It was a priceless photograph. Not a classic because of the technique involved, or the lighting, but just because the cameraman had been lucky enough to be there, backstage at Carnegie Hall, and was able to capture a vision of magical confrontation in jazz history. He got to shoot together, face to face, an ageing, ornery Miles Davis and a young, earnest Wynton Marsalis.
The new star trumpeter Marsalis was the one in the business suit while Miles, for this particular shot, looked disconcerting, like some hack SF movie-maker’s vision of a species of ebony mutant lizard. ‘Macabre’ might be an apt description of Miles’s strained put-on of a half-smile over the usual backdrop of cat black. It’s an effect he’s the undisputed master of, even now, with his receding hairline and shoulder-length curls.
Still in his mid-twenties and clearly a novice next to Miles’s propensity for achieving the look of perfect disdain, one still has to admire Marsalis for having the brass balls to get involved in a heart-stopping eyeball-to-eyeball encounter like this. Both are seated, their shoulders hunched, squaring off like boxers trading looks instead of punches, seemingly lost in a contest over who can outglare the other. Marsalis’s stance is tense. It’s as if he’s facing off the once-great Miles Davis who, as far as he, Marsalis, is concerned, has opted to become a buffoon: a role his flinty visage may refute but one which his garish pop star clothing (not to mention the music he’s been playing for some time now) cannot deny.
Davis, however, looks barely phased by Marsalis’s scrutinizing eyes. His expression, furrowed but adamant, seems to be sizing up this gifted young big-mouth, whose work so clearly apes his earlier idioms, adding considerable polish and an undeniably brilliant technique, but not taking these reference points anywhere further. In short, Miles seems to be drinking him in and spitting him out.
Marsalis came away from the encounter with his suspicions confirmed, or so he later claimed. He and Miles had spoken and, according to the former, Miles was more than ready to acknowledge the younger man’s challenge.
‘Miles just stated outright that what he does now is a joke,’ claimed the 23-year-old prodigy.
‘Hell, you know, I believe music – just about everything – sounds better these days. Even a car crash sounds better!’
Everything, that is, except the voice of Miles Davis, a charred husk of sound, hoarse and cancerous. He is talking about whether today’s computerized recording studio techniques have benefited or damaged the musical process as he, a forty-year veteran of performing and recording, conceives it.
‘It’s never been better! Damn right! Are there drawbacks? None whatsoever! Hell, some damn critic’ – the word is spat out – ‘might disagree but, you see, he don’t know! All this shit about me bein’ better in the old days . . . Music bein’ better. That’s reactionary thinking from pitiful motherfuckers who weren’t even there. The old days . . . shit! In the old days, when it was alive and happening, jazz was made by this breed of musicians; I’m talking here about creative guys but they were also weird, idiosyncratic cats! Strictly night people, y’see? Somethin’ about that night time made it real conducive to playin’ blues . . . You know, “Blues After Midnight?” ‘ He gives a parched chuckle. ‘Oh yes! Attitude shit.
‘Now these cats,’ the bone-scraping croak continues, ‘they always had their problems. I mean, I’d book a session, let ’em know where and when . . . Hell, half the cats wouldn’t be there! I don’t need that kind of mess! Runnin’ around these fuckin’ dives lookin’ for the drummer, say, ’cos he’s probably off somewhere scorin’ dope! Bass player’s a goddamned lush, always goin’ too far at the bar. Trying to get him sober enough to stand up! Meanwhile, the sax player, he’s pawned his goddamned horn! That’s the old days, far as I can recall! Nobody needs that shit! It’s demoralizing! Critics say, “Oh, Miles and Bird . . . the golden days!” What’s golden about a cat all strung out on dope playin’ a goddamned instrument with half the keys mashed up? Hell, you tell me ’cos I’m damned if I know!
‘But, see, nowadays, you walk in the studio, there’s these machines that’ll do it all for you. Drum machines – hell, you just programme the motherfucker, press a button, you got that “bim, bam, boom” twenty-four hours a day if you want it. You want it to stop? Press another button! Synthesizers too. I love ’em! I mean, say you want something with a little Brazilian sound, a Samba-type groove, then add in a little English-type music, plus a little bit of that Parisian sound – you can mix ’em all together. Get a whole new hybrid! Break down those frontiers! I love the textures you can get from those things. You don’t have to be coppin’ for no drum machine either. Don’t have to wait till midnight to get the stuff down. That’s how I like to work now. That’s how it should be.’
