THE ELECTRIC MILE

Happy New Year

2011-01-01T00:00:00.000+01:00

My Lunch with Miles

2010-03-16T00:03:00.001+01:00

It was around this time 38 years ago that Irvin Kolodin called me and asked if I would like to write a cover story for the Saturday Review. Well, who wouldn't? "It's on Miles Davis," Kolodin continued, in a tone of voice that one might use if bringing someone bad news. I understood that, because it was no secret that Miles could be difficult, but I was up for the challenge. After all, I had met him on several occasions, mostly in the hallways of Columbia's studios at 52nd Street, where we had a nodding relationship, but also at a couple of press parties, where I saw him smile, and on the beach during a Columbia Records Convention in the Bahamas the year before.

I had a relatively generous deadline, so I waited a couple of days before giving Miles a call, hoping to catch him in a friendly mood. I was in luck, he told me to come right over. Well, I hadn't expected it to go that smoothly or with such immediacy, but he seemed to be in a good mood. Moments later, small cassette machine in hand, I was ringing his bell at West 77th Street, where he owned a house.

Miles opened the door wide and led me to a fairly large room with a bar in one end and gestured for me to have a seat by the coffee table in a cozy corner at the other end. "I hope you didn't have lunch," he said in that low, raspy voice of his. Lunch? that was certainly unexpected. "No," I replied, placing my recorder on the table and noticing that Miles seemed to eye it with a hint of curiosity. It was not until several days later that Teo Macero, his producer, informed me that Miles did not like to be interviewed on tape. It's a good thing that I didn't know that earlier. At the first Ida Cox session, ten years earlier, I had watched admiringly as Whitney Balliett took notes in what seemed to be shorthand and got every word and breath right. With Miles, a tape recorder was an absolute necessity, and not only did he not balk at seeing it, there were a couple of occasions when he walked over to the bar and carried my recorder with him so that I wouldn't miss a word.

The only discomfort came when lunch was served. It was some kind of fish, which is something I got completely turned off to in Iceland. There,everything was fish, even beef had a fishy taste, and when the wind blew in a certain direction, it brought with it a generous whiff from the edge of town, where racks of fish were hung out to dry. So, I probably had not eaten fish in twenty years, but this was one time when I felt that I had to. However, I could only go so far, so I pushed the skin to the edge of my plate—discreetly, I thought—but it did not escape Miles' attention.

"You don't like the skin?," he asked.
"No."
"Well, we shan't waste it," he said, picking it from my plate with his fork.
The interview went well and the article has since been reprinted in a couple of books, but here it is, anyway.

Saturday Review cover story - November 27, 1971.

THE UNMASKING OF MILES DAVIS

When Miles Davis returns from a six week tour of Europe and takes his quintet into Philharmonic Hall this week, chances are that a good percentage of his audience will consist of young black people. This is not a writer's prediction based on a typical Miles Davis following—no one has determined just what that might be—but a request Miles made in a phone call from Paris four weeks ago: Jack Whittemore, his agent, was to take half of Miles’ fee, purchase tickets for the concert, and hand them out to young black people who otherwise could not afford to attend. “Miles has never done anything like this before, but nothing he does surprises me,” says Whittemore, admitting that he doesn’t quite know how to go about distributing over $2,000 worth of free tickets to the right people.
Such unusual gestures are as typical of Miles as they are atypical of most performing artists; they come as a surprise only to those who know the enigmatic trumpet player from a distance. Since his first appearance on the music scene some twenty-six years ago, Miles Davis has ben the subject of controversy; endearing with his music, offending with his personality. That is to say, his personality as it is most commonly interpreted, for the forbidding mask of hostility that in many minds characterizes Miles is just that: an image fostered by his own, deliberate lack of showmanship, and sculptured by reporters who have failed to recognize a serious artist at work. We don’t, after all, expect Rostropovich or Casadesus to warm up their audiences with small talk, and Miles Davis is as serious about his music as were Brahms and Schubert.
The music performed by Miles Davis today has undeniably evolved from that labeled “jazz,” which New Orleans pioneers played sixty years ago, but there are other elements contained in it, too, and if Miles’ music is jazz, then so is Stravinsky’s Ragtime for Twelve Instruments. He himself feels that jazz is “a white man’s word” whose application to his music is tantamount to calling a black person “nigger.” Accordingly, though he still must give performances in noisy, Smoke-filled night clubs, Miles approaches his work with the dignity it deserves.

