‘I pay my sidemen the highest prices because they’re worth it and I’ve got the best rhythm section in jazz. I’m retired now because I don’t do nothing unless I want to.’1
Miles Davis in 1960
By the beginning of 1960, the London Melody Maker readers’ poll had voted Miles Davis top trumpeter. For the first time in the history of that poll, Louis Armstrong had lost the title; the honour now belonged to the thirty-three-year-old Miles, whose whole view of himself and his function was totally opposite to that of Armstrong. Miles said: ‘I ain’t no entertainer, and ain’t trying to be one . . . My troubles started when I learned to play the trumpet and hadn’t learned to dance . . . they want you to not only play your instrument, but to entertain them too, with grinning and dancing.’2 Nevertheless, Miles was the contemporary trumpeter nearest to Armstrong in terms of beautifully sculpted phrases and the ‘singing’ quality of his solos. In the same Melody Maker poll, Gil Evans had ousted Duke Ellington for first place in the big-band composer/arranger category.
By this time, Miles’s super-stardom had reached such a pitch that often, when he was announced on stage or in clubs in America, there would be moans and screams from girls in the audience, rather like the reception by teenagers of a popular singer such as Sinatra. At this point in his career he was, in fact, well served by critics. Three of the most professional and most perceptive critics in the USA – Leonard Feather, Nat Hentoff and Ralph J. Gleason – analysed, assessed, expounded and explained Miles brilliantly. Hentoff published a long and graphic account (Hi-Fi Review, February 1960) of one of the recording sessions for Sketches of Spain. This had a kind of documentary realism and included dialogue as it was spoken in the studio, giving a vivid impression of the occasion. Later in the year, Feather was to intercede on Miles’s behalf with the British public, and at regular intervals, Gleason peppered local papers from coast to coast in the USA with articles and explanations about Davis.
It was at this time that people were beginning to notice Miles’s apparent obliviousness regarding audiences: his unwillingness to make announcements either of tunes or of the names of his musicians, and his persistent refusal to acknowledge applause. He had been behaving this way for years, of course, but now that so many people were aware of him, many having only recently discovered his music, his stage demeanour became the subject of comment. Ralph Gleason tried to make sense of this:
He eschews the spotlight; never smiles, makes no announcements. Many people are annoyed when, at the close of his solo, Davis walks off the stage. The Davis syndrome in performance is free individual creation, always a major part of jazz, carried to the ultimate . . . Davis’s music is as uncompromising as any in history. Sociologically, he has become a symbol of the contemporary Negro as well, winning his success solely on his merits with no bending to public taste, no concession to entertainment and absolutely no cultivation of ‘contacts’ or of anyone likely to do him any good. In other words, no ‘Uncle Tomming’.3
There were also in-depth articles in French jazz magazines that same year, and one of them, in a long piece entitled, ‘Why So Mean, Miles?’, commented: ‘The behaviour of Miles Davis is not that of an ordinary star. It is that of a strong man who has decided to live without hypocrisy.’4
Where the bebop movement had failed to get the status of the musician elevated to that of artist rather than entertainer, Miles Davis was succeeding. Gleason’s analysis, though illuminating and perceptive, nevertheless errs on the side of romanticism. Gleason (more so than Leonard Feather, who probed deeply into the Davis psyche over the years) was fascinated by the trumpeter almost to the point of adulation. Quite clearly, Miles knew how to ‘impose himself’, to make his presence felt and to shape events as he wanted them, because he was aware of all the salient factors in any situation.
In February 1960, the winter weather was so bad that, instead of flying to Chicago where they had an engagement at the Sutherland Lounge, the quintet had to go by train. Despite sub-zero temperatures, when the musicians arrived at the hotel, there were queues of people standing in the snow – which was six feet deep in places – waiting to get into the place. The audience was not deterred by the threat of fire either. Jimmy Cobb recalls:
And then another peculiar thing happened while we were working there . . . on the first floor of the hotel there was the reception desk, and right across from the reception desk was a little travel agency. Some time that day they had a short in the wires in the ceiling and it started smoking . . . it caught fire. The room where we were working was right on the first floor – you could walk directly from the reception desk into the club. And the club was packed! And the firemen were outside the door putting out this fire, and nobody left! Smoke was all in the joint and nobody left . . . and the place was packed . . . Yeah, Miles was very popular.
