‘I do like Gil Evans told me to do, years ago, say “Always keep the tape recorder on.” Yeah, I’m never gonna turn it off. You don’t know what you might stumble upon and you can’t – on the gig, you really can’t go back to it because you don’t know what it is.’1
Miles Davis
When Miles Davis had returned from his Japanese tour in October 1981, and played the Saturday Night Live NBC TV show, he had felt extremely unwell, yet chose to ignore obvious signs of serious bodily malfunction. His urine was full of blood, and after the effort of struggling through the TV show, he began to feel a numbness in his right hand and fingers, but he simply ignored these warnings. Then, in January 1982, Cicely Tyson went to Africa to do some work for the US State Department and Miles, without her restraining presence, began to over-indulge himself again. Although he had stopped using cocaine by now, he was still smoking three or four packets of cigarettes a day, and after Cicely left, he began drinking excessive amounts of beer. Then one night, he got the fright of his life: after closing his right hand, he found he was powerless to open it again, and realized he had lost the use of it. Cicely Tyson had always had a sixth sense about Miles’s condition, and even far away in Africa her intuition told her something was wrong. She telephoned him, and he told her he couldn’t move his hand or his fingers. She said that it sounded like a stroke, and, cutting short her trip, came straight back to the USA. Hospital tests confirmed that it had been a stroke and there was nothing they could do about it except give him some physiotherapy and hope for the best. But it looked as if Miles might never be able to play the trumpet again, and the huge shock of this realization at last gave him the impetus to stop all his excesses – cigarettes, alcohol, any residual drugs were banished from his life. The doctors had told Cicely that he would never be able to use that arm and hand again, but she kept this information from Miles.
He and the band were booked to do a series of concerts on the West Coast starting in February, but they had to be cancelled. Miles’s stroke was a closely guarded secret, and the mysterious cancellations were regarded as yet another manifestation of the famous Davis wilful, unpredictable persona. For over a month there was no sign of movement in the hand and Cicely Tyson told Leonard Feather: ‘One of the most difficult things was to convince him that his physician wasn’t giving us any answers. I could not sit by and just see Miles there in that condition. Finally I just physically picked him up one Sunday and took him to a Chinese acupuncturist.’2 The acupuncturist, Dr Chin, also gave him herbs that would clean up his whole system. So after a month or two of acupuncture, herbs, physiotherapy, good food, inhaling only air and drinking only Perrier water, he woke up one night and found he could move and use his hand again. From that moment on, he began swimming regularly to improve his breathing capacity and general health. But during that whole testing period, he had lost most of his hair, which really upset him because, as he admitted later: ‘I have always been vain about my appearance.’3
Although he was now on the mend, Miles was still very weak, and his energy ebbed and flowed unpredictably. He was also extremely thin, and had only a few strands of hair left, but his recovery from the stroke would prove to be the second fundamental turning point, after the one in 1979. Slowly, his health and strength would return and the last phase of his career would mirror the great creative periods of 1954–60 and 1965–71, because his self-discipline would again be good, his energy high, the whole glory of his playing would return, and again he would find new modes of procedure. But before that happened, he would have to force himself by sheer willpower to play the trumpet when his strength and health were often at a low ebb. The use of his hand and the ability to hold and play the trumpet had returned to him like a miracle; it was a kind of rebirth. He said to Leonard Feather:
They had some kind of cast on my hand. One night I woke up, picked up the horn and found I could play it. See how strong it is now! Feel this! It’s not just back to normal – it’s better than normal. And I keep exercising it on the keyboard to keep my circulation good . . . I owe it all to Cicely. If it hadn’t been for her and that doctor, I don’t know where I’d have been. I’ll never fear anything, ever again.4
Now that the ability to play had returned to him, he wanted to waste no time and planned to start a European tour in April. His band had not played together for three months, and so he called a rehearsal towards the end of March, to see how it sounded and felt. All was well and they warmed up for Europe by playing three concerts in the USA – at the Bradford Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts, on 1 and 2 April, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on the third.
It was six or seven years since Miles Davis had played in Europe, and interest there had now reached fever pitch. Fans, critics and musicians had been reading reports about his comeback, were aware of the adverse criticisms (which made them feel that Miles was once again himself), had heard The Man with the Horn, and were agog to hear him and his band in person. News of his stroke had not leaked out, and no one was prepared for the wraithlike figure who sometimes felt so weak that he had to sit down in order to play, who had good days when all went well, and bad days when he felt like quitting and going back to America.
The European concerts were, invariably, an early sell-out, and he and the band played in Stockholm on 13 April, Copenhagen on the fourteenth, Hamburg on the sixteenth and Frankfurt am Main on the following day, before flying to London on 19 April for three concerts at Hammersmith Odeon on 20, 21 and 22 April. All three concerts were sold out in advance, and arrangements had been made for an independent production company to film the second concert for London Weekend Television’s South Bank Show, which had also made a documentary film about Davis’s life and career. In the process of researching the documentary the South Bank Show had also managed to get hold of a copy of the very rare black-and-white 1959 film The Sound of Miles Davis, which featured his quintet with Coltrane playing ‘So What’, and Miles with the Gil Evans Orchestra playing ‘The Duke’, ‘New Rhumba’ and ‘Blues for Pablo’. From the point of view of sound and vision, this was, and remains, one of the finest films of jazz ever made, and once LWT had unearthed it, it tended to stay intermittently in view. Miles’s concert on 21 April would, of course, be filmed in colour, and its producer Gerry O’Reilly was an avid Miles Davis fan, and very excited about the possibility of filming him. On 19 April, O’Reilly went to London Heathrow Airport to meet Davis’s plane, but began to feel very apprehensive when the passengers filed past him and there was no sign of Miles Davis. When it seemed that the last passenger had departed, suddenly a wheelchair appeared with Miles in it, his right arm strapped up, and pushing it was Cicely Tyson, wearing a fur coat. As they passed him, Miles seemed so say something incoherent to O’Reilly, who quickly learnt the bad news: Davis felt very ill and didn’t want to play a concert the following day. After registering the shock of Davis’s apparent frailty, O’Reilly accompanied Miles and Cicely to their hotel and said he would send a doctor round. Then he asked his father-in-law, Dr Sam Weinstock, who was a psychiatrist as well as a medical practitioner, to visit Miles at the hotel in his capacity as doctor, but to use his psychological skills to get Davis into a frame of mind that would enable him to perform the following day. Weinstock spent several hours in Davis’s company that day, and later that evening reported to O’Reilly, ‘He will play on the first night, but not for very long. He’ll play more on the second night, and on the third night he’ll be unstoppable.’ And that is exactly what happened.
