‘When it comes to human rights, these prejudiced white people keep on acting like they own the damn franchise!’1
Miles Davis
Throughout the rest of 1961 and the following year, and well into 1963, although Miles Davis seemed to be at the pinnacle of his career and in a virtually impregnable economic and artistic position, he was nevertheless beset with anxieties and problems. These were to do with the personnel of his group, with the race question, with his own position in American society, and with his artistic direction. But to an outsider, it must have seemed hardly conceivable that Miles Davis could have any doubts about his direction, or that he might feel, from time to time, rather insecure. His track record, his achievements, the number of classic albums he had produced, were already legendary. From the end of the 1950s onwards, each new record release was often accompanied by the issue or reissue of his early recordings. In 1959, his previous record company, Prestige, had reissued one album and promoted six others, and taken a full-page advertisement for them in Down Beat. In the summer of 1961, Prestige also released, for the very first time, the last of the famous 1956 quintet sessions: Steamin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet. By cleverly timing the release dates of the stockpile of albums Miles had done for them in order to terminate his contract, Prestige had cashed in on every increase in Miles’s popularity.
To an outsider also, Miles Davis seemed to have all the trappings of security and success: his expensive cars, and his brownstone house in Manhattan with its marble-tile floors, leopard-skin rugs, white brick walls, abstract paintings and electronic gadgets. Apart from Miles and Frances there were the aforementioned four children, an Italian greyhound named Milo, and some turtles. None of the children was particularly musical, although Cheryl Anne enjoyed singing, and Gregory had played the drums.
Certain things were disquieting for Miles Davis, however, and one bugbear in particular was that he’d never been approached to do a tour sponsored by the US State Department. During the 1950s, America had begun sponsoring tours abroad by jazz groups. Dizzy Gillespie’s big band tour of the Middle East had taken place in the 1950s, and with its personnel of twelve black and four white musicians had shown the world, as the State Department intended it to, that racial harmony was possible in America. By 1961, these tours were frequent occurrences, and yet Miles Davis had still not been asked to do one. Travelling abroad with a group was such an expensive operation that it made government subsidy very important. There was also prestige attached to being a representative of the USA in foreign parts. Miles’s brief campaign to get himself noticed by the State Department began with a typically oblique move. He made an announcement to the press that he would not do any overseas tours for the State Department until conditions improved for blacks in the USA. Miles said: ‘Why should I go, the way they treat Negroes in this country? I don’t want to go as a second-class citizen.’2 But nobody paid much attention to his remarks, and by mid-summer he felt so slighted that he complained bitterly to Leonard Feather:
I’d rather have somebody curse me out than ignore me. Anyhow, I don’t want them to send me over just because I’m a Negro and they want to woo Africa . . . If I ever went on one of those tours, they’d have to give me a badge to wear over there. A platinum badge. It would have to say on it that this man did such and such a thing for his country and government . . . If Charlie Parker had been French, they’d have had a monument built for him over there, but millions of people in this country never heard of him, or just read about him when he died and then forgot him . . . Come to think about it, I hope the State Department does ask me to make one of those tours – just so I can have the pleasure of saying no.3
But later in 1961, Miles managed to make a racial breakthrough in an area that had defeated both Ray Charles and Nat Cole. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) asked Miles to play a benefit for them at San Francisco’s Masonic Temple in October. The manager of the 3,200-capacity hall at first refused to allow it to be used for this purpose, giving the same reasons as he had done in the cases of Charles and Cole: ‘Not because of race or colour, but because we had been advised the kind of audiences these artists draw could be destructive to our $7,000,000 auditorium.’4 In Miles’s case, however, the decision was reversed and the concert went ahead.
In September 1962, Playboy published a long interview with Miles dealing exclusively with the question of racial prejudice. This two-day interview at Miles’s home was by the black journalist, Marc Crawford, who had written the article in Ebony the previous year. On this present occasion, Crawford set the scene as follows:
. . . his rather unusual five-storey home, a converted Russian Orthodox church on West 77th Street near the Hudson River in New York City. Miles was between gigs at the time and we accompanied him on his restless daily home routine, asking questions at propitious moments while he worked out in his basement gymnasium, made veal chops Italian style for his family, took telephone calls from fellow musicians, his lawyer and stockbroker, gave boxing lessons to his three sons, watched TV, plucked out beginner’s chords on a guitar and, of course, blew one of his two Martin trumpets.
This was Miles’s most comprehensive discourse on race, and it showed that the sense of injury was both deep and far-ranging. There was still the feeling that his music was not at all valued by the American cultural establishment, and that jazz musicians were regarded as inferior to their classical counterparts: ‘The average jazz musician today, if he’s making it, is just as trained as classical musicians. You ever see anybody go up bugging classical musicians when they are on the job and trying to work?’
Similarly, the general social humiliations were distressing. Miles gave several devastating examples, of which two are as follows:
I sent for an electrician to fix something in the house. When he rang the bell, I answered and he looked at me like I was dirt, and said, ‘I want to see the owner, Mr Davis.’ When I said, ‘You looking at him,’ the cat turned beet red. He had me figured as the porter. Now he’s mad and embarrassed. What had I done but called to give him work? That same week I had seen a lot of them West Point cadets, and in a bar I asked why there was so many of them in town. Man, I just asked the cat a question and he moved up the bar and didn’t speak! But then somebody recognized me and he got red as that electrician. He came trying to apologize and saying he had my records. I told him I had just paid enough taxes to cover his free ride at West Point, and walked out. I guess he’s somewhere now with the others saying I’m such a bastard. It bugged me so, man, I wasn’t worth a damn for two or three days. It wasn’t just him ignoring me I was thinking about, but in two or three years, Gregory, my oldest boy, may be doing some Army time. How am I supposed to feel about him maybe serving under this cat?
In 1962, Miles’s group, which was now a sextet with J. J. Johnson on trombone, won first place in the Down Beat critics’ poll, unseating the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ), which had held the position ever since 1954. This must have seemed ironic to Miles; good though his current sextet was, it could not be compared with the great quintet and sextet with Coltrane and Adderley. During 1962, Miles and the group worked off and on at the Village Vanguard, and had a nine-day engagement, supported by black satirist and comic, Oscar Brown, at the Music Box Theatre, Los Angeles. But the run of consecutive great recordings, each one a masterpiece, was over for the time being. Indeed, Miles seemed reluctant to go into the recording studios at all at this time, largely because he felt he had nothing to say.
