Remembering Miles Davis (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991)

Davis by Luciano Viti

Remembering Miles Davis (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991)

"Few musicians have brought as many new sounds and sights to the jazz world as Miles Davis. An intense, ambitious musician, he has managed to make a limited instrumental technique suggest infinite possibilities. As one of the great leaders in jazz Davis, like Ellington and Charles Mingus, consistently assembled groups that sound remarkably better than their individual parts. In the 1950s the trumpeter changed the manners in jazz performance when he turned his back on audiences and refused to announce his tunes. No Louis Armstrong stage tricks for him. (But when asked a leading question about Armstrong, he lavishly praised the older man’s playing; it was impossible for a trumpeter to play things Armstrong hadn’t already done, he asserted.) Later Davis helped improve working conditions for jazz artists when he insisted on playing only a couple of sets a night previously musicians were expected to play forty minutes and take twenty off for as many as six hours.

Davis’s accomplishment is all the more impressive given his gruff and withdrawn manner, even among his musicians. Bassist Miroslav Vitous told me that Davis spoke to him only once in the many weeks that he played with him during the early 1970s, and that was to ask his young sideman to rush another group off stage so that the trumpeter could play and go home.

Davis’s early development had been swift. When in 1945 at the age of nineteen he first recorded with alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, Davis seemed a somewhat bumbling, insecure stylist without the agility or panache of Dizzy Gillespie, who indeed took over Davis’s trumpet for the virtuoso performance of Parker’s “KoKo.” But Davis’s tentative phrases contained the germ of an idea: two years later, he would record for the same company four of his own tunes, and this time Parker would be a sideman on tenor saxophone. Clearly the 21-year-old who could make a tenor player out of Charlie Parker knew what he was doing. Unable to play as fast or as high as other bebop trumpeters, Davis developed an intimate, round, almost vibratoless tone as far from the brash, extroverted sounds of Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge as from the bright fluidity of the bopsters. And he found the proper setting for that sound on compositions like “Milestones” and “Sippin Bells.” Darker in texture than comparable Parker arrangements, Davis’s pieces reflected his simpler strengths. He seemed intent, serious, restrained: “cool” is what the critics called him, and a 1949 album led by Davis with arrangements by Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis and John Carisi was dubbed The Birth of the Cool."

Michael Ullman / Boston Review

Photo Credit: Luciano Viti/Getty Images

I developed massive problems with jazz 'so called' later on and despite loving Keith Jarrett, Gary Burton, Abdullah Ibrahim and others in the modern oeuvre and Oscar Peterson, Nina Simone and Dudley Moore (how I first enjoyed the musical genre) in the latter earlier style, I found the Charlie Parker’s and Miles Davis school incredibly proscriptive and boring, kind of obvious and dull . . . totally uninteresting to me. Nothing new or groundbreaking at all to me. Louis Armstrong I enjoyed and regard highly but do seem to be drawn as well as to keyboard players but also the beat of Louis Prima, Django Reinhardt, the rhythm has to get me, Louis Jordan is MY god! 

What is it about the incessant desire to improvise over a theme of classic songs that leaves folks like Davis seen as gods of the highest brow music? Like wall paper or jigsaw puzzles it is plain dull to me and I cannot listen for long. Even Jarrett returned to covering standards and re-interpreting them. Can think of nothing more dull. 

But I respect yes RESPECT those that follow the school and Davis’ position in particular. I loved Weather Report, Joe Z in particular and music that I believe has something new to say. I return to bop and even be-bop but modern jazz leaves me stone cold

I duly recall being terribly shocked at the Rolling Stone interview with Davis where he expounded strongly held anti-white views and still am shocked by it today. That is what a white man WOULD say of course and the picture of Miles outside a club having been beaten up by police for ‘talking’ to a woman' stand as education to poor ole little whitey here.

Believe me Miles I get it

Queen of Fonk dies - BETTY DAVIS (77) - Muse and Partner, girlfriend we won't see her like again!

 We heard with sadness of the death of Betty Davis yesterday and already as we might have expected there are ROIOs flooding in. She wasn't entirely to my personal taste musically unless she got especially Dr John Fonky! but I appreciated her sound and stunning beauty. 

Zero G Sounds says "The cult funk singer and ex-wife of jazz legend Miles Davis who left an under appreciated yet trailblazing body of work, died yesterday at the age of 77" and they shared her eponymous album of 1973

Betty Davis - 1973 - Zero Sounds

Sounds of 71 says:

Betty Davis on the streets of New York, by Robert Brenner, (above) from the documentary Betty: They Say I’m Different, via nytimes

I was just gonna leave that amazing picture [above] right there, but you know what? You really need to know more about her. The movie is streaming on Amazon in the US, and there’s a bunch of clips on YouTube. Here’s the first trailer from when it hit the film festival circuit in 2014.

https://www.idfa.nl/nl/film/1862dd32-... World premiere at IDFA 2017 Pioneering funk singer and "bold soul sister" Betty Davis shook up the 70s music scene—then she disappeared. This film tells her story.