On the first night the whole atmosphere at the Hammersmith Odeon was extraordinary, highly charged with emotion and seething with expectancy. Without announcement, Miles limped on stage and stood there looking bewildered and lost, but was not at first recognized by the audience, because his appearance and stance were so different from what they were expecting. His moustache was now quite full, he was wearing a cream skull cap and a beige suit, and it was only after the young band followed him on stage that a smattering of applause broke out. The audience were still recovering from the shock of seeing him looking so gaunt and frail. He had a tiny radio in a leather wallet attached to the left side of his trumpet with a fine wire running to a tiny microphone clipped to the bell of the instrument, and in this way his sound was beamed to the PA speakers and monitors. This arrangement gave him complete freedom of movement – he could play anywhere on stage, although he did not walk around much on that first evening, but played mostly sitting down, his face often expressionless except when something played by one of his musicians brought a pleased smile of recognition. He was not in good lip, but for the audience it was thrilling to hear even a weak Miles playing, and his group was really excellent in terms of rhythm, dynamics, flexibility and solo strength. They played the same programme on each of the three nights – ‘Back Seat Betty’, ‘My Man’s Gone Now’ and ‘Aida’ in the first half, and in the second half, a version of ‘Ife’ (first recorded in 1972 and issued on the album Big Fun), ‘Fat Time’ and ‘Jean Pierre’. But length and treatment varied widely on each evening. The first concert was very short, with a first half of thirty-five minutes and a second half of only twenty-three, and at the end it was moving to see Miles and the band come to the front of the stage with their arms around one another and take a bow. That kind of close comradeship and mutual support had never before been demonstrated in public by him and his musicians. The newborn Miles Davis had not yet found his full strength, but he was audibly himself, and the band knew he was listening intently to everything they played. He inspired them; they provided the energy and panache whenever he most needed that. On the second night, he was in better shape, although still having some problems in playing, but the third night saw him utterly transformed, his energy and stamina right up, soloing for long stretches, with majestic high notes and flowing ideas. That night however, ironically, the band was not quite as incisive. This pattern of his being below strength one day and in full power the next was to repeat itself during the next part of his tour, which included two concerts in Rome (25 and 26 April), Den Haag (28), Théâtre du Chatelet, Paris (2 and 3 May), Brussels (8) and Toulouse (10). The band then returned to the USA.
Cicely Tyson and one of her friends travelled with the band during that European trip, which was such a crucial time for Miles, grappling as he was with precarious health and the struggle back into music – and the watchful, restraining presence of Cicely was an important factor. She had, after all, for the second time since 1979, taken charge, saved him from himself and put him on the road to recovery, and it was essential that he stayed on that road. But Miles still complained about her, because while he, the five members of his band and the road crew of four each had two luggage bags with them, Cicely and her friend had over eighteen bags, and the road crew were having to handle them. By this time Cicely was a big star, and this seemed to bother Miles, who thought that fame had gone to her head, and complained that she behaved in a very high-handed way with the road crew and other people. In Rome, Miles told her that he needed a rest, and took a separate hotel room, only rejoining her in the double room after the second concert. Then in Paris he had another break from her when he went to visit his one-time girlfriend, Juliette Greco. But Cicely’s influence on him was still beneficial and on this tour he began a therapeutic activity she had initiated. In the summer of 1981, Cicely had bought him some sketch pads, which he had hardly used, but now he began drawing regularly on this trip. It kept him occupied when his mind might have turned to nicotine, alcohol or drugs, and this activity, plus painting in water colours and oils, would grow and grow, absorbing and enriching his leisure hours for the rest of his life.
Back in the USA in the middle of May, he had a couple of weeks’ rest before he played a Kool Jazz Festival concert on 30 May at the Kennedy Centre, Washington, DC, then apart from one more Kool concert in Atlanta in June, he had the rest of that month off. It was around this time that he and Cicely spent some time at a health farm in New York State, and Miles had a fortuitous meeting with Jack and Lydia DeJohnette. They lived in a town called Kingston in New York State, and on this particular occasion they were standing in a very old broken-down and closed-down shopping mall. Lydia recalled:
I don’t even know why we were there, but Jack and I were having a fight – and we never fight. And this was one of those height of our relationship, blow-out fights. And we’re shouting at each other standing beside our car, and I said, ‘So where do we go from here? Forward or not? Or is it all over?’ And we’re yelling at each other, and I hear this hoarse voice calling, ‘Jack!’ And there’s Miles, and it was such a surreal scene. Jack’s yelling and I turn round and there’s this Ferrari and there’s Miles. And I say, ‘Jack, there’s Miles!’ And Jack suddenly stops and is dumbfounded. And Miles is standing there laughing at the two of us. Then we started laughing, and I said to Miles, ‘What are you doing in Kingston, New York?’ And he said, ‘Is that where I am?’ Then he said, ‘What are you arguing about? . . . Forget it!’ Then he looks at me and says, ‘Are you happy to see me?’ In fact he was in a health farm with Cicely in New York State, a fasting, cleaning-out place, and I asked him what he was doing in this obscure provincial town, and he said he had a nurse in the car with him and she hadn’t heard his music and he was trying to buy her some albums in a local record store. So we went to the record store with him and there was this very sweet scene of him trying to show the nurse who he was. The shop had some of his old, old albums, and he was looking at them in wonderment and saying, ‘Wow! I did that?!’ He may not have exactly saved our relationship, but I always felt he was in our lives. I never felt this about any of the other bands Jack worked for. Miles affected us on a personal level and beyond music.
