Miles Davis

‘I have to change. It’s like a curse.’¹

Miles Davis

In 1966, Miles Davis became forty years old, and he became a grandfather. Although Miles’s prestige was still high, his popularity had begun to decline. Also, his consistently excellent music was beginning to be taken for granted, and the press notices and reviews of albums tended to be more perfunctory. Furthermore, his record sales were falling off. Clive Davis, president of Columbia Records at the time, has said that Miles’s sales dropped to around 40,000 or 50,000 per album, whereas a few years previously he’d always sold more than 100,000 and sometimes more than 150,000. There were also rumours that he was not so well off financially. In Music Maker, September 1966, one Pat Sanchez wrote: ‘For the past two or three years he has worked so irregularly that much of his fortune is said to have evaporated. Sometimes the unemployment has been a matter of choice . . . At other times illness has been the genuine cause of his problems.’ In fact, Miles had been again laid up for the first two months of that year with a liver infection and was unable to work until March.

Leonard Feather’s Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties was published in 1966, and in a fairly long entry on Miles, Feather summed up his present position: ‘Davis’s major contributions as soloist and as orchestral innovator were made in the 1950s . . . Although his combos in recent years have rarely produced any significant new group music, the solo contributions of leader and sideman alike have assured their lasting importance.’ This was the general view of Miles Davis at the time, and musicians were beginning to mutter – as they had done at other stages of his career – that he was finished, that he’d reached the end of the road and would have to spend the rest of his life repeating himself and reworking the ground he had already covered. But Miles had brought a whole new dimension to the jazz life: the idea of sustained conceptual development. Up to this point, nearly all jazz instrumentalists who were innovators had developed their enlargement of the language in their youth as the natural outcome of their animal spirits and buoyancy. After ten years, or fewer, in music, they became prisoners bounded by the walls of their self-made creative compounds. Perhaps the only other musician who had shrugged off this pattern and sought for greater conceptual freedom was John Coltrane. Significantly, he had begun his first really creative phase at the late age of twenty-nine, when he joined Miles’s quintet in 1955. After finally leaving Miles Davis, he had pursued an intense programme of exploration, development and change, terminated by his death in 1967. But towards the end of his life he had confessed to a fellow saxophonist, ‘I can’t find anything new to play,’ echoing the dilemma of Charlie Parker. Coltrane’s truly creative life had spanned only about twelve years, whereas Miles already had behind him some twenty-two years of constant change and search.

So by the end of 1967, Coltrane was dead, and Miles was still king – if perhaps a jaded and precarious one – of the jazz world. But that world itself was losing currency, and one of the reasons for this was the momentous rise of rock music. And the leading force in this new movement was none other than Miles Davis’s own record company: Columbia. When Clive Davis joined Columbia Records in 1960 as one of the company’s two corporate lawyers, Miles was already one of their biggest stars. In particular, three of his albums – Porgy and Bess, Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain – had established him as one of the best-selling jazz artists of all time, and therefore one of the company’s mainstays. And this was remarkable, because Columbia’s general policy at the time, under the guidance of Mitch Miller, was to promote and produce middle-of-the-road (MOR) music. Their steady large profits came from such things as albums of Broadway musicals by entertainers who were heavily exposed to the general public. Their two biggest artists, for example, were Barbra Streisand and Andy Williams. But this comfortable situation was destroyed in the early 1960s when the Beatles burst on the scene and, with their clean-cut, boys-next-door image, made pop (later rock) respectable as well as exciting.

Radio play is, of course, the life-blood of record sales, and by 1965, Top Forty air time had given way to the Beatles, to Peter, Paul and Mary, to Joan Baez, and to Bob Dylan. MOR music was getting hardly any exposure at all, and the effect of this was immediately apparent in Columbia’s sales. In the early part of the decade, they had had eleven gold discs virtually in succession, each album having earned over $1,000,000. But in the mid-1960s their sales slumped to a mere 75,000 per album. Faced with this crisis, even the most reactionary elements in Columbia were forced to capitulate to rock music.

In 1966, Clive Davis was made vice-president and general manager, and he began systematically signing up rock stars for Columbia. His first acquisition was the British artist, Donovan. A year later, the Monterey Pop Festival gave even more impetus to the rock scene, and Columbia were now signing groups for advances of up to $15,000. Laura Nyro and Janis Joplin also went to Columbia, and the company, by the end of 1968, was clearly established as the leader of the record industry. Record sales were once more being measured in millions and their stars were playing to huge audiences right across the country. Clive Davis had acquired Blood, Sweat and Tears for an advance of $25,000, but in 1969 the financial stakes escalated dramatically when he signed Johnny Winter for an advance of $300,000 for six albums over a three-year period.