The above is stated absolutely deadpan, with no room for any kind of rebuttal. Nor is one forthcoming because – Good God almighty – this is after all Miles Davis. The legendary Miles Davis. The indefatigable Miles Davis. The wickedest, canniest, deepest, slickest, baddest musician this century will ever see. Miles Motherfucking Davis, three months from his sixtieth birthday, forty-seven of those years spent as a card-carrying professional musician. Miles has decided to open up a little. That’s why he’s talking down, and I am listening up.
Maybe it’s that voice, emanating from a veritable graveyard of a larynx, a voice variously described as ‘demonic’ and ‘chilling’, that’s keeping me in my place. And those descriptions were made seventeen years ago, before thirty more nodes were surgically removed from Davis’s larynx, so that now the sound is quite other-worldly: at its most vitriolic, he spits out his syllables like a coiled snake dispensing some deadly poison.
Still, in the ‘old days’ he disdainfully refers to, Davis was a man of few words. In the fifties, having tossed aside thejuilliard School of Music’s academic strait)acket to become sorceror’s apprentice at Charlie Parker’s mercurial creation of bebop, finally usurping his master’s role as kingpin of jazz attitude (four years of heroin addiction having further distanced his bourgeois origins), Miles invented a whole new concept of ‘cool’.
Ross Russell’s Bird Lives captures the Miles persona of that era better than any other account:
Aloof and disengaged, Miles turned his back on the audience, walked off the bandstand to sit alone, indolently smoking a cigarette and staring with stony contempt at the customers. Outwardly, he seemed unemotional, unconcerned and indifferent. Inwardly, he seethed with hostility. One of his favourite ploys was to shake hands with an old colleague, applying an excruciating jiujitsu grip, and, as the other writhed in his grasp, hiss ‘I never liked you!’ Or comment in a snaky voice, ‘Man, you’re getting old.’
When Davis was approached by fans simply wishing to express their love of his music, he would stonily respond, ‘So what?’ Then he could afford to behave with such imperious disdain. The Miles Davis enigma has been shaped in the balance between knowing when to react and when to stay silent. In the twilight sixties Davis, notorious for not giving interviews, suddenly granted youth-oriented periodicals considerable access, spending inordinate time discussing his new attitudes, his reasoning, allowing young scribes lavish insights into the thought process of jazz’s most controversial figure.
Then, just as the seventies began, his guard once more shot up. Having been lauded as ‘the Picasso of invisible art’ (a term coined by Duke Ellington), he was dubbed ‘the Howard Hughes of jazz’. By the mid-seventies his enigma level was unsurpassed. This stemmed more from his bizarre nocturnal forays, however, than the quality of his music, which at that time sounded morose, directionless, perplexingly impotent. Between 1975 and 1980 he refused to enter a recording-studio, maintaining an ominous silence as rumours of illness and drug dependency persisted.
*
Yet Miles has never been short of direction. Trace his progress: early years as Parker’s oft-humiliated protégé/errand-boy; the recording of Birth of the Cool in 1949; the four years as a heroin addict and pimp; the formidable comeback in late ’54 through ’57 and the seminal modal excursions with John Coltrane (best exemplified by Kind of Blue); then, the equally historic Gil Evans collaborations (Sketches of Spain and Porgy and Bess) of the early sixties. In 1968 Davis opted to work with electric backing creating more seminal music; In a Silent Way witnessed Davis’s tonal transformation from the elegant blue melancholia of before to the fire-red extrapolations that reflected a mood of vehement black militancy then gripping America.
Commencing with the electric church tonalities and brooding spiritual interludes that made 1969’s In a Silent Way one of the last albums to break new ground while still affording Miles the total reverence of his hard-line critics, he became immersed, more and more disdainfully rejecting Western concepts of structure, harmony and texture in favour of other idioms. The hypnotic drone imperative to Indian music was fused with an ever-increasing fascination with interplay around the repetition that has always been at the heart of Afro-American music.