This was becoming a good time for Miles, because it was easy to book his band and he could work as much as he wanted to. Not only he did he love his band, but he was also really on the mend and could feel his instrumental powers coming back to him with each concert. On 4 July his concert at East Rutherford, New Jersey, began a tour of the United States and Canada that went on, with a few breaks, until the end of the year, finishing in late February 1983, when he played at the Grammy award ceremony in Hollywood. We Want Miles was released in the early autumn of 1982 and received a Grammy, which Miles collected at the 1983 ceremony. After the New Jersey concert, the band played Montreal, Canada, on 11 July, Boston, Massachusetts, on the twelfth and Hudson River Pier No. 84, New York City, on the seventeenth. Then with a gap before the next engagement on 28 July at Vancouver, Canada, Miles took some more time off with Cicely, and they flew to Lima, Peru, for a few days, where she was one of the judges at a Miss Universe contest. The hotel had an indoor and outdoor swimming pool, and Miles said: ‘All I did for three or four days was swim and lie around the hotel pool and rest and eat good seafood. I was even starting to look like myself again, only my motherfucking hair wouldn’t grow back and that was pissing me off.’5
After Vancouver, there were four concerts in the USA, then on 11 August Miles and the band went into the recording studio to work on music for the next album, and this time Gil Evans was also present as consultant and arranger. History was again beginning to repeat itself and as Miles worked his way back into music and his abilities blossomed again, so his vision sharpened, and his approach to music-making in the studio began to change radically. The old loose methods with fragmentary motifs, as exemplified by his pieces on The Man with the Horn, would be abandoned, and because he was fascinated by the music of Prince and certain white rock groups, he would soon begin painstakingly constructing his music in the studio. Improvisation, however, would still be a key factor in the genesis of ideas. He had told Cheryl McCall in August 1981 that he was following Gil Evans’s advice to record all performances and solos, and very soon he would have Evans transcribing solos played even in the recording studio. Gunther Schuller has said that until it died out in the early part of the nineteenth century, improvisation used to be the backbone of all music-making, and of course, real improvisation is composition in motion, and the player can stumble upon all kinds of fresh ideas during it. Joe Zawinul has usually composed by recording his keyboard solos, transcribing them and selecting the best motifs or phrases to develop, and Keith Jarrett has always recorded all his own concerts with this (among other things) in mind.
On this occasion in the studio Miles was beginning work on an album that would be called Star People; it showed the beginnings of a transition, from his methods on The Man with the Horn and We Want Miles, to his future approach to composition. After a concert on 28 August at Jones Beach Theatre, Long Island, he and the band were back in the studio to do more work on the album at the beginning of September, and this time guitarist John Scofield was also there. Recently, Mike Stern had not been in the best of health, and although he was still playing well, he either didn’t want to, or couldn’t play the intricate melodies that Gil Evans was transcribing from solos. As a result, Miles wanted a second guitarist, and Bill Evans recommended Scofield. At that recording session he played only a little, and was not asked to join the band. On 5 September, Miles was back on tour with a concert in Chicago, followed in October with three more dates in New Jersey (23), Syracuse, New York (29), and Berkeley, California (31), and at that point he told Bill Evans to call John Scofield and ask him to come out and join the band for the next concert, on 4 November in Cleveland, Ohio. Scofield was completely surprised, but came straight out and was present at the Cleveland concert, but didn’t play because he was paid to stand at the side of the stage and listen. The same thing happened the next night at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Scofield commented, ‘It was great – easiest money I ever made!’ But at the next concert, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, on 17 November, he played and became a regular member of the band. Talking of his relationship with Stern, Scofield said:
Mike was a good friend of mine, so I had to go – sort of be the other guitar player. It was my job to play the heads [themes] and Mike was still taking most of the solos and stuff, and I was just brought in to play the written music that Mike didn’t want to learn . . . not that he didn’t want to, it just wasn’t, for some reason, happening. But Miles loved Mike and was just really trying to help him, actually. Mike was playing really beautifully then, you know.
When he joined Miles Davis, John Scofield was a few weeks away from his thirty-first birthday, and already a player of consummate grace and inventiveness, who was steeped in the blues and could conjure melodic lines out of thin air. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, he had been a key member of a very fine small group led by Miles Davis’s trusted friend Dave Liebman, and he had also played and recorded with other leading musicians, including Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Billy Cobham, Tony Williams and Ron Carter. In other words, Scofield’s highly personal style of playing was already in place, and he was not the little-known, inexperienced kind of musician Miles liked to find and shape to his music and his ideas. But Scofield seemed to have a very open mind and an infinite capacity for growth, qualities which were to make his time in the band fruitful for Miles, and invaluable for Scofield himself. Miles actually liked the idea of having two guitarists in his band. He was convinced that the guitar was the key instrument of the day, particularly where younger musicians and fans were concerned, and believed that two such very different-sounding guitarists would create tension that would be good for the music. He also thought that if Stern listened to Scofield, he might learn something about understatement, which would restrain his tendency to overplay.