The huge sums of money and the general atmosphere of frantic excitement at Columbia were relegating Miles Davis to the status of fringe artist so far as his record company was concerned. To make matters worse, the relegation was not merely financial. Part of Columbia’s excitement was not just monetary; it was the thrill of trail-blazing, of creating and opening up new areas of musical exploitation. Rock music, with its massive amplification, its use of electronics, its thrusting rhythms, and its flamboyant stars with their colourful clothes and rebellious images, had become central to the whole era – the music of the 1960s – just as jazz had been the music of the previous decade, though its popularity had never reached the enormous proportions that rock was now enjoying. And at the end of the 1950s, Columbia, with its easy-listening music policy, had had only one great trail-blazer with a world-wide influence and audience: Miles Davis.

Miles had been their man with his finger on the pulse of the age, but this was no longer the case, and he was being shunted into the sidings of ‘art’ music and mentally bracketed with the company’s ‘serious’ catalogue. Columbia were loyal to him, of course; they could not forget his great past, but they didn’t seem to think he had much of a future. He was a prized possession, a trophy almost, but not exactly a prime asset. This was probably the reason Columbia had made an attempt to change their marketing image of Miles. The Byronic and brooding black man was exchanged for Miles Smiles, and on the cover of that album there was a photograph of Davis doing exactly that. The cover of Nefertiti had an exotic close-up of Miles on the front with bare torso and a kerchief knotted round his neck, and on the back another photo of him in elegant, casual clothes, sitting on his enormous fur-covered bed. The soberly suited successful-American-businessman image had been kicked out along with the Byronic brooding – but only from record sleeves at this time: in public performances Miles was, sartorially speaking, still his old conservative, though sharp self.

Clive Davis described the Miles–Colombia relationship as he saw it:

In the process of becoming the star of the jazz world, he’d acquired some expensive habits: exotic cars, beautiful women, high fashion clothes, unusual homes. He’d also gotten in the habit of calling Columbia regularly for advances. I decided to subsidize him. I felt that he contributed to Columbia’s jazz and progressive music roster just as Vladimir Horowitz contributed to our classical list. It eventually got to be our problem, however. Fifty thousand albums barely takes you out of red ink. We began to give Miles additional money each time he recorded an album; we weren’t making any money at all.2

Elsewhere in the jazz world, a certain disquiet was becoming apparent, and a few of the more perceptive observers of the scene were beginning to look around for new directions. Down Beat was still the leading music magazine in 1966 – Rolling Stone began a year later – and in the 15 December issue, Mike Zwerin, the old associate of Miles’s who had played on the first Birth of the Cool sessions, wrote:

Jazz is going to have to make some adjustments, I think, with the electronic world of rock and roll if it is to retain its validity as a reflection of contemporary life . . . Increasingly sophisticated electronic devices are being introduced by a few groups that sometimes can swing very hard as well as improvise around a free and dissonant form of the blues. They swing and they improvise, and that – according to my definition – is jazz.

Twelve months later, an article under the headline ‘Death of an American Art?’ appeared in the Louisville Times. The writer, Jim Morrissey, said of Sorcerer: ‘This is the first Miles Davis record that left me cold.’ And he comments on the jazz scene in general:

My complaint is that too many of the jazz greats are producing non-communicating music. They get deeper and deeper in their own bag where fewer and fewer of their fans hang out. There must be some kind of wedding between jazz and some of the solid contemporary sounds that are evolving out of the early rock and roll garbage. Twenty years ago jazz was pop music. Today it has only a small proportion of the public on its side.3

This impassioned plea in a regional paper came shortly after the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival had clinched the arrival of progressive rock on the national scene, and introduced a gawping world to the brand-new concepts of Peace and Love, flower-power, and hippiedom.

The jazz scene itself was in disarray, and thus was not facing these potent new developments with a united front. It was split, broadly speaking, into two factions: on the one hand the avant-garde, and on the other, the majority of musicians making a living working veins which had been pioneered years previously. The situation was further complicated by a strong racist element. The newer faces in the avant-garde – notably Archie Shepp and Albert Aylen – in an attempt to expose white exploitation of jazz musicians, and possibly also to dislocate conventional thinking on the matter, were identifying themselves with the oppressed black population. They disassociated themselves from the word ‘jazz’ and called their music ‘black music’.

