Miles Davis: In Focus

Ahead of Miles Ahead hitting our screens this weekend,  jazz specialist and filmmaker Daniel Graham looks at one of twentieth-century music’s creative geniuses…

Miles Davis’ name is becoming better known than his music, which is something that would have irked him no end. By this I mean his actual name rather than the man to which that name belongs. For example, say Miles Davis in a casual, culturally flavoured conversation amongst typical 20-40 year olds and the words you’re most likely to hear name checked in response are cool, jazz, blue or various combinations of the three. On occasion a more scrupulous critic like the brilliantly bellicose Stanley Crouch will take issue with the ‘Miles Davis Mystic’ as promulgated by Miles’ own questionable autobiography. For the most part however Miles Davis the ‘name’ is moving towards the Salvador Dali end of the Great Artist ‘narrative’ (a detestable word that has crept into our argot). Let’s then take a serious and studied look at the man’s music and leave his colourful life story and the mythology that arose out of it for the documentarians, the filmmakers, the journalists and the jive ass mothers (as Miles would have it).

Miles Davis’ career has been documented countless times since his emergence in 1945 playing and recording alongside the ‘architect’ of bebop Charlie Parker (as Dizzy Gillespie described him). Following Dizzy Gillespie in Parker’s quintet cannot have been easy for any trumpeter of the day let alone one who was as technically deficient as Miles was at that time – he makes a famous wrong note blunder on an early recording of Billie’s Bounce, a not impossible tune to master. Nonetheless Miles created for himself a new kind of sound that set him in stark contrast to the prevailing style of pyrotechnical trumpet playing as laid down by Gillespie, Fats Navarro and others. Miles lacked technique but more than made up for it in harmonic understanding and a canny sense of structure, space and time. He was as influenced by the vocal cadence of Orson Welles as he was by fellow musicians. It wasn’t long before Miles was recording as a leader, culminating in the epochal 1949 recording of Birth Of The Cool under the baton of the magisterially gifted Gil Evans, with whom Miles would embark on a long and fruitful collaboration. This was a new kind of sound, the antithesis to the hothouse atmosphere of bebop and has often been credited with ushering in the Cool Jazz era. Although very much a group effort – where fellow jazz greats Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan and Max Roach also contributed – Miles was the nominal and symbolic leader of this new movement. It was as though his trumpet sound had found full voicing within the fluid setting of a Nonet – not possessing of the muscle and drive of a big band but more powerful than a quintet.

Ever the restless innovator (what other kind of innovator is there), Miles didn’t stay long on the sandy shores of cool jazz, soon spewing out a stunningly febrile string of records for the prolific Bob Weinstock and his glorious Prestige label (following a brutal and self-imposed ‘cold turkey’ session in his father’s Kansas City house). Later dubbed the ‘First Great Quintet’, comprised of a nascent and thrillingly unformed John Coltrane on tenor saxophone (tumbling out shambolic but exhilarating shards of notes), Red Garland on piano (deftly, dancingly comping behind Miles), Paul Chambers on bass (laying down the foundations of modern day bass playing) and ‘Philly’ Joe Jones on drums (a middle weight champ of drumming if ever there was one), this group’s first recording was made only eight months after Charlie Parker death on 12 March 1955 and was rather fittingly called The New Miles Davis Quintet. The first time one listens to this record, and its Cookin’, Relaxin’, ‘Workin’, Steamin’ counterparts, the effect remains nothing less than thrilling. Sixty years old as of 2016, they seem hardly to have dated at all with their deftly blended tone of casual insouciance and dynamic blues punch. Recorded with stunning clarity and immediacy by the brilliant Rudy van Gelder, these albums became a bellwether for the maturation of bebop into what would soon be known as hard bop, largely attributable to yet another watermark Miles album, Walkin’, featuring the most convincing proponent of Hard Bop, pianist Horace Silver.  Only two years later Miles released the semi-orchestral Miles Ahead, again under the guiding hand of arranger/composer Gil Evans. Here, Miles plays the more rounded sounding flugelhorn, cushioned by the cloudlike backing of Evans’ writing (+19 piece orchestra), itself influenced by Claude Thornhill. Miles was an emerging, Janus like musical genius whose restlessness placed him in against an ever changing backdrop, mastering and redefining each movement before moving on to new lands. However even Miles’s most dedicated fans were surprised by his 1960 album Sketches Of Spain. Inspired by the romanticized violence he witnessed at a Spanish bullfight, Davis and Evans adapted Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez into a brooding jazz flavoured soundscape that opened a new door of expression. It remains to this day one of Davis’ most popular albums. As though this pace of innovation wasn’t enough, Davis had also just recorded what is generally regarded as the greatest jazz album of all time, the magically evanescent Kind Of Blue, with his sextet featuring Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans (a key influence on Miles at this time). A landmark of true improvisation, the album came to represent an influential and liberating style of jazz known as ‘modal jazz’. It could almost be seen as Miles’s measured response to the untethered world of Ornette Coleman. Miles would never top it, but then who could? It was his Moby Dick. His eureka moment.