But change was in the air because, now that Miles’s health and strength were improving daily, he was playing longer solos and, with two guitarists, there was less solo space for Bill Evans. Furthermore, along with his burgeoning trumpet powers, Miles’s musical vision was also becoming clearer and he was beginning to direct the band with hand signals, shaping the performances that way. Bill Evans explained the dilemma:
When Miles was trying to get his playing together, I was able to play as much as I wanted, every show, with Al and Marcus and Stern, and it was great. But as time went on, he was beginning to change it around where he was playing more, which is totally fine. He was beginning to really get into guitar, and wanted to hear more guitar, so after three years or so, all of a sudden he’s really into leaving soloists at the top of their form, so when you’re in the middle of your solo, he’ll stop the band. And after you’ve been with the band for a few years, that can really start getting on your nerves.
Two more recording sessions for Star People were done on 20 December 1982 and 5 January 1983, and after the second one, Marcus Miller left the band, having recommended a young bass guitarist called Tom Barney. Miller had kept up a working relationship with saxophonist Dave Sanborn, and was in constant demand as a studio musician and as a producer and composer/arranger. He was losing career opportunities and money by playing with Miles, who really understood his dilemma. But his departure was a great blow, because Miles admired Miller’s brilliant musicianship, and liked his humour and steady temperament. Their relationship would recommence later in the decade, when he and Miller would make some definitive recordings together.
Star People reflects the changes of emphasis in the band. Bill Evans gets only two short solos on the album, one tenor saxophone chorus on the title track, which is a slow blues in B flat, and a brief soprano solo on the light-hearted and lightweight scrap of melody ‘U’n’I’. Miles, in excellent form, gets much of the solo space, and the two guitarists are also strongly featured. ‘Come Get It’ opens the album and begins with the first two rubato chords of ‘Back Seat Betty’, of which it is a direct descendant, in the same key (F), but taken at a much faster, rocky tempo, and performed with explosive energy. After a long build-up by the rhythm section, Miles comes in on open trumpet and he’s in great shape, his sound singing, and his bristling, passionate phrases sometimes screaming up to trumpet Fs and Gs. He’s a little down in the mix, with the rhythm section slightly in the foreground, but this doesn’t seem to matter, because they respond to his fiery attack, fanning his blaze. After several minutes at this awesome pace, Miles pauses and the band simmers down to half tempo for an atmospheric and compelling guitar solo by Mike Stern. Eventually an edited-in organ passage played by Miles takes the piece into ‘It Gets Better’, which has several new features. The tempo is medium slow and the drums play an extraordinarily spare and light swing rhythm, while the bass line consists mostly of three triplet notes on the first beat of each bar, and is silent on the remaining three beats. This skeletal rhythmic continuum has an eerie contemplative atmosphere, and is given a repeated harmonic sequence of nine basic chords, which Miles said he’d borrowed from the old country blues singer and guitarist, Sam ‘Lightnin’ ’ Hopkins. The brooding spirit of the blues hangs over this whole performance, and the solo honours are shared more or less equally between Miles and John Scofield, who play alternately throughout. Miles, using the Harmon mute, its pent-up sonorities so appropriate for this highly charged mood, sculpts his phrases beautifully, once or twice refers obliquely to trumpeter Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison’s bluesy phrasing, and even plays an occasional muted scream. Scofield is also in his element here, never wasting a note, his sound airy and eloquent. At one point the rhythm section stops, and Scofield plays rubato chords while Miles meditates in free time. This fine performance is utterly contemporary, but shot through with the blues tradition.
Tom Barney, the bass guitarist replacing Marcus Miller, plays only on the third album track, ‘Speak’, an up-tempo rock outing that has Miles, with open trumpet in one hand and other hand on the keyboard, punching out simultaneous riffs on both. He even managed this subsequently in live performances, although the trumpet notes were high – a further sign of his ever expanding powers. Miles also plays a quite prominent organ backing from time to time, and there are some riffs by saxophone and guitar, but Scofield is the main featured soloist. The organ also ushers in the fourth piece, ‘Star People’, which becomes a really basic slow twelve-bar blues with a 12/8 feel. But it has an unusual drum rhythm, with a single bass drum note on the first and third beat, and cymbal beats on the second and fourth. This time Miles, using the Harmon mute, and Stern share the solos, each playing several times. Stern’s initial solo is an unabashed, tonally distorted, bluesy affair that digs deep, but later on he also plays airily and lyrically, first rubato with keyboard accompaniment, then with quiet, spare backing from the rhythm section. Bill Evans, on tenor, gets one chorus of the blues and preaches a whole sermon in those twelve bars. The least substantial piece, ‘U’n’I’, is tucked away penultimately on the album, and the final performance is ‘Star on Cicely’, another up-tempo rocky piece with some transcribed solo lines played by guitar and tenor sax. Once again, the order of pieces is important. It is significant that the opening one, ‘Come Get It’, harked back to ‘Back Seat Betty’, which it had already replaced as opener for the live performances, while the final one, ‘Star on Cicely’, with its transcribed solo lines, looked towards Miles’s future methods of working.
Star People was released in the spring of 1983, to be available at the time of Miles’s next European and Japanese tours, and its packaging showed two significant changes. All the coloured drawings on the front and reverse covers were by Miles, and on the back there were liner notes by Leonard Feather. This was the first time a current Miles Davis album had had liner notes since the double-album Miles at Fillmore and single-album Jack Johnson, both recorded in 1970, and the Johnson notes had been written by Miles himself. Feather had often explained Miles to the general public in the 1950s and 1960s, and perhaps the uncomprehending adverse criticisms that had currently so upset Davis’s young musicians made him decide to ask Feather once again to explain his present musical stance. Leonard Feather was one of the most respected of all music critics, because he wrote with insight and clarity, he was a pianist, musically literate and a friend of many musicians, including Louis Armstrong and Cannonball Adderley, both of whom had played and recorded some of Feather’s compositions. Feather had also written the first scholarly analysis of bebop, Inside Bebop, published in 1949, and as a critic, he had considerable authority. He had usually been friendly to Miles, and although the latter had said that he wasn’t bothered by Feather’s total dismissal of his September 1981 Hollywood Bowl concert, he wanted to re-establish cordial relations with the critic. That is why Miles and Cicely Tyson had agreed to a joint interview with Feather in 1982, for Ebony magazine, giving him the chance to break the news of Davis’s stroke and his recovery from it.