The declining health and death of his father that year also shook him. Two years previously his father had been driving across an unguarded country level crossing when his car had been hit by a train. The apparently minor injuries had wrecked his health – his hands shook, he seemed punch-drunk, and he could no longer work as a dentist. Miles tried to get him good medical attention, but no one seemed able to help, and his father was, in any case, too proud to accept much help or sympathy. He died suddenly at the age of sixty. Miles was working in Kansas City with his sextet at the time and J. J. Johnson broke the news to him. Before that trip, Miles’s father had handed him a letter, which he hadn’t bothered to open. Now he read it and his grief and guilt were multiplied because his father had written that he had only a few days to live and he wanted Miles to know that he truly loved him and was proud of him. The funeral, which took place in May 1962, was one of the biggest ever held for a black man in East St Louis. Miles regretted most of all, perhaps, not having noticed that his father was dying and therefore having missed the opportunity to express his own love, gratitude and respect. The guilt and grief persisted that year.
So far as recording was concerned, it was his poorest year for a decade. It was rumoured he planned an album of Tadd Dameron tunes, but nothing materialized. In fact, the year yielded only three undistinguished studio tracks with a septet which included bongos and vocalist Bob Dorough, and one or two South American bossa nova-style pieces with Gil Evans and the orchestra. Wayne Shorter was on the septet session, however, and Miles found that he really enjoyed Shorter’s playing. That was one positive result of the sessions, but there was not enough material for even one album. Nevertheless, the backlog of albums still poured steadily on to the market, and Miles’s financial situation was very good. By the early 1960s, when a jazz musician ‘made it’, he could earn as much money as the leading conductors and soloists on the ‘serious’ music scene. But of the few really high earners in jazz, Miles Davis was the only one still playing small clubs.
Miles’s sextet carried within it the seeds of its own disintegration. There had been fluctuations in the rhythm section as early as autumn 1961, when Philly Joe Jones briefly replaced Jimmy Cobb at Birdhouse Club, Chicago. Red Garland had also replaced Wynton Kelly for a while, and early in 1962, when Cobb and Kelly were back, Sonny Rollins had joined for a time. J. J. Johnson, who had a strong musical life of his own, left the group permanently at the beginning of 1963 in order to fulfil some writing/composing assignments. By this time, Hank Mobley had also gone, and the rhythm section of Kelly, Chambers and Cobb were thinking of striking out on their own as a trio. External events then precipitated a complete change of personnel.
In the last week of December, Miles and the group had a five-night engagement at Philadelphia’s Uptown Theatre, but they simply failed to appear for the last two nights. The promoter, a disc jockey called Woods, sued Miles for the $25,000 he claimed the cancellation had cost him, and the matter was eventually settled by Miles paying $8,000 in instalments. Shortly after this, Miles had to cancel a gig in Detroit in order to protect bassist Paul Chambers from possible arrest in connection with a marital legal action. This cancellation resulted in another legal action against Miles for compensation. Finally, a few weeks later, neither Paul Chambers nor Wynton Kelly turned up for an engagement in St Louis, so Miles had to cancel yet again. This brought yet another lawsuit against him. This final disaster was too much for Miles, and when he was booked for a three-week residency at the Black Hawk, he decided not to take Chambers and Kelly with him. He commented: ‘They both wanted to come out to San Francisco with me, but even though they’re both excellent musicians, I had to say “No”.’5 One reason for these problems was that Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly were tired of playing only Miles’s music. They wanted to play their own music, and while they were with Miles, their reputations had soared so that they were in great demand.
Either events caught Miles napping, or he couldn’t find the musicians he wanted, because he telephoned the Blackhawk a few nights before his scheduled opening and obtained a week’s delay. He said that the left side of his face was still swollen from a root canal operation on a lower molar; but the real problem seems to have been personnel, because he ultimately arrived without a pianist, and British-born Victor Feldman, who was living in Los Angeles, had to take over the piano stool for a few days. The group for the booking turned out to be a sextet with Frank Strozier on alto sax, George Coleman on tenor, Harold Mabern piano, Ron Carter bass, and Jimmy Cobb still on drums. As usual, when Miles was not sure he could rely on his new and unproven group, he played even more powerfully himself.
During the engagement at the Blackhawk, Jimmy Cobb left to join Chambers and Kelly, and the drum chair was filled temporarily by another Los Angeles musician, Frank Butler. While he was on the West Coast, Miles went into the studio and recorded some tracks with the Feldman–Carter–Butler rhythm section, but must have been dissatisfied with the up-tempo performances, because he went back to New York and re-recorded them with different musicians. The resulting album, Seven Steps to Heaven, is schizophrenic (half from the West Coast and half from the East Coast sessions) and shows graphically the difference between Miles at his most mannered and self-indulgent and Miles at his most vital.
The West Coast sessions featured a quartet – Miles with Harmon mute and the rhythm section – playing three very slow pieces: the ballad, ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily’, and two lugubrious reinterpretations of material from the traditional jazz of the 1920s, ‘Basin Street Blues’, and ‘Baby Won’t You Please Come Home’. When a jazz musician’s vision is faltering and he is losing his direction, the only way out of this impasse is to go back to the music’s roots and regroup, and this is probably what lay behind Miles’s thinking, but the choice of those two old tunes astonished the jazz world at the time and no doubt helped to take everyone’s mind off the shortcomings of their treatment. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why these two performances are so unsatisfactory. There is an almost imperceptible slackness, a kind of self-indulgence; it is Miles doing his ballad formula to death, and without the necessary interplay between himself and the group. The muted trumpet is too far forward in the mix, and the piano and rhythm section very distant. Victor Feldman was a marvellous musician, but in this case his accompaniment seems ordinary, and the overall atmosphere is one of bland, easy-listening music. In fact, a similar atmosphere had pervaded some tracks Miles had recorded the previous year with Gil Evans. They were ultimately issued on a very unsatisfactory album (which neither Miles nor Gil wanted released) called Quiet Nights, and the meagre big-band material which made up the bulk of the album was eked out with another small-group track from the West Coast session, ‘Summer Night’.