Miles Davis, as usual, stood alone in this controversy and openly criticized both factions. As Leonard Feather put it, he had taken small-group improvisation to such a peak of brilliance that he had nowhere to look except down. He was disaffected with the more conventional scene because he rarely saw evidence of real direction and imagination in it; and he deeply disliked much of the avant-garde music he heard, for the same reasons. His attitude to both sides is clearly expressed in another blindfold test in 1968. As he had done in the similar test four years earlier, he severely criticized every piece played to him, except one; in this case, by the pop group Fifth Dimension. His comments are interesting because they show the kind of criteria he applied to his own work at this time. Of the track ‘On the Que-Tee’ from Freddie Hubbard’s album, Backlash, Miles commented:

No kind of sound, straight sound, no imagination. Freddie’s a great trumpet player, but if he had some kind of other direction to go . . . if you place a guy in a spot where he has to do something else, other than what he can do, so he can do that. He’s got to have something that challenges his imagination, far above what he thinks he’s going to play, and what it might lead into, then above that, so he won’t be fighting when things change. That’s what I tell all musicians; I tell them to be ready to play what you know and play above what you know. Anything might happen above what you’ve been used to playing – you’re ready to get into that, and above that, and take that out.4

In this same blindfold test, Miles also dismissed a track by the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis band, though he did have a few kind words to say about Thad. Two groups, therefore, one small and one a big band, from the younger (Hubbard) and the older generation, both highly regarded by most of the jazz community, held little interest for Miles Davis. He was disgusted with contemporary/mainstream jazz; but his dislike of the so-called ‘avant-garde’ was even stronger and his condemnation more vitriolic. Feather played him ‘The Funeral’ from Archie Shepp in Europe, and Miles commented:

People are so gullible – they go for that – they go for something they don’t know about . . . because they feel it’s not hip not to go for it. But if something sounds terrible, man, a person should have enough respect for his own mind to say it doesn’t sound good. It doesn’t to me, and I’m not going to listen to it. No matter how long you listen to it, it doesn’t sound any good. . . . and people will go for it – especially white people. They go for anything ridiculous like that.⁵

In the above diatribe, Miles was making two clear points: first, he didn’t see any value in the music; second, he didn’t rate it as ‘black’ music because it seemed to get the bulk of its response from white audiences. Such audiences are, of course, steeped in the Western notion of artistic progress, which extrapolates its values from industrial technology in which the latest model is not only the best (of engines, machines etc.), but also makes previous models redundant. Gil Evans, discussing the same problem in 1967, said: ‘There’s an old saying, I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said it, “I am better than you are, because I was born after you.” I see this happening all the time.’6 But the values of technology simply do not work in art. Shaw’s plays did not invalidate Shakespeare’s; Miles’s great sextet recordings of 1958 and 1959 did not invalidate his quintet albums of 1956; the advent of Dizzy Gillespie in no way diminished the greatness of Louis Armstrong’s recordings of the late 1920s. By 1968, the movement started by Ornette Coleman had been in existence for nine years – long enough for anyone, including Miles, to make up his mind about it. Davis had always believed in progress and development, but he had always been aware of his roots. He did not jettison; he added to what he already knew, and each stage of his development contained the essence of his previous stages. He seemed to view truly creative activity as a recurrent three-stage process: first, you start with what you know (and his criticism of many musicians would probably be that they stay with what they know); then you get into new and less familiar areas; in the third stage, the new area is absorbed and becomes familiar. Then the process starts all over again. This is the way Miles had proceeded throughout his career to date.

He had always had wide musical interests, ranging from the classics and ‘serious’ music to ethnic music of various kinds. He was deeply interested in Spanish music and he knew something of pre-jazz American music such as the rural and urban blues, gospel and worksongs. He had often expressed his distaste for the word ‘jazz’ and his dislike of the limitations theorists put upon it. His albums had enlarged the whole idea of what an improvising musician could do and of the contexts he could use, and several times, particularly towards the end of the 1950s with Sketches of Spain, his music had forced some critics to ask, ‘Is it jazz?’ There can be no doubt that he enjoyed the confusion he caused in inflexible minds. Even in the late 1960s, jazz criticism was still largely the preserve of whites, and now Miles was moving yet further away from any white critical standpoint, and into some area of which he seemed to be the sole inhabitant. He was moving away from his old musical associates and away from the younger generation of musicians – except, of course, for those in his own group.

