Miles Davis was a great poet on his instrument. His horn could blow warm, round notes that spoke to the deepest human emotions, and it could spit out cracked trills that evoked the angry sounds of bullets firing. Sometimes his trumpet seemed to float over and through remarkably complex rhythms and time signatures with heart-stopping speed and efficiency. His sound could penetrate like a sharp knife. It could also be muted, tender and low, like a lullaby, but it was always charged with deeply felt emotion. Miles’ sound always made us sit up and take notice. It was burnished, brooding, unforgettable.
When you heard Miles on the radio, you knew right away that it was him. You knew it by the sound because no one else ever sounded like that. Like Louis Armstrong’s, Duke Ellington’s, Thelonious Monk’s, John Coltrane’s, his voice was unmistakably unique.
Sometimes when he used the mute, whether on up-tempo tunes or slow ones, we knew we were hearing perfection. When he played muted ballads, it was as if he were tenderly kissing our feelings—then he would stun us with bright, rapid-fire bursts of notes that penetrated our souls. Miles not only soliloquized, he also had a “dialoging” style. It was like listening to him having a conversation with himself, with one of his voices imitating a fast-talking, sweet-rapping black street hustler.
Even when he was first starting out, Miles’ sound and style got your attention immediately, because you knew whatever he played, it was going to be unusual. His music was always unusual because that’s the way his mind worked—unusually. Miles Davis was always unusual. He didn’t get that way just after he became famous—he was special from the beginning.
His homeboys back in East St. Louis understood that. They knew that he was odd, a little bit different from them and everyone else. They didn’t mind his eccentricities. They gave him the space to be different all his life—but only as long as he didn’t step over the invisible line that both he and they knew was there. Miles seldom crossed that line to “diss” them, because if he had, those homeboys would have made him pay. They weren’t no “pootbutts.”
Miles knew, too, that they understood him in the way that homeboys always understand the one among them who is different. Odd. A genius. Someone who sees things they never see. Hears sounds they never hear. Voices. The screech of car tires. Maybe a mockingbird riffing on another bird’s song. The lonely voice of an old black churchwoman singing plaintively in the dusky glow of a backwater country evening, somewhere few come to, save mosquitoes or rats or evil white men dressed in bedsheets, carrying guns and flaming crosses.
In the night air, the trains never seem to stop whistling past, their wheels humming. The roads are unpaved, empty, eerie in the twilight just before the hants come out to enter everybody’s imagination and shut down those dusty roads. The voice of the old black woman floats above the shadows and trees, disembodied yet whole. It rides up there and cruises alongside the night birds circling above some unseen church or log cabin, in some out-of-the-way location back in the bushes, hidden. The voice also circles. Plaintive. Haunting. Achingly real.
And if you had the privilege of hearing that voice, perhaps you wouldn’t file it away as anything special, something to imitate and relate to for the rest of your life—a reference point for your own life’s experiences, making you sensitive, alert, cognizant of other beautiful, necessary things. But that’s the way Miles heard it.
Perhaps the voice would remind you of a lonely trumpet sound. But maybe you wouldn’t know that what you heard was special because you couldn’t see that old black woman’s face. And, if you could have met her, you might have been too busy watching her chaw on some snuff to see the wisdom in her old eyes. But Miles did see that face, saw it when he heard her voice. He saw the whole scene, took it all in. Knew that it was real and special and filed it away for later use.
From the “giddyap,” Miles’ friends knew he saw and heard things they could never see or hear. They told me so. And so they protected him. He was allowed to be and do whatever was necessary for him as long as he was cool and didn’t disrespect them by looking down on them.
He never stuck his nose all up in the wind as if he smelled something foul when his homeboys walked into a room. No. He never treated them that way. Even when he was looking down from the elevated heights they had helped him to climb, he never cultivated an attitude that would have angered or hurt them. He was always just “one of the boys,” even if they knew—and he knew—he was also apart from them.
His fame never got in the way. His East St. Louis homeboys were his best friends up to the day he died. He trusted and knew them and they trusted and knew him. To them he was always “Little Davis,” or “Junior,” or “Dewey,” or “Buckwheat”—a name he hated because it alluded to the blackness of his skin, which he was sensitive about all of his life. But some of his old friends called him that anyway, despite his protests, because that’s what they had called him back in East St. Louis when they were all young and full of piss and vinegar and thrived on insulting each other, to see who was the strongest.