At first, Davis worked at a furious rate, clearly elated by the sense of ‘command’ and ‘possession’ that the music summoned forth. Bitches’ Brew, his new recording, became the seminal work around which that dubious collation, jazz rock, was finally established, not to mention reaping sales that transcended the quantities sold by all other ‘jazz’ records. Gigs were obsessively taped, Miles often performing to predominantly white, young rock audiences as a support act to the likes of Steve Miller, Neil Young and the Grateful Dead. Although there were many formidable moments of supreme ferocity and excitement (the most sustained example being Davis’s soundtrack to the movie Jack Johnson), the odyssey from 1970 through to 1975 was one that clearly showed signs of taking a down-bound curve both aesthetically and commercially. Miles’s ‘African Bag’ – with track titles culled from the names of African guerrilla movements – had begun to exclude other existing textures and juxtapositions. One was suddenly presented with the albums such as On the Corner, with its upmarket cocaine dynamic and up-front ‘street black culture’ attitude. Two live albums from a Japanese tour, conducted some four months before his retirement, show just how lamentable Miles’s focus on his music had in fact become.
Davis’s retirement at this point has been explained by many factors. He had suffered from bursitis in his wrists and shoulders, a hip joint seemed to be disintegrating, insomnia was wasting him as much as the plethora of pain-killing drugs – codeine and morphine-based medication – which were helping to inflame several stomach ulcers. Probably worst of all, his muse wasn’t functioning (his greatest periods of creativity have tended to always correspond to his having attained a condition of excellent physical fitness) and the sound emanating from his horn, bereft of its former spitfire alacrity, sounded incredibly weary and mournful, almost bordering on an aural evocation of cancer of the soul.
For Miles Davis the years between 1975 and 1980 were ones shrouded in mystery, intense rumour and speculation. Davis’s numerous ailments – arthritis, bursitis, stomach ulcers, throat polyps, pneumonia, infections, repeated operations on the disintegrated hip – weren’t helped by their victim’s own attempts to stave off the pain and boredom by means of ingesting formidable supplies of alcohol, barbiturates and cocaine. Injecting various chemicals into his leg with a dirty needle, he suddenly found one day that he was unable to walk and was told he had to face up to the possibility of having his leg amputated. There was another operation and it was mercifully saved, but Davis continues to skin his teeth at fate.
‘I was just having myself a good time,’ recalled Miles to writer David Breskin two years ago.
Miles’s eighties recordings have been greeted to date with a bemusement that he himself has done little to dispel. In 1983, having recorded and released three albums since his return to the studio in 1980 – Man with the Horn, the live We Want Miles and a Gil Evans collaboration, Star People – he brushed them all off, baldly stating, ‘I don’t like to record at all, live or in the studio, I just do it to make money.’
Ironically, it was 1985’s You’re under Arrest that caused him to change his tune. It was to be Miles performing contemporary AOR numbers: pop songs he’d heard on the radio in his Ma-serati, taped and arranged with his trumpet as the lead instrument. Having noticed how well received his poignant live version of Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time after Time’ had been with audiences, he went on to record, according to guitarist John Scofield, some forty songs, including several Toto compositions, Tina Turner’s ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It’, Dionne Warwick’s ‘Déjà Vu’, even Lionel Richie songs and Kenny Loggins’s This Is It’.
Ultimately, Davis included only the Lauper tune, the Totopenned Michael Jackson opus ‘Human Nature’ and D-Train’s ‘Something on Your Mind’, opting instead to toss in some original material composed by group members and arranged by himself. This gave the finished product a schizophrenic quality symptomatic of artistic tunnel vision, but Miles didn’t care. He claimed You re under Arrest to be his all-time favourite recording. ‘The best album I’ve ever made!’
That album’s executive producer, Dr George Butler, is not one of Miles Davis’s favourite people. Since the abdication of Teo Macero, Miles’s producer since 1959’s historic Porgy and Bess, Butler became the key figure in playing midwife to the final recordings Davis did for Columbia/CBS. He considers Miles somewhat unpredictable:
‘I think that sometimes his whims can get a little out of control. They’re in his head, these little gems, so to speak, but the problems arise when it comes to translating them into a reality. He tends to need someone to pull them all together. Even when I worked with him, I often didn’t know how it would work out as a complete project. I was usually always, pleased with the results. He’s still very clever. One of the very, very few.’