Betty the Colombia Years!

FOOTNOTE:

 I am disappointed by the number of obituaries and tributes that post pictures of Marsha Hunt in place of Betty and they are two very distinct looking women. They should not be confused! Oh, yeah they both liked getting their legs out in shorts or 'hot pants'! but this is fairly offensive in my book when all you can look at is there attire? And their bodies. They are very particular handsome striking looking women and are easily told part in my opinion

Frequently the pictures cite the shots of Marsha at The Isle of Wight festival in 1969. Still I am sure people can make the same mistake and show such careless research as us white folks all look the same to people of colour!

Betty Davis

Betty

Betty Davis

Marsha Hunt at the Isle of Wight 69

Marsha Hunt

Betty On Stage

Marsha Hunt at the Isle Wight Festival, August 31, 1969 with the band White Trash 

Marsha at the Isle of Wight 1969

Another in the series of women associated with musicians

BETTY DAVIS

(no, not that one!) 

Betty Davis caught the eye of Miles Davis, who had already caught hers. 

“I saw this great-looking man at this dance concert,” she said. 

After she found out who he was, she went to hear him perform at the Village Gate. 

Mr. Davis spotted her and sent over his bodyguard to tell her, she recalled, that the trumpeter would “like to have a drink with you.”

They were married in 1968 and divorced after a turbulent, sometimes violent year. “Every day married to him was a day I earned the name Davis,” she says in the film*.

She was Miles Davis's second wife, model and soul/funk singer Betty Mabry Davis. Betty introduced Miles to Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. In his autobiography, Miles said Betty was "too young and wild," and accused her of having an affair with Jimi Hendrix which hastened the end of their marriage. 

Betty denied the affair stating, "I was so angry with Miles when he wrote that. It was disrespectful to Jimi and to me. Miles and I broke up because of his violent temper."

*

They Say I'm Different - Betty Davis 2017

MILES DAVIS in 1959, attacked by police

 I know this has been around for an age but this has been preying on my mind of late. There is an amusing side, at hopefully my own expense, but I recall being shocked by an Interview in Rolling Stone where Miles Davis expressed his distaste for white people and supported the principles of black power and in retrospect at the time I was offended (poor me!) . . . . I might have chosen to dig a little deeper as to why he particularly held the views he did at the time and here is the answer (one amongst many!?)

MILES DAVIS

I was six years old when this took place and blissfully unaware of such things.  Safe and sheltered in my white middle class southern suburban English village had yet to witness or even be aware of such horrendous and entrenched racist violence. Davis will have doubtless faced it or similar every day of his life . . . . . . . 

Miles Davis on Billie Holiday . . . . . . and Junk

Miles Davis and Billie Holiday

“I remember when Billie Holiday died in July 1959. I didn’t know Billie all that well; we didn’t hang out or nothing like that. Billie loved my son, Gregory. She used to think he was cute. I knew that she and her husband weren’t getting along because she said to me once, “Miles, I told him he could leave me alone. He could have our house, everything, but just leave me alone.” But that was all I remember her telling me that was personal…. I remember her being a very warm, nice woman, and she had that smooth, light-brown skinned Indian look before drugs destroyed her face. She and Carmen McRae reminded me of the way my mother looked, Carmen more so than Billie. Billie was a beautiful woman before all the alcohol and drugs wore her down.”

“The last time I saw her alive was when she came down to Birdland where I was playing in early 1959. She asked me to give her some money to buy some heroin and I gave her what I had. I think it was about a hundred dollars. Her husband, John (I forget his last name), kept her on the stuff so he could control her. He was an opium user himself. He used to be telling me to come and lay on the sofa with him and smoke opium. I never did it with him, never smoked opium once in my life. He kept all the drugs and gave them to Billie whenever he felt like it; this was his way of keeping her in line. John was one of those slick hustling street cats from Harlem who’d do anything for money…”

“Whenever I’d go see her, I always asked Billie to sing “I Loves You, Porgy,” because when she sang “don’t let him touch me with his hot hands,” you could almost feel that shit she was feeling. It was beautiful and sad the way she sang that. Everybody loved Billie.”

“She and Bird died the same way. They both had pneumonia. One time down in Philadelphia they kept Billie in jail overnight for drugs. Maybe it was a couple of days, I don’t remember. But I know they had her in jail. So she’s in there sweating and then being cold and stuff. When you are trying to break a habit, you get hot and cold, and if you don’t get the proper medical treatment, you go right into pneumonia. And that’s what happened with Billie and Bird. When somebody gets backed up with that dope - using, stopping, using, stopping - and then when it gets into your system, you die. It just kills you and that’s what happened to Billie and Bird; they just gave in to all the shit they was doing. Got tired of everything and just checked out.”

Some quotes from Miles Davis about Billie Holiday