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Davis’s accomplishment is all the more impressive given his gruff and withdrawn manner, even among his musicians.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