Dr Butler is of course a diplomat. He refers to Miles Davis as ‘unpredictable’ in the same way an adversary might refer to his opponent as a hell of a guy. Miles, never renowned for being pragmatic about discussing those he dislikes, doesn’t lay the blame for his problems with Columbia, the label he has been with for thirty years, solely at Butler’s door, but he does get rather testy whenever the name is brought up:
‘He [Butler] came up to me, this is a year and a half ago, and said, “Miles, you should really put that version you do of ‘Time after Time’ out. It could really take off, be a smash.” I said, “George, I told you that six motherfuckin’ months ago!” But he hadn’t heard me then, he wasn’t listenin’! He just don’t know! See, I can’t stand a black man who wants to be bourgeois! That’s a pitiful condition to be in.
‘Another time’ – Miles is getting warmed up, that demonic croak lubricated by cantankerous phlegm – ‘that George, he phones my house. My daughter takes the call. She comes to me later, tells me he rang, right? I ask her what he wanted. She says, “George wants you to phone and say happy birthday to Wynton!”’ His voice registers a sound of exasperated contempt. ‘Happy birthday to Wynton! Shit on that! Who does he think I am? See, George, he reckoned it would make a nice gesture! He don’t understand me, never did!’
Wynton Marsalis, whose virtuoso prowess as a trumpet-player is coupled with his controversial and reactionary views on staying true to the fifties spirit of jazz, has provided the media with their most recent opponent to Miles Davis. Dr George Butler signed Marsalis to Columbia, and when the latter, at the precocious age of nineteen, successfully fronted Miles’s classic sixties quintet – Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams – when Davis himself refused at the last minute to take part in a one-off reunion gig, a confrontation was inevitable.
‘Wynton . . . well, he’s a good player,’ mutters Miles reasonably. ‘No two ways around that. But see, I don’t want to get caught up in some jive feud thing here. That may be his style but it’s not mine! He’s good but his whole style of presentation, his look, his manner – it’s dumb! Plus he could do with a few lessons in couth! What’s he doin’, messin’ with the past? A player of his calibre should just wise up and realize it’s over. The past is dead. Jazz is dead! The whole context has changed and people gotta . . . Why get caught up in that “old” shit? Music shouldn’t be this stuff you play to kid your audience into thinkin’ that’s the way it was. Don’t no one start telling me the way it was. Hell, I was there! They weren’t!
‘Some people, whatever is happening now, either they can’t handle it or they don’t want to know. They’ll be messed up on that bogus nostalgia thing. Nostalgia, shit! That’s a pitiful concept. Because it’s dead, it’s safe – that’s what that shit is about! Hell, no one wanted to hear us when we were playin’ jazz. Those days with Bird, Diz, ’Trane – some were good, some were miserable. But, see, people don’t understand why I get so touchy sometimes. I just don’t want to talk about that stuff. People didn’t like that stuff then. Hell, why you think we were playin’ clubs? No one wanted us on prime-time TV. The music wasn’t getting across, you dig! Jazz is dead. Goddammit. That’s it. Finito! It’s over and there is no point aping the shit.’
Miles isn’t angry, just adamant. His rationale is often wrought from a logic that is genuinely ingenious. At other times his philosophy is shaped from one overall point of view that he is Miles Davis and you’re not. Musing over the previous outburst, he settles back to consider the simple fact that, finally, black music has overtaken the white folks’ watered-down approximation of same in the market-place.
‘Hell, y’know, Lionel, Quincy, Michael, Prince and me together . . . Now wouldn’t that make for one hell of a movie?’
This is where Miles Davis chooses to pitch his tent in 1986. After thirty years as a Columbia recording artist, Miles Davis is releasing his first Warner Bros, album. Initially entitled The Perfect Way, after the Scritti Politti number on side two, it has since been renamed Tutu after one of five Marcus Miller originals that predominate among the product’s contents. Speaking to Warners’ A&R kingpin, Tommy LiPuma, late last year, little was forthcoming with regard to how much cash the label had spent on procuring Miles. ‘It’s standard practice not to divulge such matters,’ said LiPuma, another good-natured pragmatist. It was, of course, ‘a great honour to have Miles Davis on the roster. He seemed to like our way of thinking. He felt that his association with Columbia had gone as far as it could. He was looking for a change.’ Not that LiPuma and Warners had any grand schemes for Miles. ‘Let’s just say that, when you come to work with a musician of Miles’s pedigree, it’s not fitting to try and tell him what to do.’