The previous autumn, the jazz world had been shaken by the appearance at the Five Spot in New York of the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman. He had dispensed with chord sequences and traditional scales altogether and was playing ‘free’ jazz. But Coleman had not, as Miles, Mingus and Coltrane had, got to his present position by working through and mastering all the known techniques of jazz: he had got there by rejecting everything except the old format of theme – solos – reprise of theme, and by expressing a kind of naked emotion – the blues and roots of the music. For those who remembered Bird and bebop, it seemed like a second coming, and many musicians not in Miles Davis’s impregnable position feared they would be made stylistically redundant overnight. Coleman was hailed by Leonard Bernstein, John Lewis, Gunther Schuller and others as the new Messiah. He was lionized, given a huge amount of press and publicity, and found it relatively easy to get well-paid work. By September 1960, his two albums for Atlantic were selling 25,000 at a time when 6,000 was a good average sale for a jazz record. Miles Davis believed that many of Coleman’s detractors were simply jealous, and commented: ‘I like Ornette, because he doesn’t play clichés.’5 And Jimmy Cobb said later: ‘At the time I don’t think anybody was really worried about being dated with what Miles was playing.’ But it must have seemed ironical to Coltrane that he was getting so little recognition, whereas Ornette, five years younger, was getting so much. One of Trane’s disadvantages was that he was always in the shadow of Miles Davis’s fame and prestige. His liking and admiration for Miles were very great indeed, and the two of them had been through much together. Teo Macero said of Trane: ‘He’d smile like a little boy when Miles would play something he liked.’6
Everywhere Miles’s group went, there was controversy – sometimes bitter controversy – about Coltrane, and his impact was intensified by his stamina (both physical and mental), which was formidable and, in fact, without precedent in jazz. He was taking the whole art of improvisation into another realm of values entirely. No longer was it simply a pretty variation on an easily digested melodic theme; now, with Coltrane, it was becoming a vast and incessant flow of original ideas all conceived and expressed at white heat and with what Ralph Gleason called ‘the urgency of his almost primeval cry’.7 So it must have become clear to Coltrane at the beginning of 1960 that, in order to realize his own potential and get the kind of recognition he needed, he would have to leave Miles and go out on his own. Jimmy Cobb describes the situation in those last hectic months Coltrane spent with Miles’s quintet:
Coltrane would play all night, and come off in the intermission and go somewhere and play . . . stand in a corner or something . . . You know, Miles had to make him stop, because he would play an hour solo himself, and we were only supposed to be on the stand for forty minutes or something. He had incredible chops – he couldn’t stop. Miles used to say, ‘Man, look, why don’t you play twenty-seven choruses instead of twenty-eight?’ . . . Coltrane would say, ‘I get involved in this thing and I don’t know how to stop.’
On one occasion when Coltrane said he didn’t know how to stop, Miles said: ‘Try taking the saxophone out of your mouth!’8
In March and April, the Miles Davis Quintet became part of a JATP (Jazz at the Philharmonic) package tour organized by Norman Granz. The itinerary took in Scandinavia, France and Germany, and this was the first time Miles had been abroad with his full group. Although Coltrane wanted to leave, Miles managed to persuade him to do the tour. Jimmy Cobb recalled: ‘All he had with him were his horns, an airline bag, and a toilet kit. He didn’t really want to make the gig, but Miles talked him into it. He sat next to me on the bus, looking like he was ready to split any time.’9 There was savage controversy over Coltrane in Germany and France. It was rumoured that at one major concert in Germany, when Coltrane was booed, Miles had angrily stopped the music and taken his group offstage. In France, apart from bewilderment at Miles’s stage behaviour, there was considerable dismay about Coltrane, and many members of audiences walked out. The furore reverberated in the French jazz papers for months afterwards. But Coltrane and Miles were a new breed of musicians whom even the experienced Norman Granz failed to understand. He was mystified and furiously angry when he tried to set up a jam session involving Coltrane and Stan Getz for a television programme, and Trane had the audacity to refuse to do it. But given the direction and development of Coltrane and Miles since 1955, it should have been obvious that neither of them would want to indulge in this kind of activity. Their battle was not an external one with other instrumentalists, but an internal affair against old, received ideas and old habits of thought. It was on that final tour that Miles bought a soprano saxophone and gave it to Coltrane, which resulted in the reinstatement of that instrument as a major force in jazz.