During club or concert appearances, he never addresses his audience nor announces his selections, generally wears clothing that reflect future fashion trends—Gentleman’s Quarterly named him, “Best Dressed Man” ten years ago—saunters off the band stand or to the rear of the stage when not playing, and occasionally turns his back to the audience while focusing attention on his fellow musicians. “I have been with him on several occasions when he left the stage during a performance,” says Robert Altshuler, Columbia Records’ publicity director, “he either crouches or ambles to the side of the audience and you realize that he is deeply concentrating on everything that his musicians are playing—he is digging his own band, digging it in a the way a Miles Davis fan would. He simply becomes a part of his own audience.”
Club owners and concert promoters have been known to go into a rage over Miles’ seeming detachment, but conformity is not in his vocabulary and, despite the constant criticism, he has for twenty years remained the dark, brooding, wandering loner who doesn’t care whether he is regarded as an eccentric genius or a bellicose bastard, is long as people listen to what he says through his music.
The son of a well-to-do dental surgeon, Miles Davis has never been poor, but money cannot cure the inherent stigma that society has attached to people of dark skin and, faced with prejudices that sometimes are so subtle that only their victims can detect them, he has always sought to fight back on his own. “I am not a Black Panther or nothing like that,” he explains, “I don’t need to be, but I was raised to think like they do and people sometimes think I’m difficult, because I always say what’s on my mind, and they can’t always see what I see.”
One thing Miles never fails to see is someone taking advantage of him. “Back in the days when he was only getting a thousand dollars for a concert, Miles was booked into Town Hall,” recalls Jack Whittemore. “The tickets were selling very well, so the promoter suggested doing two shows instead of one. As was customary in such cases, Miles was to get half fee, five hundred dollars, for the second concert, but when I approached him with this he looked puzzled. ’You mean I go on stage,’ he said, ‘pick up my horn, play a concert, and get a thousand dollars. Then they empty the hall, fill it again, I pick up my horn again, play the same thing, and get only five hundred?—I don’t understand it.’ I told him that this was how it was normally done, but he was not satisfied. Finally, he tirned to me and said he’s do it for five hundred dollars if they would rope off half the hall and only sell half the tickets. When the promoters heard this, they decided to give him another thousand for the second concert.”
If Miles is “difficult,” it is because his honesty and candor are such rare traits in the show business world that few people know how to deal with him. His monumental disdain for the complimentary small talk and instant familiarity that entertainers are exposed to, and his absolute refusal to indulge in such trivia, has earned him the reputation of being unapproachable. “I have found,” observes Altshuler, “that when Miles meets someone new—people from the press I’ve introduced him to—he will check them out first. They don’t always know this, but Miles is actually laying down the ground rules for a totally honest exchange of questions and answers, and he will accept his interviewer only if he can be sure that his time is not going to be wasted with inane questions.” As one might expect, Miles is reluctant to appear on TV talk shows.
“Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson don’t know what to say to anybody black, unless there’s some black bitch on the show and she’s all over them,” he told me while conducting a guided tour of his unconventional but comfortable Upper West Side residence. “It’s so awkward for them, because they know all the white facial expressions, but they’re not hip to black expressions, and God knows they’re not hip to Chinese expressions. You see, they’ve seen all the white expressions, like fear, sex, revenge. White actors imitate other white actors when they express emotions, but they don’t know how black people react. Dick Cavett is quiet now when a black cat is talking to him, because he doesn’t know if the expression on his face means ‘I’m going to kick your ass,’ or if ‘right on’ means he’s going to throw a right hand punch. So,” he continued, pointing out the oddly shaped, multi-level blue tile bathtub, “rather than embarrass them and myself, I just play on those shows and tell them not to say anything to me—I have nothing to say to them anyway.”
Miles makes a good point, intelligent, relevant questions are rarely directed at black guests on TV’s talk shows, and the media’s handful of established hosts relate to his music about as well as Nixon’s “silent majority” relates to the problems of Bedford-Stuyvesant residents. We stepped down into the circular bedroom where a television set, dwarfed by a gigantic bed, silently radiated an afternoon ballgame. “I just put it on because I have nothing to do,” volunteered Miles as he waved his hand towards a long row of flamboyant clothes and boots in dazzling colors. “I have these made for me.” When CBS flashed the image of its night host on the little screen, it served as a cue for Miles. “Merv Griffin is embarrassing to me,” he said. “I felt like yanking his arm off last year.” He was referring to the 1970 Grammy Awards ceremony at Alice Tully Hall, during which, after a superb performance by Miles’ group, Griffin—the evening’s master of ceremonies—brushed him off with a remark that was disrespectful of his music. “The trouble with those cats,” said Miles, “is that they all try to come off to those middle-aged white bitches.”

Such remarks don’t exactly produce invitations to guest on late night TV shows, but Miles aims his fire without such considerations. Even Columbia Records—with whom he has enjoyed a good and fruitful relationship since the mid-Fifties—has been victimized by his public candor. In a recent statement, published by a black weekly, Miles—who refers to himself as the “company nigger”—suggested that his label was not affording black artists equal opportunities in terms of exposure. As we seated ourselves comfortably in the round sunken living room, I asked if there had been any repercussions from Columbia. “No,” he replied, “Clive [Davis, Columbia’s president] asked me why I had said that, and I said ‘Was I telling a lie, Clive? If you can say I’m a liar, I’ll retract that statement.’ You see, all those records I have made with them have been a bitch, and they come out being rich behind all this token shit.”
“You would think that he’s not grateful,” says Clive Davis, “but I just know he is. I’m not sure that it’s his mind that he speaks; I’m not sure that he just doesn’t tell people what they want to hear, because it takes a certain amount of research before you go off making such statements. I’m prepared for all of Miles’ statements, none surprise me. I do mentally treat him differently, not because he’s black—because we have such a tremendous number of black artists—but because he’s unique among people, and you expect the unexpected from Miles Davis.”
Clive Davis admits that he is not totally unaffected by Miles’ criticism. “It bothers me because I think we have really done a tremendous amount to be creative along with him, and we work very closely with him so that we make sure that he sells not only to jazz audiences and to contemporary rock audiences, but to r&b audiences as well.”
Despite his complaints, Miles readily admits to having an unusually close relationship with Columbia, which is borne out by his long tenure with the label, and the fact that the 45-year-old superstar of black music could easily find another home for his recording activities. “The Internal Revenue Service is always after me,” he says, “but I just send their bills on to Clive. I got one for $39,000, but he took care of it.” When asked to verify this, Davis gave a diplomatic reply: “Miles is treated very well by Columbia Records,” he says. “I think he’s really appreciative of it, too—we don’t get Internal Revenue bills from Chicago or Blood, Sweat & Tears.”