During the 1968 blindfold test, Leonard Feather must have felt quite confused when they came to the only track which Davis liked and which he deemed worthy of a proper critique. This was ‘Prologue, the Magic Garden’ by Fifth Dimension. Miles commented:

That record is planned, you know. It’s like when I do things, it’s planned and you lead into other things. It makes sense. It had different sounds in the voicing, and they’re using the stereo . . . coming out from different sides and different people making statements . . . That’s the way you should record! . . . I liked the composition and the arrangement. It’s Jim Webb and the Fifth Dimension. It could be a little smoother – they push it too hard for the singers. You don’t have to push that hard. When you push, you get a raggedy edge, and the edge gives another vibration. I liked the instrumental introduction too. We did things like that on Porgy and Bess – just played parts of things.7

During the later 1960s, Herbie Hancock was probably closer musically to Miles than anyone else except Gil Evans. Hancock had already written his popular hit, a rhythm and blues piece called ‘Watermelon Man’, and his musical interests were wide, ranging from Stockhausen, Bartók and Stravinsky to pop music. He was, for a jazz musician, remarkably unprejudiced and never made a generic condemnation of music of any kind, preferring to listen to and judge any piece on its own merits. Talking of rock and pop music, he said:

I think it’s become very artful . . . the Beatles, for example: some of their songs are very artful. And Dionne Warwick, James Brown, Mary Wells, Smokey and the Miracles, the Supremes . . . I like all kinds of music, and there are certain types that are directly related to me. Rhythm and blues is part of my own personal background, not just from being a teenager during the time rhythm and blues first started, but because I’m a Negro; and so far as pop music is concerned, it is probably basic to everybody’s listening.8

Rhythm and blues was still providing a link between black musicians of all generations; Miles himself had started out with such a group. This experience and his general musical interests coincided almost exactly with those of Hancock.

But an even greater shock awaited Leonard Feather when he visited Miles Davis in a Hollywood hotel in 1968. He wrote: ‘I found strewn around the room records or tape cartridges by James Brown, Dionne Warwick, Tony Bennett, the Byrds, Aretha Franklin, and Fifth Dimension. Not a single jazz instrumental.’⁹ The names all have two things in common: the artists were very popular, and they were all noted for musical quality of one kind or another. James Brown was the king of soul music, Aretha Franklin the queen, and Fifth Dimension leading exponents of rock music. The Byrds were an extremely musical white group who came out of Los Angeles and made their reputation by ‘covering’ Bob Dylan hits. Dionne Warwick was a superb singer who showed a Billie Holiday influence, but with strong soul overtones. Her repertoire consisted mainly of songs and arrangements written by Burt Bacharach, probably one of the most gifted songwriters of the century. Tony Bennett sang in the Sinatra vein, and to that extent was the odd man out on the list. The popularity, the musical quality were there, but he was much closer to the night club type of intimate ‘torch’ singing than the others, and his audience was most probably predominantly white. As Miles had done in the previous decade, these artists were all proving that it was possible to make excellent music and still be successful commercially. The difference was that Miles had done it with purely instrumental music, whereas now, in the middle and later 1960s, the emphasis was heavily on vocal music. The basic problem facing Miles Davis and all other jazz musicians was how to reinstate instrumental music as a major force on equal terms with the ubiquitous vocal groups.

Meanwhile, the internal dilemma of jazz – a kind of tribal warfare between reactionary and avant-garde elements – seemed to be taking everyone’s mind off this central problem. The split, and the wider problem of the relationship of artist and audience, had been starkly revealed in October 1967, when the Miles Davis Quintet and the Archie Shepp Quintet shared the same bill at the Jazz Expo concert in London. Miles elected to play first because, so the story went, he said that he didn’t want to play to an audience of sick people – the implication being that they would be sick after listening to the Shepp group. The Hammersmith Odeon has a capacity of 3,500, and both houses were packed. The mystique surrounding Miles was still strong, and this was only his second visit to the UK; it was seven years since he had last played there. A large proportion of the audience was there to see the Miles they knew – the Miles of the live albums, and of the famous quintets and sextets of the 1950s. At the same time, much space in the musical press had been devoted to the avant-garde movement, and many of the audience had come because they wanted to hear Archie Shepp.

The curtain rose to reveal Miles Davis wearing an impeccably tailored russet-coloured suit and a neat collar and tie. The rest of the quintet – Shorter, Hancock, Carter and Williams – were wearing dinner jackets and black bow-ties. This reassured the audience; it was what everyone expected, because the image and presentation had been exactly the same during Miles’s previous visit. There was that same statuesque quality about the group, a kind of rapt intensity that created the impression that their external stillness, their apparent obliviousness to the audience, were symptomatic of violent internal (imaginative) activity. The audience were expecting a series of fairly short pieces, probably including ‘So What’, ‘Walkin”, and some famous ballad such as ‘My Funny Valentine’ or ‘Stella by Starlight’, all of which would be given the usual jazz formula of ‘theme–solos–reprise of theme’. The atmosphere was pregnant with anticipation of the familiar.

