EVOLUTION
MILES MARSHALL LEWIS
What’s in a name? Eight months after the release of Miles Davis’s controversial, spellbinding fusion album Bitches Brew, Dad identified his firstborn as Miles. That early December morning, three months to the day after James Marshall Hendrix asphyxiated on his own vomit, my parents decided on Miles Marshall. But growing up named after those icons, I never felt burdened with trying to measure up to them on any kind of musical level. (Thank God.) If anything, my namesakes held a different kind of crown over my head for me to sport cocked to the side: the crown of cool.
No jazzman was ever a bigger rock star than Miles Davis. The so-called Prince of Darkness went so far beyond categorization that his inspiration for records like On the Corner came from funk innovator Sly Stone and experimental German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Miles set off the whole cool school of jazz with Birth of the Cool in the 1950s, but that’s not why he built a rep as the genre’s coolest player. Miles was cool because he stayed rooted in the now and never looked back; because he knew in his blood that constant evolution causes expansion. Turning down gigs at Fifty-second Street nightclubs like Birdland and opting instead to play the Isle of Wight rock festival for over six hundred thousand fans at a time, he refused to be boxed in.
No rock star was a bigger jazzman than Jimi Hendrix: jam-crazy, improvisational, slavishly devoted to his instrument. In the young rock culture of the 1960s, he demanded the space to be multidimensional in a milieu where no other singer-songwriter looked or sounded anything like him. Hendrix tunes like “The Wind Cries Mary” were lyrically on par with the best of poetic wordsmiths like Bob Dylan or John Lennon. From the moment Hendrix crashed the scene, his brilliant innovations with guitar-amp feedback, along with literally incendiary performance theatrics and an eclectic fashion sense, immediately marked him as a man apart. In an era when Motown’s finest were suiting up for the acceptance of mainstream America, Hendrix’s rebel tendencies made anticonformity cool for African Americans. (Sporting a Hendrix T-shirt still means something well into the twenty-first century, especially if you’re of color.)
Miles Davis was the coolest godfather I never had. He launched my writing career: The first thing I ever published, outside of childhood letters to Marvel Comics, was his obituary in my college paper. The first vinyl I spent my own money on was My Funny Valentine, his 1964 concert album. Before I turned twenty I’d already seen him play live, twice. When I was a teenager, appreciating all the romance and vulnerability, the solitude and beauty, in the phrasing of Miles’s baroque ballads was its own reward. But learning about Miles the man was a separately edifying head trip.
The only autographed anything in our Bronx apartment was a menu from the Greenwich Village jazz club the Bottom Line, Miles’s signature snaking down the side. (My father approached him at the bar after a show.) On weekend trips down to the comics shop Forbidden Planet, Pops sometimes cut through the Upper West Side by Miles’s place—312 West Seventy-seventh Street—to catch a glimpse of the man or his canary yellow Ferrari Testarossa. My dad and I never spotted it, but I knew he drove one.
In those dawning days of the music video, I watched Miles on TV, decked out colorfully in the hip threads of Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake, wraparound shades in place. Fresh from my first read of Malcolm X’s autobiography, I was also impressed by Miles’s nationalistic agitprop. (When I was fourteen, Davis told Jet magazine, “If somebody told me I had only one hour to live, I’d spend it choking a white man.”)
The sports car, the raspy voice, the cool clothes, the militant stance . . . I was impressed by it all. Miles Davis was my first exposure to an African American Renaissance man, and all the things I thought made him great influenced what I aspired to become. I am as devoted to hiphop culture now as Miles was to jazz, judging by his 1990 autobiography. His late-’40s dalliance with French chanteuse Juliette Gréco was semiscandalous for the pre–civil rights era; I’ve been living in Paris for the past seven years, married to my French choubidou, Christine. And I’ve made my share of race-man choices—graduating from a historically Black college; writing and editing at XXL, Vibe, and BET, all bastions of Black culture.
The same evolutionary spirit Jay-Z details in “On to the Next One” defined Miles Davis’s attitude for over four decades. By the time Birth of the Cool spawned a whole new subgenre of jazz in the fifties (typified by light tones and relaxed tempos), Miles was already at the center of the hard-bop scene with records like Walkin’ (1954). His exploration of musical modes instead of chord progressions blossomed on Kind of Blue (1959)—the greatest-selling jazz record of all time—but the about-facing Sketches of Spain (1960) followed less than a year later. Inspired by classical and big-band music, it’s the most celebrated of his collaborations with arranger Gil Evans. Still, those eleven years of changing the face of music weren’t enough.
