FIGURE 4a.1 Miles Davis. Copyright © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.
Writing about Miles Davis as a mere Interlude of Cool is just plain wrong. Acclaimed as birthing “cool” itself, he with his legendary status is rightfully the topic of innumerable studies—biographical, musicological, historical, and political. Brilliant, immensely talented, and deeply passionate, Miles Davis altered the course of contemporary American music, several times. He was uncompromising in all matters, aesthetic and political, living at that rare high heat that only the most intense aesthetic expressions afford. He was and always will be the icon of old-style cool.
While early critics may have debated his virtuosity as a trumpet player and later critics accused him of selling out, one clear attribute sets Miles Davis apart from his peers: change. As Ian Carr quotes him: “I have to change. It’s like a curse.”
1 From his birthing of “cool jazz,” in contrast to the “hot jazz” of bebop, in the late 1940s to his introduction of fusion at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955 and on
Kind of Blue in 1959 to his fusing of jazz, rock, and funk on
Bitches Brew in 1969 and his full embrace of all-things-electric in the 1980s, Miles Davis changed music—“at least fiver or six times,” by his own count.
2But he never did so through romanticized notions of pure creativity or the sheer force of “genius.” Miles Davis understood himself as immersed in the wide histories of music. In an early interview with
Down Beat in 1950, he explains the necessity of knowing musical history: “You’ve got to start way back there before you can play bop. You’ve got to have a foundation.”
3 This unquenchable thirst for
all kinds of music defined Miles’s life. Although disgusted with the “prejudice and shit” of Juilliard,
4 he recognized the value of the technical knowledge he gained there. From those early days in New York City, when he would “go to the library and borrow scores by all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Prokofiev” (M, 61), to much later days of being enthralled with the theoretical innovations of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Paul Buckmaster, Davis engaged music in all its layers, angles, and forms.
Early on in the late 1940s, he is shocked that “a lot of black musicians didn’t know anything about music theory” (M, 60) and, later, that Jimi Hendrix couldn’t read music. But he never shames them for it.
5 He simply recognizes the different approaches, bridges the gaps, and makes way for the one thing that matters most to him: creativity.
6 It is little wonder that a man with such a voracious appetite for all music works with legendary figures from the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Miles constantly pushed forward, constantly changed.
One further aspect of Miles Davis’s life makes him the exemplary figure of old-style cool for me and this project: his unflinching commitment to call out race and racism. His autobiography,
Miles, is filled with stories of racism: early childhood memories of being called “Nigger! Nigger!” on the street; stories of East St. Louis race riots in 1917; the constant and often violent police harassment as an adult; the refusal to appear on late night television talk shows because the white hosts and producers do not recognize their own racism; humorously told stories of ignorant white bigots at the Reagan White House’s dinner for Ray Charles; and so on and so on and so on. While he describes his father as “a Marcus Garvey man” (M, 22), Miles claims he did not come to a political consciousness of race and racism until he returned from Paris in 1949. Despite his descent into a hellish four years of heroin addiction, Miles emerged in 1955 at the Newport Jazz Festival to become not only the defining figure of jazz, but also the defining figure of black resistance. As Amiri Baraka explains: “In a sense Miles embodied a black attitude that had grown steadily more ubiquitous in the fifties—defiance, a redefined, contemporary function of the cultural traditional
resistance of blacks to slavery and then national oppression…. Miles was not only the cool hipster of our bebop youth, but now (late 50s) we felt he embodied the social fire of the time.”
7 Miles never looked back.
His interviews across the 1960s and 1970s are filled with scathing critiques of racism and racist institutions, ranging from police practices to music producers and promoters to media representations and deeply held social narratives. The infamous interview with
Playboy in 1962 reads as a primer in race consciousness. Calling out bigoted whites for their ignorance and always, always refusing to play the Uncle Tom, Miles Davis never ignored, erased, or kept silent about the deep racial stratification of US culture.
8Still, my celebration of Miles Davis as the icon of old-style cool is not without hesitation or complexity. As with so many icons of this ever so masculinist aesthetic, cool, his life and autobiography are filled with a hedonism and sexism that are often difficult to stomach. Always a fashion maven and a boxer, Miles developed a love for fast, expensive cars, drugs of various sorts, and beautiful, sexy women.
9 While these all fall, perhaps too easily, into a pattern of lives that are set free from social controls by fame and wealth, the stories about sex and women, including his violent outbursts, become increasingly intense in his autobiography. We must heed Pearl Cleage’s anger and not sidestep the sexism and violence that also filled this too cool man’s life.
10On the one hand, the stories of his wild orgies during his retirement from the music business from 1975 to 1981 are perfectly in step with the kind of excessive pleasures that filled this life: Miles Davis was a man who sought the limits of all experiences, repeatedly. He could not turn away from the allure of intense pleasures, even in their self-destructive extremes. But the sexism of these stories as an endless stream of nameless female bodies colludes with the monolithic concepts of “women” that pepper the entire autobiography, especially the closing pages on various racial “kinds” of women. The role of women in Miles’s life vacillates between the two classic positions of all sexist men: the pedestal and the bed. The classic contradiction, then, is the way this stereotyping of “women” clashes with his vehement anger about precisely this kind of racist generalizing about “blacks” as a monolithic phenomenon. His politics were, so to speak, lacking in self-critique.
To call Miles Davis the icon of old-style cool is thus not to celebrate him uncritically. It is not to position him as The Magical Negro who saves us from the neoliberal bastardization of cool. There is no way back to Miles. But the ways that race and sex came together in his life speak to the kinds of deep social conflict that must animate any historical sense of cool. Nothing superficial, and rooted deeply in the histories of music and politics, Miles Davis was not merely a rebellious young hipster. He was after change—deep, abiding, persistent, ongoing, and always intense change. And the register in which he exerted his power to make such change was singular: creative, ingenious, often mind-blowing music.
I’ll give him the last word, speaking in about 1955, just as he is birthing cool:
Wherever we played the clubs were packed, overflowing back into the streets, with long lines of people standing out in the rain and snow and cold and heat. It was something else, man. And a whole lot of famous people were coming every night to hear us play. People like Frank Sinatra, Dorothy Kilgallen, Tony Bennett (who got up on the stage and sang with my band one night), Ava Gardner, Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Home, Elizabeth Taylor, Marion Brando, James Dean, Richard Burton, Sugar Ray Robinson, just to mention a few.
When this group was getting all this critical acclaim, it seemed that there was a new mood coming into the country; a new feeling was growing among people, black and white. Martin Luther King was leading that bus boycott down in Montgomery, Alabama, and all the black people were supporting him. Marian Anderson became the first black person to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. Arthur Mitchell became the first black to dance with a major white dance company, the New York City Ballet. Marlon Brando and James Dean were the new movie stars and they had this rebellious young image of the “angry young man” going for them.
Rebel Without a Cause was a big movie then. Black and white people were starting to get together and in the music world Uncle Tom images were on their way out. All of a sudden, everybody seemed to want anger, coolness, hipness, and real clean, mean sophistication. Now the “rebel” was in and with me being one at that time, I guess that helped make me a media star. Not to mention that I was young and good looking and dressed well, too. Being rebellious and black, a nonconformist, being cool and hip and angry and sophisticated and ultra clean, whatever else you want to call it—I was all those things and more. But I was playing the fuck out of my horn and had a great group, so I didn’t get recognition based only on a rebel image. I was playing my horn and leading the baddest band in the business, a band that was creative, imaginative, supremely tight, and artistic. And that, to me, was why we got the recognition. (M, 197–98)
