“donna” on the jukebox
I entered the world of jazz through a Miles Davis record I heard back in 1955, when I was fifteen years old. I had gone into a fish joint—on Fair Avenue in my hometown, St. Louis, Missouri—to get a jack-salmon fish sandwich (actually a kind of whiting that St. Louis blacks called “jack-salmon”). It could have been a a summer weekday or a Saturday during the school year. I don’t remember. All I recall now of walking into that small, nondescript place, since destroyed by so-called urban renewal, is that it was daytime and the sun was shining.
The joint had a yellow linoleum floor and the prefabricated look of vinyl and plastic that later became so popular at McDonalds, Jack in the Box, and all the other banal fast-food restaurants that swept over America and inundate our culture today. Back then, this fish joint was cutting edge, even though the black people in the neighborhood hated the way it looked. We called its sterile style “clean looking,” to distinguish it from the usual “greasy spoon” style that most local black eateries wore back then. As we liked to say, this joint was “trying to look white.” But we loved the great food that was served up there, and we came back time and again despite our reservations about their “fried hair” and “white look.”
Once inside, I immediately noticed a booth filled with four black, hip-looking older guys wearing the latest “in” clothes. Smoking cigarettes and wearing shades, their wide-brimmed hats hanging majestically on the prongs of two steel poles, which seemed to grow beside their booth like facing trees.
The men were sitting there talking and eating deep-fried “jack-salmon” sandwiches doused with hot sauce, with sides of potato salad and cole slaw. They were also listening to the jukebox that was jamming sounds I had either never heard before or never paid attention to. Whatever it was, it was new to me, and at that moment, I was drawn to it like the rabbit to the tarbaby.
I remember being struck by the music easing out of the brightly colored jukebox, which seemed to match the cool style of the four men sitting there nodding their heads in time with the rhythm. In unison. Although I had intended to buy a takeout sandwich, I decided instead to sit down in a booth to eat and listen to those men talk, and to drink in the music they were nodding their heads to.
They talked about the sounds they were hearing on the box. One man said the trumpet was played by a “homeboy” from across the river, someone named Miles Davis. Another said the tune was called “Donna.” I also recall one of them saying that “the young alto player sounds almost like Bird. Man, he’s something else.” Well, I didn’t know who Miles was, or “Bird,” or the young alto player who sounded like him, either, but I found the conversation fascinating and I listened intently while they played the record over and over again. Jazz music made sense to me that day for the first time in my life.
Until then, my choice in music had always been black rhythm and blues, music I could move my body to—though I suspected that I could also move my body to “Donna,” the same way those hip guys were dancing on their hind parts in that booth, nodding their “processed” heads. At that time, I liked the Platters, the Dells, the Cadillacs, Sam Cooke, Johnny Ace, Clyde McPhatter, Jackie Wilson, and the alleged wild man of music who was then living right down the street from me, Chuck Berry. But this music was totally different. It had no words, no voices, no vocal dancing to slide words around, over, ahead, behind, and still land right back on the beat.
It was a completely different kind of music and, after the four men left, I found myself getting up, reaching into my pocket for a nickel, and walking up to the jukebox. I found “Donna,” dropped my coin in, turned around, and eased my way back to my booth as the music poured out of the box. As I polished off my second fish sandwich, I kept nodding my head to the tune’s insinuating rhythms and moving my hind parts in time to the beat.
becoming hip
When I left that joint that afternoon, I felt as though I had undergone a secret initiation, a rite of passage, one that would separate me forever from the rest of the students who attended Beaumont High School, to which I had just transferred. The school was overwhelmingly white and the students there were “square” to the bone. To my way of thinking, hardly anyone there had any sense of style at all.
During the summer of 1954 my mother had moved us from our old black neighborhood. She had wanted us to be the first black family on the block, but actually we were the second. We were a family of six: my grandmother, Leona Smith; my mother, Dorothy Smith Troupe Brown; my stepfather, China Brown, blues bass player, leader of his own band, and clothes presser at a large cleaning plant; my uncle Allen, unemployed wino, a gentle, harmless man; and my younger brother, Timothy. Our white neighbors hated all of us immediately.
We lived next door to the first black people on the block: a couple, Thomas and Margaret O’ Guin. He was a doorman at a local hotel and she was a homemaker. They were older, more conservative than we were, and had no children, which probably explains why they had never had a problem living on Ashland Street before we arrived. Our family brought not only children but young black men into the neighborhood. After we arrived, the whites on the block began leaving faster than people in a movie house when someone’s yelled “Fire.” Our white nextdoor neighbors never spoke to us, not once.
In this hostile racist environment, I was fast learning to hate myself just for being black. Earlier in my life, living in a black neighborhood, I had never felt any self-hatred. In fact, it was the other way around; I was proud of who my father was, and of what our family name meant in the black community. My father, Quincy Trouppe (he added a second “p” to his last name because he liked the way it was pronounced when he played in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico), was a great star in the old Negro baseball league, and his older brother, James (“Pal”), was a leading black political and labor leader around St. Louis, who had also made a ton of money from real estate and “other” investments. A distant cousin, Ernest Troupe, was a lieutenant on the police force. So, within the St. Louis black community, our name was well known and well respected. But, of course, none of the white people in the new neighborhood knew any of this. To them, we were just a bunch of “niggers.”
Naturally, I hated the new block and would walk back to my old neighborhood every chance I could get (a distance of about four miles). When I asked my mother why she had moved us, she simply said it had been in our “best interests.” She, however, travelled outside the neighborhood to work as a telephone operator every day, just as my stepfather, China, and my grandmother did. But my brother Timmy and I had to go to school with the racist neighborhood kids every day, and they were like a pack of howling, rabid dogs.
During my first two years in my new home, the white kids (mostly boys) called me every vile name they knew. They called me “nigger,” “coon,” “monkey,” “gorilla,” “jiggaboo,” “shinola,” and “boy,” to name just a few. We fought on many occasions. With the exception of one Italian kid, Tom Palazolla, who invited me to his home, they hardly ever spoke to me or even looked my way during my ears at Beaumont, except when it came to sports (which is how most whites prefer dealing with black men even today). The entire experience seemed designed to drain me of my racial identity and pride.
That’s why Miles Davis and his music came to mean so much to me. The white kids at Beaumont High were into Bill Haley and the Comets and Elvis Presley. But what they really loved was Pat Boone’s rendition of “Ain’t That a Shame.” I hated Boone’s version of that song, because I had heard the “real thing” by Fats Domino, and I knew that Pat Boone had “borrowed” it from him and become famous singing it because he was a white man. Boone made a career of such “borrowings.” He also made a “mint” with his cover of Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruity.” But my white schoolmates didn’t know or care about any of this. They didn’t give a flying fuck if Boone was getting over because he was covering black songs. It certainly didn’t matter to them that Elvis Presley was doing the same thing. Chuck Berry lived in the neighborhood, but the white kids didn’t even know his name, not to mention what a great contribution he was making to American music.