Back in the USA, after a few more engagements with Miles, Coltrane left the quintet in order to lead his own group. Cannonball Adderley’s departure had been a blow, but Coltrane’s departure was a devastating loss to Miles, who almost broke down and wept during their last gig together, in Philadelphia. So strongly did he feel that he even went to the microphone and made a brief announcement about the saxophonist’s imminent departure from the group. And, as Jimmy Cobb commented: ‘He never talks with nobody about nothing, so you know, he really must have felt something for Coltrane.’ The saxophonist’s departure left a gap that, in some ways, Miles was never able to fill again. Trane had been interested in artistic growth, and his incessant exploration of the unknown had sparked off ideas in Miles, giving the trumpeter the kind of challenge he needed. Also, Coltrane’s ‘sheets of sound’ had been a superb contrast to Miles’s own spare phrasing. From now on, Miles was going to have to produce the contrasts – spare brooding and multi-noted aggression – himself. There was simply no other saxophonist of Coltrane’s calibre in jazz at the time. The only other one who might have matched his power was Sonny Rollins, and he was in semi-retirement. When Trane left, Miles must have felt quite naked and insecure, and to fill the saxophone vacancy he turned to an old friend and an established star, Sonny Stitt, the man he had met in St Louis around 1943. But despite the personnel change, the popularity of Miles Davis and his group continued to grow. During the year, Miles himself was chosen favourite jazz instrumentalist by a poll of America’s leading disc jockeys in Billboard (trade paper of the music industry). And in Down Beat’s first disc jockey poll in May, six of Miles’s albums were placed, Porgy and Bess being voted first, and Kind of Blue third. In August, the quintet with Sonny Stitt had a residency at the Village Vanguard in New York, playing to packed houses and ecstatic audiences. One critic wrote: ‘The room was literally jammed . . . Many of the audience were obviously in protoplasmic harmony with the proceedings; that is, their neurons were jumping.’10 And after this engagement, the group went off again to Europe for a British tour, followed by dates in Paris and Stockholm. This time the French gave Miles and the group a tremendously warm reception, cheering them at the end of the first piece, ‘Walkin’ ’, and never ceasing to acclaim them for the rest of the night. Both houses at L’Olympia were packed – 2,000 people attended each performance.
Charlie Parker had never played in Britain, and this tour was to be Miles Davis’s first visit. A build-up in the musical press started some weeks before he arrived in an attempt to make up for some fifteen years of ignorance on the part of the British public. This publicity campaign culminated in a long feature article in Melody Maker by Leonard Feather, who emphasized the glamour surrounding Miles and attempted to reconcile the apparently paradoxical qualities of the trumpeter. Feather insisted that Miles was not anti-white, pointed out that ‘the more sensitive an artist is, the more difficult he may find it to deal with insensitive people’, and tabulated Miles’s trappings of success:
Miles has found out the hard way, that money is power, even in race relations. He may tend to work a gig for less money if the promoter is a Negro. His fee for a single job nowadays ranges from $2,500 to $4,000, out of which his four sidemen only cost him a total of two or three hundred a night. Miles today is a wealthy man, owning some $50,000 worth of stock. He just bought an entire building in a good section of Manhattan, where he lives on the first two floors, renting out the rest of the building as apartments. He drives a Ferrari that cost $12,500 and he likes to drive fast. He has a substantial five-figure annual income from Columbia Records. Miles’s apparent aloofness on the stand has a devastating effect on women, who often find his good looks more irresistible than his most lyrical solo. Recently he was married to a lovely, petite girl named Frances Taylor, who teaches dancing. He has remained close to his daughter and two sons (seventeen, fourteen and ten) by an early marriage.11
Despite all the column inches and the comforting presence of Sonny Stitt, who was already known to the British public via JATP, there were terrific outcries from critics, who should have known better, about Miles Davis’s stage behaviour. However, one or two writers rose to the occasion, and that most perceptive of critics, Max Harrison, wrote:
The concerts revealed – again as no record has – the force with which high notes were attacked and sustained, and the controlled vehemence of some of the up-tempo phrasing showed that Davis’s music has expanded its scope to the point where his mode of expression can now be as violent as it is intense . . . in his best moments . . . he extemporised solos of sometimes fierce, often acutely concentrated lyricism that were so moving as to be almost disquieting. One can analyse such improvisations in terms of their unusual melodic style, tone, personal dynamics and nuance, but the mystery of their strange power to move us remains unexplained.12
A few other British critics made intelligent and honourable attempts to say something pertinent about the music, but for the most part, the Miles Davis tour of Britain revealed a sadly parochial press. The New York Post commented acidly:
Miles Davis packed his trumpet and took off for Paris, Stockholm and home, where the citizenry is less likely to be fuddled by his sophisticated approach to jazz . . . Londoners were bothered by the fact that he seldom acknowledged applause. Jazz in this city is back in the New Orleans era. Boisterous Dixieland is the favourite. Davis dropped into this wasteland late in September.13
For economic reasons, these foreign tours had to consist of concerts in big halls, but Miles did not feel really comfortable under such circumstances. He explained:
Nobody can relax at concerts, the musicians or the people, either. You can’t do nothing but sit down, you can’t move around, you can’t have a drink. A musician has to be able to let loose everything in him to reach the people. If the musician can’t relax, how’s he going to make the people feel what he feels? The whole scene of jazz is feeling.14
Miles certainly preferred the intimate atmosphere of a club for making his music, and of course, under such conditions, when the audience are almost touching the star of the evening, the fact that he is not announcing titles or acknowledging applause becomes insignificant.
After the European trip, Miles returned to New York and in November 1960 took a two-week residency at the Village Vanguard, a tiny club (capacity perhaps two hundred) in Greenwich Village. The evenings were shared with the Bill Evans Trio with legendary bassist, Scott La Faro, and drummer Paul Motian. It was after hearing the Evans version of ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ during this engagement that Miles began playing that unlikely song himself. At the Vanguard, Miles and the group were in their element, and reviews mentioned the active responses of audiences to the music. It was also noted that Miles went about his business in an amiable way, chatting with members of the group and nodding politely when applauded.
There were two probably intentional errors of fact in Leonard Feather’s account of Miles Davis for the British press: the description ‘an earlier marriage’ refers to Irene Birth, Miles’s common-law wife who had borne him three children; and although Frances Taylor was with Miles during the British tour in October, they were not married until December that year. Miles and Frances were very much in love and getting on well, and in preparation for the marriage, Miles had recently bought a five-storey building at 312 West 77th Street. It was a converted Russian Orthodox church, and after it had been renovated in 1961, Miles and Frances moved into the first three storeys and rented out the two top storeys. All the children were now living with them – Miles’s three, Cheryl Anne, Miles IV and Gregory, and Frances’s son Jean-Pierre. Miles’s parents and brother and sister also visited them. Thus began perhaps the only period of conventional family life Miles would enjoy as a husband and father.
In January 1961, a long feature article entitled ‘Miles Davis: Evil Genius of Jazz’, was published in the American black magazine, Ebony. The writer, Marc Crawford, was black and the piece, which took up seven pages of the magazine and was liberally illustrated with photographs, presented a detailed account of Miles as a successful and independent member of his race. There were photos of Miles playing, of Miles and his wife, his mother, his father, on the farm, in restaurants, and finally a whole sequence of pictures of him working out in the gym. But even in the heat of resentment at racial prejudice, Miles retained his balance and fairness:
I don’t like to stress race because I have friends of all colours. But everything I see around me stresses it. People say, ‘Would you want your sister to marry a Negro?’ That’s jive even to ask the question. I might not want to marry your sister. It makes me sick. It makes me prejudiced. All I want for my kids is a simple thing. To be free. To not have to think about colour or anything. Just think about what it is they want to do and do it. And Negroes who try to act the way they think other people want them to act bug me worse than Uncle Toms.