It’s not every day that a jazz critic gets such a dramatic scoop. During the interview Miles was on his best behaviour, his conversation free of obscenities, and he was at pains to co-operate with Cicely’s attempts at explaining his ‘evil genius’ image: ‘He used that façade to protect his vulnerability. Beneath that false surface you see what a sensitive, beautiful person he is. Nobody could play that without having a great depth of soul.’6 Feather’s liner notes for Star People are professional, friendly, but rather non-committal because he quotes Miles frequently and offers no strong opinions of his own.
Bassist Tom Barney’s first concert with the band was at Phoenix, Arizona, on 28 January 1983, followed by Denver, Colorado, on the twenty-ninth, and three February dates in Texas: Dallas (1), Houston (3) and Austin (4). Then after Toronto and Ottowa on 15 and 17 February and the Grammy award ceremony on the twenty-third, Miles and the band had a month off before their European tour, which started at Lille, France, on 29 March. After seven concerts in France and one each in Italy and Belgium, they came to London’s Hammersmith Odeon for two concerts on 27 and 28 April. The fact that Miles Davis could get seven concerts in France and only two in the UK speaks volumes about the relative states of jazz in those countries at that time. In London, he did a long interview with Richard Williams for the Sunday Times and actually wanted to be interviewed on TV by someone. Here was the opportunity for a very rare event, but no British TV stations were interested, and the BBC spokesman, when contacted, had never heard of Miles Davis. At Hammersmith Odeon, when the house lights dimmed, Miles and his band came on stage to enthusiastic applause, which he acknowledged with a flamboyant wave of the hand. He was wearing a flat-topped black Spanish hat with a wide brim, dark glasses with bright, orange-pink rims, a black boiler suit, and reddish-brown high-heeled boots. Although he still limped slightly, the overall impression he gave was of energy, contained and tigerish. From the audience’s viewpoint, the band was set up in a semi-circle with Bill Evans positioned at the far left, next to him, but nearer the centre was John Scofield, and more central still was the new bassist Tom Barney. Al Foster and the drums were centre stage rear, in front of them was Miles and his keyboard, and to the right were first Mike Stern and then Mino Cinelu and his percussion.
After a perfunctory arm wave that started the usual two dissonant chords (Stern), Miles shrieked out a high trumpet G above top C and the band went into a fast rock beat and ‘Come Get It’. This was an exceptionally dramatic opening, and the dynamism of the performance was almost overwhelming. Miles was in utterly magnificent form, with a gloriously big, singing sound, huge range, and great power and stamina. If anything, he sounded even more majestic than he had done at his other peak in 1969. It was also dramatic, when someone else was soloing, to see him holding the trumpet with one hand, the left hand at the keyboard as he stabbed out electronic chords and high trumpet riffs. From his keyboard at centre stage he controlled the whole performance of the piece, eventually bringing it to an end and introducing ‘Star People’, the slow blues with a 12/8 gospel kind of feel. This was an utter contrast to the opening piece; now the quiet, empty, brooding rhythm section was electrifying and his playing sent chills up and down the spine. Once the piece was established, Miles left his place in the centre of the band’s semi-circle, and walked to the front of the stage, slowly playing occasional phrases all the while. He crouched and played to the photographers in the pit on the right side of the stage, then walked slowly to the centre of the front apron and played to the audience there, then to the left side to repeat the performance.
This was Miles feeling relaxed and confident enough to recognize the existence of the audience and to indulge in some fundamental showmanship. But it never seemed cheap because his playing was so powerful, with marmoreally sculpted phrases, the huge singing sound of his trumpet in the middle and lower registers and the wild screams that also sang at the top end of the trumpet. At one point, during a tenor saxophone solo, Miles walked over to Bill Evans, stopped him in mid-flight and led him over to the electric keyboard. While Evans began creating luminous atmospheric sounds, Miles stood in the shadows beside John Scofield, listening. This was the only time, so far in the concert, that attention was not focused directly on Davis. After some minutes, he went up to Evans, patted him on the cheek and sent him back to his sax. The subtlety of the band’s backing was quite magical, with different timbres, textures and little rhythmic interjections, and the dynamics all evening were superbly managed, ranging from a whisper to a roar. Miles was in such playing form that he dominated the whole evening, and there were shorter spots for the other soloists. The programme included all the pieces from Star People, plus a new piece, ‘Hopscotch’, and ‘Jean Pierre’, which was given a full performance and then, as an encore, a brief reprise. The British critics recognized the enhanced power of Miles and his band and, as they had been a year previously, were perceptive and generous in their appreciation of both.
Cicely Tyson, beaming with happiness, was backstage throughout the concert, and Miles, too, seemed in exceptionally good spirits and health, full of smiles and with a sheen on his skin. Someone said to John Scofield, ‘It’s a pity you didn’t get to play so much yourself tonight.’ Scofield replied: ‘God! I was listening to Miles. Did you hear how Miles played tonight?!! It’s so great to be with someone who can really play! Being with Miles is like being back at school again – I’m learning all the time.’ After the second London concert, the band went back to America for about three weeks off before a four-concert tour of Japan. The only negative happening in that triumphant European tour seems to have been the departure from the entourage of roadie Chris Murphy who, according to Miles, left because he’d had enough of Cicely.
It was now becoming clear that Miles Davis’s return to playing, which had begun as a kind of giant lap of honour by an ailing man with a glorious past and little apparent future, was turning into something much more dynamic. He was in yet another new phase, and the essential activity in this one was live performance – he seemed to want to be permanently on tour and playing concerts. The recordings would be like blueprints for the live performances, where the music and the magic really happened. In concert, the next few years would see some of the most eloquent and moving playing of his whole career, and some of the most subtle use of dynamics and electronic orchestral colours by his band.