But I knew. I knew the “real deal” and it bothered the hell out of me that these white teenagers didn’t even care that they didn’t know shit; that they could think of black people as stupid and uncreative while all the while their musical heroes were stealing our songs, music, and language and calling them their own.
When I discovered Miles Davis, I knew I had found something these white squares didn’t and couldn’t know. I was hip. I wanted to be seen as someone completely different from the squares. And, “quiet as it’s kept,” I really saw myself apart from all my high school classmates, the black students as well as the whites. I had no respect for my black classmates because they had bought into the idea of their own inferiority. They believed that their culture, language, and music were beneath those of their white counterparts. So they tried their best to be as white as they could in their speech, dress, and manners. It sickened me to see my old friends change that way. I refused to change, and I guess that sickened both my black and white classmates because we all quickly drew apart.
What happened to us was sad. But at the time I had no language to explain myself to them, nor they to me. We were mute in our separation and pain. We couldn’t explain why we were drifting apart. We only knew that we were and that we were powerless to stop it. But I had Miles Davis in my life, and they didn’t, and that’s what saved me: his music and his living example of what a black man could be: someone completely independent, amazingly creative, fiercely proud.
As a teenager in the late 1950s, I had few fiercely proud black role models and heroes: Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Paul Robeson, and my father’s older brother, Albert, were at the top of my list. Of these men my Uncle Albert was the only one with whom I had a real personal experience—though Chuck Berry lived three blocks down the street from me and I would see and speak to him on occasion. Uncle Albert taught me firsthand what it meant to be what I later came to know as an “unreconstructed black man.” This was a dangerous, lonely, and unrewarding position in which to place oneself. Uncle Albert didn’t take anything off anyone—black or white—and the reason my father’s family had to leave Dublin, Georgia, during the late 1920s was that Uncle Albert, as a teenager, threatened to kill a white man who had called him a “boy” and a “nigger.” He refused to be disrespected, whether by a boss, his friends, or anyone else. As a consequence he kept his self-respect but had a hard time keeping employment and making a living. And although they managed to make a much better living than did Uncle Albert, Chuck Berry, Paul Robeson, and Miles Davis were like that, too.
I began to look for more records by Miles. I found out who “Bird” was by finding Miles Davis’ name on some of Charlie Parker’s records. In the same way I also found out that the “young alto player” who sounded just like “Bird” was Jackie McLean. I wanted to learn everything I could about Miles Davis. So I started asking some of the older guys about him, which led me to my cousin, Marvin, a very good drummer and everyday criminal and junkie. (He was a junkie so obsessed with getting money to support his large habit that he later broke into his own father’s house, my Uncle, James “Pal” Troupe, and stole everything that wasn’t tied down. It was the talk of the family for years.) Marvin—dead now—always liked me. He was always telling me I had “potential.” Somewhere around 1955 he turned me on to the album Bags Groove, which completely blew my mind because it was so different from “Donna” and all the other music by Miles I had heard until then.
bags groove and hard bop
The title track “Bags Groove,” named after the vibraphonist Milt “Bags” Jackson and recorded in 1954, was the first jazz music that went straight to my heart and brain, not to mention my body. It had something in it that just moved me to my core, something way beyond what I expected to experience listening to a jazz tune. I had liked “Donna” a lot—still do—and “Walkin’,” the signature tune of the “hard bop” movement, and “Blue ’n’ Boogie.” But “Bags Groove” had something in it that took me completely outside of myself. Maybe it had something to do with the sense of space Miles created, or maybe it was Thelonious Monk’s spare, eccentric piano that unlocked the feeling of wide-openness the tune has always had for me, even now. Whatever it was, I know it affected me like no other song I had ever heard.
Even though I had been moving fast through all of Miles’ records I could wrap my ears around, I still wasn’t prepared for his wide-open, soaring, lyrical voice on “Bags Groove.” I loved Monk’s wonderful solo in the middle of the song. I loved Bags’s vibe work underneath it all, with Percy Heath walking the hell out of his bass lines. And I loved the way that Miles comes back in that clear, crisp, beautiful tone of his. Man, when I first heard “Bags Groove,” I felt I had died and gone to some very hip heaven. I also felt I could dance some very cool steps to this music, and, on a number of occasions, I did. But even more than that, more than making me want to move my body, more than challenging me to think about what sound is all about, “Bags Groove” went straight to my heart. It made me feel older and “cool,” on the inside of something new. It confirmed my sense that I was a cut above the group I was hanging with, people who weren’t into Miles or jazz. And, to be sure, after a short time I found myself uncomfortable with most of these old friends and moved on, eventually finding a place for myself with an older, more adventurous crowd.
What I didn’t know when I first heard “Bags Groove” was that in the fall of 1953, just before recording it, Miles had kicked heroin. I knew about his drug habit from my cousin Marvin and I had even thought it had a positive effect on his playing and was one of the reasons he seemed so cool. I wasn’t alone in this opinion. In the early 1950s, many hipsters thought that using heroin was very cool. At that time, heroin was just beginning to work its devastating way into urban communities all over the United States. It wasn’t moving only into black communities then. In New York it was moving into the Lower East Side (Jewish and Polish and Russian populations) and the Upper West Side (Irish and Puerto Rican populations). In Chicago, in the fifties, a lot of the junkies were Polish and Slovakian. It was really more of an urban poverty issue than a racial one—unlike the crack epidemic of the 1980s, in which cocaine and crack use did split along racial lines.
The reasons I never got involved with heroin were that I was an athlete and that my cousin Marvin, a junkie himself, advised against it. So, because I respected Marvin and trusted his advice, I never shot up or even sniffed it. Still, deep down, I continued to think that the people using heroin were the hippest people I knew. They were so “clean”—well-dressed—and had such hip, laid-back attitudes. But I didn’t know that before Miles recorded “Bags Groove,” he had secretly gone to his father’s farm in Millstadt, Illinois, to kick his habit. That’s why he played so great, because he was drug-free, really clean.
a case of hero worship
After I fell in love with “Bags Groove” I redoubled my efforts to find out everything I could about “The Prince of Darkness.” I began reading all the magazine articles I could find about Miles. I discovered how he dressed—all decked out in elegant clothes and expensive Italian shoes. I checked out his aloof, disdainful but always—to me—cool attitude. From conversations with older black men who had known him in St. Louis, I discovered how he spoke and behaved, and, after absorbing all of this information about him, my own style soon changed. The way I spoke, stood, walked, and dressed changed. Even the way I “hit on” girls changed so my style would be more in line with the way I imagined my hero did things.
Although I wasn’t into Bird’s music as much as I was into Miles’, because of my love for Miles, I paid attention to the news of Charlie Parker’s death in March of 1955. Today, I love Bird’s music but, perhaps because I grew up with him, I still prefer Miles.
After I first saw Miles play live, as far as I was concerned, he could do no wrong musically or socially. I had had black sports heroes previously, but Miles was my first black hero beyond the world of sports. His music and the way he presented himself to the world opened up the possibility that I would be able to do anything I could imagine myself doing. His music and his example made me feel special. Free. Able to utilize my own imagination.