After a series of feted freebop recordings, Davis dropped his first full-on electric album, In a Silent Way (1969), and jazz was never the same. Again. With producer Teo Macero slicing and dicing different takes like a pre-hiphop mixmaster, the jazz-fusion highball Bitches Brew (1970) proved there was never any turning back with Miles. Dividing fans and critics alike, Bitches Brew made it plain that Miles Davis was always going to do whatever the fuck he wanted. Full of electric guitar and synthesizers, ambient mood and rock-style improvisation, Davis’s double album marked the final major stylistic shift in jazz to date. On his final studio album, Miles teamed with producer Easy Mo Bee (future collaborator with rapper Biggie Smalls) and came up with the 1992 Grammy-winning Doo-Bop (though I always preferred its more provocative working title, Blow). And if you can stay that perpetually innovative while sporting unstructured blazers, nattily tailored suits, snakeskin pants, or buckskin-fringe vests, more power to you.
Miles and his astrological brother-in-arms, Prince—the two Geminis had a mutual admiration—both had an impact on me in my teenage wonder years as eclectic champions of reinvention and ever-reaching development. With Miles, becoming stale, repetitive, or stagnant (creatively or intellectually) was entirely verboten, an invaluably cool lesson to learn at a young age.
There was a time when being Black and loving Jimi Hendrix was like being Black and loving hockey or country music: a curious sort of pursuit for somebody blessed with melanin. Way back when there were few clearer signs of being Black on the outside and white on the inside (the classic old stigma of the “Oreo” African American) than declaring love for James Marshall Hendrix. Yet when it comes to evolving the Black identity, rock music’s number one guitar god represents on many levels.
If you have parents who have repeatedly trotted out a dozen familiar stories throughout your life, you know what it felt like to hear—over and over—that my pops had attended the New Year’s Eve show Hendrix recorded live for his Band of Gypsys album in 1969. (Mom’s familiar story is about how our aquarium’s fish always swam in waves with “1983 . . . (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” on the stereo.) In the mix-tape age of my high-school days, Maxell cassettes often streamed favorite Hendrix hits over my Walkman: “If 6 Was 9,” “Manic Depression,” “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” In the eighties, Rolling Stone reported that Prince had covered “Red House” live somewhere in Europe, and I spent months dissecting different versions of the Hendrix original. Then I got almost ten years’ wear out of a vintage, Hendrix-ian suede vest I unearthed at Cheap Jack’s, a secondhand shop on Broadway that was anything but cheap.
Plus, we’re both Sagittarians.
But one of the coolest things about Jimi Hendrix is how he reframed racial identity by pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be Black. Decades before the eighties’ Afropunk movement, Black folks would generally give you a pass for digging on Band of Gypsys (recorded with African American bassist Billy Cox and Black drummer Buddy Miles) but roast you alive for appreciating the earlier Jimi Hendrix Experience albums (recorded with his original British bandmates). Black Panthers gave Hendrix heat for conking his hair, idolizing Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and supposedly straying from his musical roots on the chitlin circuit with Little Richard, the Isley Brothers, and others. None of this stopped him from mastering rock and adding to its canon with widely influential work like Electric Ladyland.
Hendrix was Hendrix, unconcerned with staying true to anyone’s ideas of Blackness but his own. He outplayed Eric Clapton, totally wrested Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” from the rock poet’s hands, and indiscriminately jammed with everyone from Cream and Steve Winwood to Billy Preston and Stevie Wonder. A master of the blues by way of Jupiter, Hendrix took the Black-rooted music form halfway across the universe and back, expanding its possibilities in ways immediately exploited by Led Zeppelin, Funkadelic, Black Sabbath, and scores of others.
I discovered our shared middle name reading a Hendrix biography in college. Pops let me discover that one on my own, saying that if I felt connected to my namesake, then I’d find out eventually—by which time I trailed my red clay–soiled campus in combat boots, silver ring through my nose, a tattoo freshly inked on my deltoid (all pretty rare at Black universities in 1990). From the vantage of 1990, Hendrix revealed ways of being Black that went far beyond the then-modern models of Bobby Brown or Ice Cube. Waving his own freak flag, breaking away from a Black image that whites might’ve felt more comfortable with, Hendrix rather single-handedly evolved Black style for all the Lenny Kravitzes, Jean-Michel Basquiats, and TV on the Radios to follow.
My favorite Miles Davis tune of all time is “Générique.” My all-time favorite Jimi Hendrix song is “Third Stone from the Sun.” And my favorite lesson learned from both my namesakes is—to paraphrase rapper Rakim—that constant evolution causes expansion. Break beyond boundaries of the tried and true, and therein lies the mother lode.