MILES DAVIS

Miles is an absolute mother-fucker of a musician. He’s just simply one of the most vitally important makers of music that stalks the earth today, both as a player and improviser on his own and as a leader and shaper of other musicians. Miles Davis, virtually alone among the important jazz creators of the ’40’s and ’50’s, has dared to grow and change and venture into new shapes and forms.

Miles doesn’t go out of his way to be kind. He acknowledges his debts and sometimes praises the musicianship of others (though not over-generously) but he is quite outspoken about the fact that he no longer has any use, any time, for the conventions of music The Way It Used To Be. He has left his former contemporaries sadly and finally behind; they are hors concours, and he knows it, and he says it. Miles Davis today sounds like no one else at all. He is as far away from his early ’40’s professional beginnings as time could possibly let him be. He hasn’t wasted his years.

Miles Dewey Davis III, born is 1926 in Alton, Illinois, across the Mississippi from St. Louis, son of a dentist, made his first recordings in 1945, with Charlie Parker. That’s called Starting at the Top. He had jammed with Parker in St. Louis, then gone to New York to find him. He studied at Julliard. And in the streets and in the clubs. He scribbled chord changes on matchbook covers. The whole thing.

His bop recordings (with almost everyone who was anyone) of the midand late’40’s show a clean, clear, young sound with (already) a highly-developed linear sense, a sense of the subtleties of a spatial approach to sound progressions. In 1949 and 1950,’ Miles led the .legendary “Birth of the Cool” recording sessions for Capitol. (These have just been re-released, complete for the first time on LP, as a part of Capitol’s uneven but oft-interesting jazz classics series.) These were highly structured, intellectualized jazz tracks, part Claude Thornhill, part Oakland/Paris neo-impressionism, part something altogether new. Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan did the arrangements, and Miles was joined by players like Lee Konitz,, John Lewis, J.J. Johnson, Mulligan himself, and even Gunther Schuller, that ‘fraidy-cat formalist of contemporary American composition, who played French horn on several tracks.

Though some of the finest records he made in the ’60’s were also collaborations with Gil Evans, this sort of tightly-arranged coolness was clearly not where Miles wanted to stay. It’s usually said that his work in the early ’50’s was unimportant, that he didn’t play too much or too well, that drugs (before he kicked them with all the fierce determination his fighter’s stance suggests) weakened and defeated him. There’s truth to this, of course, but, on the other hand, he did play brilliantly (if with restraint) on, for instance, the Blue Note sessions of ’51, ’53, and ’54. In any case, the white jazz critic establishment widely and loudly hailed Miles’ triumphant “return”, after he played a magically powerful solo on “ ‘Round Midnight” at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival.

He kicked into a new period of prolific activity. He continued to record, though more frequently and with more grace and strength, with men like Sonny Rollins, Lucky Thompson, Milt Jackson, Monk, Mingus, Elvin Jones, et al. And he led, initially on Prestige, the definitive jazz group of the ’50’s and early ’60’s. The incredible, explosive, stunningly influential quintet: a young, brash over-reacher of a tenor-player from Philadelphia,, John Coltrane, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, Philly Joe Jones on drums.

In 1960, Miles made Sketches of Spain with Gil Evans for Columbia. It was an inspired marriage of cultural and musical sensitivities; many maintain that the Davis/Evans adaptation of the second movement of Rodrigo’s “Concerto de Aranjuez” is among the most successful jazz/classical meetings ever staged. The album also proved quite plainly that Spanish music could swing and that Miles Davis was not a prisoner of any musical idiom.

In 1961, Miles went to Columbia full-time; his tenure there started with Miles Davis in Person and has carried through (so far) to Live/Evil His groups have included Wynton Kelly, Wayne Shorter, Hank Mobley, George Coleman, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Joe Zawinul, and more. In 1969 came Filles de Kilimanjaro, an album that was somehow ... well... different. The roles of the rhythm players seemed to be extended, given new importance; Miles himself seemed to be playing more rhythmically than ever. Later that year, when In A Silent Way was released, a whole new style of music was born. Miles had turned the thing around, firmly and with great elegance.

It comes out of the way he used to play, the way he plays now. Long thematic lines, broken boldly. A fantastic sense of the uses of silence (the holes being greater than some of the parts), an interior logic to the lines that makes them carry on even when no note is being played, a startling facility in the lower register. It’s muscular music, punching, driving, fantastically dramatic. (One device that Miles uses well, it has been pointed out, is a variation on the old big band key-change idea: stay in one place for a while, then shift forcefully for maximum effect.) An even more important thing, historically at least, is what he has done (beginning with In a Silent Way and carrying through, going even further, with Bitches Brew, Live at the Fillmore, and perhaps most notably of all, Jack, Johnson and Live/Evil) with the whole idea of rhythm. He has changed roles, to begin with. He is the soloist, but he is rhythmically leading the other players, playing out of them but simultaneously forcing them tb play out of him. Bar fines have no meaning anymore; Miles’ musicians (and the multitudes who have since taken inspiration from what he created) have been freed, not through anarchy but through the intensely demanding acceptance of the most basic truths and disciplines of music-making. These men play out of their own bodies; their music is their pulse, their electricity, their chemistry. The people Miles has chosen, worked with, developed — Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, John McLaughlin, Jack de Johnette, Hermeto, Gary Bartz, Airto, Michael Henderson, Ndugu, and the rest — display a whole new tradition of virtuosity on one hand. On the other, they are among the most basic, honest, straightforward musicians in the world. ,

The main thing, finally, though, is probably best found in the immortal words of Herbie Hancock: “Miles,” he has said simply, “can swing his ass off.”