As America in the sixties saw rapid advancements in the Space Age, the social upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement and the seeds of the Vietnam War being sown, Miles Davis’s music gradually became overshadowed by Ornette Coleman and his former employee John Coltrane, whose more aggressively modal, humourless music was more convincingly capturing the tenor of the times. Having advanced ten-fold since his early days as sideman to Miles and the most Daedalian genius of the bebop movement Thelonious Monk, by 1961 John Coltrane was standing virtually alone on the Mount Olympus of Jazz, having just begun his legendary tenure with Impulse Records. Miles possessed a keen barometer of public taste and of his place in satisfying and shaping it. For the first time in his career his music started to sound, well, old. Even his thrilling live album At The Blackhawk, with the underrated Hank Mobley on tenor saxophone, was falling behind the brazen innovations of Ornette Coleman (whom Miles unfairly derided). However Miles’ reputation amongst younger musicians (who weren’t entirely beholden to the Coleman influence) remained solid. He was a discoverer of talent without equal and his greatest discoveries were yet to come.

In 1965 Miles formed an entirely new group consisting of Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone (fresh from a highly influential stint with Art Blakey), Herbie Hancock on piano (a young genius from Chicago who would go on to become a leading light in fusion jazz), Ron Carter on bass and the 19 year-old firebrand Tony Williams on drums. Their first album was called ESP, a fitting title for what would become known as the ‘Second Great Quintet’. Comprised of entirely new compositions by the band members themselves, ESP saw the beginning of a startling renewal in Miles Davis’s creativity. His new sidemen were both in awe of their leader and willing to ‘kick him up the ass’ as Miles himself described the drumming of Tony Williams. This quintet released a half dozen masterpieces over the next couple years under the shrewd production of Columbia’s Teo Macero (who had produced Kind Of Blue several years earlier) and were seen as experimenting with form rather than without form (as Miles himself would describe it). Once again, the social and political upheavals of America in the mid to late 1960s seemed to fuel Miles’ musical directions. Innovations in jazz music were occurring almost every week at this point in time and not just in Miles’ groups. By 1969 he would record his first fusion masterpiece In A Silent Way which could be seen as the result of Miles’ love of James Brown, the blues and, if I may conjecture, the Vietnam War’s damaging overall effect on the American psyche. This album also introduced to the world the next generation of jazz greats such as Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin and Dave Holland.

