[Dixielandjazz] MILES DAVIS (yet again)

[Stephen Barbone]

NOT OKOM, DELETE IF A PURIST
MILES DAVIS, ANOTHER BOOK REVIEW
HOWEVER, GREAT READING IF YOU LIKE JAZZ.
NOTE ESPECIALLY THE LAST PARAGRAPH

Those who were lucky enough to know Miles Davis, or even to have spoken
to him fleetingly, or really listened to his music, realize that he was
a very complex individual and this review captures some of that flavor.

Cheers,
Steve

December 29, 2002 - New York Times

'So What': Miles Davis as the Personification of Cool

By ADAM SHATZ

Late in his career, Miles Davis found himself seated beside a Washington
matron at a White House dinner. What had he done to be
invited? she asked innocently. ''Well, I've changed music four or five
times,'' he grumbled. ''What have you done of any importance other
than be white?''

Davis's self-assessment was haughty, but it was only slightly inflated.
>From his work as a sideman in Charlie Parker's revolutionary bebop
quintet of the mid-1940's to his avant-garde funk adventures of the
1970's, Davis (1926-91) left his imprint on a wider range of genres than
anyone in the history of jazz. Unlike Parker, he did not invent a new
harmonic language. Nor was he a composer of the stature of Duke
Ellington or even of Thelonious Monk. His gift was less tangible yet
arguably more profound: a new way of seeing, a kind of bruised
introspection that was sensitive and volatile. The sound of his trumpet
-- nearly vibratoless and often hauntingly filtered through a Harmon
mute-- was one of the most distinctive and beautiful in 20th-century
music.

Davis was more than a musician, however. As John Szwed argues in ''So
What,'' he was also a significant cultural figure: with his clothes, his
procession of beautiful wives and girl friends and his nonchalant
manner, he exemplified cool. (''So What,'' the title of the number that
opens Davis's 1959 masterpiece, ''Kind of Blue,'' is a perfect
distillation of his attitude.) Often hiding behind sunglasses and
refusing to smile for audiences or even face them when he did not feel
like it, Davis embodied a new style of black identity, a stance that was
existential rather than ideological in nature, and therefore all the
more unnerving to white racists.

Szwed, a professor of American studies at Yale, warns that his book ''is
not a biography in the contemporary sense'' but rather ''a meditation on
Miles Davis's life.'' In fact, he has produced an awkward compound of
genres -- rich in anecdote and observation, yet finally unsatisfying as
biography or as meditation. As in ''Space Is the Place,'' his 1997
biography of Sun Ra, Szwed is deft at making unexpected and insightful
connections. He brilliantly situates Davis's work in the context of
parallel developments in classical music, theater and film, showing, for
instance, how Davis's innovative use of the microphone onstage mirrored
that of Orson Welles in his great radio broadcasts, and likening the
collagelike editing of Davis's psychedelic albums to Soviet cinematic
montage. It is refreshing to see Davis placed in such an expansive
field, although Szwed presses his case farther than it can credibly be
taken, as when he links Davis's music to postmodern epistemology.

Szwed's most promising argument, though he fails to develop it fully, is
that Davis belongs to a tradition of middle-class bohemians. A rebel and
a slummer, Davis had more in common with Mick Jagger than with
Ellington, a man who was as comfortable with his bourgeois
upbringing as Davis was anxious to escape his. Szwed suggests that
Davis's attraction to ''the rootless of the streets and the nighthawks
of the clubs'' may have been a reaction to his affluent but troubled
home life in East St. Louis, Ill. Davis's father, a distinguished
dentist who owned a 160-acre farm, was perpetually at war with his
elegant and reserved wife, and beat her severely when his temper flared
-- a pattern of behavior that resurfaced in Davis's own treatment of
women. After his parents divorced, Davis remained close to his father,
who supported him through his late 20's and helped him overcome his
heroin addiction, while growing progressively estranged from his mother,
who never concealed her disapproval of her son's ''downwardly mobile''
career choice.