However, a return to Miles’s customary creative standards occurs in the three New York performances on Seven Steps to Heaven. In recruiting his new rhythm section Davis had, for the first time in his career, chosen musicians from the younger generation. His new drummer. Tony Williams, was just seventeen, bassist Ron Carter was twenty-six, and pianist Herbie Hancock was twenty-three. So far as saxophonists were concerned, Strozier had left the group after the Blackhawk residency, and George Coleman was to stay with Miles for just over a year. For Herbie Hancock, being asked to join the Miles Davis Quintet was something of which he’d hardly dared dream. Later, he recalled the experience:
I got a call from Tony Williams, and he told me that Miles was going to call and ask me to come over to his house to play . . . Miles called me up. He asked me if I was busy, if I was working. I was at the time, but I told him no; so he asked me if I would come over to his house the next day . . . Next day I went over. Tony was there with Ron and George Coleman. We ran over some things while Miles walked around and listened. Philly Joe Jones stopped by too. Then Miles called up Gil Evans. He said, ‘Hey, Gil, I want you to hear my new drummer.’ Because Tony really knocked him out. After we rehearsed the next day, he told us we were going to do a record in two days. I was wondering what was going on; he hadn’t even told me whether I was in the group or not. So I didn’t say anything, and we did the record – Seven Steps. Then we had another rehearsal, and he mentioned a job at Bowdoin College. I said, ‘Wait a minute, Miles. You haven’t told me if I’m in the group or what,’ and he said, ‘You made the record didn’t you?’ so I said, ‘Yeah, okay.’ That was fine. I was jumping through hoops.6
In the studio, the new young rhythm section immediately proved itself; the brash, unstoppable pulse of Tony Williams’s drums, and the broad foundation of Ron Carter’s ‘singing’ bass notes, spurred Miles into pushing himself, yet again, to the limits. On the title track, ‘Seven Steps’ and on ‘Joshua’, his use of chromaticism, which had begun to appear on the Blackhawk and Carnegie Hall live albums, was now substantially in evidence. On Kind of Blue with such modal pieces as ‘So What’ and ‘All Blues’, Miles had stuck to the basic scale or mode for his notes. But with the live albums, it was noticeable that on the same pieces he tended to alternate funky rhythmic phrases with more abstract ones that used any of the twelve notes in any octave – also, of course, using the microtones in his inflexions. There is a kind of paradox here: on the live albums there is a tendency towards greater ‘concrete’ phasing in his use of bluesy and funky phrases, which is accompanied by an opposite tendency towards more abstract chromaticism. It is often the tension between these two approaches that creates the drama of the solos. After 1960, the focal point of his solo work becomes less harmonic and gradually more rhythmic and linear. In the three New York tracks of Seven Steps, this abstract chromaticism is already much more prominent.
Although the young rhythm section showed tremendous confidence and panache on their first recording with the great trumpeter, the difficulties of trying to live with a legend were keenly felt by all of them. At first, on live gigs Hancock tried to adopt a sort of Wynton Kelly approach, and Tony Williams played some Jimmy Cobb patterns which often derived from Philly Joe Jones. But when George Coleman took his saxophone solo, the rhythm section would abandon its self-imposed roles and open up, playing around with the pulse much more freely. Again, a kind of schizophrenia resulted, and Hancock recalled:
And then one day Miles said, ‘Why don’t you play like that behind me?’ I remember when that happened, we were in Detroit . . . some club there, and we were playing all kinds of crazy things behind George and behind Miles we played really straight. Anyway, that’s when Tony and I started playing our little musical games behind Miles in a way, because we were developing this thing . . . After four days it turned around and he was leading it. Not only was he in it, but he really established that thing. And his playing was different after that. It was a most uncannily rapid adaptation to this other sound that I could ever imagine . . . That’s what Miles does. He feeds off everybody else and kind of puts it together.
If Miles Davis’s previous rhythm sections had been superb – the best in jazz at their time with Garland, Chambers and Philly Joe in the middle 1950s, and Kelly, Chambers and Jimmy Cobb in the later 1950s and early 1960s – this rhythm section in 1963 was yet again superior. So far as straight 4/4 time-playing was concerned, it was to prove itself to be possibly the greatest rhythm section of all time, and Hancock, Carter and Williams seemed to have an inexhaustible variety of ways of creating and releasing tension, expanding and contracting space. This interaction between the members of the rhythm section was also a continual dialogue with whoever was soloing. In fact, there was no longer the idea of a soloist and rhythm section. When a horn was playing, it was a quartet functioning on equal terms. Only the bass spent most of its time in a supportive role. Piano and drums commented, spurred and generally conversed with the leading voice. But, in many ways, Ron Carter was the key new member of the group, both musically and morally. Musically he was the anchor man who gave the band stability and who never faltered, and he was also Miles’s trusted right-hand man: ‘I was the guy who was allowed to pay the band off, to collect money every night from the club owner, to confirm travel reservations, talking to the lawyer about publishing rights, and kind of business manager of the band.’
Miles also made Carter guardian to Tony Williams who, at seventeen, was under age. In California a person had to be eighteen and sometimes twenty-one years old to be legally entitled to enter certain clubs. So if Carter didn’t go to the night club to play, Williams couldn’t go in, and he had to enter always in the company of the bassist. The quintet’s meteoric development may have been aided by this enforced association of the oldest and youngest men in the rhythm section. The group had come together for the recording in May 1963, and soon after that Miles took them out to Los Angeles, where they played two engagements per night, working from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m. at the Jazz Workshop, followed by a two-hour set at Basin Street West on Sunset Strip. Carter recalled,
So we were playing there almost seven hours a day as a group, and I remember us [Carter, Williams and Hancock] going to one of those all-night cafeterias and just sitting for hours after each gig, just trying to figure out what took place . . . what happened on this tune and what is this chord, what is this rhythm, what is this note, trying to understand and analyse as best we could what took place and to have a clearer view of it to work on this item for tomorrow night. People think that jazz players just play off the top of their heads all the time, but quality players are aware of what goes on. They catalogue in their mind what doesn’t work and should be discarded temporarily, and what seems like a real gem of an idea to be worked on the next night. And we had hundreds of these conversations.