But the audience was doomed to a certain disappointment. Miles had moved on musically, and both his subject matter and his method were foreign to the majority of his listeners. He played one long, continuous set lasting about an hour, and during its course, one or two familiar themes appeared and disappeared. There was a wisp of “Round Midnight’ and some themes from Miles Smiles; there were obvious tonal centres; there were solos; but the drums boiled and bubbled, keeping up a continuous dialogue with whatever else was happening, and the group played brilliant collective improvisations without ever getting into the really tight rhythmic grooves for which Miles was, and is, justly famous. In other words, there was never any proper release of the immense tension that was generated, and because of this, the audience were denied the satisfaction of complicity in the performance. Instead, they were kept on the outside – respectful, attentive, but not really involved. When the curtain fell, the applause was warm, but somewhat mystified.

The second half of the concert was a very different affair. Everything about Archie Shepp’s group was the antithesis of Miles’s quintet. They wore casual, colourful, flamboyant clothes, and Shepp capped his anarchic regalia with a brightly-hued fez. They bobbed, weaved and moved vigorously as they played, giving an impression of great physical effort. From the first notes of Shepp’s tenor, they plunged into a total, non-tonal freak-out with raving horns and rolling drums, which lasted all of twenty minutes. For the first five minutes it was a tremendously dramatic experience, but soon numerous sections of the audience became very restless, and many people walked out. It was ‘energy’ music with a vengeance, and it was totally iconoclastic: a complete rejection of the whole jazz/bourgeois/white/Western tradition. The audience reactions were extreme. As opposed to the numbers (and they were a minority) who walked out in angry disgust, there were those who stayed either out of curiosity or to cheer. From the first half of the evening, when the audience had been excluded from the performance and given the role of mystified outsiders watching a sacred and barely comprehensible ritual, the situation had changed radically: the audience were now being forced to commit themselves to either total rejection or to some kind of acceptance of the event.

The one musical element which Archie Shepp’s and Miles Davis’s concerts had in common was that they both played continuous sets with much internal movement. In other words, the structure of their performance was organic, arising largely out of group interplay, and the time continuum was non-Western in the sense that there were no real beginnings and endings, but a soundstream giving the impression of an eternal ebb and flow. There were, however, several extra-musical elements in Shepp’s concert which helped to account for the fact that a substantial section of the audience was able to identify with his group. First of all, his performance was essentially a theatrical event (Shepp was actually a dramatist of some repute), which was heightened by its context – appearing after Miles’s group, which seemed to be setting up most of the values Shepp was about to knock down. The clothes and mannerisms of Shepp’s group were those of the younger generation, and his musicians’ physical involvement with the music was nearer to the extrovert atmosphere of the rock scene. Also, the younger generation in the latter half of the 1960s worshipped iconoclasm – the smashing of traditional attitudes and old cultural mores. It was a case of épater les vieux. Many of Shepp’s supporters enjoyed the discomfort of the members of the audience who walked out. The shattering of dreams, illusions and expectations was made concrete by the visual appearance of the group on stage and by the reactions of outraged listeners.

By the end of 1968, rock hysteria had reached a peak in America, and jazz was experiencing an all-time low. In August of that year, Dave Holland, the young English bass player, joined the Miles Davis Quintet in place of Ron Carter, and was astonished by what he found:

When I joined the band, it was on a sort of decline in America. We played a lot of clubs where there were sort of thirty or forty people in the audience in a night. We played gigs out in San Francisco in, I think it was September of that year . . . and I was amazed that so few people would come. I thought that, working with Miles, it would be a packed house every time. We played Basie’s – the first gig I did – well, that was full. There were always places that were like that. We played places that were packed. But . . . I thought that Miles felt it necessary to make another move. There was definitely that period where Miles said to himself, ‘I’ve got to make a change. There’s got to be a change in the music.’

The situation was rapidly becoming like that of the 1930s, when big bands had dominated the scene and small groups found themselves out of context and without prospects. It was in the 1930s, for example, that King Oliver ended his days as janitor of a pool room, and clarinettist Johnny Dodds had to work as a taxi driver and play only in his spare time. In that decade, jazz musicians were faced with the choice of either joining some orchestra, if they were flexible enough and good enough sight-readers, or taking some other kind of employment. But in the later 1960s, the problem was much more serious, because the whole financial basis of instrumental music was being undermined. During the 1930s, the big names such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and the Dorsey brothers managed to survive and stay in the limelight by leading big bands. But thirty years later, it looked as if even the big names – and Miles’s was one of the very biggest – might find themselves scuffling for work. There was, of course, no chance at all of jazz receiving the kind of massive state subsidy that so-called ‘serious’ music enjoys and without which it would cease to be performed.