This, of course, was early in the relationship, before LiPuma would become executive producer of the first WB release, at that point tentatively pencilled in for a late spring 1986 release. LiPuma had definite ideas about suitable collaborators: Thomas Dolby, for one, was high on the agenda; and Lyle Mays, the young keyboard player best known for his collaborations with guitarist Pat Methony. It was then that Prince’s name came up. LiPuma reacted immediately. ‘I felt that Prince might not be too conversant with certain idioms pertaining to Miles’s playing. But his work on the Family album displayed a keen awareness of the dynamics inherent in be-bop so, yes, indeed, Prince was ideal.’ Miles refers to Prince excitedly as ‘that funky little dude’. By the time of the release of Around the World in a Day in 1985, the ageing trumpet legend had become totally smitten with pop music’s most audaciously resourceful stylist:
‘Prince wrote me a letter and along with the letter he enclosed a tape of instrumental tracks he’d recorded by himself in his studio. And in this letter he wrote, “Miles, even though we have never met, I can tell just from listening to your music that you and I are so exactly alike that I know whatever you play would be what I’d do. So if this tape is of any use to you, please go ahead and play whatever you feel over it. Because I trust what you hear and play.” I mean, now here’s a dude . . . Hell, he’s got it all! Multi-musician with a damned vengeance! As a drummer he can hold it down, you know what I’m sayin’? There’s not many cats can nail it tight what with current technology makin’ most drummers damn near obsolete. As a guitar player . . . he puts out! Plus, he’s a goddamn great piano player. Matter of fact, he’s about as good as they get, and I’ve worked with the best, I should know!’
Did anyone say Wynton Marsalis? Prince is who Miles Davis checks out now. The way he works in the studio – ‘sheer genius,’ reckons Miles. Hell, it didn’t even drag Miles’s bag one bit when the boy genius suddenly called through for some typically enigmatic reason requesting Miles not to release the tracks he’d sent him. ‘I don’t know exactly why he decided not to let ’em come out but I respect the boy.
‘Do you know who Prince kinda reminds me of, particularly as a piano player? Duke! Yeah, he’s the Duke Ellington of the eighties to my way of thinking. Only, back in them old days you couldn’t get a man like Duke on prime-time. No, white audiences didn’t want to see that elegance, that attitude, ’cos it was too intimidatin’.’
This leads Miles straight into another of his harangues:
‘See, this is the thing you got to take into consideration here. Time and again, the black man has fucked up. He starts out with his shit together, then he gets damn side-tracked by white folks, y’know, whisperin’ in his ear, “Hey, son, you should do this. Clean it up. Tone it down. Get smart. Get jive. Get yourself a goddamn monkey-suit or somethin’.” The white man, see, he’s always out to mess with our thing, packaging it, strapping some jive label on it. And the black man, he’s fallen for it mostly every damn time. Why? ’Cos he’s greedy, that’s why! Hell, it’s shameful what I’m sayin’ here but it’s the truth. White man starts talkin’, the black man, he listens up, starts seeing dollar signs flashin’ and the next thing you know he’s selling himself out everywhere. See, attitude – that’s what the black man’s got. Attitude! The white man wants it so bad, he can’t help but be jealous. So, over and over, the black man’s music gets fucked with. But he don’t see it happening ’cos greed is motivatin’ him more than his better instincts.’
That deadly voice, shorn of any pitch beyond a gravel-toned whisper, rarely registers an emotional counterpoint to these tenacious accusations. He does sound particularly melancholy, however, when I query him about the absence of Darryl Jones, the young bass-player featured in last year’s ensemble. Davis, during 1985’s European gig, had tended to behave somewhat mischievously towards his fellow musicians. At London’s Festival Hall he kept resetting keyboard player Robert Irving III’s synth patterns to no appreciable avail, while in Paris he brought on John McLaughlin in what could only be interpreted as a bid to upstage guitarist John Scofield. Only Jones was left unscathed by such questionable antics. At Montreux, Miles had even sidled up to the bassist and, his arm around his shoulder, gently coaxed him to the lip of the stage for an ovation. This occurred, mark you, just before young Darryl passed an audition to work with Sting on his Dream of Blue Turtles record and tour.