Later I would come to know that Miles had had the same effect on the lives of many other people from all over the world. In fact, when I was working on his book with him, I discovered there was a group of men and women of all ages and races who followed him around the world attending his concerts, just to hear how differently he would play at each one. I came across them comparing notes at a concert on Long Island. They knew who I was. They knew he had chosen me to pen his life story because they knew everything there was to know about the man, and they looked up to me because I was the Chosen One. Told me so. I was completely astonished to discover these people, as was Miles, who had known nothing about them because they knew enough about him to keep their respectful distance.
the first quintet
By the time I graduated from high school and went on to Grambling College in Louisiana, Miles’ music had changed. The music he and his first “great quintet” created from 1956 to 1960 became some of the most influential small group jazz ever played. John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, and Red Garland were the personnel. I remember waiting impatiently for every record the group released. And whenever a new record came out, if it was during summer or a holiday break, I would make a beeline over to Percy Campbell’s house, on Labadie in St. Louis, to listen to it. Of all my friends, Percy (now dead, having been stabbed in Oakland in the 1970s) had the best sound system and record collection. Workin’, Steamin’, Relaxin’, Cookin’: the albums the quintet released became the musical badges of hipness my friends and I proudly displayed in our conversations. The way we saw it was, if you weren’t into Miles and Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Bird, and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, you weren’t into anything.
By the time Miles released Round Midnight in 1956, he had added the great alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley to the band. This expansion of the group into a sextet led Miles down even greater musical roads, which fact became evident when he released Milestones in 1958. In December of 1958, I caught the sextet live at the Sutherland Lounge in Chicago; it was my second time hearing Miles live, and, like the first time, it proved memorable.
I was home from college on Christmas break and some friends and I drove to Chicago to hear them. I had a ton of fun in Chicago, and the Sutherland Lounge was a much hipper place to listen to music than Peacock Alley had been. It was bigger, the acoustics were better, and it seemed as if the audience paid more attention. I got into the club with a false draft card again, only this time it was easier, probably because my friends and I were older. We were flat-out “clean,” with the attitudes to match our hip clothes; aloof, disdainful, and too arrogant for words. We didn’t have much money—just enough to get in, buy a few soft drinks, and pay for gas for the trip back home—but we were imitating Miles and that got us over. The music the band played that night was glorious. It was so good it was transcendent.
Of course, Miles’ music had changed since the first time I heard him live. He was moving full speed ahead into his modal period, and everyone was really beginning to stretch out, taking long solos. Coltrane was something else that night. He yelped and howled and blew so furiously it seemed as though his life depended on every note. He was just beginning to get into the style that would later become known as “sheets of sound.” Cannonball was something else, too, tearing off solos that flew like birds. But it was Miles himself who was the spark, the catalyst that ignited, sparked, and drove everyone else that night. The way I remember him playing that evening, his trumpet seemed to soar above the other instruments like a golden eagle, lyrical, probing, and driving everyone to play beyond themselves. He burned through his solos in that now famous “running” style that he had perfected. Then he switched to the mute on the ballads, tonguing the notes like a passionate lover kissing his woman. He was on top of his instrument. He knew it inside and out, knew what to play and when and where to play it. His mind was sharp and free of drugs, his dress was sartorial splendor. Yes, he was “The Man.” I tell you he was something else again, and I left the Sutherland Lounge that night completely blown away.
Album after stunning album was released during this great period from 1956 to 1960, one of the most fertile periods any American musician has ever known. And I listened attentively to them all. Sometime during these years, Miles’ legendary hipness merged with his great music and turned him into an almost mythical figure. In 1958 alone, Milestones, Miles and Monk at Newport, Jazz Track, and Porgy and Bess were released. And the next year, perhaps the most celebrated jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue, was released. That album would make the already world-famous trumpet player a legend and become the most talked-about and influential record of its time.
kind of blue
Like Bags Groove, the album Kind of Blue changed the way I listened to music. This was the third time that Miles taught me how to open my ears. After hearing this album, I found that I needed a sense of openness and open-endedness in the music I listened to. I learned to need space within the structure of the composition. I needed surprise, too, rather than the rigid, tightly wrapped sameness that seemed to be typical of a lot of other musicians. After hearing Kind of Blue, I began to accept and understand the idea that a great artist works in many different forms and styles, always searching, always challenging the status quo. That’s what I, and many others, began looking to Miles for, this notion of change. We began to understand that it is alright to move away from the familiar and to evolve into something different. We learned that venturing into the unknown could produce something special, as indeed Miles proved with Kind of Blue.
I always had loved Miles’ tone and his licks. Now, I also expected him to show me something different every time I heard him, to lead me down a different musical path—preferably one that I knew nothing about. This notion was exhilarating—positively revelatory. It brought me closer to understanding the concept of what freedom for a young black man could be. On Kind of Blue, Miles once again led me to a place within myself that would teach me something about who I was, about what I thought greatness in music, art, sports, any endeavor could be. Kind of Blue became a barometer, as “Donna” and “Bags Groove” had been before it. Miles was my barometer, and no one else came close, not even my father.
Miles’ music and his attitude were beginning to affect how I chose to live in the world. I was starting to choose flexibility over rigidity as a must—as an essential value. When I considered all the different races, religions, subcultures, and social and political philosophies we have in this country, it began to seem imperative that we learn to respect our differences. It seemed to me then—and today seems even more so—that believing in “this and that” wins hands down over “this or that,” which was then and still is the prevailing philosophy—whites or blacks, classical music or jazz. I was beginning to understand that we could love it all. The improvisations of jazz along with the fixed, unyielding notation of classical music. Because in the modern world one has to be ready for anything, to have the ability to switch up when confronted with the constantly new situations that a multicultural society presents.
It was Miles Davis and his music, his ever-expanding approach to and embrace of many different styles, that taught me to see the importance of inclusiveness rather than separation. Later, other artists would stretch my inclusive vision even further: Pablo Picasso, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Aime Césaire, and Derek Walcott, to name a few. But Miles Davis remains the most important model for me, because he was the first to demonstrate that it was alright to court change and strive to be different, that you could constantly reinvent your art and do it artfully, with grace, with the possibility of greatness and integrity. Flexibility, not rigidity: Miles was “The Man” who showed the way for millions like me all over the world.
the “bust”
After hearing Kind of Blue in 1959, I began to crave change. I didn’t know exactly what I was seeking but I did know I wanted and needed change. I knew it was out there, because Miles Davis was out there, playing and living it. So I knew it was possible. By 1959, my friends and I were wearing shades all the time like Miles and the other hipsters. We walked the way we thought he walked, we spoke to women the way we imagined he spoke to them, we stood and dressed just like he did. He was our main man. And in our young minds we were just like him.
So in the autumn of 1959 when word came down to us about Miles’ run-in with a white policeman outside of Birdland, in New York, we were, to put it mildly, distressed. This incident made him into more than just a musical hero to us. Because of it he became a social and political icon, one who would help usher us into the riotous, tumultuous 1960s.
