Miles Above
A “Listen Up!” column by Zen Delta
The music biz is not big on anniversaries, but the business has been home to some of the most influential individuals in history – some having inspired listeners to become players and some changing the very face of music as we know it.
Well, we are approaching another anniversary, and for jazz fans and all jazz musicians, this was one of the greatest losses to the world of music and of one of the most influential people of all time.
Miles Davis had a vast impact on jazz and beyond jazz from the forties to the nineties, and he did so despite the fact that almost alone among major jazz influences, he did not have a virtuoso command of his instrument.
His work sometimes faltered; there were wrong notes; he was incapable of the speed or acrobatic flights of Dizzy Gillespie. But what he did have was a steely musical intelligence and a completely original idea of how he wanted to sound. In addition to that individual, unforgettable sound, his contribution to jazz took the form of a series of highly influential ideas.
His career was made up of a number of distinct phases. First, the early years starting from the point at which Charlie Parker selected him, a shy 20-year-old from a wealthy black family in St Louis, as his musical partner for his stellar quintet of l947-8.
Davis’s clouded tone and pared-down approach owed as much to earlier masters of lyrical jazz like Billie Holiday and Lester Young as it did to hop. And he carried this emphasis of tonal beauty and melody in his first great experiment, the Miles Davis Nonet of 1948.
This was an ensemble of an entirely novel kind - light, suave, neither a big band nor a small group. It only existed for the span of one short engagement and a few recording sessions, but it heralded the next phase of jazz, a reaction against the heat and complexity of bebop.
Davis’s own fortunes plunged in the early fifties, when he was afflicted with heroin addiction. By the mid fifties, however, he had recovered and reached musical maturity. There was lyricism still in his playing, but also pent-up anger and brooding melancholy, especially when be used a harmon mute, as he generally did on ballads.
As a musician, and also as a man, he was magnetic.
For the rest of his life, much of Davis’s formidable musical intelligence was devoted to finding appropriate settings for his own wonderful, but potentially rather static, trumpet. In 1956 he came up with a quintet, and selected John Coltrane as his front-line partner, whose sound set Davis off like a rough mounting for a fine stone.
This Miles Davis Quintet, which also had Philly Joe Jones on drums, was one of the greatest jazz groups of all time.
Meanwhile Davis continued to explore the idiom of his forties Nonet in company with arranger Gil Evans. Miles Ahead (1957) and Porgy And Bess (1958) are the most successful amalgamations of jazz solo and large ensemble outside Ellington. Later Davis-Evans collaborations, Sketches Of Spain and Quiet Night tended to veer dangerously close to sub-classical easy listening.
In 1958, however, Davis formed a sextet including Coltrane, as well as the altoist Cannonball Adderley and the white pianist Bill Evans. With this band Davis made a couple of albums Miles Stones and Kind Of Blue that turned jazz around. With Kind Of Blue, Davis reached a peak he never scaled again, although be put together another very celebrated band in the mid sixties, with Wayne Shorter on tenor, Herbie Hancock on piano and Tony Williams on drums. But this kind of rather abstract jazz was losing its public by the end of the sixties, and Davis decided that something had to be done.
His solution was to blend his music with the newly ascendant rock, thus in effect inventing jazzrock fusion. Here the crucial album was Bitches Brew (1969), which launched yet another new phase, with yet more famous names graduating from Davis’s groups, and which made Miles more famous than ever.
In 1976, worn out, Davis retired for several years, which were given over, according to his autobiography, to sex and drugs. He returned in 1981 and continued to work in the fusion vein. The albums had become slicker, sometimes synthesised disco.
Miles, however remained Miles, his own playing curiously unchanged, despite the drastic alterations in backing. He died, vastly popular to the end, in 1991.
Artist: Miles Davis
Born : 26-05-1926 in Alton, Illinois
Died : 28-09-1991
Instrument : Trumpet, Flugelhorn, Keyboards
Zen Delta is Creative Director of ACMEBROADC@ST MARKETING SERVICES which specializes in providing writing, editing, graphic design, printing, promotion + publicity services as well as publishing, web design, photography, film and music production. Contact: postmaster@acmebroadcast.tvheaven.com.
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