Specialties, Samples and Endorsements

Let's Talk:  Focus, Fees and Process

Reckoning with Miles Davis, cont'd.

The seminal stuff was produced over a twenty-year period, starting in the late 1940s, and there has never been a corpus of jazz like it. Miles made a new audience sit up and listen. Learning from Bird, Diz, Monk and the other first-generation bopsters, he transformed their hermetic music into something more subtle yet formally open, more latent yet listenable.

The early Blue Note and Prestige sides just blew me away when I first heard them in college and they’re still full of musical surprise. Here began the two paths Miles was to follow for years—the cool and the hard-ass, the moody and the mainstream. Miles always had the best people in his bands. Even then, he mixed new talents like Jackie McLean and Sonny Rollins with older hands like Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke. The result was a sound and a style that set the pace for serious jazz for many years.

Then came the 1949 experiments with Gil Evans in Birth of the Cool (French horns and tubas in jazz??) and, in 1955, the blowing band with Coltrane, Red Garland and Philly Joe Jones. That group made Miles’ reputation with the jazz public at large, and John’s too. They set each other off perfectly and, as Miles said, "the music we were playing together was just unbelievable. It was so bad that it used to send chills through me at night, and it did the same thing to the audiences, too." I once heard them live on the South Side of Chicago: Five men never made so much coherent, artful (and loud) noise. The  Cookin’-Steamin’-Relaxin’- Workin’ series on Prestige forms the object lesson.

If you follow jazz, you’ve seen the recent hoopla for Kind of Blue’s 40th anniversary. Both a stylistic watershed and a brilliant synthesis, that disc looks backward to the Gil Evans sounds and forward to the simplified modal harmonics and stretched-out melodic improvisations that would preoccupy Miles for the next ten years. I still have the worn-out mono LP I burnt into my brain in graduate school. 

Two years before, in 1957, he and Gil did their first large orchestral collaboration, Miles Ahead. Through the mid-‘60s they continued to create and record some of the most ambitious larger compositions jazz has seen. Porgy and Bess (1958) and Sketches of Spain (1960) are the most successful. Evans wrote them as suites, experimenting with harmonics and voicing, layering on slabs of tone color, moving far beyond what he’d achieved in the Claude Thornhill-Birth of the Cool style. These compositions are perfect concertos for Miles, orchestral complements to his trumpet inventions.

By the mid-‘60s, jazz had reached a highpoint in popularity, and so critics were pronouncing it dead. This was the age of Motown, Bob Dylan and the Beatles. Miles reformed and regrouped once again, this time with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams and Ron Carter—another extra-ordinary band that tested the limits of the quintet format. Live at the Plugged Nickel (1965) catches the group’s fire, how it opened up musical space and time yet still managed to play wholly recognizable, exciting jazz.

Well, by 1970 Miles had pushed on to a country where some of us felt compelled to stop at the border. You know, the bugs, the jungle, the heat, the dysentery. Was it the lure of money and fame that drove him? Some kind of musical quest for the primitive? A need to be master of all modes? Whatever the reason, jazz died a sort of partial death when Miles left. For the wrong reasons, the critics were right. It was also about this time that the Prince of Darkness began to be called the Prince of Silence. Nine years after his death, we continue to miss him.