>From his adolescence, when he was playing in a popular St. Louis dance
band, Eddie Randle's Blue Devils, Davis moved in a rough and seedy world
of musicians, prostitutes and gamblers. Despite his adoration of his
father, he studiously avoided the company of people like his parents. It
is possible to trace many aspects of Davis's character -- the shrewd
business sense, the need to prove his street credentials, the tension
between curiosity and caution, risk and calculation -- to his pampered
yet unstable childhood. Unfortunately, Szwed rarely pauses long enough
to reflect (to ''meditate,'' as it were) on Davis's torments. He tells
us, in numbingly exhaustive detail, of the traumatic changes in his love
life, his battles with drugs and illness, his skirmishes with the law,
his purchases of expensive cars and Italian suits and his enthusiasms
for boxing and painting. And he chases down some interesting facts of
debatable pertinence, for instance that Jack Ruby owned a Chicago club
where Davis performed in the late 40's. Yet Szwed is capricious in his
recounting of Davis's life. Parker, the great Oedipal figure of Davis's
career, receives unaccountably cursory treatment. Though Szwed reflects
intelligently on Davis's recasting of Parker's innovations, he fails to
capture the electrifying effect the saxophonist had on Davis.

Szwed is most illuminating when discussing Davis's working methods.
Davis was a deeply collaborative artist whose work grew out of his
friendships with other musicians, notably the arranger Gil Evans, who
some believe was the only person he really loved. Davis viewed recording
-- and even composing itself -- as a kind of process-art, entirely
distinct from live performance. Beginning in the late 1960's, he and his
producer, Teo Macero, used the studio not just to correct errors but
''to compose a work that was often larger and more formally complex than
what was imagined as they recorded.'' Before recording, Davis gave his
sidemen cryptic instructions (''play the guitar like you don't know how
to play,'' he once told John McLaughlin), and then the tape would roll.
Macero, a protege of the electronic composer Edgard Varese, edited the
raw material, cutting the tape with razor blades and turning it into
something musically coherent. Davis, who was perfectly content to
delegate the final cut to Macero, betrayed a certain unease about their
authorship when he began subtitling his records ''Directions in Music by
Miles Davis.'' This was consistent with a nasty pattern of claiming
credit for tunes by his sidemen, and of denying it to his collaborators,
including Evans.

Of course, Davis never pretended to be nice; he had many vices, but
insincerity was not among them. The portrait that gradually emerges from
''So What'' -- his violence toward women, his cocaine binges, his petty
and gratuitous cruelties toward his friends -- is often shocking. By the
mid-1970's, Davis was holed up in his Upper West Side mansion, a place
so dark you could not tell if it was night or day. He lived for five
years among bugs, rats and an entourage of groupies, drug dealers and
prostitutes, whom he photographed having group sex once he became
impotent. If his friend Cicely Tyson had not rescued him, he would have
died in his apartment. In his memoir, he thanked Tyson, his wife in the
1980's, by writing that she never turned him on sexually.

''The wreckage Miles left in his wake was not easy for anyone to
understand, or forgive,'' Szwed concludes. And yet, as Szwed
understands, this Davis, nicknamed the ''Prince of Darkness,'' has not
only been forgiven by his fans, his darkness has become an essential
part of his mystique. How could a man so brutal in his life create such
beauty in his art? Szwed circles evasively around this fundamental
question. ''Even with the distance of time,'' he writes, Davis ''resists
interpretation as tenaciously as some cool-surfaced character from a
novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet.'' Coming from a man who has spent several
years researching Davis's life, this is a disappointingly timid
conclusion.

The biggest challenge in jazz improvisation, Davis observed more than
once, is ''not to play all the notes you could play, but to wait,
hesitate, let space become a part of the configuration.'' Crammed with
facts yet strangely undermeditated, Szwed's biographical meditation is
like a solo with too many notes, intermittently inspired but too
cluttered to breathe, and lacking the confidence of a well-honed
interpretation.

Adam Shatz has contributed reviews and articles to The New York Times,
The Nation and The New York Review of Books.