Miles Davis did not take part in these discussions – he didn’t need to because he had always had an intense curiosity about music and a tremendous awareness of the rhythm section. But George Coleman, who was only two years older than Carter, didn’t take part either. Carter commented: ‘I love George, he always plays great. But he was a little less curious than we were about what we were doing. I think horn players, Miles and Wayne [Shorter] excepted, are in general less curious about what rhythm sections do.’ These informal seminars, plus the long hours of putting things to the test, bore fruit rapidly, and Miles was so thrilled with his new group that he asked Jack Whittemore to get as many playing engagements as possible for the rest of the summer, with the result that the quintet was booked solid. When the group appeared at the Antibes Festival in France on 27 July, it had already found its unique identity. To followers of Miles’s music, the new approach was once more shocking and exhilarating. With a completely new band to introduce to the public at large, Davis wisely stuck to his old repertoire of a sprinkling of ballads and songs, some blues and some modal pieces. The performance at Antibes was recorded, and live albums were also issued of the group’s performances the following year at the New York Philharmonic Hall (February), in Tokyo (July), and at the Berlin Festival (September). So five live albums (the New York Philharmonic Hall concert yielded two) documented the way Miles’s new band dealt with the old material. He was not to make a studio album with the band until the beginning of 1965.
There had always been interaction in the way Miles’s previous groups functioned, but there had never been anything as fundamentally wild and extreme as the performance at Antibes. Even the more conventional songs for which he used the Harmon mute (‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘All of You’) were full of internal movement. Miles’s own playing now encompassed an awesome range of expression, veering from tenderness to ferocity and from sparseness to prodigality. The whole group’s use of space was now intensely dramatic; pauses and almost empty bars juxtaposed with bars crammed with multiple activity. On these songs, however, Miles’s solos were generally more diatonic and funky/lyrical; but the fast and more modal pieces were now taken at breakneck speed, and his open horn work was extremely abstract and chromatic. His dialogue with the drums is wild as the rhythm section boils along. The concentration and inspiration of Davis and the whole group is at white heat in these performances, and the self-indulgence of some of his recent performances in the studio has been completely banished; the enervating, self-regarding sadness has been obliterated by an outgoing and blistering creative onslaught. Miles had done it again – found the key musicians of the next generation, found new ways of expressing himself, and fresh avenues of exploration. According to Ralph J. Gleason, Miles was so delighted by the test pressings of the Antibes concert that he played them until they were almost worn out. Gleason commented: ‘It was not a happy time for him in many ways, but these test pressings made it better.’7
During the autumn, Miles and Gil Evans collaborated on the music for a play called The Time of the Barracudas, which starred Laurence Harvey, and had a brief run in California. The music was recorded in Hollywood, and the tape recording was used for the play. Evans conducted and Miles played on the tape. The play was supposed to open on Broadway in New York in November, but for some reason it never did. The collaborations between Miles and Gil seemed doomed at this point in time. Columbia despaired of getting the two of them back in the recording studio, and at the end of the year issued Quiet Nights, which contained only twenty minutes of the orchestra and Miles, and a further six minutes of the small-group performance. Gil Evans said, ‘They never should have released it; it was just half an album. But I guess they had to.’8 Miles himself was furious that the album was issued, and blamed Teo Macero for the whole affair. His relationship with Macero was sometimes stormy and this was one of their first real rows. Teo recalled:
He didn’t talk to me for two-and-a-half to three years . . . when we released Quiet Nights! He thought I was an insane person . . . I was crazy. But I said, ‘Look, call me what you want. I don’t care. It doesn’t make any difference. But one thing you must remember – for three years you’ve had records spilling out, and all that period I always put together the records and they always came out.’ He was, I think, in a very bad period of creativity. I think that that might have been one of the things that upset him.
Seven Steps to Heaven was released in the late summer, receiving mixed reviews, but at the end of the year, Miles Davis in Europe (the Antibes concert) came out to universal acclaim. In January 1964, it won the Jazz magazine Jazz Album of the Year award, thus giving a good start to what was going to be a crucial year for Miles and the band. It had become obvious that the renewed vitality of the trumpeter and his group, the fresh treatment of old thematic material, was merely a reprieve from the real problem: the need to find new musical concepts that expressed the identity of this young band, totally different from Miles’s earlier groups. With the spate of live concert recordings, it was noticeable that the music was getting rather repetitious. In an effort to keep things exciting for musicians and audiences, the old modal pieces (‘So What’ and ‘Milestones’) and the blues ‘Walkin’ ’ were played at ever increasing tempos until they were sometimes simply too fast for comfort or coherence. By late 1964, there were several versions of live performances of these pieces, as well as of Miles’s favourite songs and ballads: ‘All of You’, ‘Autumn Leaves’, ‘My Funny Valentine’. They all, of course, have some wonderful moments and produced some excellent music, but two of them stand out as something more than that: classic performances. The Antibes concert is the most sustained in terms of quality of inspiration in all areas – fast, medium, or slow pieces – and this is probably because the concept and the material were completely fresh to the young band at the time.
The other classic album from this period comes from the concert the group played at the New York Philharmonic Hall on 12 February 1964. During this performance, nearly all the up-tempo pieces were taken too fast and played rather scrappily, whereas the slow and medium-tempo tunes were played with more depth and brilliance than Miles had achieved before. The fast performances were issued on an album called Four and More, and the magnificent slower pieces were released under the title My Funny Valentine. It may have been the very importance of the occasion at the Philharmonic Hall which caused both the greatness of the slower things and the scrappiness of the fast ones, but there was also much tension in the quintet when they were told that, as it was a benefit concert, they would not be paid. For Miles, the concerts were a benefit for voter registration in Mississippi and Louisiana, and the co-sponsors were the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee. Miles also told Melody Maker, however, that one of the concerts was to be in memory of President Kennedy. The latter had been assassinated the previous year, and his death crushed a lot of hopes for the more speedy attainment of racial equality. Miles had expressed a certain confidence in Kennedy in 1962: ‘I like them Kennedy brothers; they’re swinging people.’9 So, for Miles Davis, the concerts were for his own people and also in memory of a president he had admired.