There had been another significant change earlier in the year. After an argument with Mark Rothbaum, Miles fired him, and found two new managers, Lester and Jerry Blank. They had set up the short European tour and the following briefer Japanese tour. But Miles’s fortunes under their management slumped, and he complained that they seemed to have great difficulty in getting bookings for his band. It may have been that as he and his music were now regularly available to the public, familiarity was breeding indifference. If so, it was cruelly ironic that just as he was arriving at yet another different artistic peak, with new modes of procedure and new heights of expression, his drawing power should decline. Certainly, he felt the financial pinch during this period, and had to sell his prize possession, the brownstone house on West 77th Street, still in the process of being redecorated, in order to pay off money he owed to the Blank brothers. John Scofield said:
When I joined the band, the money was more than when I left the band. It was one of those strange situations when the money went down. When I joined the band, we were picked up in limousines to go to the airport and we were treated incredibly well . . . Anybody in their right mind is not going to over-pay the band, but Miles could sometimes be very generous. After he got new management, then the money went down.
The Japanese tour took in Sendai on 20 May, two concerts at Osaka (25 and 26), and Kanagawa in the Tokyo area (29). The concerts were shared with the Gil Evans Orchestra, with Miles playing the first half and Gil the second, and though the houses were all sold out, it is possible, because of the shared billing, that Miles received lower fees than he had the previous year. The Japanese audiences were as enthusiastic as ever. Back in the USA, the band played St Louis, Missouri, on 7 June, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania (13 June), and three days later they were in the Hit Factory recording studios, in New York which was bassist Tom Barney’s last date with Miles. The latter’s nephew, Vincent Wilburn, had recommended a Chicago-based replacement called Darryl Jones, who was nineteen years old. Jones had come to New York in May and auditioned at Miles’s house. His ability to play a B flat blues at a very slow tempo earned him his place in the Davis band.
No details of the music played or rehearsed at the 16 June recording session are available, but it is almost certain that Miles took that opportunity to start updating the pieces in his repertoire he wanted to retain and adding fresh pieces, using his new methods of procedure in both cases. Scofield said:
When I first started playing with Miles, his method in the studio was to jam [improvise] and record it and find the best spots . . . just a constant evolution of really jamming and listening back to the tapes and finding one or more spots. That’s when Gil Evans was helping. I mean Gil was probably the most over-qualified transcriber in the world, because Miles would have him transcribing trumpet and guitar solos, and then we would play the transcribed parts of the solos as heads [thematic motifs]. Then we would work on a bass line, or write out a bass line that had been improvised and that would become the bass line to a song. And I was new in the band and fresh, and he liked what I was blowing [improvising] so he used some of my solos, but some of his melodies came from his solos too. My guitar solo on the song ‘Speak’ on the album Star People later became the melody of one of the pieces on side two of the LP Decoy.
Miles’s next concert was at the Avery Fisher Hall, in New York, on 26 June. This was Jones’s first gig and Mike Stern’s last with the band, and the next four American concerts were played by the sextet with Scofield as the only guitarist. But that summer and autumn Miles was again in the studio, working on the music for his next album, Decoy, and he brought Robert Irving III into the band to play keyboards and synthesizer. Irving had, of course, played an important role in the conception and realization of the two soul/funk pieces on The Man with the Horn, and now Miles seemed to want Irving, not just for his excellent musicianship, but also because he was young and in touch with current trends in popular music. Apropos of his Grammy award for We Want Miles, Davis had told David Breskin, ‘I don’t like to record at all, live or studio. I just do it to make money.’7 With this comment, he may have been just shrugging off his Grammy with a nonchalance that belied the fact that the award had pleased him mightily. But there was perhaps a deeper truth underlying the comment; it was the live concerts that were his raison d’être, at this moment in time, and in the studio there was almost a sense of manufacturing the music. John Scofield commented: ‘He would be sort of getting the music together for the recording, and we would be recording, and then we’d go out on tour and the music would really blossom.’
Decoy’s title track, composed by Irving, is an inoffensive rocking piece with a rolling bass line and a little riff melody. Miles, using the Harmon mute, improvises with fluency and warmth, and the whole thing feels mellow enough to reassure the faintest heart. Branford Marsalis is the soprano player on this track and he and Scofield repeat at intervals the little melody, which is not as angular or convoluted as some of the Miles/Scofield motifs, but rather as disarming as a nursery rhyme. Marsalis solos excellently, as does Scofield, who always seems to find new things to say. He and Marsalis play another more lyrical motif, then the latter solos again briefly as the piece fades out. This is the opening track on the album and it seems designed to court radio play. The second track, ‘Robot’, is performed by a trio consisting of joint composers Miles and Irving playing synthesizers plus Mino Cinelu on percussion. Irving also plays synthesized bass, and did the electric drum programming. It is very short, without any solos, and has a heavy robotic rhythm and ominous synthesizer sounds. It fades with a tiny touch of trumpet. ‘Code MD’ is another fairly bland Irving composition, a medium-tempo rocky piece with, at times, an ensemble sound reminiscent of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. At other times a long, slow, moaning synthesizer melody wanders drunkenly across the soundscape, and Miles’s open trumpet screams seem an appropriate comment on the proceedings. ‘Freaky Deaky’ is another strangely atmospheric, but musically slight synthesizer outing for Miles, who is listed as composer, and is aided and abetted by Cinelu, Foster and Jones.