By 1970 Miles Davis was not just a legend of jazz but also a legend of modern music. His influence reached further than the word of jazz, which by this time had worn itself out after an exhausting twenty-year period of fast paced innovation and exploration. Jazz made up about 7% of all record sales in the USA in the 1970s compared to its heyday in the 1930s when 7 out of 10 of all records purchased by the American public were jazz. What was Miles to do? He couldn’t go back. He refused to go back. Forward was the only way and forward meant fusion. It meant plugging in and getting electrified. It was the voice of the youth, the black youth to be specific that Miles most highly coveted. If James Brown could sell a million albums to the black youth of America then so could he. The 1970s was a mixed bag for Miles. There were undisputed masterpieces such as the wildly intoxicating Bitches Brew and the dancing danger of Jack Johnson, his 1970 soundtrack album featuring some explicitly Jimi Hendrix style guitar voicings from John McLaughlin. But Miles would bow out from the music world in 1975, having endured 30 years of bullshit from record producers, the media, racist cops, mobbed up club owners, douchebag hipsters and the noisy smoky dives he was forced to play in. Not to mention his own on-going drug and alcohol abuse, excessive sexual practices, living out of a suitcase lifestyle and a general sense of ennui. It would be seven long years of darkness, sex, drugs, violence, paranoia and ongoing health problems that would change forever the Miles Davis we knew. When he returned to the stage in 1982 to record the pleasing if not exceptional comeback album We Want Miles, gone were the dangerous good looks that graced the album covers of Milestones, Round About Midnight, At The Blackhawk and the racially provocative Porgy And Bess from 1959 where we catch a glimpse of Miles’ arms cradling his trumpet with a blond white lady brushing his leg next to him. Miles was no longer the Byronic Black Beauty with the golden trumpet. He now resembled an anaemic Florida gangster from Miami Vice, which he indeed ended up playing in one of his less memorable TV appearances, barely fitting into an outsized and garish blue suit.

The 1980s was even worse. Miles was barely recognizable, physically or musically, showing up in absurd space suits and dreadful hair plug-ins. The Penguin Guide To Jazz described one of his albums of this period as being drab cop show funk. Sadly they were right. Fine that Miles would no longer play bebop, but why did he produce such terrible drivel as an alternative? Set against this was the lamentable rise and rise of the undeniably talented yet neo-conservative Wynton Marsalis playing his brand of neo-bop. There were some highlights such as Palle Mikkelborg’s suite-like Aura and a last breath of bebop on the Quincy Jones produced Live At Montreux where the next generation Miles Davis, trumpeter Wallace Roney, stepped in for the aging Davis on the trickier ensemble passages. Miles even turned Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time into a surprisingly convincing jazz ballad. The man always had an ear for a pretty tune.

The end was nigh for the great Miles Davis. He was a genuinely innovative stylist on a notoriously difficult instrument to master and personalize, a possessor of a plaintive, darkly romantic tone unmatched by any of his contemporaries or successors. He spearheaded at least four major new styles in jazz – Cool Jazz, Modal Jazz, Third Stream and Fusion. He identified the uniqueness of several of the very greatest of all jazz musicians and catapulted them to enduring acclaim – John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, John McLaughlin, Philly Joe Jones, Cannonball Adderley and others. He came of age under the tutelage of Charlie Parker, learnt invaluable lessons from the famously taciturn Thelonious Monk, reacted sensibly to the revolution brought about by Ornette Coleman and ushered in fusion jazz despite vociferous opposition from the jazz establishment. His name is synonymous with jazz, with style, with artistic endurance and with innovation. There were several things wrong with the man on a personal level (his misogyny being the most troubling), and some things wrong with the musician, but this fact remains unchallenged by even his most persuasive detractors – Miles Davis the musician was one of the greatest and most influential genius’ of the 20th Century.

More Mileage

Craving more Miles? Daniel offers his choice picks from the musician’s extensive back catalogue. Follow the links to listen on Spotify…

  • Birth Of The Cool (Capitol Jazz/EMI) – Listen
  • Cookin’ With The Miles Davis Quintet (Prestige/Universal Music) – Listen
  • Milestones (Columbia/Sony) – Listen
  • Kind Of Blue (Columbia/Sony) – Listen
  • Sketches Of Spain (Columbia/Sony) – Listen
  • E.S.P (Columbia/Sony) – Listen
  • Cookin’ At The Plugged Nickel (Columbia/Sony) – Listen
  • Filles De Kilimanjaro (Columbia/Sony) – Listen
  • In A Silent Way (Columbia/Sony) – Listen
  • Bitches Brew (Columbia/Sony) – Listen
  • Jack Johnson (Columbia/Sony) – Listen
  • Live/Evil (Columbia/Sony) – Listen

Miles Ahead screens at HOME from Fri 21 April. Watch the trailer and find out more here.

Jazz Goes To The Movies runs throughout July in partnership with the Manchester Jazz Festival. Daniel Graham worked with us on this season.