For his young rhythm section, their anger at not being paid and the importance of the occasion may have accounted for the slight desperation of some of the fast pieces. Herbie Hancock described the psychological pressure:
That was my first time playing at the Philharmonic Hall and that was, like, a big deal, because the new Carnegie Hall was the Philharmonic Hall. Just from the prestige standpoint I really wanted to play good – the whole band really wanted to play good because that was the whole band’s first time playing there . . . although Miles had played at Carnegie Hall before . . . but it was really a special concert. Only the New York Philharmonic plays there . . . and I tell you something . . . it was really funny . . . When we walked away from that concert, we were all dejected and disappointed. We thought we had really bombed . . . but then we listened to the record – it sounded fantastic!
The My Funny Valentine album from that concert is one of the very greatest recordings of a live concert. The rapport between the large audience and the quintet is as close and immediate as if the event were taking place in a small club, and the charged atmosphere enhances the inspired creative act. There is here a kind of complicity between audience and musicians, a unity which is quite rare. In the first chorus of ‘Stella by Starlight’, for example, when Miles plays a particularly incisive phrase, there is a clearly audible yell of ecstasy, and other good moments are greeted with immediate delighted applause. Even the theme of ‘All Blues’ draws an instant response.
The playing throughout the album is inspired, and Miles in particular reaches tremendous heights. Anyone who wanted to get a vivid idea of the trumpeter’s development over the previous eight years or so should compare the October 1956 version of ‘Funny Valentine’ and the 1958 version of ‘Stella by Starlight’ with the versions on this 1964 live recording. The earlier performances are romantic, melancholic, and their emotional range is narrow though deep. On the later versions, there is a strong movement away from romanticism and towards abstraction, and the emotional range is very much greater.
In the later ‘Funny Valentine’, for example, Miles probes more deeply into both the song’s structure and his own emotional and technical resources. Despite the occasional oblique references to the original melody, and the free harmonic approach (Miles once said: ‘We play “Funny Valentine” like with a scale all the way through’), the thirty-six-bar structure of the song is always there. Miles plays open trumpet on this version (he used Harmon mute on the earlier one), and even in the extreme upper register, where most trumpeters sound strained and brash, he is still able to project his unique, lyrical sound and to bend his notes expressively. He plays the first eight bars colla voce with Hancock’s piano accompaniment, then the bass and drums pick up the pulse. The whole ensuing trumpet solo is a dialogue with the piano and rhythm section, and the internal movement is realized with great subtlety. Alternations between the slow pulse and the double-tempo feel enhance the dramatic inner logic of Miles’s solo, which moves to a blistering climax in his second chorus when he suddenly rises on the last quaver of the twenty-ninth bar, ascends for three more bars above trumpet top C to F, G, G sharp and A, and then descends, bending his high F superbly on the way down (Appendix A, Fig. 7). After the dazzling power of this solo, the listener needs the relief, the simple romanticism of George Coleman’s tenor solo, which follows. The rhythm section also reassures us by playing a steady double-tempo feel. This familiarity and continuity, this everyday grooving done supremely well, is necessary after the disquieting areas into which Miles’s solo took us. In the performances on this album, Miles Davis had taken the technical and emotional exploration of standard song structures as far as was possible before they disintegrated completely and metamorphosed into something else.
On the last day of February, Miles’s brother Vernon called in the middle of the night and told Frances that Miles’s mother had died. Frances broke the news when Miles got home in the small hours of the morning. Once again he had not had the opportunity to say goodbye. He knew she had gone into Barnes Hospital, St Louis, but hadn’t realized how serious it was. He and Frances were booked on a flight to St Louis for the funeral, but when the plane aborted the take-off because of engine trouble, Miles’s superstition made him get off the plane and go back home, leaving Frances to attend the funeral on her own. Once again, he was consumed by guilt and grief because his remaining parent had died unseen and uncomforted by him. It also seemed that the sunny heyday of his family life – the handsome and successful couple with their four children (albeit all from previous relationships) – was coming to an end. His relationship with Frances was starting to deteriorate, partly because she wanted another child and Miles didn’t, but also because he was away touring much of the time, and he was still continually in pain, drinking too much and snorting coke. He began going to after-hours places frequented by other coke users, and he would disappear and be incommunicado for two days at a time. When he was at home, his moods would fluctuate and paranoia would be lurking around every corner. The façade of stability and patrician solidarity could still be conjured up on occasion, as when Miles and Frances threw a party for Robert Kennedy, who was running for senator of New York, and the guests included Leonard Bernstein, Bob Dylan, Lena Horne and Quincy Jones. Miles also began a friendship with the author James Baldwin, which lasted until the latter’s untimely death. But the decline in Miles’s behaviour went on and he and Frances had violent arguments that upset the children, until one day Frances walked out and went to California. That was the end of their relationship – another thing that Miles lived to regret.
In late spring, George Coleman left the quintet. He gave his reasons in a Down Beat interview in March 1980:
Miles was ill during that time – a lot of times he wouldn’t make the gigs and it was frustrating . . . His hip was bothering him – and so there was a lot of pressure on me, and sometimes the money would be late and I’d get it in a cheque and have to try and get it cashed, so I really got tired of it; so I just decided to leave.