The recent upsurge in Miles Davis’ popularity is mainly due to an album entitled “Bitches Brew.” Released in the spring of 1970, it was the subject of a well coordinated national promotion campaign aimed more at the young rock fan than at the established Miles Davis follower. Of the close to thirty Miles Davis albums that have accumulated in Columbia’s catalogue over the past fifteen years, “Porgy and Bess”—with sales figures approaching 100,000—had been the most successful; other albums have averaged around 50,000 and recent releases have barely crawled to the 25,000 mark, but “Bitches Brew”—a two-record set—-has sold over 400,000 copies in this country alone.
The wide stylistic gap that separates “Porgy and Bess” and “Bitches Brew” is reflected in the sales figures, but it is not just the sound of his music that Miles has changed, for he has also updated the group’s appearance. Surrounded by a young inter-racial group of musicians sporting afros, long hair, headbands, dungarees and dashikis, Miles has transformed himself into a trendy, youthful figure. With his flared pants, leather boots, tasseled Western vest and love beads, he points his shiny horn downward and roams slowly amid the complex-looking electronic equipment. It is no coincidence that the current Miles Davis band has the look of a modern-day rock group—he is determined to win over a new generation of fans, and judging by album sales, the plan is working. Miles’ new music is an abstraction of everything he has played before; it is as if he were summing it all up for us, but we know that he won’t let it end here—this is merely the latest plateau. At the same time, it is a testimony to Miles’ artistry and forward thinking that none of his past recordings—going back to his revolutionary 1949 Capitol sessions—sound outdated in 1971.

If rock groups are not envious of Miles’ musical accomplishments, they perhaps should be, for many of them have yet to approach the stage of development reached by Miles and collaborator Gil Evans in the Fifties. One can’t help, but wonder if, ten or twelve years from now, anyone will have more than a nostalgic nod for the current efforts of today’s musical pop heroes. There is bitter irony in the fact that Miles has to take second billing—as he did last year—to a group like Blood, Sweat and Tears, which sells records in the millions and turns youthful audiences into a frenzy of excitement with musical ideas borrowed from Miles’ past. “I can’t be bothered with these groups,” says Miles, recalling with some amusement how he turned down promoter Bill Graham’s request that he retract a negative statement about Blood, Sweat and Tears, “if they can’t stand constructive criticism, to hell with them. I’m honest in what I say, I don’t lie, so I don’t have to watch my words or take them back.’
There are those who feel that Miles’ attacks on rock groups are unfair and that he, in an odd sense, owes these performers a debt of gratitude. They see his appearances last year at the Fillmores East and West—Meccas for the rock cult—as a turning point in his career, but they seem to lose sight of the fact that these concerts, along with Columbia’s promotional efforts, would not have sold the public on Miles Davis if he had not had something substantial to offer. For over twenty years, Miles has pointed music in new directions, reaching unexplored plateaus, then forging ahead before others could catch up with him. “He has never been bound by convention,” says Teo Macero, who has produced virtually all of Miles’ recordings since 1958. “You wouldn’t expect Miles to go back and do something the way he did it years ago anymore than you would expect Picasso to go back to what he was doing in his ’blue’ or ’rose’ periods.”