The last three tracks, ‘What It Is’, ‘That’s Right’ and ‘That’s What Happened’, all attributed to Miles and Scofield, are the most convincing performances of the whole album. According to Jack Chambers,8 the first and third pieces come from the Davis sextet’s concert at Montreal’s international jazz festival on 7 July 1983. ‘What It Is’ has a bustling rock rhythm with exciting boppish riff melodies played by Bill Evans on soprano and Scofield. Evans gets his only solo on Decoy in this piece, acquitting himself beautifully, and Miles’s trumpet duet with himself is achieved, Chambers says, by overdubbing another solo from the same concert. ‘That’s Right’, is bluesy but not a blues structure. It’s based on two roots – C and F – and is a slow, gentle performance with an unhurried triple feel (3/4, or 12/8) with a haunting little melody played by guitar and saxophone once or twice. Marsalis is the saxophonist on this track and shares the solo honours with Scofield and Miles. ‘That’s What Happened’, is simply a short punchy excerpt from the concert, and ends abruptly.
The album Decoy seems to be a moment of trial and error and indecision for Miles Davis. It seesaws between the blander soul/rock pieces by Robert Irving III, which imply or require a tighter, more fixed structure, and the short, impressionistic, but insubstantial electronic ensemble pieces without improvised solos, or the performances, which have the looser but more dynamic approach of his working band. He was perhaps seeking some kind of synthesis of these three areas into a coherent new direction.
Decoy was packaged tastefully by CBS. Although a single LP, it was given a gatefold cover with a moody photograph of Miles in dark brown and sepia tints, the full length of the open gatefold, his hat, head and shoulders on one panel with the rest of his torso down to his left arm and hand, which is holding his trumpet, on the other panel. His luminous, unsmiling eyes stare left at the camera, and the indentation from the trumpet mouthpiece is clearly visible on his upper lip. It is a portrait at once sombre and elegant, of a man in control of himself and his life. A couple of his coloured, semi-abstract sketches of faces and bodies decorate the inside surfaces of the gatefold, alongside the track and personnel information and the credits.
Miles liked Branford Marsalis’s playing and wanted him to join the band, making it a two-saxophone group, but Branford was committed to playing with his brother Wynton. So Bill Evans, who had had so little solo space on Star People and Decoy, and was not too happy about the way he was treated during concerts, was still the sole saxophonist in the working group, but would not be there much longer. After a concert at Elizabeth, New Jersey, Miles took his septet to Europe for a six-concert mini-tour, starting on 23 October at the annual Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw, Poland.
This Warsaw concert turned out to be an extraordinary event. Poland was still part of the Eastern bloc, the Iron Curtain was in place, though somewhat eroded, and glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were some years away. It has to be remembered that during World War II, jazz was banned in Germany and Japan, partly for racial reasons – the African and Jewish elements – but also because small-group jazz can be a perfect metaphor for democracy and liberty, as opposed to licence. This occurs when the bandleader is a central authority under whose auspices each member of the group can develop his or her own identity and creativity. The greater each musician’s individuality, the more potent the collective identity of the group, and all the qualities necessary for jazz – individuality, spontaneity, autonomous control, trust in one’s chosen associates – have always been anathema to totalitarian regimes. During World War II, jazz became an important part of the Resistance in countries all over Europe during the Nazi occupation, and after the war it became a form of resistance and a symbol of the assertion of the individual in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite countries.
Poland’s Jazz Jamboree had started modestly in 1958, but gradually developed into one of the most important international jazz festivals in the Eastern bloc. In 1965, the Polish international jazz magazine, Jazz Forum, edited by Pawel Brodowski, was launched and, written in English and Polish, soon became the most important such publication in Europe. In 1982, its annual poll voted Miles Davis Musician of the Year and top trumpeter, We Want Miles was voted Record of the Year, and the band was third in the small-group poll. His musicians, Mike Stern, John Scofield, saxophonist Bill Evans, and Mino Cinelu, also gained places in their respective instrumental categories. Miles held on to his personal poll positions in 1983, but young lion trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was hot on his heels, and also played with his own group, which included his brother Branford, on the first day (20) of the Polish Jazz Jamboree. Miles Davis had been a legend among Polish jazz enthusiasts for decades, but he had never before played in the country. Tomasz Szachowski noted this in his Jazz Forum review of the Marsalis concert: ‘The young trumpeter’s group is a direct descendant of Miles Davis’s last acoustic quintet and plays contemporary jazz worthy of that tradition. The quintet made up for the fact that Warsaw had never hosted either Miles’s old group or VSOP’ (Davis’s 1960s quintet with Freddie Hubbard replacing Miles).9
The fact that Miles Davis might at last play in Warsaw triggered a fever of anticipation, made more intense by knowledge of his unpredictability and the possibility that he might simply fail to appear. Also, since 13 December 1981, Poland had been under martial law, which meant that the government had permanent emergency powers, and the 1982 Jazz Jamboree had been cancelled as a protest by the jazz community at this Communist repression. In this atmosphere nothing seemed certain, and the visit, at long last, of Miles Davis seemed almost too good to be true. But when he did arrive at the Polish airport, without Cicely Tyson, but with his six musicians, his three-man sound team, his manager Robert Blank, and his nephew Vincent Wilburn, who was now travelling with him as helper and bodyguard, he was treated like royalty. He did not have to go through customs, but was ushered out via the VIP lounge, where the customs officers were all smiles and had ‘We Want Miles’ badges in their lapels. Outside the airport was a crowd of foreign journalists and American TV crews, and a Russian-made Chaika limousine, of the sort used to transport the then Russian President, Yuri Andropov, waiting to take Miles to his hotel. Personal messages from Andropov were relayed to Miles . . . the President sent his best wishes, called him ‘one of the greatest musicians of all time’, and said he wanted to come to the concert but was too ill to do so. The limousine took Miles to Warsaw’s most luxurious hotel, the Victoria, where he had a suite with two bedrooms, living room, bathroom and kitchen. One of the riders in Davis’s contract stipulated that a swimming pool should be available to him at all times, and the hotel’s basement swimming pool had been filled with fresh water for him, though he seemed not to use it during his short stay. He spent all of the following day indoors sketching, drawing and seeing only his closest associates. But his great welcome in Poland had warmed his heart, and uncharacteristically, late in the day, but well before his evening concert was due to take place, the surprising message came to Pawel Brodowski and musician Janusz Szprot that it might be possible to interview Miles. Sure enough, they experienced the most friendly and relaxed interview Miles had given in years. It was published in Jazz Forum, and later published in full in Sweden’s Orchester Journalen.