According to the news reports, the incident began innocently enough, with Miles walking his friend, the famous white newspaper gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, out of the club to get a cab. Out on the street, Miles encountered a white policeman, who asked him to “move on.” Miles refused on the grounds that he wasn’t loitering as the policeman had accused him of doing, pointing to his name on the display board outside Birdland’s entrance to prove it. The cop wouldn’t listen to him and a struggle followed, with Miles getting hit on the head by a second policeman, who had been watching in the shadows. After beating and subduing him, they took Miles to Rikers Island, where he spent the night in jail.
It seems like we knew all of this even before the picture of a bloodied Miles walking out of the jailhouse hit the newsstand. In the photograph, his beautiful, stylish first wife, the black dancer Frances Taylor, was draped over his arm. Miles had a bloody bandage wrapped around his head and blood spattered his expensive Italian sports jacket. Despite his injuries, Miles still looked unbroken. In fact, he looked positively defiant, his eyes flashing rage. This photo was flashed all around the world, in the pages of newspapers everywhere. Naturally, it caused outrage among many of his fans, including me.
This photo and the fact that he had defended himself and seemed willing to fight to the death for his rights only increased my respect and admiration for “The Man.” After all, this was just before the beginning of the civil rights movement, and respect as equal citizens was what most black people would soon be fighting for. With that incident, Miles vaulted into the political arena of civil rights. (What timing he always had!)
sketches of spain
In 1960, Sketches of Spain was released to universal critical acclaim. Gil Evans, Miles’ best friend, served as arranger, making this their third album together. Perhaps because of its strong classical European overtones, the critics loved it almost immediately. On the other hand, my friends and I in St. Louis were baffled when we first heard it because it was such a change and so European in its orientation. Then we fell completely in love with it. Sketches of Spain proved to be the biggest-selling album of Miles’ career until then. (It was later surpassed by Bitches Brew.) Today, it remains the favorite Miles album of millions of people.
Released immediately after Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain surpassed anything Miles possibly could have imagined. It turned him into a sex symbol, someone who was pursued by beautiful women from all over the world. People who weren’t even jazz fans were talking about his impeccable style and taste. Popular magazines like Time ran feature stories about him. He had crossed over from being an idol of black people to being an idol of whites, too.
For a black man in 1960 to achieve this kind of musical success was astonishing. Today, such success can be understood only when compared to the impact that Michael Jackson had twenty-five years later. Miles’ Sketches of Spain was the first real “crossover” moneymaker.
transitions
After finishing college, I joined the army and traveled to France, where I played basketball on American army and French teams. This took me all over Europe—and everywhere I went I found that numbers of people loved Miles Davis, his music, and his style. He was their hero, too. This surprised me, but it only added to my respect for him.
In France I found myself traveling back and forth between Metz, where I was stationed, and Paris, where my girlfriend lived and where I played basketball. It was in France that I began to write poetry, look at art, and associate with others (both French and American) who were considered “bohemian.” I began truly interacting with whites and “intellectuals” for the first time, hanging out until all manner of hours (after the basketball season ended) in dark, smoky clubs in Metz and on the Left Bank of Paris. I became a sponge, absorbing all kinds of artistic and political ideas, and by the time I left Europe in late 1964, I was a changed person.
I returned to the United States at the time of assassinations (John and Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X), incendiary rhetoric, and shoot-outs between black, Latino, and Native American groups and the police and the FBI. These were the violent manifestations of the deep political and cultural changes that were happening then and are still reverberating today. Another aspect of those changes was the growing acceptance of black music and black musicians by white audiences. Rhythm and blues, renamed “rock and roll,” was about to conquer white America.
From the beginning of his career, Miles had wanted to reach a wide, racially diverse musical audience. He always wanted to be cutting edge, but he always wanted to be popular, too. In the early 1960s, his challenge was to accomplish both of these goals without compromising his musical integrity. Sketches of Spain had brought him a huge audience, but more American whites than African Americans were listening to it. After its great success, Miles wanted more than ever to reach black Americans, especially young black Americans.
Grown weary of playing old standards, he wanted to return to music that was closer to the roadhouse funk he had grown up with—but he also wanted a contemporary sound.
Miles set out to create a more accessible music, one that combined jazz with elements of rhythm and blues, African modal music, and rock and roll. That’s just what he eventually did accomplish, but when he achieved his goal he was both celebrated and ridiculed for his efforts by long-time fans and music critics.
He began by listening to the music that was popular with young people: James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone. He also listened to Motown, the African-American label out of Detroit’s inner city, and he was certainly well aware of the company’s phenomenal success. Headed by a black man, Berry Gordy, Motown was releasing all kinds of great “crossover” music, and Americans of all races and ethnicities were listening and dancing to Motown’s megahits.
sheets of sound
In 1965, for the first time since I had begun listening to him, I wasn’t paying much attention to Miles’ new recordings because they seemed out of sync with my musical tastes. When I’d returned to the States, after hearing James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” I was out on the dance floor shaking my booty again like everyone else in America. And though I was dancing my ass off to James Brown, it was the energy and passion of John Coltrane and his group that were moving my soul. Trane’s surging “sheets of sound” seemed to transcribe the political outrage of the inner cities into profound music. In his music, I heard the gunfire in the streets, the cries of rage, the urgent need to revolt.
In the 1960s, the great social upheavals the United States was experiencing were significantly altering long-standing racial relationships. That fact, and my own political beliefs and emerging artistic consciousness (helped along by Miles’ boundary-shattering music), was pointing me toward a fundamental reassessment of my life.
I had moved to Los Angeles to live in the black community called Watts after the riots there in 1965. I lived in a commune of writers, poets, and artists and met many other creative people from all over the community. I joined the Watts Writers Workshop and began to write poetry every day. The one constant presence in my life was John Coltrane. I listened to him every waking hour, sometimes all day long.
But as much as I was learning to love Trane, Miles remained my idol and role model. From the mid-to late 1960s I had memorized almost all of my favorite solos by both musicians. I used their riffs and licks as a foundation for the rhythms and cadences of my own emerging poetic language. Their horn solos helped me to pull myself away from the sonnets, sestinas, and villanelles I was composing when I first started writing poetry.
I kept trying to imitate the flow and structure of their musical ideas. With Miles I wanted to get something like his floating sound and jabbing, insistent staccato rhythms into my poetic lines. With Trane I wanted to learn how to generate the same kind of energy and passionate intensity that his “sheets of sound” did.
the second quintet
In 1966, I “rediscovered” Miles’ music. My ears finally opened to his new sound. By then the second quintet (and sometime sextet) had been working together for two years. It took me so long to hear what they were doing because the music was so difficult and different.
In fact, this band was one of the most liberated I have ever heard—then or since. Hearing that band live was like watching a chameleon go through its changes. Night after night, they never played the same tune the same way. Although they played the standards, they did them with extraordinary harmonies and rhythmic experiments. They freed themselves from all the conventional chord changes. But no matter how much they broke with traditions, they swung. They always swung.
