Miles. He was, unquestionably one of the greatest and most influential musicians of the twentieth century. And yes, he was cool - the king of the cool, by the way. As a matter of fact, a friend and I decided one evening, you could functionally define the word "cool" as meaning, "as close as one can come to being as or like Miles Davis as possible."
But there’s so much more to it than that. For roughly thirty years (from 1945 to 1975), Miles Dewey Davis engaged in one of the most powerful, probing, sustained exercises in the progressive creative development of an art form the world has ever seen. His revolutionary changes in stylistic directions, always outward-looking, forward-reaching, has often brought him comparisons to other restless revolutionaries, such as Pablo Picasso. Let’s just take a quick look at his long yet mercurial career, and we can get a fairly solid outline that suggests - at least to some degree - the extent of the man’s achievements.
In 1945, at the age of 19, Miles Davis moved from East St. Louis to New York City in search of Charlie Parker, the revolutionary messiah of the new modern jazz called bebop. Not only did Davis connect with Parker, but he played in his band, in clubs and recordings, for most of the next four years. This was his musical school, his formal training ground: night after night of playing the most adventurous and demanding forms of music while it was still in its infancy. Miles hit the New York jazz scene at precisely the perfect time. Parker and some of his young cohorts, including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and drummers Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, had been experimenting with new forms of expression in the playing of the music called jazz, but it was Parker - nicknamed "Bird" by the cognoscenti - who was carrying the torch and pushing the music the farthest.
Charlie Parker was a bona fide genius: unquestionably one of the greatest musicians in modern history, and his imagination led him to extraordinary flights of dizzying improvisation. Every night, every song, every solo, was a revelatory experience of dazzling virtuosity and inexhaustible creative wonder. He was the great pied piper of modern jazz, and the new style and approach he created revolutionized the way that jazz musicians the world over would approach their music. To this day, whenever we think of "modern jazz," we are essentially thinking in terms of the new conceptions of playing that Charlie Parker laid out so dramatically some seventy years ago.
And there by his side was the young Miles Davis. I can think of no other experience, imagine no other apprenticeship that could compare to what Miles was getting in his young and hungry years.
This should tell us something about the character of the man in and of itself. Unlike Parker, Miles Davis was not a prodigy. He was a pretty good trumpet player for his age, he was smart, and he caught on pretty quickly. But the young Miles Davis had so little doubt about his capacity for absorbing and mastering this extraordinarily challenging new music that he had tough-minded audacity to go right up to Parker and begin playing. This was a kind of confidence that bordered on insanity. But it is precisely this proud, fearless construction of mind that allowed Davis to shape his entire extraordinary career.
No, young Miles Davis could not play with the fluent, fiery abandon of Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, or some of the other hot young trumpeters on the scene. But what Parker liked about Davis was his sound. Miles Davis definitely had a gift for creating the perfect, penetrating clear tones that would develop into what is probably the singular most recognizable voice on his instrument. Period. Miles also was gifted in that he could hear and play melody. Lots of musicians played fast and furious licks, but Davis was always about constructing beautiful melodies with his horn. He focused on the middle range of the trumpet and always tried to get the most beautiful, delicately nuanced solos he possibly could. Bird loved Miles’ playing, and he loved the contrast that came between his own acrobatic, over-the-top style and Davis’ hip, laid-back approach.
Needless to say, playing night after night with Charlie Parker in the most demanding and revolutionary jazz group in the world, Miles Davis quickly got better and better. By the time he left Parker around 1949, he was unquestionably one of the greatest young trumpet players in jazz. Perhaps more importantly, the time he had spent playing with Parker gave him an unprecedented pathway in order to directly absorb all of the musical ideas of the day shoulder to shoulder with the man most responsible for the revolution itself. There is no way to measure what the depth of understanding that those years provided the young musician. Miles Davis walked away from Charlie Parker’s group as a living embodiment of the essence of the new jazz form. This was the kind of mastery that one could never get any other way, and Davis carried everything he had absorbed from playing with Parker for the rest of his professional life.