St. Louis and East St. Louis were—and still are—great trumpet towns. That’s because there were so many marching drum and bugle corps bands, which were part of a tradition brought over to St. Louis by Germans from their fatherland—although I don’t ever recall seeing a white drum and bugle corps marching band. (That’s not to say there weren’t any; I just never saw one.) But it was the black marching bands in St. Louis and East St. Louis who put their distinctive creative stamp on the tradition—the high-stepping kicks and the swaying back and forth of the bugles as they were played were black innovations—and who raised the practice almost to a high art form.
Based in individual black communities and sponsored by local African-American chapters of the Elks and various Masonic orders, these marching bands would liven up the streets on weekends during the spring, summer, and early fall, and I remember them with great fondness. I looked forward with anticipation whenever word came down that they would be gracing my St. Louis neighborhood with their sounds and presence.
These bands developed a style of playing the bugle, later transferred to the cornet and trumpet, that became known as the St. Louis “running” style. Pioneered by Eddie Randle, Levi Madison, Harold “Shorty” Baker, and Clark Terry (Miles’ real first mentor in trumpet style) and perfected by Miles (who, in his youth, had played in several East St. Louis marching bands), it was characterized by musical ideas, chords, and notes strung together in a continuous blowing, dialoging manner, akin to a fast-talking conversationalist. (Trumpeter Lester Bowie, from St. Louis, provides an example of this style today.)
This distinctive St. Louis sound was connected to the great trumpet tradition of New Orleans by the musicians who traveled on the riverboats shuttling up and down the Mississippi. But where New Orleans trumpet players employed a hotter, bigger, brassier style (as exemplified by Buddy Bolden, Freddie Keppard, Louis Armstrong, Al Hirt, Wynton Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, and Terrence Blanchard), the St. Louis style was generally cooler, more subtle and conversational (although it, too, could be hot and brassy at times).
The different styles came out of different cultures. New Orleans is a lively city with a coastal culture heavily influenced by the French, Spanish, Native American, and African peoples. With its Mardi Gras, Congo Square, African ring dance, Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, African drumming, Cajun fiddling, and Creole cooking, the culture of the Crescent City is thoroughly intermingled like a great big pot of gumbo or jambalaya.
St. Louis, on the other hand, is a city founded by the French but controlled by Germans. And although many other ethnic groups (French, Italians, Jews, Hungarians, Native Americans, and African Americans) have had an impact, the culture is pervasively German. It is more Calvinistic than Catholic, more marching band than Mardi Gras. It is a culture where a show of emotion is considered uncouth, almost uncivilized. Thus, a much more restrained musical culture developed among St. Louis blacks, one that took a much cooler approach. The one citywide parade, the Veil Prophet Parade, was for nearly one hundred years a whites-only event. (The parade and ball were finally integrated in the 1970s.) Such parades were sedate, dull affairs. I witnessed many and never saw anyone dance with any saints or speak to any spirits. Blacks had the Annie Malone Parade to get by on, but even this was no joyous, celebratory affair; rather, it was cool and laid back. If New Orleans is gumbo and jambalaya, St. Louis is chitterlings, barbecue, mashed potatoes and gravy. That Miles grew up in this cooler musical milieu is reflected in his approach to music and in the man himself.
It is only fitting, then, that the story of my relationship with Miles begins in St. Louis, where I first heard him play. This book describes how his music and personality affected my life and the lives of a generation who looked for proud, “unreconstructed” black men to admire and emulate. It also examines, through the lens of Miles’ life, how it is that jazz, this country’s classical music, is always neglected—until it conforms to the white majority’s expectations—because it is perceived as a black art form. The genius of Miles Davis is in many ways the genius of jazz, a genius that is often overlooked, to the great loss of American culture.
One note about the possessive spelling of Miles’ name in this book. I write “Miles’” without the extra “s” because that is how I hear it. Without the apostrophe and added “s,” his name sounds right to me, open-mouthed and familiar. I know that traditionally only a few great names that end in “s”—like Jesus’ and Moses’—have been spelled this way. I trust that my breaking with this tradition and placing Miles’ name in such illustrious company will not offend anyone. Miles Davis was first and foremost all about sound, and so am I.