Later in the year, Marc Crawford also looked Miles up in Chicago, where the trumpeter was staying at his in-laws’ home. Crawford wanted to write another feature, this time on Miles’s relationship with Gil Evans. He found Davis in relaxed and expansive mood, clad in a dressing-gown and slippers, sipping Dutch beer and listening to Ravel’s piano concerto in G major. Miles had just cooked himself a late breakfast of eggs, hamburger and tomatoes, garnished with salts of garlic and celery. Perhaps it was the pleasant change of actually having a black writer who wanted to interview him that made the trumpeter so co-operative. Eventually, in the middle of the proceedings, Miles phoned Evans, who flew from New York to ‘hang out’ with Davis for a few days. Evans said that he worked only for Miles and himself, that he could not do anything he did not want to do, and that he considered himself a ‘commercial arranger’, but only in the sense that ‘what I write is popular’. And he rejected Miles’s contention that he (Evans) was just beginning to receive the acclaim his talents had long deserved. Evans said: ‘I haven’t been around music for twenty years just waiting to be discovered. Nor am I a recent discovery. I am just now able to do the things I couldn’t do before. My product just wasn’t ready.’15
Shortly after this, Miles was back in New York and he allowed his house to be used for a confrontation between musicians of his own generation and various jazz writers. For this event, Miles laid on a bar with a barman and a plentiful supply of food. He and Frances acted as hosts, but did not take a leading part in the discussions. The man in charge of operations was Cannonball Adderley, and the other main participants were musicians Gerry Mulligan, J. J. Johnson, Horace Silver, Billy Taylor, Gil Evans and Philly Joe Jones. The critics and writers present were Nat Hentoff, Ira Gitler, John S. Wilson, Dave Solomon, Martin Williams and Stanley Dance, and they were grilled about why they labelled everything – ‘East Coast’, ‘West Coast’, ‘hard bop’ etc. – after which they were asked to define the qualities that made a real critic, and to say who fell into this category. As is usual in this kind of confrontation, the replies and the arguments were inconclusive, but once everyone had let off steam the evening subsided into chat and more drinking until all took their leave.
After the engagement at the Village Vanguard in November 1960, Sonny Stitt had left the quintet, and there were two candidates for the saxophone vacancy: Jimmy Heath and Hank Mobley. Heath would have been a good choice: he had already recorded with Miles, and his style would have suited the quintet. Unfortunately, however, he had had some trouble with the authorities and was on parole. Although he played a few engagements with Miles, he ultimately lost the job because his parole board refused to allow him to travel beyond a ninety-mile radius of Philadelphia. Hank Mobley, although four years younger than Miles and Jimmy Heath, was basically from the same generation. He had worked with Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Horace Silver, Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk, among others, and had established himself as one of the most important of the younger tenor players of the 1950s. When Jimmy Heath became ineligible for the job, Mobley joined the Davis quintet, but stayed with the group for barely a year, because his style was so unsuited to Miles’s music. Mobley’s laid-back way of playing – a kind of legato approach which phrases over the rhythm section and almost never cuts into it – was antithetical to the whole approach of Miles and Coltrane.
In March 1961, when Miles Davis went into the studios to make another album, John Coltrane was working with his quartet at the Apollo Theatre, and Miles asked him to come to the studio in the intervals between the sessions at the Apollo, and play on some of the album tracks. The group was in the middle of recording the title track, ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’, when Trane walked in with his horn. Hank Mobley had the chords written on a sheet of manuscript, and Coltrane, who had never played this tune before, simply looked at the chord symbols and played a solo alive with expression and tonal beauty. Coltrane played on one other track, a modal piece in 3/4 called ‘Teo’. It was based on four scales played for unspecified duration by each soloist (cf. ‘Flamenco Sketches’), and had a Spanish feel. On this track, Trane’s playing is superlative, with a magnificent entry and a flow of ideas which bubbles into a climax of ‘sheets of sound’ – phrases that double back on one another and are both continuous and circular. Miles was clearly inspired by this, and played a second solo on the piece, achieving greater intensity than he had in his first one. For Hank Mobley, it must have been depressing to hear such a contrast to his own playing on the album. Some Day My Prince Will Come, although it contains these two gems by Coltrane, some fine playing by Miles, and some excellent work from Wynton Kelly, is nevertheless uneven in quality, and lacking in that group identity that always characterizes the best Miles Davis albums. Not surprisingly at this stage in his career, the trumpeter’s musical vision was faltering. He was also in a lot of pain at the time, and was diagnosed as having sickle-cell anaemia, which was causing arthritis in his joints, particularly his left hip.