The band members were all much younger than Miles and they led him into newer, more challenging directions. The drummer, the late Tony Williams, was seventeen years old, fresh out of Boston and Jackie McLean’s band, when he joined Miles. Many people think he was the most gifted drummer Miles ever had. Herbie Hancock was playing great Bud Powell–influenced piano, Wayne Shorter was Miles’ most imaginative saxophonist since Coltrane, and the rock-steady and creative Ron Carter on bass completed the core group.
Influenced by the band’s exuberant energy and the great tunes the other musicians were writing—especially those of Shorter, the band’s main composer—Miles’ approach to the trumpet had changed again. His horn had flown into the stratosphere. He played higher and faster than he ever had before, splintering off notes like wood chips flying out of a wood thrasher. The change was so evident it was almost like hearing a new trumpet player. At a club in L.A. one night I overheard music critic Leonard Feather marveling at how fast Miles was playing. He kept shaking his head in amazement about Miles’ great new sound.
In the few years that the quintet/sextet was together, the personnel and instruments kept changing and electric instruments were added. For Miles, electrical amplification represented the future of music—but it also led to the breakup of his second great band.
in a silent way
The year 1968 was a momentous one for Miles. He began a short-lived marriage to Betty Mabry, he suffered from a depression caused by the death of his friend John Coltrane in 1967, and he found himself searching for a new sound again. As Dizzy Gillespie once said, “Miles is like a man who has made a pact with himself to never repeat himself.” And, I, after hearing Miles play the memorable solo “Petits Machins” (“Little Stuff”) on the album Filles de Kilimanjaro, was altogether into his music again.
With the release of In a Silent Way, it was clear that Miles had found his new sound. At first, it was hard to listen to, because I had just recently become accustomed to the second quintet, and I wasn’t ready for him to move in another direction; but it wasn’t long before I was loving the new sound. By then, I understood that one important reason to love Miles was that you would never know what to expect from him. It wasn’t that his playing was so different on In a Silent Way but rather that he had placed himself in a new musical context. He had surrounded himself with an entirely new sound that brought his voice into sharp relief, allowing us to hear it in a more open and expanded way. There were deep, mysterious spaces in the music and there was something mysterious and magically compelling beneath its surface that bubbled like an underground river. It drew me back to listen to it over and over again.
In a Silent Way uses three electric pianos, an electric organ, and an electric guitar in addition to conventional acoustic instruments. All the musicians take long solos, but Miles’ are especially bright, haunting, and, at their core, sad. Miles had learned and absorbed so many new musical ideas from the members of his second “great” band that he had caught up with the musical language of the younger generation. And once he was comfortable with new instruments like the synthesizer, he felt it was time to move on. He wanted to move forward with his own musical agenda, and he knew he wanted to go in the direction of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Sly Stone, and Charles Lloyd. Years later, Miles told me that Charles Lloyd had served as a catalyst for how he had played In a Silent Way. Still, though Miles had loved the way Lloyd had fused elements of rock and jazz together, it was not Lloyd but guitarist Jimi Hendrix who was the biggest influence on Miles at this time.
“jimi”
I met Hendrix in California around the same time Miles was introduced to him in New York. I met Hendrix when I was reading poetry on the beach in Venice, but I didn’t know who he was because he told me only that his name was “Jimi.” He liked my poetry and offered to play behind me, and I accepted. His amazing guitar blew me completely away, so I asked for his full name. When he told it to me, I was so astonished I couldn’t read anymore. My mouth dropped down somewhere around my knees and he just stood there laughing at me. Laughing and watching my reaction. He was a shy man and was flattered that I loved his music so much and that I knew who he was, because, as he later told me, most blacks had never heard of him. That was because the kind of music he played appealed mostly to the young white fans of rock and roll.
The following week I came back to Venice to read at the beach and Hendrix was there and played behind me again. That was the last time I ever saw him up close. I didn’t know that he knew Miles, nor did I ever mention to him how much I loved Miles’ music. But I did find out later that Hendrix had influenced Miles so much that Miles had tried to transpose his guitar style for the trumpet.
bitches brew
Miles had plunged deep into electric instrumentation for the first time on In a Silent Way, and he continued in this direction even further with his next album, the ground-breaking Bitches Brew, which rose to the top of the jazz charts and eventually sold five hundred thousand copies, becoming Miles’ biggest-selling record. Like Kind of Blue, it exerted a tremendous influence throughout the worlds of jazz, pop, rock, and blues.
But more than any other album until then, it polarized his audience into two distinct groups: those who loved his music before Bitches Brew and those who loved it after hearing Bitches Brew. In the first group were the older lovers of jazz and European classical music, perhaps evenly divided among all racial groups. His new audience was equally diverse but decidedly younger and more tuned into rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and funk. When they came together at Miles’ concerts, the two groups were like oil and water; they were loudly contentious and even got into arguments about which way Miles should take his music.
However, it was the younger group that raved about Bitches Brew and bought it, and it was on the hook of the younger group that Miles hung his musical hat. One thing is certain: Miles knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that his new approach would reach the younger generation and, like the true innovator that he was, didn’t care what anyone else thought. He once told me, “Old people don’t buy records but young people do.”
He sure was right in this assessment, because many of his older fans never bought a record of his again after Bitches Brew, and this included many of my older friends. I think it was a class difference as well as a generational one. His older audience liked to wear suits and ties and go to concert halls. Many of them also liked European classical music and opera. The kids who liked Bitches Brew were not only younger; they were raunchier. They dressed down instead of up and danced in the aisles and cheered in the “wrong” places. They were bored by classical music or opera but loved rock and roll, funk, and soul.
I, for one, appreciated Miles’ courage, especially because it seemed to me that he was at the top of the music world when he made these changes. In my opinion, it’s a lot easier to change when you’re closer to the bottom than when you’re on top. Miles always initiated change when he was riding high and being richly rewarded for what he was doing. The cause of his many changes was never financial need. It was what he needed to do to advance as an artist.
Others didn’t see it that way, especially the critics. After Bitches Brew, Stanley Crouch called Miles “the most brilliant sellout in the history of jazz” and a “traitor.” Leonard Feather, who had been one of Miles’ biggest fans, didn’t appreciate the change, either. But then, until a certain point in time, Feather hadn’t liked John Coltrane, and he’d urged people not to buy Trane’s records or to listen to him live because they would only be listening to “noise.” Miles once told me that Feather had urged him not to include Trane in his first great group. Time sure proved him wrong on that point.
Miles went his own way despite the beating he knew he would take from hostile critics and fans. Miles knew that all forms of art reflect their own societies and cultures. In 1969, despite the furious objections of the purists, he knew that electrical instrumentation was here to stay. As Ralph Gleason wrote: “Electric music is the music of this culture and in the breaking away (not the breaking down) from previously assumed forms a new kind of music is emerging. The whole society is like that. The old forms are inadequate. Not the old eternal verities but the old structures.” Miles, according to Gleason, was always reaching for “new ideas and new forms, and in music this has meant leaving the traditional forms of bars and scales, keys and chords, and playing something else altogether which maybe you can’t identify and classify yet but which you recognize when you hear it and which when it makes it, really makes it—is the true artistic turn-on.”