Although the outlook was bleak, one jazz group in particular was doing very well: a quartet led by saxophonist Charles Lloyd. Miles Davis shared the bill at the Village Gate with Lloyd’s quartet in early 1968 and said of it: ‘Charles Lloyd . . . has a good group.’10 Both Tony Williams and Ron Carter had recorded with Lloyd during their period with Miles, and Lloyd’s current group included pianist Keith Jarrett and drummer Jack DeJohnette, both of whom were to play and record with Davis a few years later. The Charles Lloyd Quartet was an acoustic unit, but its performance covered a wide area of expression, ranging from freely improvised passages to wildly swinging jazz pieces reminiscent of the Adderley group, rock-based blues and pieces with a strong soul or gospel tinge. Lloyd and Jarrett wrote most of the themes, but their repertoire also included an occasional rock/pop song such as the Lennon and McCartney tune, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’. George Avakian, the man who had signed Miles for Columbia in the 1950s and produced Miles Ahead, signed up Lloyd for Atlantic Records, and made sure that the quartet was promoted as vigorously as if it had been a rock group. He persuaded Atlantic to invest money in buying advertising space, giving press conferences, and making sure that anyone who could or would write reviews was able to attend the concerts. Avakian also ensured that the group appeared at prestige concerts of all kinds, and after a resounding success at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1966, he engineered an event the following spring that was to win over rock audiences for the quartet. Avakian tells the story:

Coming virtually from nowhere, as Lloyd had done, he was a man without a past and with all the future before him. For Miles Davis, with his credentials as one of the leading musicians of the previous twenty years, a precipitate move was out of the question; nor was it his style. Despite his reputation for impulsive, self-willed behaviour, when it came to music, he never moved until he was absolutely sure of his ground. Each step had always to be carefully tested and secured. Things were becoming pressing, however, because of poor record sales and the dwindling jazz club scene. Clark Terry said of Miles at this time: ‘I happen to know that there was a period when in spite of all his many possessions – investments, home, car – there was a period when he needed to bolster these; he really needed to get into a higher financial bracket.’12 And this was corroborated by Clive Davis when he stated that Columbia began to give Miles additional money each time he recorded an album, and went on to say:

Miles nevertheless called constantly to ask for more. He has a raspy, low voice – a fiery whisper that conveys heat over the telephone while you are straining to find out how much money he wants. He is spellbinding, and he can talk. After a while, the money business got to be a sort of joke. For Miles called often – sometimes urgently – and I had to figure out each time if he was serious. Walter Dean got some of his calls too . . . sometimes he spent hours on the phone listening to that hoarse, almost demonic voice and dodging its monetary thrusts.¹³

Miles Davis knew one fundamental truth about the record industry: companies will promote only after they have invested money in their artists. Also, the amount of promotion is proportionate to the amount of investment. Artists’ quality means little; it is their price that calls the tune. By demanding more money, Miles was simply raising the stakes. But he did not confine his attack to the internal machinery of his own record company; he began making himself accessible to journalists of all kinds, so that at the end of the 1960s he was talking in print even more than he had done at the beginning of the decade. He attacked and criticized the status quo, the record companies, and the rising white rock groups whose success was diminishing the status of black artists. It was bitterly ironical that rock music, which came from rhythm and blues roots, was beginning to undermine black soul music. Billboard, on 6 December 1969, reported:

A few months ago, soul records made up as much as forty per cent or more of the playlists of some top forty stations. Today, George Wilson, a Vice President of Bartell Broadcasting and program director of WOKY in Milwaukee, has only five records in his top thirty-six that are by black artists. A couple of these are the Supremes and the Fifth Dimension, who are considered pop artists rather than soul artists . . . The college kids a few months ago used to dig soul because they thought it was hip. But I think the growth in popularity of progressive rock on the campuses has hurt soul.

At this time, the civil rights movement was rapidly gaining momentum. The decade had begun with ‘Negroes’ asking for their rights, with sit-ins, boycotts and marches; it ended with ‘blacks’ demanding their rights, with riots, demonstrations and a series of assassinations. As a leading black citizen, Miles Davis couldn’t possibly allow himself to be shunted into a cultural backwater by Columbia. Furthermore, he was now in search of a black audience. Until now, his audience and his record-buying public had been largely white. Only a tiny minority of blacks knew anything about him at all, and he felt this keenly. A few years later, he said: ‘I don’t care who buys the records as long as they get to the black people, so I will be remembered when I die.’14 If Columbia regarded him as they did their classical music roster, Miles Davis would never get to the black audience at all.