There had always been a difference between Miles’s live performances and his studio recordings. In the studio, the duration of the music is circumscribed and therefore form becomes more important. Also, in the studio, every nuance, every tiny inflexion is captured, and in a very real sense, many of Miles’s studio recordings were exquisite. But in live performance the idea of form became less important; the pieces began, offered a string of solos, and then ended. The interest lay in how much each player could say in his solo, how inventive his musical language was, and how much he could communicate his feeling to the audience. So in live performance, one would expect a soloist to take tremendous risks, revealing not only superb phrases and ideas, but also muffed lines, occasional mistakes and failures. As Miles’s quintet was producing only uncertain results in the studio, it was an obvious step to try to capture on shellac the dynamism of the group’s live performances. In April 1961, the quintet had a booking at the Blackhawk, a club in San Francisco, and two of the nights there were recorded for a live album.
The Blackhawk was a small and shabby jazz club of which its owner, Guido Caccienti, once said, ‘I’ve worked and slaved for years to keep this place a sewer.’16 But it had good acoustics, and was renowned for the quality of the music to be heard there. Most of the leading jazz musicians, including Charlie Parker, had played there and had found the relaxed atmosphere conducive to good music. The very shabbiness of the place deterred the expense-account type of (white) businessmen of whom Miles once said:
They ain’t come to hear good music . . . They drink too much, they get loud . . . I can’t stand dumb-ass people not respecting the other customers that have come to hear the music. Sometimes one table like that has bugged me so that when I get home or to my hotel, I walk the floor because I can’t sleep.17
Guido Caccienti had a rare respect for music and musicians. He said, ‘You gotta dig music, you come in here.’18 And he never complained when Miles didn’t bother to play the last set of the evening – which happened most nights.
The Blackhawk sessions were Miles’s first premeditated attempt to make a live album. Two nights (the Friday and Saturday) were recorded, and Miles and Teo Macero later edited the tapes down to make two albums out of enough material for perhaps four. This is why the tempos of various pieces go up and down: different versions of the same piece were spliced together. Jimmy Cobb commented with some feeling, because drummers are always blamed for fluctuating tempos:
They’d take the same tunes and Miles would find solos he liked better on one version than another, and if it was close enough he’d just . . . splice . . . They spliced that album to pieces . . . But it was close because Teo was doing it and he’s a musician, and Miles was probably telling him where to do it . . . But you can hear the splices.
The Blackhawk sessions are notable for the exceptionally dynamic playing of the rhythm section and their interplay with Miles. It is not just a dialogue of trumpet and drums, but a three-way affair with Wynton Kelly’s piano incessantly responding to and interacting with the trumpeter’s phrases. Kelly shows exceptional imagination in all his performances with Miles from this point on. In contrast to the previous month’s studio session, at the Blackhawk the group feeling is phenomenal, and Kelly’s inspired piano accompaniment makes Miles push his abilities to the limits. His playing is now shot through and through with the funky phrases of the old blues tradition, and his sustained use of the highest registers is thrilling. Wynton Kelly has attempted to describe something of his relationship with Miles Davis:
He’s a pretty cat. If you really knew him, you couldn’t knock him. He’s more like a sideman than a leader. And he’s always creating, playing outside the chords and me and the rhythm section finding him. When he gasses himself you can feel it all over the bandstand and sometimes I’ll look up and catch that little smirk on his face and then I know for sure.19
A few weeks later, Miles was ‘Fashion Personality for the Month of May’ in the Gentleman’s Quarterly, and on the nineteenth of that same month he allowed himself to be persuaded to play a concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall. This was to be a benefit concert for an organization called the African Research Foundation, and the proceeds were to go to buy a mobile medical unit to be sent to Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Before this, no one had ever been able to persuade Davis to appear on a New York concert stage, and on this occasion it was only his interest in the African Research Foundation that prompted him to agree to do so. Miles was to appear with his own quintet, and also with the orchestra led by Gil Evans – the first time Davis had ever appeared in public with the Evans unit.