One tangible result of Miles’ recent commercial success his been the signing up by Columbia of several black musicians who last year would hardly have been able to get as far as Clive Davis’ eleventh floor office. Explaining this change in policy, Clive Davis makes one momentarily forget that he is running a highly competitive commercial business: “I am very eager to allow Columbia to be used by the most forward looking American jazz artists, to explore what kind of synergy can come out of jazz and rock. What do the jazz giants, the leading jazz figures of today have to say? What is their reaction to the fact that, in attempting to fuse jazz and rock, Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears have reached millions of people all over the world while they, without such an attempt, only reach a few thousand with their music.” He mentioned that the label has signed Omette Coleman, Jack De Johnette, and Weather Report—an offshoot of Miles’ group—and that it was recording Charles Mingus. “Just as Columbia sponsored a Modern American Composer series in classical music—not having any less reverence for Stravinsky, Mahler, or classical music performed by the New York Philharmonic or the Philadelphia Orchestra—so we are here exploring a very exciting now development in music, to see where it will go. I don’t know where it will go, but I think that by opening up the company to this kind of exploration of music by brilliant talent, we are providing a tremendous service.”
Columbia’s aims are obvious and Miles is not fooled for a minute: “It’s smart to be with the niggers sometimes. I know what made “Bitches Brew,” but they need guidance: Mingus needs guidance; Omette needs guidance; nobody’s going to tell them what to do because then they might call them white bastards. They have to tell Mingus what to do, otherwise he’ll do the same shit all over again, and they have to tell Omette that he can not play the trumpet and violin. Motown shows you where it’s at, man.”
It is difficult to imagine anyone telling Miles Davis what to do with his music, but he is just as receptive to constructive criticism as he is ready to give it. “Miles lets you be as creative as you want to be,” says producer Teo Macero, “as long as it doesn’t screw up his music. A lot of artists say ’Man, don’t touch my music, don’t do this, I don’t want any electronic sound, don’t use a Fender bass, and so forth, but Miles is so far ahead that he’s on the same wavelength as you are, which makes for a great deal of excitement. When he plays, he does it with such intensity that every note is a gem. He doesn’t make any mistakes, if he doesn’t like something he did, it is usually because it didn’t capture the right feeling. We never discuss the music or how things went in front of anybody else; he either calls me out into the hall or we sort of talk in the comer, and I try to refrain from talking about the piece over the studio talk-back system. That’s something I’ve learned by working with him over the years. Like his private life, he keeps it to himself; I never ask, because if he wants to tell me something, he’ll do it.”
The physical aspects of producing a Miles Davis album are as unconventional as his music. As Macero explains, there are no takes one, two or three, “because there’s something new that pops into the music every time, whether it’s deliberate or just by accident—no one seems to know quite for sure. The group is constantly building toward a final goal and we don’t stop the tape machines like we used to do in the old days—they run until the group stops playing. Then we go back, listen, and decide between us what should be tacked to what—it becomes a search and find routine, and finally it’s all there, it’s just a matter of putting it all together. There are a lot of tapes for each album, but we may use only the material from two or three sessions.”
Two albums, “Miles Davis at Fillmore” and the sound track for the documentary film “Jack Johnson,” have been released since “Bitches Brew,” but neither shows signs of doing as well commercially. This of course provides an incentive to make the next release particularly interesting, and it looks as if “Live and Evil” (one word is the reverse spelling of the other) will be just that. Scheduled for a December release, it is the distillation of ten to fifteen reels of tape, selected from an original working pile of thirty reels. “The album is partly live, and it has an ethereal evil, where the mind is clouded and all these things are happening,” says Macero, “it’s like a wild dream.” Artist Mati Klarwein, who was responsible for the unusual “Bitches Brew” cover, has been commissioned to give the new album a similar look.
If “Live and Evil” becomes another “Bitches Brew,” there will undoubtedly be more demands on Miles Davis’ time, a commodity he values and likes to spend as a part-time pugilist working out in a midtown gym, swimming in some appropriate waters, sleeping in his oversized bed, or simply relaxing with friends amid the international decor of what has been termed “an architect’s nightmare”—his house on West 77th Street.
Unimpressed by critics (“I don’t know any, because I never read what they say”) and disc jockeys (“If we didn’t make any records, they wouldn’t have anything to do”), Miles periodically threatens to quit the music business to avoid the exploitation which he admits is “the name of the game.” Some day, he will undoubtedly do just that, and then a smile the public never knew may emerge from behind the mask.

Electric Miles Davis Columbia recordings

2010-01-26T19:54:00.005+01:00

The database contains entries for most of Miles Davis's Columbia 'Electric period' recordings. Included are the original monaural LPs (CL series);

original stereo reissues (CS series);

one or two subsequent reissues (e.g. the PC series in the mid-1970s);

the most recent LP reissues (CJ series: many of these are based on digital re-masters).

Davis's Columbia records began appearing in Japan in the late 1950s on the Nippon Columbia label. In 1969 CBS/Sony took over and began reissuing the Davis catalog in a more systematic way.

The listing for Japanese CDs includes several series. In the case of most titles, there are by now five or six issued CD versions:
The original CBS/Sony CDs (35DP series) were released in 1983.
Another series (with 32DP / 50DP catalog numbers) was issued in 1985-1986; this series reissued all of the 35DP titles and added most of the remaining titles from Davis's Columbia years.
The CBS/Sony CSCS series in the late 1980s reissued most of these recordings.
The Sony SRCS 5000 series in the early 1990s reissued most of them again (including several not reissued in the CSCS series).
The Sony "Master Sound" series (SRCS 91xx and 93xx), released beginning in early 1997, used 20-bit masters incorporating Super Bit Mapping. A few of the titles had bonus material not included in previous releases. The initial releases were housed in paper LP-style sleeves.
A subsequent "Master Sound" series (SRCS 97xx), released beginning in mid-2000, incorporated one-bit "Direct Stream Digital" mastering. Several of these titles included bonus material, some of which first appeared on the boxed sets of Miles Davis's recordings that began to appear in the late 1990s. The initial releases had paper LP-style sleeves.
Sony released the first "Super Audio CD" versions of Miles Davis (SRGS 45xx) in mid-1999. These were also based on the one-bit DSD masters. Again, several titles included bonus tracks.

The download link is: http://sharebee.com/1caf6b8c

Thanks to MilesAhead

Miles Davis live at Sartory Festsaal, Cologne, November 12, 1971

2009-09-19T00:04:00.002+02:00

Miles Davis (tpt)
Gary Bartz (ss, as)
Keith Jarrett (el-p, org)
Michael Henderson (el-b)
Ndugu Leon Chancler (d)
Charles Don Alias (cga, perc)
James Mtume Foreman (cga, perc)

Directions (J. Zawinul)
Honky Tonk (M. Davis)
What I Say (M. Davis) (part)
It's About That Time (M. Davis) (part)
Yesternow (M. Davis)
Funky Tonk (M. Davis) / Sanctuary (W. Shorter-M. Davis)