If Miles and his band were excited about what they had accomplished with the recording of Bitches Brew, it did not equal the shock that his fans went through when they first heard it—whether they loved it or hated it. The first thing I noticed when I bought the album was the cover. It was truly strange. It was a “cosmic” painting by Abdul Mati of three black people looking at sea and sky, two men and a woman. The woman’s hair seems like a small tornado connecting her head to the dark clouds in the sky. She has an arm around a man’s waist and he has an arm around her shoulders. They are nude above the waist. Another black face juts out of the left margins above a flaming pink flower. All three seem to be Africans looking westward toward what could be America. This was the first time Miles had used original art on an album cover, and it seemed more suited to a rock album than to jazz. Even the title of the album seemed more in keeping with rock and roll than with jazz, and the cover announced the psychedelic orientation of the music within.
I remember getting ready to listen to the record by fixing myself a stiff drink, going into the front room of my home in Athens—I was teaching at Ohio University at the time—and placing the first of the four sides (Bitches Brew is a double album) on the turntable. When the drumbeat opened up the music, I sat down eagerly. It was early afternoon and I kept listening until late into the evening, even bringing my dinner into the front room to eat with my plate on my lap as I absorbed every note and chord of this at first very weird music. Before the night closed down, it had deeply impressed me.
It took a while for me to understand what Miles was doing and to hear the music’s roots. Bitches Brew went even deeper into the rock-funk-blues bag than had its predecessor, In a Silent Way. Yet it is a direct descendent of that album, with its modernist edge and its expansive search for freer modes and ways to express musical ideas.
The album begins with Joe Zawinul’s tune “Pharaoh’s Dance,” which opens in a swirling maelstrom of electrical pulsations that carry the listener into a strange new place where nothing is predictable. Guitars and electric pianos lay out short runs that widen like the concentric circles a rock makes when it is thrown in a river. Then comes Miles’ first mournful, very short solo, and after that, when the other musicians start up again, Miles seems to jab and punch his way like a boxer through an enveloping sound that swirls all around him. His horn almost screams a few times as if frustrated at not finding a way out of all that sound. The group mimics the traffic noise of rush hour in Manhattan, with car horns honking and millions of people talking and yelling in a hurricane of voices. It is a remarkable opening. Even today, whenever I think about Manhattan, I think about “Pharaoh’s Dance.”
The title tune starts slowly. Miles opens with a marchlike, trilling solo that moves into a long passage that rises, falls, and spreads out as if the trumpeter were descending into some kind of private hell. His voice sometimes screams, other times pleads. The trilling, marchlike figure, reminiscent of his drum and bugle beginnings, is repeated throughout the composition like a refrain. Miles’ solo in the middle of this twenty-seven-minute piece is stunning in its creation of a feeling of profound loneliness and isolation.
In contrast, “Spanish Key,” which opens up the second side of the album, pulsates throughout. It churns and boils like water in an iron cauldron over a large fire. Everyone who solos here does so splendidly—John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Benny Maupin, Zawinul, and, of course, Miles.
“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” is a memorable Miles Davis composition. From the opening bass line punctuated by drum accents and guitar blues licks to the bass clarinet moaning in the background of Miles’ opening statement, you know this is the blues, but the blues played in a way you’ve never heard before. The music seems to be boiling, with voices emerging from whatever the concoction is that is being cooked down there. “Sanctuary” closes out this very controversial album more in the style of his second great quintet. When set against the rest of the songs on this album, its haunting tune seems almost tame.
Bitches Brew broke down the barrier between rock and traditional jazz. Some critics, fans, and musicians never forgave Miles for doing this, but he was celebrated by millions for pushing the envelope of innovation and creativity in that direction. The album also pushed Miles into larger venues than the small jazz clubs he had played for years. Bitches Brew not only generated controversy; it made Miles richer, too, and more famous than he had ever been. He played gigs with the Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana, and the late Laura Nyro, taking his music to an evergrowing, larger audience.
miles’ “stock” bands and recordings
After Bitches Brew, Miles drew more and more from the same pool of musicians—his “stock recording band” as he liked to call it—to make his new recordings. This was true for Circle in the Round, Live-Evil, Big Fun, Get Up with It, Jack Johnson, and On the Corner, all recorded in the early 1970s, though some, like Circle in the Round, were released much later. Live-Evil was an extension of what Miles had done on Bitches Brew, using some of the same musical concepts and figures, only this time around, in his words, they were “more worked out” because on Live-Evil he knew exactly where he wanted the music to go.
He was moving away from everyone having a solo to using more ensemble interplay and group improvisation, a hallmark of funk and rock. This caused an even larger rift between Miles and the jazz purists because jazz has always been considered the soloist’s art form, the place where an individual can improvise and solo to his or her heart’s content. Now Miles was moving away from even this sacred tenet. There were still solos, but they were shorter, more intense bursts within the group context. For many of his older fans, this change proved to be the last straw; but their places in Miles’ audience were eagerly taken by younger, rock-and funk-oriented fans.
Between 1965 and 1970, Miles released many albums that carried his name as leader. All of them used members of the stock recording band that he had developed over the years. It seemed as though he was living and sleeping in the recording studio. Most of the albums I liked, listening to them over and over again; some I was indifferent to, listening to them only occasionally; others I listened to once and never played again. But if Miles was becoming more prolific during these years, he was also becoming more improvisational when he played live at concerts.
During this period Miles was literally making up the music onstage, creating it as the concert went along. Songs grew longer and longer and he completely abandoned the traditional standards, like “My Funny Valentine” and “If I Were a Bell,” that had driven Coltrane out of his band. In 1971, when Miles toured the United States playing rock halls as the opening act for Carlos Santana, many jazz fans and critics were more confused than ever. But even if it didn’t appear that way from the outside looking in, Miles knew that he was moving toward the music of On the Corner.
on the corner
On the Corner, recorded in the summer of 1972, was released later that year. The critics and fans who had thought Bitches Brew the most controversial jazz album Miles would ever release had more surprises in store, because On the Corner was indeed just right around the corner. This album produced more shocked dismay among jazz purists than even Bitches Brew. I, too, was confused and disappointed when I first heard it. But I came to think, and still do, that On the Corner was a powerfully innovative album.
The album cover—paintings of black street scenes by California artist Corky McCoy—made it clear that Miles was reaching out to young African Americans. I could see that. I knew he was trying to play jazz with a James Brown funk groove. I could hear that. But, as I said, the music confused me at first, because it wasn’t James Brown and it wasn’t Miles Davis but something else altogether different, with lots of Indian instruments like sitars and tablas thrown into the acoustic and electric mix for good measure.
Initially, I was even disappointed by Corky McCoy’s cartoonlike drawings of black people on the cover. But the second time I listened to it and looked at the cover drawings, I heard the rhythm underneath that pulled me into the music, and I understood McCoy’s images, too. The album has not let go of me since. On the Corner is quintessentially an album that comes from the sounds, rhythms, and attitudes that permeate the culture of that great city, New York.