The concert was a sell-out, and Miles, showing devastating form, dominated the whole evening. It was almost as if he was demonstrating to himself and to the world that he was self-sufficient, that he could carry any event of any magnitude by himself – without the aid of John Coltrane. It was an evening of inspired music, recorded by CBS. All the critics wrote ecstatic reviews, and even the old sceptic, John S. Wilson, was captivated, admitting:
The evening was a triumph for Mr Davis. He played brilliantly . . . And although he has often been charged with treating his audiences disdainfully, he not only smiled on a couple of occasions but acknowledged applause with a quick glance over the footlights and a slight nod of the head . . . Last night [he] seemed intent on proving his all-round capabilities on the trumpet. He played with tremendous fire and spirit, soaring off into high-note runs with confidence and precision, building lines bristling with searing emotion and yet retaining all the warmest, singing elements of his gentler side. He was in the spotlight almost throughout the evening, yet he never faltered, never seemed to tire and poured out a stunning series of magnificent trumpet solos.20
All the other reviews were equally superlative, and justifiably so, because the two-CD Columbia Legacy album Miles Davis at the Carnegie Hall – The Legendary Performances of May 19, 1961, which documents the evening’s music, shows that, in the words of another reviewer, ‘Few jazz performances have touched the heights of that evening. It was jazz at its finest.’21 With the Evans orchestra, Miles performed the ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’, but this was not issued at the time because Sketches of Spain had only just been released. The orchestra also joins Davis for ‘So What’, ‘Spring Is Here’, ‘The Meaning of the Blues’/‘Lament’ and ‘The New Rhumba’, and he is backed by his quintet on six other pieces, including ‘Teo’, ‘Oleo’ and ‘Walkin’ ’.
This hugely successful concert was almost spoiled and cut short by a political incident. When Miles was in the middle of ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’, Max Roach, dressed in a white jacket and carrying a placard on which was painted: AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS! FREEDOM NOW!, walked up and sat down on the stage apron, while Davis and the crowd looked on in amazement. A moment later Roach was joined by another demonstrator. Miles waved his trumpet at Roach in dismay and then stopped the music and walked off-stage. Security guards carried off Max Roach and his companion, and backstage people talked Miles into going back on, which he eventually did to prolonged applause. The anger Davis felt expressed itself in the even greater intensity of the music. One critic noted: ‘He returned to the stage . . . a different musician, swinging with what Gerry Mulligan has termed “controlled violence”.’22
Later, Miles said, ‘I don’t know what Max was doing. Ask him.’23 Roach said: ‘I was told some things about the Foundation that I thought Miles should know. Some people tried to contact him, but they couldn’t get to him. I went on stage because I wanted Miles to be aware of these things.’24 Roach was referring to accusations by a group of African nationalists, who picketed outside the hall before the concert, that the Foundation was in league with South African diamond interests seeking to ‘enslave’ Africans instead of helping them. But these reasons seem lame and unconvincing. After the concert Roach shouted through the stage door: ‘Tell Miles I’m sorry. Tell him he was so great I was crying during the first half. Tell Miles I love him.’25 Inadvertently, however, by riling Miles Max Roach had made some contribution to one of the great performances in jazz history, and 1961 had seen the emergence of a new Miles, a player who was now going to explore the resources of the trumpet, and of himself, to their utmost limits. But this hugely successful recorded concert was really only a moment of respite. Miles was unhappy because he felt in limbo musically, and the continual pain in his joints led to his greater dependence on pain-killing drugs and an increasing consumption of alcohol and cocaine.