The concert itself was superlative. In a letter, Pawel Brodowski wrote:
The Miles Davis appearance in Warsaw at Jazz Jamboree 1983 was a great, traumatic experience and can easily be considered the single most important event in the history of jazz in Poland . . . The 3,000-seat Sala Kongresowa was filled to over-capacity. According to estimates, there were some 5,000 people in the audience, and their feeling was best described by keyboardist Wojtek Karolak in his review for the Polish edition of Jazz Forum: ‘When the world’s funkiest orchestra started I felt as if I was sitting in a Formula One car taking off. I was knocked deep into into the seat, trying to say something, but I was capable of producing only some inarticulate sounds unknown in any language. The Sala Kongresowa became, for the moment, the most important place on earth. This whole foolish world disappeared suddenly without even apologizing. The super funk radiated from the stage, hypnotizing amazed people. No one ever played in such a way and no one ever listened in such a way in this place before. Something exceptional was happening.’10
Miles’s musicians were fired up by the whole situation, and played with great urgency and purpose. They began with ‘Speak’, which had an almost superhuman impetus, and now several attractive riff motifs punctuated the various solos. The rhythm section was superlative throughout their programme, which also included ‘Star People’, ‘What It is’, ‘It Gets Better’, ‘Hopscotch’ and ‘Jean Pierre’. Miles, Scofield and Bill Evans were in peak form, and the whole sound of the band is unlike that of any other group – the performances eternally shifting soundscapes with solos constantly coming and going. The audience response was ecstatic, and Miles played three encores, probably for the first time in his career. The audience chanted, ‘Sto lat, sto lat, niech zyje, zyje nam!’ (One hundred years, one hundred years, may he live for us – a traditional Polish birthday song, rather like ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’). Miles was pleased, and after lifting his trumpet a few times in acknowledgement to the crowd, he eventually took off his hat and bowed, baring his bald head to the public. Thinking of previous Jamborees, and putting this whole occasion into historical perspective, Tomasz Szachowski wrote in Jazz Forum:
Each of the Jamborees was unique with its own emotions, experiences, sometimes dramatic ups and downs. But the 25th Warsaw Jazz Jamboree – unlike its distinguished predecessors with their rich history – was dominated by the personality of but one musician, Miles Davis. Moreover, perhaps for the first time, the Jazz Jamboree was a true mirror reflecting the contemporary jazz scene.11
After Warsaw, Miles and the band played to enthusiastic audiences in Madrid, then two concerts in Berlin and two in Paris. Paris was Bill Evans’s last gig with the Miles Davis band. He was tired of having his solos curtailed:
We were still friends and everything, and I had talked to him about it, and he’d say, ‘Well, this is something I hear, you know’, but what I heard was completely different, so I knew it was just a matter of time. I wanted to move on. There had been some tension during some of the shows over the last year, where it would even show on stage that I was frustrated, and sometimes he would be, but after the show we’d still hang out and joke around. So when the call came to join John McLaughlin, it was perfect timing for me to move on, and Miles accepted that completely. I walked into his dressing room in Paris and told him I was going to be joining John McLaughlin in the next month, and that this was probably my last gig. So we sat and talked and it was basically all right. It wasn’t a thing where if I got mad, I would say, ‘Well, I’m going to quit’, and he’d say, ‘All right, you’re fired.’ It was nothing like that because we knew each other too well. We had a relationship, and we still do so, you know.
Back in the USA, George Butler, Columbia’s vice-president for jazz, with the aid of Cicely Tyson, had organized a retrospective celebration of Miles’s life and work, which took place on 6 November at Radio City Music Hall. It was called ‘Miles Ahead: A Tribute to an American Music Legend’, and it was co-produced by the Black Music Association, with comedian Bill Cosby as host. It was an elaborate four-hour show, covering Miles’s music from the 1940s to the present, and musicians from all areas of his career played a part in the presentation. From the early days, there were J. J. Johnson, Jackie McLean and Philly Joe Jones, Jimmy Heath; from the 1960s, George Benson, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams and George Coleman. An all-star band conducted by Quincy Jones played some Slide Hampton versions of Gil Evans arrangements from Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain, after the president of Fisk University presented Miles with an honorary degree in music, he and his group played a half-hour set to wind up the proceedings. At the end of his set, however, Bill Cosby pressed him to make a speech, but all Miles could say was, ‘Thank you’, which annoyed some people, who thought he was ungrateful for such a lavish evening of tributes. But he insisted in his autobiography, ‘I meant it from the bottom of my heart . . . It was a beautiful night, and I was happy that they honoured me the way they did.’12
After the celebration, Mino Cinelu left Miles because he had been asked to join Weather Report, and he was replaced by Steve Thornton. On 17 and 18 November, the band, with Thornton on percussion but without a saxophonist, was back in the recording studio, and with Gil Evans working as arranger, they recorded some pop tunes on the first date and some rock tunes on the second. Then Miles was hospitalized once more, because his hip implant had started disintegrating, and he had to have yet another operation. He was expected to recover in time to resume performing six weeks after the operation, but he caught pneumonia in December 1983 and was out of action for two months. Illness, once again, gave him the respite necessary for reflection on his life and music after the intense activity of this extraordinarily dramatic first phase of his comeback. He was not to perform in public again for six months, but from the end of January 1984 until the following May, he was constantly in the recording studio with his band. There would be changes, musical and otherwise, in the immediate future, some coming as a pleasant surprise to him, and some more radical that he himself would initiate.