But Miles Davis was more complex than that. He was not satisfied with just being another great jazz musician. Endlessly creative, restless, and blessed (or cursed) with an enormous ego, a burning, angry flame in his heart, he was always hearing and searching out for some new sound. He was one of the great listeners in music history, and his lifetime of choices in sidemen bear this out like no one else. Plus, he had such an extraordinarily delicate and rare sensitivity that he could encapsulate the essence of loneliness and heartache with just a few carefully chosen notes. This powerful and strange mix of powerful character traits in this one-of-a-kind mortal came merged in the public eye as one of the most powerful and mysterious artists the world has ever seen.
Davis’ starkly original nature shone through tremendously with the first recordings that he made as a leader himself. His first session, in 1947, displayed a form of be-bop that was softer and somewhat more sophisticated in tone than his sides with Charlie Parker (who appeared on Davis’ debut playing a tenor saxophone, with a beautiful, smooth complimentary tone). But it was the groundbreaking recordings he made in 1949-1950 with his octet and nonet that set off a new direction in jazz. Working with composer/arranger Gil Evans, among other experimentalists in New York, Davis utilized unusual combinations and instrumentation (such as French horn, tuba, and baritone sax) to produce a radically new and different sound.
While these recordings had little impact at the time, they influenced a large number of musicians enormously, laying the foundation for a more mellow form of bebop that came to be christened "cool jazz," and became extremely popular, especially on the West Coast. When all these recordings were finally compiled and released on an LP in 1957, they were fittingly named, The Birth of the Cool. These recordings continue to be much loved and appreciated today.
In 1951, Miles Davis signed a recording contract with the independent Prestige jazz label, and he began a five-year series of non-stop recording sessions with different musicians, first releasing 10-inch, and then later, 12-inch albums in abundance. Unfortunately, around the same time, Davis became addicted to heroin.
This is in a way profoundly shocking as Miles had managed to remain scrupulously straight all during the time he had played with Charlie Parker, who, even if he was the king of modern jazz, was also the "king" of the jazz junkies. Davis had seen first-hand what heroin could do to an individual, so it is surprising that he became hooked himself, especially at this date, when his solo career was set to take off.
I have read Davis’ autobiography and other books about his life, and I have speculated that the musician’s sad falling into this habit was intimately related to personal depression combined with a racial anger at how black artists such as himself were treated in the U.S. at the time. This was highlighted for Davis by a very successful trip to France, where great jazz musicians were treated as cultural royalty. I believe that Davis was powerfully tempted to remain in Europe, where he was accorded both admiration and respect, but he realized that if he cut himself off from the on-going musical developments in New York, he would not advance in his art. On his return to the States, being painfully reminded of the second-class citizenship his own country afforded black men and the music they created, I believe he gave in to a kind of despair. Whether I am right or wrong, this is the time that Davis began using narcotics. He would struggle with a horrible addiction for nearly four years.
If heroin did not damage his playing ability - while many critics maintain that it did - it certainly slowed down Miles’ momentum as an artist. There are many good recordings from this period, both for Prestige and for Blue Note records, but there does seem to be an erratic quality and a hesitancy that is quite easy to blame on drugs, and Davis himself admitted to having great difficulty in holding his life together during this period.
Fortunately, in 1954, Miles Davis made a firm commitment to break his habit. He left New York and returned to his father’s house in East St. Louis, where he locked himself away for three excruciating days as the horrible pains of detoxification and withdrawal took their toll. When he finally emerged, however, he was a man reborn. No doubt Miles Davis suffered temptation and the after-effects of his ordeal, but the fire had been rekindled inside of him. Whatever he went through one thing is certain: beginning in 1954, Miles Davis began playing the trumpet with a new passion, precision and control that astonished even those who knew and admired his playing.
It was at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival when Miles Davis created a sensation with his spellbinding performance of Thelonious Monk’s mysterioso ballad "‘Round Midnight." Columbia Records was so impressed that they offered Miles a multi-year contract for an amount almost unheard-of (for the time) of a jazz musician. "What’s all the fuss about?" Davis purportedly replied. "I always play like that."