Westdeutscher Radio (WDR) radio broadcast, including spoken intermission

Info Only

The Art of Miles Davis

2009-09-18T23:39:00.002+02:00

Miles Davis rare French/Czech documentary

2009-03-23T22:57:00.001+01:00

French TV, rare, in Czech language with rare footage scenes

Miles davis live at Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, August 18, 1970

2009-03-23T22:44:00.002+01:00

August 18, 1970
Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood MA

Miles Davis (tpt); Gary Bartz (ss, as); Chick Corea (el-p); Keith Jarrett (org); Dave Holland (b, el-b); Jack De Johnette (d); Airto Moreira (perc)

Directions (J. Zawinul) 9:13
Bitches Brew (M. Davis) 9:34
The Mask (M. Davis) 3:42
It's About That Time (M. Davis) 7:41
Sanctuary (W. Shorter-M. Davis) 1:35
Spanish Key (M. Davis) 5:35
The Theme (M. Davis) 2:07
Miles Runs the Voodoo Down (M. Davis) 3:58
The Theme (M. Davis) 1:01

Miles @ 45 rpm

2009-02-27T23:29:00.004+01:00

The famous Miles Davis short tracks from "Miles at Isle of Wight" Lp. The tracks were used for 7" promo singles Davis did throughout the 70s'

Great Expectations (2:42)
The Little Blue Frog (2:32)
Molester (Part I) (3:04)
Molester (Part II) (2:10)
Holly-Wuud (2:52)
Big Fun (2:30)

Miles Davis (tp, org)
Dave Liebman (ss, fl)
Reggie Lucas (el-g)
Pete Cosey (el-g, per)
Michael Henderson (el-b)
Al Foster (d) Mtume (per)
Columbia Studios, NYC, July 26, 1973

UNAVAILABLE

Miles' last interview

2009-02-27T22:32:00.000+01:00

I Remember Miles - Part 1

2009-02-24T23:40:00.001+01:00

This is a World Premiere Sneak Preview of the upcoming documentary, I Remember Miles, by internationally known Producer/Director Malcolm W. Adams for Totown Digital Media, a company of Totown Communications Group Japan.

I Remember Miles - part 2

2009-02-24T23:39:00.001+01:00

I Remember Miles - Part 3

2009-02-24T23:38:00.001+01:00

Memorabilia

2009-02-16T18:15:00.002+01:00

In the Spring and Summer of 1970 Miles was promoting Bitches Brew. This led him to appear in a variety of rock environments. The story goes that the Grateful Dead musicians watched
Miles and his musicians from the wings, feeling utterly in awe and intimidated. Miles's live double album Black Beauty was culled from the April 10 night...
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Teo Macero on producing Miles Davis

2009-02-16T18:03:00.003+01:00

Transcript from the Miles Davis Conference, May 10-11, 1996, Washington University in St. Louis. Here Macero speaks about his work with Miles Davis.

... And talk about the, how the records were made. I met Miles several years before, I think at Birdland, when in 1954 and 1955, they had projects to do with Leonard Bernstein and I'd get a lot of samples for the album. I had written something for the very end, and Lenny didn't like it, he said it was too lugubrious, so we had to get somebody like Miles to swing this particular tune. But they did ask me to write a couple of introductions, so they got Miles, they got his group with Coltrane, and they came to the session and we became friends. I wrote a couple of introductions and picked one, and that was it. And then about a year and a half later I became his producer.
Because I joined CBS, my first record date was in 1955. It was a marvelous experience with Miles. I'd like to just play something that you're never gonna hear, ever again. I mean these tracks, I put together for CBS Sony recently are not coming out the way we had proposed them [plays music samples].

Later on, with Miles' music, I must say, you could do anything with it. He said to me, "Do whatever you want." I say, "Oh yeah, okay, I'll take care of it." So you could use the front in the back, the back in the front, the middle somewhere else, or you didn't have to use any of that. Many times when I was working on a Miles album, and editing it, I would take everything from the very beginning of the session, any little fragment, I would mix it down and put it all together. And then finally (I'd) cut the material and put it all together using the three-machine splice technique with a lot of reverb machines and all kinds of techniques that we had at that time. One guy said he was going to take a record back because he heard the music going back and forth, left and right. Well, we had a machine that did that with Miles. I mean, if you listen to some of the tracks, you hear the shifting. You say 'what the hell is going on?'

You know, even on Bitches Brew and all that stuff, that was all mechanically done in the editing room. All subject to Miles' approval. He came to the session, I mean the editing room, about six times in his lifetime while I was with him at CBS. And the one time that he did come when we were doing In a Silent Way, and everybody says that's a classic record. Sure it is a classic record. I said, "Look at it, I've mixed everything now on this particular record, I think you'd better get your ass down here because," I said, "I'm really bewildered, because I've got 30, 35 reels of quarter-in masters, and I said, I gotta cut it down to two, an A side and a B side." And I said, "If you don't come, I'm gonna make the cuts anyway." He said, "Aw, shit, I'll be right down." So he came down, and he stayed with me most of the day, and what happened was that he, we, cut out everything down to two reels of tape with eight and a half minutes on each side, and then he started to leave. I said, "Where the hell you going?" He said, "That's my record." I said, "Wait a minute, you can't do this. They're going to skin you alive, they'll do me in." They wanted to do me in anyway, because we were kind of rebels at the time.