As early as 1966, Miles was complaining in the black magazine Jet: ‘I get awards all over the world. What I need now is some rewards.’¹⁵ And a year or two later, he is complaining bitterly to Clive Davis about his treatment at the hands of Columbia:

Then one day Miles called me to complain about his record sales. He was tired of low sales, and angry about it. Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago had borrowed enormously from him – and sold millions. These young white artists – he was in a rather militant frame of mind – were cashing in while he was struggling from advance to advance. If you stop calling me a jazz man, he said at one point, and just sell me alongside these other people, I’ll sell more. In part, I agreed with him.16

By the beginning of 1969, Miles had formed a relationship with a black-owned marketing and public relations firm called New Wave Communications, and was ready to launch a full-blooded campaign. Its immediate aim was to suggest that Columbia should set up a special marketing programme with several black promotion and talent agencies. The idea was to promote black Columbia artists in the black community through records, concerts and night clubs. As one of the New Wave officials put it: ‘The trouble with a company like Columbia is that when they get a good black artist they don’t promote him. And they spend very little money with the black media.’¹⁷

Miles took these steps because he was faced with only two alternatives: to be on top, or to be very much the underdog. His position in American society was not static; you do not stand still, you move up or down. In the middle and later 1960s he was moving down, and he was doing everything in his power to reverse that movement. The key to that was to increase his white audience and to create for the first time a substantial black audience for his music. Dave Holland put it in the following way:

He wants to be rich, he wants to be powerful, and the only way to do that is to be on top in the profession. He wasn’t prepared to be a memory – somebody to go and see because you used to dig him. He wanted to be somebody who appealed to the generation that’s happening now. And he’s always done this, I’ve noticed. He always makes music which goes right to the next generation.

Two things always seemed to presage a major change in Miles Davis’s music: a tendency to write much more of the music himself, and a closer association with Gil Evans. On his last two albums, none of the compositions had been attributed to him, and even if he had reshaped all the pieces written by his sidemen, the fact remains that the germ of all the pieces came from them and not from Miles. But suddenly, with Miles in the Sky, he is writing again, Gil Evans is once more involved in, as he called it, ‘midwifing’ pieces, and Miles’s two compositions, ‘Stuff’ and ‘Country Son’, take up well over half the playing time of the album. Dave Holland comments on Miles’s renewed writing activity, which began with this album and was to increase in intensity over the next two or three years: ‘I think he started writing more then, because only he knew what he wanted to do at that point. I don’t think anybody else really understood.’ And Teo Macero recalled the following pep-talk:

For a long time he didn’t write any music, and I said, ‘Look, you’re one son-of-a-bitch that I know can write better than anybody else – I don’t care who it is – you wanna get off your ass, get a piece of paper and a couple of pencils, and get home and write some goddam music. Why get somebody else to write your music? You’ve got the talent; you’re a very creative artist.’ He didn’t know quite how to take this. I said, ‘You’ve got more talent than anybody I know. You can create better than anybody I know, but you’re too goddam lazy!’ Well, I tell you, he went home, and then there was a period when every record that came out was written by Miles Davis.

Throughout his career to date, the instrumentation of Miles’s small groups had remained more or less the same. It had usually been the classic post-war line-up of trumpet, tenor or alto sax, piano, double bass, drums, and occasionally an extra saxophone or trombone. But for Miles in the Sky, he now began introducing other instrumental sounds. For the first time, he used electric guitar, electric piano, and electric bass guitar – the last instrument hitherto associated only with rock and pop music and rhythm and blues. But this new departure is done with his customary caution; the guitar is used only on ‘Paraphernalia’, and the electric piano and bass guitar only on ‘Stuff’. Miles had been thinking of the electric keyboard for some time, and when Joe Zawinul had started using one with Cannonball’s group, Davis had flown all the way to Mexico City to hear the sound of this new instrument in context. Zawinul tells the story:

We played Mexico City and he wanted to hear that because ‘Mercy Mercy’ [Adderley’s hit record] had just come out on the radio, and he just wanted to hear it. Funny, man, that night the electricity broke down in Mexico City and there was no electric piano! And Miles said, ‘Hey, man, I come here washed and clean, and then the goddam piano ain’t working!’

