[Dixielandjazz] Miles Davis Inducted into Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame

[Steve barbone]

Congratulations  Miles. No doubt even though they are only in the "early
influence" category, Pops, Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll will welcome you with
open arms as a "Rock Star" in the performer category.

Interesting also that Ahmet Ertegun is both chairman of the R&R Hall of Fame
and the Lincoln Center Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame.

Hopefully Miles will get into Lincoln Center's Hall of Fame soon.

Cheers,
Steve



A Jazz Legend Enshrined as a Rock Star?

NY TIMEDS - By BEN RATLIFF - March 13, 2006 - Forum: Jazz

Miles Davis is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tonight.
Not as an "early influence," as Hank Williams, Louis Jordan, Louis
Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton were; that category is for
artists whose careers were established long before rock 'n' roll began. (The
hall has not inducted anyone in that category since 2001.) Davis is being
recognized as a rock star.

Miles Davis, who flirted with rock from the late 1960's on, will be inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tonight. The view of the trumpeter as
rock star is not shared by all.

To what extent was Miles Davis a rock star?

This seems provocative for a second, and then a little meaningless. It is
not some sort of timely argument for underappreciated work; adventurous
musicians like those in the Black Rock Coalition have been claiming Davis's
electric period as an inspiration for decades. There are some jazz adherents
who never liked Davis's long electric phase and will be mildly outraged. But
after all the jagged turns of his career, and its thorough box-set gilding,
most of us have long since let Davis's body of work just assume its own
meaning. 

Davis's so-called rock could be strange and brilliant (especially from 1969
to 1975). His jazz was less opaque, and his love for it as a language and a
tradition much clearer. Jazz had been his training, the basis of his best
recorded work, which would include "Walkin'," "Birth of the Cool,"
"Milestones," "Miles Ahead" and "Live at the Plugged Nickel," among other
albums. But by the mid-1960's he sensed correctly that jazz's greatest age
was closing. He listened to everything, from Karlheinz Stockhausen ‹ who has
not yet been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but certainly
could be in the future ‹ to the trumpeter and record executive Herb Alpert,
who is being inducted this year in the lifetime-achievement category.

Davis couldn't stand being permanently linked with jazz if it meant his
becoming second-class. He wanted the music industry to take him even more
seriously than before; he came into contact with rock 'n' roll simply by
being himself and resisting decline. A series of women in his life during
the late 1960's, particularly Betty Mabry, brought him closer to the center
of rock culture, the musicians and the nightlife and the clothes; he was
also working with Clive Davis at Columbia Records, who ambitiously drove his
label during those years to be a rock 'n' roll contender.

As pop record-making changed, as the album-qua-album became as important as
the hit single, with a wider canvas for fuller expression, Davis found
himself suited to that challenge, too, during a remarkable partnership with
his producer Teo Macero.

By 1970 Davis had veered hard toward funk and rock: first Jimi Hendrix,
whose Band of Gypsies riffs he quoted and altered for his own purposes, and
then Sly Stone and James Brown. You could call his albums "Bitches Brew" and
"Live-Evil" rock by extension ‹ especially in this context, because Mr.
Brown, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Sly and the Family Stone have already
been inducted into the hall. And the album "A Tribute to Jack Johnson" from
1970 even more so. You could also call them quite amazing records, whatever
they are.

Davis, who died in 1991, was finally unsentimental about jazz, yet he
respected many of its forms. With rock he could be more instinctive,
brusque, shocking, mystifying, wasteful. With "In a Silent Way," from 1969,
he did want his music to sound "like rock." He said as much in his 1989
memoir, though at the time he was fantastically dismissive about the issue.
("What's a rock 'n' roll band?" he sneered at a journalist in 1970. "The
only rock I know is the rock of cocaine.")

But if he wanted more of his music to sound like rock, he meant its sound:
the volume, the riff, the electric guitar and bass, the back beat.
Everything else was changeable. There were dense slabs of hammering rhythm,
static harmony, great moving plates of collective improvisation, which he
ordered around as he conducted onstage. In the studio, he jammed endlessly
with a revolving cast of musicians and then, with Mr. Macero, cut and
spliced and layered the tapes. He could treat rock and funk like
abstractions. Perhaps that's why his electric period ‹ which, let's be
clear, lasted half of his career ‹ had such vertiginous high points
("Live-Evil," "Get Up With It") as well as such drowsy lows (a lot of his
music after 1980).

The program essay for tonight's induction ceremony does not acknowledge the
oddness of Davis's induction; it simply describes his accomplishments. But
the view of Davis as rock star is not unanimous. Ahmet Ertegun, chairman of
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, said in a telephone interview on Friday that
as a member of the nominating committee he did not vote for Davis, because
he felt that his most significant work had nothing to do with rock.

Mr. Ertegun, a cofounder of Atlantic Records with a lot of jazz in his past,
said he did vote early and strongly to put Davis in Jazz at Lincoln Center's
Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, where he thinks he belongs.

"I love Miles Davis," he said, referring to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
induction. "I also love John Coltrane and Jack Teagarden, but I'm not voting
for them either."