And I said... "give me a couple days and I'll see what I can figure out," because we've got these two reels with one eight and a half, nine minutes on one side, and something on the other side. So what I did, I copied little excerpts of the very, if you listen to it very carefully, you'll hear a lot of repeats, but you don't know that they're repeats, because it sounds like a continuous song, and a continuous performance. I bridged... I made 18 minutes... I mean the eight and a half minutes or nine minutes come up to eighteen and a half, nineteen or twenty minutes on that side. I said, "I'm home free." And I did the same thing on Side B. And then, the record became a classic. But the critics wouldn't know that. I mean, that's why... I love critics, but I don't like them to review my records.

I would do all kinds of devious things, subject to Miles' approval, because every record I ever made with him, he heard before we went to press. If he didn't like it, I said, "we could change it." There was some talk on On the Corner when they had the nine bands, nine different titles, and they said, "the first pieces sounds like one band, why do you have all those titles?" Well, I was so devious in those days, that I wanted the artists to make some money. The only way the artist can make any money on his mechanical royalties would be to split up the song that the album- in the eight or the nine tracks, list 'em, he gets three cents for each side, or each track, or four cents for each track, instead of the usual four cents for 16 minutes, or whatever it might be. So I was trying to make them – I did this for Brubeck on a number of projects, and I did this on Miles whenever I could. And sometimes when I would just make up a funny foreign-y kind of cue sheet and say it's twenty minutes, so the guy gets... you paid for minutes of music. I mean, it was fun. I'm sure CBS didn't like it because they had to pay the extra money, but I didn't give a damn. I mean, I was out for the artist. That was my problem with CBS, because I would tell the artist what to do in terms of the contract.
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2009-02-03T23:09:00.003+01:00

Lot 128, Martin Committee Model, 1957, trumpet, used by Miles Davis

Trumpets have an allure that is hard to describe, even when they are silent. When they are as gorgeous as the 1957 Martin Committee Model , Lot 128, that once belonged to Miles Davis, they are even more irresistible. With a blue-green finish, keys inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a separate mouthpiece, accompanied by a document concerning its provenance, the only thing missing is the genius that once played it. The lot has an estimate of $15,000 to $25,000. It failed to sell.

The document states that in 1966 the trumpet was given by Miles Davis, a huge boxing fan, to Ray Robinson II, son of the boxing legend Sugar Ray Robinson. Davis, a special fan of the boxing superstar, was instrumental in encouraging his retirement after his final fight with Joey Archer in 1965: "Sugar, it's time man" was all he had to say. Robinson retired the next day. This trumpet could only have complemented a man who was not only a jazz legend in his own lifetime, but also extremely handsome. Christie's catalog offers some history:

"The Martin Committee Model was originally designed in the late 1930s for the Martin Band Instrument Company by a "committee" which included brass instrument makers Renold Schilke, Vincent Bach, Elden Benge, and Foster Reynolds. Miles Davis played custom made Committees throughout his career." It is easy to see why.

Lot 125, five of 25 sketches by Miles Davis, circa 1980

As if being a musical genius was not enough, Miles Davis was also a wonderful artist, and some of his vibrant sketches including a sketchbook with 25 sketches, Lot 125, that has an estimate of $6,000 to $8,000. It sold for $6,600.
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Miles Davis live at the Isle of Wight Festival August 29, 1970

2009-02-01T16:17:00.003+01:00

Miles Davis (tpt)
Gary Bartz (ss, as)
Chick Corea (el-p)
Keith Jarrett (org)
Dave Holland (b, el-b)
Jack DeJohnette (d)
Airto Moreira (perc)

1. Call It Anything:
Directions / Bitches Brew / It's About That Time / Sanctuary / Spanish Key / The Theme

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Miles Davis at the Isle Of Wight Festival 1970

2009-01-29T00:29:00.009+01:00

On August 29, 1970, Miles gave a brief but stunning performance at the Isle of Wight Festival in Great Britain. A year earlier he had still been playing in jazz clubs for audiences of 30-40, but now he was on the same bill as the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Joni Mitchell, and The Doors, playing to a crowd of 600,000.

Excerpts from this concert have been previously released on Isle of Wight compilation albums, and were titled, 'Call it Anythin'' and 'Call it Anything.' With the release in November 2004 of the DVD Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, Miles's entire 38-minute performance at the Isle of Wight is finally available to the public.

Acadamy Award winning director Murray Lerner beautifully presents all the power and dynamism of the music, as played by Miles and an all-star band consisting of Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Gary Bartz, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, and Airto Moreira. The footage is in glorious full-color detail, featuring a healthy-looking Miles without sunglasses (as can be seen from the screen grabs below), and the sound quality is excellent.

In addition, Lerner also interviews all the above mentioned sidemen, plus Herbie Hancock, Mtume, Pete Cosey, Carlos Santana, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Belden. These interviews form a 45-minute introduction to the concert that clarifies a lot of what goes on musically.
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Miles Davis - Isle of Wight (1970)

2009-01-29T00:20:00.001+01:00

"Call it anything" (intro).
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Miles Davis - Isle of Wight (1970)

2009-01-29T00:13:00.000+01:00

...more...

Tanglewood

2009-01-20T23:44:00.003+01:00

Miles sharing the bill in August with some legendary colleagues.

B. B. King and Miles Davis (Barcelona, 1973)

2009-01-19T15:48:00.000+01:00

Miles Davis Honda Scooter Ad

2009-01-19T15:41:00.000+01:00

When ads say the truth...