‘Darryl? I had to let him go. Same shit as IVe been relatin’ to you. That boy . . . I liked him too. He could play so good and, hell, I felt kind of paternalistic toward him in a way. But then Sting comes along, offers him more money, high-class accommodation and all that stuff. And Darryl, he got so damn confused, I just said to him, real diplomatic and cordial like, “Man, what do you really want?” You know what he said to me? Darryl said, “Miles, I wanna do cross-over.” God, I almost threw up! Here’s a boy with real potential and yet here he is falling for that white man’s corporate bullshit. Cross-over my black ass! Don’t mean nothing! . . . Anyway, the boy has made his choice.’
Curiously, Miles then goes straight on to praise Sting’s music.
‘See, I like Sting! Yes, indeed! He’s good and I like his songs – some of ’em – and his voice. He ain’t like Mick Jagger rippin’ off Wynonie Harris, shakin’ his goddamn skinny white ass and pretendin’ to sing the blues. You can take that shit, toss it in the river, watch it sink. Fuck that shit!
‘Sade – her too, y’know. I think she’s interestin’ right now ’cos, see, if she works on her attitude she could shape up to be something good. Like, when she comes on the radio, I keep hearing intimations of Lena Home comin’ through. Now, she ain’t that good – yet. But, like Lena singin’ “Stormy Weather” – hell, it’s something and God knows I love her but, damn, that “my man is gone” shit. . . Women ain’t like that now! Like, Billie [Holiday] singin’ about “her man” and how she ain’t worth shit without him. That was real but that was then. It would be a lie to do that shit now though, ’cos women have changed. They don’t need no pimp! They don’t stand for that shit and that’s how it should be. I know ’cos I used to be one myself! Had me seven women when I was strung out back in them old days [mordant chuckle]. And I’ll be damned if I can remember their names . . .
‘I don’t like to think back to that. Women nowadays are into control. Like that song by Michael’s sister, Janet [Jackson]. That’s what’s happenin’! Anyone who wants to go back to the past, they’re too scared to live in the present.’
Miles Davis at sixty years of age is one funny motherfucker. Almost garrulous, when once he was prone to the absolute minimum of verbal expression, the hostility that seethed within him seems now to have dissipated, leaving only the ghost he chooses to inhabit when his pride is threatened.
What remains is indeed complex, hard to pin down. His rhetoric is loaded with odd contradictions yet he remains consistent in more crucial areas than many of his most zealous followers seem able to fully comprehend. He has been criticized for playing at being a pop star but, first, he’s not playing and, second, he’s always been a pop star: a larger-than-life luminary whose name is recognized by multitudes of people to whom the medium of jazz expression is as alien as the ancient Greek alphabet.
Those millions may know of him because of his notorious past: getting busted for narcotics and a heavy-duty arsenal of weaponry in ’52; getting savagely beaten by white cops outside Birdland; having New York mobsters in late ’69 riddle his red Ferrari with bullets – the fact that Miles later would boast that both his adversaries (cops and mobsters) had been ‘dealt with’. Even the plethora of decidedly chilling rumours regarding his imprisonment of women for days on end during the dark endless nights of the seventies. Maybe they know him because of his single-handed elevation of the fifties black hipster to a realm of treacherous grace which, through his sartorial elegance, his fat, bright sports cars, his beautiful statuesque ebony-skinned women-friends, his feisty hyperactive persona, spelt out to all and sundry, ‘I’m not as good as you are. I am better.
And even if they may have only glimpsed one of the five separate periods of extraordinary creativity his muse has been responsible for setting into motion, they recognize that Miles Davis is great in a way that defies placing him in an immediate peer group.
Now, after six years of shaping himself up for that sixth shot at further greatness, Miles feels that he is ready. His divorce from Columbia is indeed a brave move, mainly because in so doing he has granted the label the right to release any number of extracts from what John Scofield claims to be some 300 hours of unreleased material; music, moreover, made by a younger, considerably more tenacious personality, whose artistic temperament – the depthless blue pools of longing that lurk alongside the shanty-town flame-thrower and the blood-red splashes of tension – has set aesthetic standards his Warner Bros, product is going to be hard pressed to keep pace with. Teo Macero hinted at the extent of an extraordinary mother-lode lurking in the vaults when he referred to late-sixties sessions alone:
‘Everything that was done in the studio was recorded. Miles is probably the only artist in the world where everything is intact. I just edited out what I wanted, then the original went back into the vaults, untouched. Whoever doesn’t like what I picked twenty years ago, they can go back and re-do it.’