In 1972 I was living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in a sixteenth-floor apartment on Central Park West with a wonderful view of Central Park. I knew that Miles was living on 77th Street, a block and a half off Broadway. Yes, I was in New York City and I felt as though I was in heaven. Tall buildings, millions and millions of people, all kinds of cultures and sounds mashed together. Close up.
Had I not been living in New York, perhaps I wouldn’t have gotten into On the Corner on just my second hearing, but living there made me more receptive and helped me penetrate the music’s density and get right down into its rhythmic core.
On the Corner is definitely African-American urban funk tinged with jazz and Indian and African flavors. It’s a jambalaya or gumbo from New Orleans. It’s “hip-hop” before “hip-hop.” Indeed, it might have been the first hip-hop record released by a major label, with its recurring bass and high-hat drum rhythms punctuated by snare accents, its use of electrical instrumentation, and its looping use of the recording tape.
On the Corner is all about an urban musical attitude and its orientation is funk, while its wonderful displays of musicianship are the improvisational skills found in the best of jazz musicians. A deep groove is laid down from jump, a rhythm that bumps and bounces along like a hip black man or woman walking down a New York street and taking in all the sounds and images. You can hear the car horns.
Miles plays wah-wah guitar rhythms on his horn, wailing, screeching, screaming, and meowing like a cat in the night. And though there are fine featured solos, On the Corner is really about group ensemble playing. The drummers and percussionists anchor this recording and goose and push it with an unbelievable pulsation and synchronicity. In the background, bells shake, gourds are scratched and shaken, whistles are blown. The drummers make the sock cymbals shimmy and shake like the behinds of men and women bouncing up and down and side to side on Harlem streets. The rhythmic figures are repeated throughout in a hypnotic fashion, but everyone is part and parcel of the ensemble group sound that percolates and brews and boils and spills over everything.
With this record, Miles proved definitively his ability to absorb different musical genres and turn them into his own musical idiom. On the Corner is a great synthesis. Over time I have grown to cherish it as much as I do any other album Miles ever made. In my opinion, it is a masterpiece that captures the music and sounds and feeling of our times like no other. Of course, the purist jazz critics hated it and had a field day bad-mouthing it, but it was not only panned by mainstream jazz critics—it didn’t sell well, either. Initially, then, it sank like a stone. But time has done well by it because as many young music lovers have discovered it, it has become an indispensable record for them.
On the Corner was a harbinger for the direction Miles would take from 1972 until 1975, when bad health, cocaine addiction, alcoholism, and disinterest in what he was playing—and with the entire music scene—forced him into five years of silence. From 1975 until 1980, he did not play a concert, cut a record, or even pick up his horn to practice. He just slid further down into drug and alcohol addiction, sex orgies, and a lifestyle that kept him prowling the streets of Manhattan during the hours after midnight like a madman or predator.
backstage at a very fisher
The last time I heard Miles play live before he retired was at the Kool Jazz Festival at the Avery Fisher Hall. It was a great and strange night. I went to the concert with my homeboy and friend pianist John Hicks and another friend, writer Steve Cannon. Hicks had told me that Miles had asked him to play at the concert, so he had gotten us great balcony seats overlooking the stage, and backstage passes so we could hang out with Miles and the musicians after the concert. Hicks was overjoyed to be playing with Miles, and I was happy for him and for the opportunity to be there to celebrate with him. After all, he was one of the guys who used to sit up in the bleachers at Tandy Community Center back in St. Louis and say—along with me and some other guys—that he was going to “run away to New York City and be just like Miles Davis.” So here we were, hanging in New York City, chilling, with me thinking I was finally just about to meet Miles. I remember thinking that it just couldn’t get any better than this.
When the band took the stage I saw that the working band had changed again—this time Miles was on trumpet and on the electric organ and keyboards. Sonny Fortune was on saxophones, Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas on electric guitars, Michael Henderson on electric bass, Al Foster on drums, and Mtume on percussion. But no John Hicks. Where was he? I thought that he would probably come out in a short while, but he didn’t. It was very strange. He didn’t join us in the extra seat we had, either. I remember thinking he would show up sooner or later.
The concert was great, one that brought people to their feet many times with whistling and standing ovations. Miles was playing with fire that night. The rest of the group played what music critic Howard Mandel later called “scorched earth music,” saying they were “burning the house down” with their music that night. Music critic Greg Tate called that band “the world’s first fully improvisational acid-funk band.” And it was that, too. I also remember the crowd being younger and blacker than previous ones, but with lots of Latinos, whites, and Asians, too. It was certainly a more multicultural audience than any I had ever seen at Miles’ concerts in the past.
When the concert was over, Steve and I went backstage to see if we could catch up with John Hicks. We found him standing just outside Miles’ dressing room door, ranting and raving, madder than a motherfucker. When he finally calmed down he told us that Miles had been so high he had forgotten that he had asked Hicks to play. Miles told Hicks that he, Miles, was going to play piano that night, which he did. Well, that just about sent Hicks off the deep end, and he threatened to hit Miles upside his head with a beer bottle; but some of the musicians stepped in, stopped him, and cooled the whole thing out. When we were leaving, Hicks said it was the drugs that were making Miles trip that way.
The energy backstage that night after that concert was awful. I had never seen Hicks so angry—and I had known him for twenty years. He was always smiling, even while playing some of the “baddest” piano around. I remember feeling very bad and sad for him when we left the hall that night to get ourselves a stiff drink. I also remember thinking that Miles couldn’t keep going on like that, being so fucked up on drugs that he would forget something as important as who he had asked to play with him at a concert. John Hicks wasn’t a liar; he took his music and everyone else’s seriously. So I knew the problem had to be with Miles, and that disturbed me. It also disturbed me that he could do such a hurting thing to so fine a musician. My respect for Miles slipped that night. I remember thinking that just because someone was a legend, that didn’t give him the right to treat a person as badly as Miles had treated John Hicks. It was awful. A year later, in the summer of 1975, Miles retired from the music scene, and he didn’t come back for five long years, leaving a big hole in the music and in many of our lives.
miles points the way
Miles’ New York comeback concert, on July 5, 1981, again at Avery Fisher Hall, during George Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival, was a huge musical and media event. He had already played Boston’s Kix Club on June 27 to packed crowds, but Boston isn’t New York City and on July 5 a host of important music critics and celebrities like Bill Cosby, Mick Jagger, Dustin Hoffman, Quincy Jones, Clint Eastwood, Elizabeth Taylor, Woody Allen, and Richard Gere turned out to greet and hear Miles. A slew of great musicians, like Max Roach, Clark Terry, Jackie McLean, Ornette Coleman, Jack DeJonette, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Abbey Lincoln, Mtume, the late Julius Hemphill, and Dizzy Gillespie, also were in attendance, along with many, many others.