2009-01-19T15:22:00.002+01:00

Miles 1970

2009-01-19T15:17:00.001+01:00

Central Park, New York, July 6, 1970

Miles Davis - Sanctuary

2009-01-19T15:05:00.001+01:00

Bitches Brew - An example of editing to create musical structure in the title track

2009-01-12T10:10:00.003+01:00

by Enrico Merlin

The issued version is structured in two parts: the first part is used as Intro, Interlude and Coda. The second part, or Solos Section, is based on a vamp and is used to develop the solos. The beginning of the ostinato of the second section was created by looping a phrase that starts at 2:50.

INTRO

* 00:00 - Bass vamp #1
* 00:41 - THEME by Davis w. echo -> THEME by Davis & Shorter

SOLOS SECTION #1

$ (a) 02:50 - Bass vamp #2 with Brooks & Alias
* (b) 02:56 - Bass vamp #2 with Brooks, Maupin & Alias
$ (b) 03:01 - Duplication of (b) bass vamp, from 2:56 through 3:01
$ (b) 03:07 - Duplication of (b) bass vamp, from 2:56 through 3:01
$ (b) 03:12 - Duplication of (b) bass vamp, from 2:56 through 3:01
$ (ab) 03:17 - Duplication of (a) plus (b) bass vamp, from 2:50 through 3:01
$ (b) 03:27 - Duplication of (b) bass vamp, from 2:56 through 3:01
* 03:32 - the rest of the rhythm section enters and the performance continues without edits until 10:36
* Solos: Davis (3:54/ 6:20); McLaughlin (6:32/ 7:26); McLaughlin (7:50/ 8:55); Davis (8:55...)
$ 10:36 - Duplication of the passage played just before (from 10:31 through 10:36) plus new fragment (5 notes played by Miles) until 10:42
$ 10:42 - Duplication of the previously played passage (from 10:36 through 10:42), plus new fragment until 10:52
$ 10:52 - Duplication of the previously played passage (from 10:42)
* 11:28 - Davis' solo ends
* 11:38 - Shorter solo, ending at 12:36. A very brief Holland solo follows
$ 12:42 - Groove » Corea (12:49...)
$ 13:28 - Corea cont.

INTERLUDE

$ 14:36 - Bass vamp #1 » THEME by Davis w. echo (15:55);

SOLOS SECTION #2

$ 17:20 - Bass vamp #2 » Solos: Holland (17:29/ 19:18); Davis (19:23/ 20:11) » Groove » Davis (20:58/ 21:48)
$ 22:01 - Groove » Zawinul (22:31)

CODA

$ 24:04 - Duplication of the introduction (from 0:00 to 2:50)

$ denotes a tape edit.
* denotes a musical event.

MIles Davis interview 1982

2009-01-12T10:10:00.000+01:00

Miles Davis interviewed by Bryant Gumbel for NBC's the Today Show in 1982

Wayne Shorter on Miles Davis

2009-01-12T10:06:00.000+01:00

(interview 2001)

A glimpse of Miles's hand writing...

2009-01-04T23:22:00.002+01:00

... in this case for the track "Shhh " from In A Silent Way (click on pic for larger view)

Miles Davis live at La Pinède, Juan-les-Pins (France), July 26, 1969

2009-01-04T23:08:00.007+01:00

Miles Davis (tpt)
Wayne Shorter (ss, ts)
Chick Corea (el-p)
Dave Holland (b, el-b)
Jack De Johnette (d)

Track 1 includes:
1 Introduction 0:35
2 Directions (J. Zawinul) 6:17
3 Spanish Key (M. Davis) 10:36
4 I Fall in Love Too Easily (S. Cahn-J. Styne) 2:54
5 Masqualero (W. Shorter) 8:28
6 Miles Runs the Voodoo Down (M. Davis) 8:45
7 No Blues (M. Davis) 13:33
8 Nefertiti (W. Shorter) 8:49
9 Sanctuary (W. Shorter-M. Davis) 3:32
10 The Theme (M. Davis) (with applause) 0:45
ORTF radio broadcast

The Quintet performed twice at the Juan-les-Pins Festival, July 25 and 26. Columbia was on hand and recorded both shows, but so far only the July 25 concert has been released.

Info Only

Bookshelf: Miles Beyond

2009-01-04T22:33:00.003+01:00

Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991
by Paul Tingen

Product Details
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Billboard Books (September 1, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0823083608
ISBN-13: 978-0823083602
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches

Published in May 2001, Miles Beyond is the first book that deals in-depth and sympathetically with the Miles Davis's electric period, 1967-1991. Primarily based on new and often exclusive interviews with over 50 musicians, managers, producers, family, and romantic partners, the pioneering book unearths much new information and thousands of never-before-revealed facts, insights, and revelations about Miles, including many new insights into his working methods, artistic development, and his private life, all set in the context of a chronological analysis of the music he produced from 1967 to 1991.