The very idea of a man as prodigiously talented as our subject having to do battle with his own past triumphs at the age of sixty seems one that would cause even the most self-assured egocentric sleepless nights. Miles, however, seemed totally unnonplussed by the concept:
‘Did I relinquish the rights to my unreleased stuff on CBS? Well, yeah, but it don’t scare me, hell no! ’Cos even if they want to release ’em they wouldn’t know where to find ’em . Teo, I don’t reckon he knows either. And what if they did? Hell, they put the shit out, it won’t sell. There’s enough old shit of mine bein’ issued as it is. I never seen any of it toppin’ no charts. No one wants to buy it. Why should they?’
Again, that overwhelming adamancy, that patented I’m Miles Davis and you’re not vehemence. His past, those gone-dead decades he refuses to contemplate affectionately, filter through, but he looks back only in disgruntled sideways glances. Those damn critics, the same plebeians who used to bug him when he was Downboat’s pet king-pin – they’re the ones who fucked with his music:
‘It’s like Duke [Ellington], he said it first and he said it best: “If it sounds good, it is good.” But them damn critics, they always had to complicate matters. Pigeonholing my music, they turned off my potential audience. First they said, “Ah, well, this is Cool,” or “This is space music.” Voodoo? Teo, he came up with that label for Bitches Brew! There wasn’t no damn voodoo going on, it just sounded good to Teo and, hell, I wasn’t in no mood to argue with him! There’s more “bottom” to that stuff. More rhythms.
’Now they say Bitches Brew is a goddamned masterpiece but, hell, those critics hated it. Jazz-rock, my ass! They couldn’t see that I was hip to the way black folks were hearing their music. I wanted to play for my people! I was listenin’ to James Brown ’cos James was the Man – still is – where rhythm is concerned. That’s what all the stuff I put out from Bitches on out was based on.’
Like the Janet Jackson record he admires so much, Miles Davis has always understood the need for control: to possess a firm grip on his life and his artistic destiny. The son of a bourgeois black family, he has succeeded in transcending the values of his upbringing, thwarting a debilitating drug habit, leading numerous formidable ensembles, controlling the music to suit his mercurial personality while, as Herbie Hancock once observed, keeping his musicians intimately involved. He has succeeded, above all, in both understanding and manipulating the key forces at work controlling a vicious business: the power of money, the power of image and taking hold of the power of mystique as a means to an end. As an artist, his role as catalyst is one that has involved an incredible facility for controlling often ridiculously opposed forces, harnessing a tenacious, fiery temperament to front music that has been mostly defined as ‘the sound of sadness and resignation’. Similarly he has controlled his music’s progression while rarely, if ever, turning his back on ‘tradition’, always aiming for the ‘sophistication of simplicity’.
This year has seen a number of interesting developments. Duke Ellington, Miles Davis’s beloved predecessor, twelve years after dying of pneumonia in a New York hospital, has had his profile embossed on a postage stamp. Bill Cosby, the black American comedian who was best man at Miles’s wedding to actress Cicely Tyson five years ago, boasts the most popular prime-time TV sit-com in the US. And Quincy Jones, Miles’s old running buddy, with his Grammy nomination for The Color Purple, the movie he co-produced, has been putting Michael Jackson through his paces in the recording studio for another billion-dollar disc. Miles is ready to ascend from the comfy confines of prestigeville. America’s TV heartland has already witnessed this curious image of a man, a skinny figure with gleaming skin and what remains of his hair curling all over his shoulders: his hands grip (what else?) a trumpet, his lithe form is slouched against a small Japanese scooter, his eyes stare out at the viewer with imperious disdain. Then the voice, emanating from that shredded, node-less killing-floor of a larynx, mutters, ‘I ain’t here to talk about this thing, I’m here to ride it’ Miles Davis, renowned for his taste in the slickest, fastest sports cars, has followed Lou Reed, Grace Jones and Adam Ant into advertising Honda scooters. The money helps but it’s exposure he wants. And is getting, if the role of a pimp in a recent Miami Vice episode is any indication.
Amazingly, at sixty Davis looks better than he has in over fifteen years. At a diminutive 5 feet 4 inches, he none the less looks formidably exotic, in fact nothing short of stunning. In 1981 he looked awful – overweight and obviously very, very ill. Today he looks like a male Grace Jones – rail-thin, his attitude in his heels, his eyes torching with a gleam that can turn from depthless calm to deadly volatility.