In his stead, tenor saxophonist Sam Rivers joined Miles for a couple of months, during which time the group played in Tokyo at Japan’s World Jazz Festival. Miles Davis was the star of this six-day festival, and he was paid well over $20,000 for his six concerts. Leonard Feather reported on Miles’s popularity in Japan:
It was Davis who drew the crowds; his photo adorned the cover of the current Swing Journal; he got the full VIP treatment, with first-class air transportation, a private air-conditioned limousine from hotel to concert hall, the right to refuse to be photographed during his set (even without flashbulbs), and the privilege of being the first American group on the show, so he could get out fast instead of having to wait around backstage . . . His status as the cynosure and chief attraction of the festival was the source of discomfort and obvious envy on the part of a couple of the older musicians . . . Miles Davis achieved an immediate rapport. The opening bass figure of ‘So What’, the first cadenza of ‘Stella by Starlight’, brought immediate applause, the result of strong record associations.10
When Sam Rivers left the band, Miles managed to persuade tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter to join. The latter had been playing with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and was strongly influenced by John Coltrane. Shorter also wrote excellent small-group compositions. Miles had been trying for some time to get Shorter to join his band, and had even gone as far as telephoning Art Blakey’s backstage dressing areas to speak to the saxophonist. More pressure had been put on by Harold Lovett, who also phoned Shorter and said: ‘What’s the matter with you, man, don’t you dig Miles?’11 During all these communications, Blakey is said to have walked around angrily muttering, ‘He’s trying to steal my tenor player.’12 At last, after Sam Rivers had gone, both Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock phoned Wayne Shorter and talked him into joining Miles’s group. Shorter had no reason to regret the move:
It wasn’t the bish-bash, sock-’em-dead routine we had with Blakey, with every solo a climax. With Miles, I felt like a cello, I felt viola, I felt liquid, dot-dash . . . and colours started really coming. And then a lot of people started calling me – ‘Can you be on my record date?’ It was six years of that.13
Shorter was with Miles when he played the Berlin Festival in September, and the occasion revealed that this was the best saxophonist Miles had so far found for the band. Tonally, there were definite resemblances to Coltrane, and Shorter also showed great variation in the length of his phrases and in his attack. At last, after some four years of trial and error, Miles had achieved a stable personnel.
But things were in a state of flux on the jazz scene in general. By 1964, the avant-garde movement spearheaded by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane had gathered many more adherents, and there was much controversy about it in the specialist jazz press. The second wave of New Wavers included saxophonists Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler, and many white musicians such as Roswell Rudd, Mike Mantler and Paul Bley. The phrase ‘free music’ was bandied about a great deal and it seemed to denote a music ‘freed’ from the ‘restrictions’ of set structures and harmonies. Miles Davis must have observed this movement with some interest and even concern. Earlier in the year, he had used almost the same terms to describe some of his own aspirations:
I intend recording some ‘freedom’ music . . . I get away from the normal bar structure. You know, away from the straight thirty-two bars. For example, we’ll have maybe eleven bars written, and then I’ll play. Then maybe twelve bars written, and then I’ll play again. We did something like this on the Time of the Barracudas score.14
Miles’s concern with high standards in all kinds of jazz was boldly expressed for all to see in the third blindfold test he did for Leonard Feather. This took place in June 1964, and the only record he liked out of the eight he listened to was ‘Desafinado’ by Stan Getz and João Gilberto. For the rest of the test, he severely castigates old friends like Clark Terry, his idol Duke Ellington and a couple of representatives of the avant-garde. In the case of Terry and Duke, Miles blames the record companies for the ill-conceived tracks. Feather plays him a piece by Eric Dolphy and Miles explodes: ‘That’s got to be Eric Dolphy – nobody else could sound that bad! . . . You have to think when you play; you have to help each other – you can’t just play for yourself.’15 And finally, when Feather plays him a Cecil Taylor piece, Davis says: ‘Is that what the critics are digging? Them critics better stop having coffee. If there ain’t nothing to listen to, they might as well admit it.’16 Miles is generally disgusted with his contemporaries, and also totally disaffected by the avant-garde. At the same time, there is no doubt that during this period he was equally dissatisfied with himself. The re-examination of his own immediate past, and the glance even further back at old tunes like ‘Basin Street Blues’ and ‘Baby Won’t You Please Come Home’ had not yet resulted in any new vision. Meanwhile, retrospective views of him were starting to classify him as a man of the 1950s. The thirtieth anniversary of Down Beat fell in 1964, and in their birthday issue (2 July 1964) there was a long feature on Miles by Leonard Feather, reviewing his whole career and bringing it up to date with recent interviews. It was entitled ‘Miles and the Fifties’, and it was comprehensive. In it, Miles reveals that he is still irritated by the gulf between the Western musical establishment and the jazz world, and still upset about the unequal status of musicians. He concludes with a prediction that seems more rooted in wishful thinking than in actuality:
Nowadays some of the teachers don’t teach the way they used to, with that same old dry legit tone, because in the first place you can’t get a job with it. The old symphonic repertorial music is going to go out. They’re going to concentrate on the guys that write more or less modern music. Pretty soon all the schools of music will be together and understand one another and learn from each other’s approaches, and you won’t hear Beethoven’s Fifth any more as a standard on a concert.
Of the future of jazz all he could say was: ‘There is no next trend. If there’s another trend, then we’re going backwards; because, look, you had Duke, and you had Charlie Parker and Dizzy, and you had Lennie Tristano, right? And they’re all just levelling off. There’s not going to be another trend unless it’s the walking-off-the-stage trend.’ But nevertheless, it was becoming essential for Miles to find a fresh concept to suit his brand-new regular band, and in January 1965 he recorded his best studio album since Kind of Blue. This new one was called (perhaps ironically, because it was the name of the record label on which most of the avant-garde music was being released) ESP. Probably because of Miles’s estrangement from Teo Macero over the release of Quiet Nights, the live albums of 1963–4 had been put out without the usual Davis–Macero consultation. And now, Miles chose to do his first studio album for eighteen months in Los Angeles, not New York, and the man who supervised the whole project was not Macero, but Columbia’s West Coast A&R man, Irving Townsend. The freshness and absence of cliché on ESP came as a revelation. The germ of the idea could be seen in the greater abstraction and chromaticism of the live albums. Although Miles did not discuss music much with his group, one day he stated to Herbie Hancock that he wanted to abandon completely formal chord constructions in his solos:
By the time we got to ESP, Miles said, ‘I don’t want to play chords any more’ . . . I guess what he wanted to go for was the core of the music . . . Here’s how I look at it . . . now I don’t know if this is the way Miles looks at it, but a composition is an example of a conception, so Miles, rather than play the composition, he wants to play the conception that the composition came from . . . That’s why you hear melody fragments and you kind of hear the momentum and the sound of the tune somewhere — something that distinguishes that tune from another one . . . but maybe the chords are not there. Even when we were playing ‘Walkin’ ’ or any of those other [familiar] things, he didn’t want to play the chords after we played the melody.