Miles in the Sky is a transitional album referring back to the concepts of the previous two, but looking forward in that it set up new criteria and changed the role of the instruments. One piece, ‘Black Comedy’, composed by Tony Williams, is very much in the manner of the preceding two albums with a scheme so skeletal as to be little more than a fragmentary riff, and a series of highly abstract solos. It is familiar territory to the musicians and they play it with confidence and panache. Miles’s solo is especially potent, and Tony Williams keeps up an unfailing dialogue with the rest of the action. But ‘Black Comedy’ is the only track that looks back in this way. Wayne Shorter’s composition, ‘Paraphernalia’, is in brisk 4/4 with a section in 3/4. During the solos, the 4/4 section is of indeterminate length (open bars), and the 3/4 section, which has a set length, is cued in when the soloist plays certain phrases. On this piece, George Benson’s guitar is used to add texture and colouring to the rhythmic feel, and for most of the performance, which is in the tonality of D, Benson simply repeats a rhythmic figure using single strings and working on octaves of the root. To circumscribe the role of an instrument so severely shows a great change in Miles’s thinking. The guitar’s role is entirely supportive, and there is a similar change in the role of the drums. For the most part, Tony Williams is confined to a steady ostinato on hi-hat and cymbals, and though he does depart from this at intervals, using the rest of the drumkit to create multiple rhythms in reaction to the soloists, it is his straight time-playing which gives the track identity and life.

It was commonly believed, in contemporary jazz circles in the 1960s, that if all members of a group were outstanding improvisers, then everyone should be seen and heard to be creating on an equal basis; no one should be ‘relegated’ to a supportive role. It was this attitude which lay behind Tony Williams’s drum dialogues with the rest of the group, which was what usually happened in live performances right up until he left Miles in the spring of 1969. In the recording studio, however, from now on things were never going to be quite the same again. Miles Davis seemed to be turning away from the idea that creativity manifests itself in a perpetually inventive way of disturbing (and disguising) the pulse of a piece of music. Instead, he was turning towards the non-Western practice of a very clear, unambiguous pulse, and rhythmic repetition, which creates a continuum in which all kinds of musical events, including rhythmic variations, can take place. Tension can then be created and released by the superimposition of one rhythm on another, by changes in rhythm, and by moving out of a regular time-feel altogether. Drama would occur when the listener suddenly became more aware of the pulse, or of its absence, or of a new pulse.

With Miles’s composition, ‘Stuff’, this becomes much more obvious because the whole piece is based on a rock beat. This direction had been indicated by the track ‘Eighty-One’ on ESP, but Miles had chosen to ignore it while he explored the more abstract areas that album had opened up. ‘Stuff’ is a long piece, occupying well over half a side of the album – and Tony Williams lays down a funky eight-to-the-bar cymbal beat all the way, spicing it now and then with some rapid fill-ins. Only occasionally do his convoluted rhythms become oblique to the basic pulse, and when they do, they are made much more dramatic simply because they are juxtaposed with his long stretches of straight time-playing. Hancock’s electric piano chording is spare and very funky; he understands this idiom completely. The theme, which is full of melodic fragments, displaced accents, slurs, smears and trills, is some 164 bars long and takes almost six minutes to play. This nicely sets up that hypnotic, repetitive, non-Western time-feel, and the continuity of rhythm is superbly contrasted by the dislocated theme. Miles takes the first solo, and his phrases echo the asymmetry of the theme. He does not sound as magnificently confident as he does on ‘Black Comedy’, but somehow, the very tentativeness of his playing gives it more weight; we can sense his groping for a way into a new musical area. After solos by the saxophone and keyboard, Tony Williams plays a brief drum solo over the rock feel laid down by bass guitar and piano, and the horns play the piece out with a shortened version of the theme. ‘Stuff’ was the first Miles Davis composition for a very long time, of which the most memorable part was the rhythmic feel and the theme; the solos were important, but the indelible memory was of the piece as a whole.

‘Stuff’ opens the album, and the final piece on side two is Miles’s other composition, ‘Country Son’. This has no written theme for the horns at all, and thus presages Davis’s future methods. It is a three-part structure in D minor. The first part has a swinging 4/4 feel, the second section is an out-of-time interlude and the third section is a slow rock pulse. The drama arises from the juxtaposition of these three sections. The performance begins with Miles launching into a wild improvisation on the 4/4 section. He’s using a straight mute; another departure, and further evidence of his search for fresh sounds. The extremes of his playing are highlighted on this track because he moves from aggression on the swinging section to an exquisite tenderness on the free interludes. After solos by Shorter and Hancock, Miles winds up the album with a solo starting on the free section and moving into the slow rock feel. Here, some of his phrases (Appendix A, Fig. 8) are to be played again and developed a year later on In a Silent Way.

The two Miles Davis compositions that point to new directions open and close Miles in the Sky. It is clear that they were put in key positions on the album intentionally. There is change in the air; later in the year there would be changes in his group . . . and a completely new rhythm section by the spring of 1969. But first, after more musical conferences with Gil Evans, Miles was to go into the studios to try out yet more new ideas on an album to be called Filles de Kilimanjaro.