‘Yeah, I’m lookin’ good, ain’t I! I swim every day when I’m touring, have acupuncture, stick to these special herbal diets. Don’t fool around anymore. Dope is out! Used to get through maybe a third of an ounce of cocaine a day, stay up forty-eight hours, smoke six packs of cigarettes in that time, drink spirits, take sleeping-pills. I was killin’ myself. I was a hog and that’s . . . See what I mean by black people bein’ greedy?’ He credits his wife, Cicely Tyson, for saving him from death when his body was racked with painful ailments. His currently gleaming skin and trim physique he attributes to a more unusual source:
‘I went to the place called La Prairie. This fella I know took me there. They give you these shots: I got eleven of ’em so far! They consist of, well, basically, it’s unborn sheep glands! Yeah, that’s right. Goddamn sheep! These shots, they make your eyesight sharper, make your skin softer too. Make your sex organs much – [he issues a low grunting sound]. It’s funny though!’ he continues, clearly drawn to the subject. 1 didn’t feel that eleventh shot! The other ten – I felt them, no damn problem! But that last one . . . man, maybe those sons of bitches ripped me off! Y’know what I’m saying . . . And this shit costs a hell of a lot for it to be pumped into you. OK! Anyway. [He pauses.] Y’know this stuff – when it’s in your bloodstream, it’s like you’re high on cocaine or somethin’. But it’s natural! I’ll tell you the feeling this stuff gives you. Say, you’re sitting in your living-room and suddenly you start feeling kind of hungry. Well, with this sheep-shit pumpin’ through your veins, you don’t ask nobody to go and fix you something to eat! Hell, no, you get off your ass, go in the kitchen and go fix it yourself!’
Miles is clearly getting quite lively in his old age. With Tutu already long completed and down at the pressing-plant, Miles casually states that its successor has already been recorded:
‘It sounds hot. Y’know, this new stuff I’m comin’ out with is better than anythin’ I’ve recorded in the past. Hell, I don’t think so I know so! I want this shit to get out to the people. That’s why I left Columbia, see. I kept tellin’ em, “If you dumb motherfuckers keep puttin’ labels like “Contemporary Jazz” on my damn records, you might as well stick them up next to beans and molasses!” Might as well throw ’em in the river! I had to leave. It was degrading! Now they say, “Jazz is comin’ back; there’s a revival.” They don’t know! Same people that think that, they’ll say, “Bird died for his art. He had a good ole’ time doing it!” He died on his knees, man! Broke and broken! He wasn’t in control of nothin’! People love that bullshit though. See, death – it’s safe. All those fuckers too scared to feel anything: they get into that “mystique” bullshit.
‘If I was dead now, they’d love me whatever shit came out with my name on it. Hell, if I was a recluse doin’ nothin’, it would be the same. Fuck ’em . I don’t like to relax, lay back on my old stuff. Show me a motherfucker who’s relaxed and I’ll show you a motherfucker that’s afraid of success.’
I ask him about his renowned quote: ‘I’ve got to change. It’s like a curse.’ Is it still a curse?
‘Funnily enough, someone else asked me that question. That quote, maybe I said it once but now I believe, hell, I know, it’s a blessing! My music is better than ever. To my ears, I check out the contemporary heavyweights. I’d like to work with Quincy. He understands, Prince, he understands. In fact, Prince said to me, “You don’t ask God for what you want, you thank him for what you’ve got already.” Now I’m not a particularly religious person but, hell, I can empathize!’
Max Roach, the great jazz drummer, stated, weeks before the first clumsy return to the stage in 1981, ‘Miles is a champion. Champs always come back.’ With Muhammad Ali brain-damaged, James Brown an egomaniac bordering on lunacy, and most other ‘champs’ burned out, the vision of Miles Davis at sixty, still fit and functioning with formidable élan, is one worth cherishing.
‘Don’t you ever count me out!’ he muttered as we concluded our talk. I don’t intend to. Neither should you. After all, he’s Miles Davis and you’re not.
*
Five years after this was written, Miles Davis died from complications arising from pneumonia at his home in Los Angeles. He had been musically active up until the very last days of his life.