I was there, too, along with my future wife, Margaret. Everyone was “dressed to kill.” And although his comeback album, The Man with a Horn (1980), had been totally savaged by the critics (I too was deeply disappointed with the music on this album), everyone was there to hear what Miles was now into musically, since its release had been some months earlier. In the end most went away happy, because the music was popping—even though Miles’ trumpet chops still weren’t all the way back, his musical ideas were almost there. Still, his playing was much better and stronger than it had been on The Man with a Horn, where it had been dismal. He sounded much better, richer, more adventurous in his playing, and this encouraged almost every Miles fan there. His band that evening was first-rate: Marcus Miller on electric bass, Mike Stern on guitar, Bill Evans on saxophone, Al Foster on drums, and Mino Cinelu on percussion, with his guest artist for the evening the beautiful and outstanding percussionist Sheila E.
His fans’ encouragement was rewarded with his playing on his next album, We Want Miles, which is a compilation of Miles’ 1981 summer concerts at Kix and Avery Fisher Hall and his September tour of Japan. By his Japanese tour there is a marked improvement in Miles’ playing over what I heard in July at Avery Fisher Hall; his sound, tone, and attack are much richer, stronger, and more confident. We Want Miles sold over a hundred thousand copies (extremely well for a jazz album) and won a Grammy—a “sympathy vote,” I remember one of his detractors saying after the award was announced. I didn’t think so, because there were some very nice cuts on that album, including “Back Seat Betty,” “Jean-Pierre,” and “Fast Track,” all composed by Miles.
By the time his next album, Star People, was released in 1982, his playing chops were even better. And although I liked this album—especially “Speak,” “It Gets Better,” and the blues tune “Star People”—it was his next album, Decoy (1984), that fully got my attention. Even though it was awarded the Grammy for that year, I don’t think it’s one of his greatest albums, although it includes some good tracks, notably the title tune, “Code M.D.” (for “Miles Davis”), “Freaky Deaky,” ‘What It Is” (a favorite expression Miles used when greeting friends with one of his rare smiles), and “That’s Right.” The music on this album is open, airy but tight, and very, very rhythmic, with catchy contemporary musical hooks, funk grooves, and a group sound so large it seems like a big band is playing in many places.
Miles’ next album, You’re Under Arrest, also sold over a hundred thousand copies, in a very few weeks. This was due in part, in my opinion, to Miles including the very popular songs “Human Nature” and “Time After Time” on this album, tunes that would remain in his live performance repertoire until his death. Again, this wasn’t one of my favorite albums, though it had some moments, like those two lovely pop ballads, the opening track entitled “One Phone Call Street Scene” (which features Miles, Sting, and others talking), “Intro M D 1,” and “Katia” (two other songs he kept in his concert repertoire).
Miles said he made this album because of “the problems that black people have with policemen everywhere.” He personalized this belief when he said: “The police are always fucking with me when I drive around out in California. They didn’t like seeing me driving around in a sixty-thousand-dollar yellow Ferrari, which I was doing at the time I made this record. Plus, they didn’t like me, a black person, living in a beachfront house in Malibu. That’s where the concept for You’re Under Arrest came from.” Miles sometimes drove around with an expired license and old Georgia plates, but his logic was, “The police know who I am, so why do they have to stop me?”
Still, the arresting part of this album—at least for me—is the striking photo of Miles on the cover and back of the album. He’s dressed in all black, with a wide-brimmed black hat and a no-nonsense look on his face, and is holding what looks like an automatic rifle. It’s a stunning photograph.
The good thing I would say about this album is that Miles plays very well here; his sound and tone are bright and clear, his playing and attack are very confident, very strong. Throughout this album he shoots off flying riffs in high and middle registers with ease—his playing chops are fully back!—and he has perfected the big-band sound that will remain a signature of his band until his death.
I liked the huge sound, the way it was structured, layered, and arranged, the way each musical instrument was voiced. Miles had learned much from Duke Ellington, Stockhausen, and Paul Buckmaster about using rhythm and space, about how to manipulate the band’s sound from high to low and all points in between, in the blink of an eye. Among the modern jazz musicians he was, in my opinion, unsurpassed in achieving this huge, layered big-band sound with relatively few—six or seven—musicians. You’re Under Arrest was the last album Miles recorded for Columbia Records, ending what had been a very rewarding recording relationship of almost thirty years.
Miles moved over to Warner Records, and on his first album, Tutu, named after South Africa’s black Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu, he reaches the highest plateau with his layered “big-band” sound. From the opening track, “Tutu,” on, Miles’ manipulation of the band’s sound is masterful. For me this is the most completely rewarding of his final albums—although I truly like Amandla, Aura, and Live Around the World. All of these albums are rich and nourishing, and in different ways.
Aura is outstanding for its inventive, adventurous spirit and structure. Recorded in 1984 in Copenhagen, in collaboration with the remarkable Danish composer and trumpet player Palle Mikkelborg, this record was released by Columbia (because Miles was under contract with them when it was recorded) in 1989. The album has a wonderful experimental edge to it, both in its compositional structure—all by Mikkelborg—and in the musicianship on display here.
Miles’ playing on this album is really outstanding. His solo riffs at times soar into the stratosphere. On other occasions, he plays a more thoughtful horn, open or muted, his solos sometimes long and sometimes fragmented, seemingly bitten off just as they get started. On still other occasions he plays with a pure introspective beauty reminiscent of his earlier, pre-electric phase. All in all, it is a wonderful album.
Amandla (meaning “freedom” in Swahili) is also a truly first-rate album, continuing the layered big-band sound, only funkier. The album has more of a Caribbean and African touch because Miles was really listening to Kassav and zouk and Franco, the late great Zarian guitarist. (I know because, as the reader will recall, I introduced Miles to their music.) Amandla has splashes of guitar and synthesizer colors patched into the group sound that echo Kassav’s wide use of the guitar, electric bass, and synthesizer. It’s a subtle effect, but it’s there underneath it all.
Live Around the World is rewarding for other reasons, mainly because it captures how really magnificent Miles’ last bands were live and in concert.
Although very, very interesting in places, doo-bop—like Ralph Ellison’s last novel, Juneteenth, published in June 1999—is an unfinished project, because Miles died before the album could be completed. Had he lived, I am convinced, doo-bop would have been more fully realized, and possibly the innovative, truly outstanding record that Miles told me he wanted to make. As is, doo-bop is only an indication, a musical index finger, if you will, pointing in the direction music might go in the future. Already some musicians, like Branford Marsalis, Greg Osby, and Russell Gunn, have released intriguing musical albums that move confidently in that direction, and perhaps beyond.
i see things
When I listen to Miles play I see things. I hear birds sing. I see and hear rivers and midnight trains as they cross a lonely midnight, midwestern landscape. I see beautiful women floating, naked and clothed; I see stylish men, pimps and slick-dressing gangsters. See ghosts all up in and between his chords, and I hear old and young people talking on southern porches after the sun has gone down. I hear horses whinnying and dogs barking. I mean, the way his sound flows is, for me, like seeing a parade of very hip people, magical in their elegance, flow by in an unending stream of eloquence just as the sun sets in the west and all those marvelous colors are singing their sundown song. He was magical for me when I first heard him and he was magical at the end, and he still is. Not despite all the changes in style his music and playing went through, but because of them.