1954 also marked the beginning of a new energy in New York City jazz. In February of that year, the great drummer Art Blakey, along with pianist Horace Silver displayed a new group at Birdland, the famous club named after Charlie Parker, featuring the electrifying performance of a phenomenal young trumpet player named Clifford Brown. The music was hard, raw and edgy, maintaining the bebop language and structures, but incorporating an emphatic new drive that came, partially at least, from the contemporary rhythm and blues acts that were beginning to thrive and that would soon transform into rock ‘n’ roll. The new sound was dubbed "Hard Bop."
Davis made the decision to step away from the "cool" sound he had helped to create and to help lead the way with this exciting new movement. His old friend, drummer Max Roach, had enlisted Clifford Brown and was playing some of the most exciting music in the city. Davis, sensing the timing was right, went to work trying to put his own group together that would compete with Blakey and the Brown/Roach quintet and put himself at the forefront of modern jazz again. He was disappointed, no doubt, when his friend, the dynamic Sonny Rollins - probably the best young tenor saxophonist of the day, turned down his offer and took up employment with Roach. But Davis persisted, and by 1955, he finally emerged as the leader of one of the greatest small groups in jazz history.
Today this group is known by the title, the "First Classic Quintet" (to distinguish it from the later great quartet that Miles led in the 1960s). Driving the rhythm section was Davis’ favorite drummer, the dynamic Philly Joe Jones, a whirlwind of a player that could drive a band like no other. On bass, Davis found a true prodigy: Paul Chambers from Pittsburgh was barely 19 years old, but already was one of the finest and most sensitive bass players in the history of jazz. Red Garland was Davis’ choice for piano. He had a light and graceful touch that Miles admired, held things together tastefully, and would soon become famous and influential for his "block chord" soloing.
The band’s secret weapon, however, was an unknown tenor saxophonist from Philadelphia. John Coltrane was the same age as Miles Davis, but he had nowhere the credits or the experience that his employer carried. On the other hand, he had a sound. It was an enormous, growling sound, quite unlike anything anyone had heard before. Coltrane, a tall, unassumingly quiet man, quite astonishingly played like a screaming madman, his head filled with clusters of ideas that he fought ferociously to get out of his horn in time. Coltrane quickly divided opinion, but Davis heard the possibilities immediately. Remembering the old magic between his own spare playing and Charlie Parker’s gymnastics, Miles Davis employed John Coltrane as his ultimate foil, the saxman matching his leader’s beautiful tone and careful crafting of melody with the raging power of his own surging explorations.
There are many who believe still that this was the greatest jazz combo of all time.
During 1955-1956, Davis and his new group played continually, racking up a tremendous following that engulfed New York City and gradually spread around the country. During this time, the band recorded not only five albums’ worth of material for Prestige (to complete Davis’ contract with them), but also laid down four sessions at Columbia on the sly to prepare for Miles’ major-league debut. When it was finally released in early 1957, the Miles Davis Quintet became a national sensation.
‘Round About Midnight (March 6, 1957)
It is with this astonishing debut album on Columbia records that I recommend newcomers both to Miles Davis, as well as modern jazz in general, to begin. The playing is absolutely astonishing, the sound is beautiful, and what you are hearing is the absolute distillation of over a dozen years of development, both for the artist and the art form. It is absolutely one of the pinnacles of modern music. But for Miles Davis, this album was, in so very many ways, just the beginning.
(To be continued . . .)
By the way, for those who wish to advance deeply into the exploration of Miles Davis' quintet and sextet recordings for Columbia from 1955 to 1961, this extraordinary box set features the complete recorded works of Miles together with John Coltrane for the label. Documenting the collaboration of two of the most important jazz artists in history, this compilation contains many alternate takes, outtakes, and live performances. This superlative 6-disc set is one of the finest collections of modern jazz ever offered anywhere. It is historically comprehensive, essential in both form and content, and endlessly musically rewarding. I cannot recommend this set highly enough.
The Complete Columbia Recordings of Miles Davis with John Coltrane (October 26, 1999)
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