ESP comprises three up-tempo pieces in 4/4, three slow pieces in 3/4, and one variation of the blues in F with a rock feel. The fast pieces are characterized by skeletal, angular themes, abstract and chromatic improvisation, considerable group interplay, and a pulse which is sometimes implied rather than actually stated by the drums. The slow 3/4 performances are loose and lifting with a kind of abstract lyricism, and the solos are austere, understated and mournfully reflective. The underlying melancholy, however, also tinges the greater activity of the fast performances.
Standing out from this atmosphere of abstract severity is the blues ‘Eighty-One’, jointly composed by Miles and Ron Carter. This is the only piece on the album with some funk built into its theme, and its use of rock rhythms jolted the jazz world which, at the time, was snobbish about anything which smacked of ‘popular’ music. But there had been hints of spontaneous rock rhythms in the improvisations of his new group the previous year. During the Philharmonic Hall concert, for example, there had been a passage of spontaneous rock during Herbie Hancock’s solo on ‘All of You’; and a few months later, in Tokyo, the same thing had happened during Miles’s solo on ‘Funny Valentine’. In the studio, ‘Eighty-One’ was characterized by a lovely bass ostinato, a crisp and even drum rhythm, and a theme which brilliantly juxtaposed legato triplets, long notes and stab notes. The feel and the bass riff were maintained for the first part of each solo, after which the rhythm section played a straight 4/4 feel. All the musicians seemed to respond to the clear disciplines of this piece, and Miles in particular played a magnificent solo. Davis had a hand in the composition of three other pieces on the album, and was the sole composer of ‘Agitation’, a fast and abstract performance. ESP is also something of a landmark in Miles Davis’s recorded work because it was the first album on which he used the ‘open bars’ technique in which there is no set chorus-length for the solos, and events happen on cue.
Shortly after this recording, Miles Davis went into hospital for surgery and spent most of the rest of the year out of action. His health had gradually declined as the pain in his hip increased and in Japan the previous July, it had been so severe that a doctor had had to be summoned before Miles could play the first concert. He had delayed the operation as long as possible, but he underwent major surgery on 14 April, and the hip bone was replaced with bone from his shin. This was a failure and in August a second operation gave him a plastic hip joint. Ten years later, this repair job itself was to start disintegrating, necessitating more surgery and the insertion of another artificial (plastic) hip joint.
The first operation was so serious that Miles Davis was in hospital from April until July (1965), by which time he was so bored that he got hold of a pair of crutches and discharged himself. He had hoped to be well enough to start playing again in July, but that was out of the question, and to keep Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock in work (Carter and Shorter had other outlets), he asked Sonny Rollins to play the dates that had been booked. Miles managed to get out and about a little, however, and visited the Five Spot to hear Roland Kirk, whom he applauded rather ghoulishly by banging on the floor with his crutches. He paid for his impatience to leave hospital, because on 4 August he fell down at his home, causing damage that led to the second operation, considerably delaying his recovery. Meanwhile, rumours went around that he was suffering from sickle-cell anaemia – a kind of cancer of the bone marrow common among blacks.
It was a particularly galling time to be laid up; he had just got his new personnel stabilized, and there was a feeling that Miles’s own position in the jazz world might not be so impregnable. By the end of the year, the Down Beat readers’ poll had voted John Coltrane into first place in the Hall of Fame category, Jazzman of the Year, Record of the Year (A Love Supreme) and first on tenor saxophone. Miles Davis was still first on trumpet, his group was second to Dave Brubeck’s, and he had three albums placed in the Record of the Year category. But generally, it was Coltrane’s year, and many vigorous and vociferous new musicians were coming up in his wake.
It would be foolish to suggest that Miles Davis’s health problems have been psychosomatic; they are too serious, too real, for that. Nevertheless, there seems to have been a strong link in each decade of his mature career between, on the one hand, his problem of creativity and the deep inner necessity to change his music and his lifestyle, and on the other hand, his physical well-being. In the early 1950s he was a heroin addict, and managed to kick the habit only by a supreme effort, after which he went on to a period of gloriously creative music. Similarly, in the early 1960s, when that first brilliant phase had spent itself, his health declined and he began to suffer from the bone malady, after which he was to have another resurgence of creativity. Perhaps one simple explanation might be that periods of enforced convalescence gave him the breathing space he needed to review his past and consider the future.
It was not until November that Miles began playing again with his quintet; it had been an eight-month lay-off. He opened in mid-November at Philadelphia’s Showboat Lounge, then went to Detroit for a one-week stand at the Grand Bar. After that, he went to New York’s Village Vanguard for a Thanksgiving Week engagement, followed by a stint at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington D.C., Ron Carter was not available for these engagements, and the bass position was filled in Philadelphia and New York by Gary Peacock, and in Detroit by Reggie Workman. Miles finished off the year with a booking at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago, with Carter back on bass. Two nights at the Plugged Nickel were recorded, but nothing was released at the time. One album was eventually released in 1987, and a seven-CD box-set of the music of both evenings was released in 1995. It is an exciting and moving document, but Miles had clearly not fully got his strength back after the surgery and the long lay-off. His spirit is heroically willing, but the flesh is weak. There are glimpses of his greatness, but his solos are often full of long pauses, his sound is thinner and less burnished than usual, and his technique a little ragged. As Gerry Mulligan remarked at the time, however, a weak Miles is more eloquent than many a stronger trumpeter. The band plays mostly his old repertoire, taking it sometimes to the verge of disintegration. Wayne Shorter is on brilliant form, virtually reinventing the vocabulary of the tenor sax. If this music had been released at the time, Shorter would possibly have had an even greater influence on other saxophonists.
