Bookshelf: Miles on Miles

Legendary trumpeter and St. Louis area native Miles Davis is one of the most talked-about and written-about musicians of the late 20th century, and he's now the subject of yet another book, Miles on Miles, which collects 30 interviews from various periods of Davis' storied career.

The blurb from publishers Lawrence Hill Books describes the volume as "essential reading for anyone who wants to know what Miles Davis thought about his music, life, and philosophy. Miles on Miles reveals the jazz icon as a complex and contradictory man, secretive at times but extraordinarily revealing at others. Miles was not only a musical genius, but an enigma, and nowhere else was he so compelling, exasperating, and entertaining as in his interviews, which vary from polite to outrageous, from straight-ahead to contrarian. Even his autobiography lacks the immediacy of the dialogues collected here. Many were conducted by leading journalists like Leonard Feather, Stephen Davis, Ben Sidran, Mike Zwerin, and Nat Hentoff. Others have never before seen print, are newly transcribed from radio and television shows, or appeared in long-forgotten magazines."

Edited by Paul Maher Jr. and Michael K. Dorr, the hardcover tome has 320 pages and a list price of $24.95. Lawrence Hill Books is a division of Chicago Review Press that "specializes in mostly nonfiction on topics of African American and Latino interest, progressive politics, civil and human rights, and feminism." (For what it's worth, they've also published a book on Davis' longtime arranger and collaborator Gil Evans that looks interesting...)