three horns play, in simple triads, a three-note riff which moves up and down the scale. The notes are short, played with great precision, and don’t fall on the fourth beat of any bar. The rhythm section plays a bright 4/4 and Philly Joe once more ticks off the last beat of every bar with a rimshot, thus providing a kind of punctuation for the horn riff. During the second sixteen bars, this buoyant pulse is interrupted and held back with great artistry, thus producing a feeling of slowing up, though the actual tempo remains the same. This impression is created because the bass, instead of ‘walking’ purposefully up and down the scale playing crotchets, is silent on the first beat of each bar then simply repeats pedal notes E and A over the last three beats, while Philly Joe’s rimshot falls on different beats, thus stopping the regularity of rhythm. The two saxophonists continue playing up and down the scale in harmony, but this time with longer notes (minims), while Miles plays the same kind of thing slightly out of phase with the saxes; his rising and falling notes are played against theirs, dragging the phrases back. The tension rises as all these factors pull against the memory of that first springy rhythm, and then suddenly the last eight bars arrive, the original beat is back, and the tension is released magnificently. Miles is, once again, using very simple devices to say extremely complex things. This composition has deservedly become a standard tune in the repertoire of jazz musicians all over the world. The structure – the way the piece ‘breathes’ – is preserved for the three horn solos, and they match the quality of the conception of the composition. Wilfrid Mellers comments on Miles’s own solo:
Bird was a composing improviser, and Miles is an improvising composer . . . When the trumpet [flugelhorn?] emerges from the beat of time. . . the soft, suave tone veils tremendous passion: which gradually breaks through until the line swirls with almost Parker-like agitation. The effect of the piece depends on the contrast between the passion the line generates and the immensely ancient, modal quietude of its first statement.19
I have dwelt on the album Milestones because it is one of the great classics of jazz and occurs at a key point in Miles Davis’s career. The music on it glows in the memory. It is profound, delightful, full of confidence and immense optimism. Throughout, there is the feeling that the past is rich, the present enjoyable, and the future full of promise.