[Dixielandjazz] Miles Davis redux

[Stephen Barbone]

List mates:

Posted with some trepidation because Miles in not OKOM. However, there
is an interesting view of "orthodox" jazz as promulgated by Marsalis and
the Lincoln Center Orchestra, if you get that far. This is perhaps, how
the modernists view OKOM?

Anyway, for those with a broader view of jazz, where it has been and
where it is going, below is a good read. For those only interested in
OKOM, you might want to "delete" now.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

December 27, 2002 - New York Times

Restless Variations on the Theme of Miles Davis

By JOHN ROCKWELL

In 1987 the jazz trumpeter and group leader Miles Davis attended a White
House reception in honor of Ray Charles with his wife at the time, the
actress Cicely Tyson. When a woman asked him what he had done to be
invited, he answered: "Well, I've changed music four or five times. . .
. What have you done of any importance other than be white?"

Or so reports John Szwed, a jazz critic and professor of anthropology,
African-American studies, music and American studies at Yale, who has,
with "So What," written the first Davis biography since Davis's death in
1991 at 65.

In his voluminous notes, Mr. Szwed attributes this quotation to Davis's
autobiography ("Miles," written with the poet Quincy Troupe and
published in 1989). But there, in a book widely criticized as
flamboyantly inaccurate and self-mythologizing (though elsewhere admired
for its sass and style and insights), Davis says he said: "Well, I've
changed music five or six times, so I guess that's what I've done and I
guess I don't believe in playing just white compositions. Now, tell me
what have you done of any importance other than be white, and that ain't
important to me, so tell me what your claim to fame is."

So, one might wonder, what? (This book's title actually derives from a
famous track on one of Davis's most famous albums, "Kind of Blue.") Who
really cares if he said four or five or five or six? Mr. Szwed certainly
has a right to tighten up quotations, even shakily remembered
ex-post-facto embellished quotations, and his version is punchier and
pithier.

The discrepancy between the versions makes one a little apprehensive,
however, since this new biography's chief value — despite some fresh
interviews and Mr. Szwed's disclaimer to comprehensiveness — is that it
pulls together pretty much everything ever written and filmed and
recorded about Davis and offers a distilled, up-to-date recounting of
his complex, brilliant, maddening and still tendentiously controversial
life. So when funny little discrepancies crop up between the source and
his version, one frets.

For all his fabled irascibility, of course, Davis was right about his
own career accomplishments. Duke Ellington compared him to Picasso, in
his constant musical reinventions. Yet those reinventions got him into
constant trouble. Musicians, critics and fans cling to what they've come
to know and too often regard change as betrayal. Davis changed a lot,
and hence, in many people's eyes, he betrayed himself and them over and
over. Especially since his was a life addled by drugs: heroin, and later
alcohol and cocaine, as well as an endless round of prescription drugs
to relieve him of the pain from his horrific illnesses and injuries.
Fortunately for us (if not necessarily for him) his biggest,
longest-lasting addiction was to music.

Whether you count his changes as four or five or six, he moved from the
Juilliard School to bebop (as a young member of Charlie Parker's quintet
in the 1940's), to cool jazz (helping on the fly to spawn West Coast
cool jazz), to so-called modal jazz (abandoning traditional chord
changes for improvisations based on modal scales), to jazz-rock and
jazz-funk, to layered recordings built up from edited tracks, to
open-ended explorations of roiling, murky sonic textures. Those later
styles, which overlapped, continue to influence not only younger jazz
musicians but also noise-rockers and ambient producers like Brian Eno.

Davis's entire career can be seen as prescient of all the arts' shift in
the second half of the last century from Modernist hyper-complexity (in
his case bebop) to post-modernist simplicity (in his case vamps and funk
and even pop).

He was more of a musical thinker than a virtuoso. He constantly thought
about how music could work, tending toward a minimalist removal of notes
compared with the onslaughts of the bop pyrotechnicians. Yet constant
throughout his shifting styles were his own rounded tone, wonderfully
evocative of the human voice, and spare explorations of the trumpet's
middle range.

Much of his evolution came through his interactions with collaborators
and his oddly indirect guidance of them. Aside from Parker, he numbered
many of the great figures of midcentury jazz among his sidemen. There
were his two famous quintets that, despite shifting personnel around the
edges, consisted of himself plus John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul
Chambers and Philly Joe Jones in the mid-50's and Wayne Shorter, Herbie
Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams in the mid-60's.

There was his wonderful partnership with the composer and arranger Gil
Evans and later his work with the innovative producer Teo Macero. Plus a
panoply of jazz giants and, from the mid-80's on, rock and world
musicians, sometimes near-unknowns seemingly brought into recording
sessions and even concerts with no rehearsal just to shake things up.

A lot of that later experimentation is slighted in the neo-conservative
critical climate of jazz today, and particularly by the jazz orthodoxy
promulgated by Wynton Marsalis (another Juilliard trumpeter) and the
brain trust surrounding him at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Not to speak of
Ken Burns's Wyntonian slant in his "Jazz" television series.

By and large, in this view, Davis is regarded as a wasted talent,
selling out to rock and electronics in a pitiful, desperate effort to
remain forever young. For them his drug use and pimp posings represent
little more than a terrible example.

But these things move in cycles, and the continuing influence of members
of his 60's quintet and others (Keith Jarrett, for one) keeps alive an
alternate view of jazz as something broader and more generous than that
emanating from Lincoln Center.

Mr. Szwed's book is good on most of this, and valuable for trying to
maintain an open mind on all of Davis's permutations. One might expect a
respectful stance on the later eccentricity from a man who wrote a book
on Sun Ra, but Mr. Szwed is really exemplary in his fairness. He doesn't
accept all the failed scraps and crippled technique and hair-brained
follies as equally excellent. But he doesn't condemn them out of hand
and sometimes finds beauty amidst the chaos.

The main problem with his book is that far too much of it reads like a
recitation from stacks of laboriously assembled file cards (or their
latter-day digital equivalents). From paragraph to paragraph we plod
from cursory recountings of domestic incidents to recording sessions to
concerts, with less numbing detail than true obsessives wallow in,
perhaps, but too much unilluminating, underexplored listings of sidemen
and takes. As a meditation on Miles Davis's life, as he calls it, this
book isn't meditative enough.

Though no prose stylist, Mr. Szwed can stretch out when he chooses to,
notably in a chapter called "Interlude." Here he sums up the Davis music
and personality at that key moment in his and jazz's history, 1959, when
free jazz (Ornette Coleman) and rock (and its seduction of a record
industry bedazzled by potentially huge profits) changed jazz forever.
Mr. Szwed's references beyond jazz to classical music, literature, art,
dance and philosophy are often very smart. My own favorite is his
citation of the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno on late Beethoven,
wherein ego dissolves into pure music in anticipation of death, to
explain Davis's recessive role in some of his late recordings.

Anyone who cares about this tortured genius of a man — and many still do
and many more should — will have to read this book, minor misquotations
aside. There's ample information here that one can't get elsewhere under
one cover. But the Davis-Troupe autobiography is way more fun.