Miles Davis’s return to the New York scene, in particular, was welcomed by many musicians and friends who turned up at the Vanguard to greet him. His fans also arrived in strength and there were long lines of people waiting outside the club. But there was one discordant note during the Vanguard engagement. During one intermission, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, who was strongly identified with the rising avant-garde movement, went to the dressing room and asked if he could ‘sit in’ with the band. Outside, in the club, people near the dressing room door could hear an argument. The dispute seemed to have been settled, however, and Miles and the band started their next set by playing the old tune, ‘Four’. But when Wayne Shorter finished his solo, Archie Shepp walked out of the shadows playing his tenor and sat in with the band. Miles Davis simply melted away and was not seen again that evening. Accounts of the occasion said that Shepp’s playing sparked Miles’s group into new vitality, but Miles himself must have had a most unpleasant shock. Up to this point, musicians of most styles and persuasions had always shown the utmost respect for his musical standards, and his ability, and the idea of sitting in with the band was unthinkable – especially if the leader had expressly objected to it. Now, it seemed that there was a new generation of musicians who were not in awe of Miles Davis.
There was at this period an even greater discrepancy between Miles’s live performances and his studio recordings. On gigs, he was still playing the old tunes, but in the studio, beginning with ESP, he was recording much fresh material. During the next two years, he released only three albums: Miles Smiles in 1966, and The Sorcerer and Nefertiti in 1967, and these three albums, with ESP, defined an area of abstraction which many jazz musicians are still exploring to this day. The essence of this way of playing is as follows. A melodic fragment sets up the theme of the performance: a pulse (usually 4/4 or 3/4), a tempo, and a series of phrases is played against that pulse. The improvisations are explorations of these factors posited by the theme, and so the soloist tends to refer back to thematic fragments. Paradoxically, this ‘advance’ in concept is a return to roots, because it is a movement away from the harmonic improvisations of bebop and post-bop jazz, and towards the melodic (and rhythmic) improvisation that was characteristic of the swing era and earlier jazz forms. The approach to improvisation set up by Miles’s mid-1960s group came to be referred to as ‘time – no changes’, because there was a pulse but no set harmonic sequence. In fact, the soloist was free to play any kind of melodic shapes he wished because the bass and piano players were using their ears to follow wherever his inspiration took him.
Miles Smiles carries on the exploration of abstraction, but the music is fleshed out by powerfully surging rhythms. Again, there is a harking back to roots with the physical pulse of the multiple rhythms. ‘Footprints’, a Wayne Shorter composition, is another reworking of the blues, this time in the tonality of C, and an ostinato bass line gives the piece coherence. Another powerful performance is ‘Freedom Jazz Dance’, a composition by saxophonist Eddie Harris. The theme is a sort of abstraction from the blues in that an angular phrase is played and then echoed with a slight variation (the ‘call’), and then the ‘response’ is a brilliant melodic line that weaves its angular and chromatic way up to a high stab note. For many people, ‘Footprints’ and ‘Freedom Jazz Dance’ expressed the musical essence of a period; they created reference points, standards against which other performances were judged.
It is difficult to say exactly why Miles’s next two albums, The Sorcerer and Nefertiti, were not so satisfying. The playing is remarkably fresh and free from cliché, and an extremely high level of invention is sustained by everyone. Most of the themes are written by Wayne Shorter, and his highly original melodic shapes obviously inspired the players. There are also one or two fine themes written by Hancock and Tony Williams, but Miles is credited with no compositions on either album. The causes of dissatisfaction lie in the atmosphere and feeling of the music in general. There’s a curious lack of abandon, a kind of self-consciousness, as if the musicians were all outside the music watching themselves playing. There’s an almost wilful avoidance of cliché, a kind of ‘creativity at all costs’ atmosphere, and the music seems to be veering more towards cerebral Western concepts. On the fast pieces, tension is continually created and rarely released, because the pulse is perpetually ‘creatively’ disturbed, and the soloists resolutely avoid repetition or any harmonic resolution of phrases. And on the slower pieces there is sometimes a monotony of mood, an oppressively effete melancholia. The most memorable performances are the ones which experiment with structure: Shorter’s ‘Nefertiti’ and ‘Fall’, both of which feature the whole quintet throughout, with no solos as such. The former is striking in that Shorter’s superb melody is repeated by the horns throughout, and the dynamism of the performance consists in the continual reaction of the rhythm section to the phrases of the tune. Both this piece and ‘Fall’ are considerably less abstract than the other pieces on the two albums, and feature strong tonalities and repetitions or ostinati which enhance the improvised movement.
This whole period was one in which Miles Davis was absorbing the influences and ideas of his sidemen. Shorter’s unusually imaginative melodic themes were both evocative and inspiring, and Miles was also feeding off the improvising of his fertile young musicians. This must have been one of the reasons why he wrote nothing for these two albums. Yet, according to Herbie Hancock, Davis was entirely responsible for the concept of the music. Hancock said:
I don’t know why he didn’t write so much, but on the other hand, his influence on the compositions was as though he’d written them. I didn’t know Miles before 1963, but he’s a master at being able to conceptualize a composition – someone else’s composition – understand the heart of it and reshape it to get the most value out of it – musically and from a musician’s standpoint, because we have to play it, so it has to be interesting enough for us to want to play it and be stimulated by it . . . in a composition there are certain things you can do that reach outwards towards the audience . . . in the dynamics, in the contrasts . . . and Miles knows how to do that . . . how to leave things out . . . because they’re provocative, not only for us, but also for the audience.
But in 1967, Miles Davis was again at a crossroads, and this may explain why the two albums of that year seem somehow incomplete, as if they are preparations for something else. Earlier in the year, Gil Evans had said that Miles was even toying with the idea of leading a big band, but this venture was never to materialize in the way in which Evans imagined. By the end of the year, not only Miles, but the whole American jazz scene was at a kind of crossroads because the USA had been gripped by rock and roll fever. On 16 July 1967, the jazz scene had also lost one of its most vital leaders; John Coltrane, Miles’s old friend, died of cancer of the liver at the height of his powers and his fame. This left Miles Davis as the most eligible man to provide some kind of leadership for an ailing, unconfident jazz scene.