The book's interviewees include: Bob Belden, Bob Berg, Paul Buckmaster, Leon 'Ndugu' Chancler, Mino Cinelu, Chick Corea, Pete Cosey, Erin Davis, Jack and Lydia DeJohnette, George Duke, Marguerite Eskridge, Bill Evans, Robert Fripp, Sonny Fortune, Jo Gelbard, Steve Grossman, Herbie Hancock, Michael Henderson, Dave Holland, Adam Holzman, Karl Hyde, Robert Irving III, Mark Isham, Darryl Jones, Henry Kaiser, Bill Laswell, Dave Liebman, Reggie Lucas, Teo Macero, Marilyn Mazur, Palle Mikkelborg, Jason Miles, Marcus Miller, James Mtume, Bennie Rietveld, Mark Rothbaum, Badal Roy, Wayne Shorter, Jim Rose, John Scofield, Wadada Leo Smith, Mike Stern, Peter Shukat, Ricky Wellman, Lenny White, Vince Wilburn Jr., Mark Wilder, and Jah Wobble.

The 352-page book contains 17 Chapters with 266 densely-written pages of text, Endnotes, a Bibliography, an overview of the personnel of Miles's live bands 1963-1991, and, from Enrico Merlin, a Discography and a 40-page Sessionography, with details of all Miles's electric music that was officially released in 2001.

From Bloomsbury Magazine: "The most important book on Miles Davis ever."

From buy.com: "Although many books have been written about Miles Davis's far-reaching influence on the jazz world, his electronic experiments from the late 1960s to his death in the early '90s have been less well documented. Dutch music writer Paul Tingen, who first discovered Davis via one of the trumpeter's more rock-oriented albums, redresses this imbalance with his remarkably comprehensive Miles Beyond, an illuminating survey of the great musician's later experimental forays. Tingen analyzes Davis's recording process through revealing interviews with many of his musical colleagues, who recount the seemingly haphazard methods the trumpeter used to draw out the best performances from his musicians. The author also traces the influence of such seminal Davis albums as On The Corner on later generations of hip-hop and dance music artists--for example, Bill Laswell, whose Panthalassa album controversially remixed much of the trumpeter's late-'60s and early-'70s output for 1990s ears. Written with a fan's enthusiasm and a scholar's erudition, Miles Beyond is a refreshing re-examination of the later output of one of the great jazz innovators."

Introduction

Where were you the first time you heard the music of Miles Davis? Since you are reading these words, chances are that you will know the answers to this question.

The memories of the big moments in our lives, whether personal or historical, remain with us forever, and are often embedded in seemingly irrelevant details: how things smelled at the time, what music we were listening to, what the weather was like. This is often called the "JFK effect," illustrated by the proverbial question: "where were you when you heard that John F. Kennedy was shot?"

Miles Davis never achieved the household fame of the likes of JFK. And yet an amazing number of people remember where they were and what they were doing when they first heard his music, illustrating Miles Davis's huge impact.

My own answer to the question when I first heard the music of Miles Davis will bring the reasons for the existence of this site and for writing Miles Beyond into focus. I first became aware of Miles 's music as a teenager in the late '70s, on Dutch radio, at my parents' home. It was a sunny afternoon in the middle of summer and I heard some seriously weird stop-start rock music fronted by a screaming electric guitar.

Since I was—among many other things* —into experimental and avant-garde rock music at the time, bands like King Crimson and Henry Cow, and loved screaming electric guitars, I listened attentively, and made a mental note of the artist mentioned after the piece finished. I remember wondering: "Miles Davis? Isn't he a jazz artist? But this music doesn't sound much like jazz. Maybe this is another Miles Davis." I went to the local music library about a week later and found out that they only had records by one Miles Davis. They were indeed filed under jazz, and hence unlikely to contain the piece I'd heard on the radio.

I was puzzled and about to give up when I noticed a cover that looked promising: a red and gold psychedelic affair with a night vision of a large city seen through what looked like an aquarium. I took it home, placed it on my record player and found my jaw dropping. This definitely wasn't jazz, more like some weird, avant-garde, totally over the top funk. I was initially put off by the nerve-wrecking density and seeming monotony of the music. This was nothing like the engaging, open, stop-start stuff I'd heard on the radio. But since Agharta, the record I'd brought home, was all I had, and since the cover looked so cool, I persevered. The insurgent cover instruction to play the album back at the loudest possible volume was further encouragement, much to my parents' dismay.

Soon I discovered that astonishing moment, 14 minutes and 43 seconds into Side 1, where the band cuts out and Pete Cosey's guitar solo goes into total overdrive. Being a guitarist myself, I thought I was an insider on the outer fringes of crazy electric guitar playing, but this was beyond my comprehension. From that moment on Side 1 until the middle of Side 4, the music was continuously interesting, provocative, unbelievable, and highly exciting. I was sold. For the next months Agharta rarely left my record player.

It bewildered me that I didn't have a clue as to how the music and the solos were structured or conceived. There was clearly a large element of improvisation going on, but the music was too structured and too melodic and there was too much flawless interplay between the musicians for it to be totally improvised. I was baffled by this dense and bizarre music, because I had no frame of reference. Nothing I knew sounded even remotely like it, not even the other electric Miles Davis albums I sought out and enjoyed, among them Get Up With It, In A Silent Way, and Bitches Brew. (Fifteen years later I finally found the piece I had first heard in the Dutch radio. It turned out to be "Gemini/Double Image" from Live-Evil. It was testimony to the strong impression that piece made on me that I could still recognise it after all that time.)

***
The idea of writing a book on Miles's electric period was born one afternoon in the early '90s at Goldsmiths' College in London, where I was studying for a music degree. I ran into two guys around 50 years of age in the canteen who identified themselves as jazz musicians and college tutors. We talked and they asked me whether I liked jazz. I told them that I greatly admired jazz, but generally speaking didn't have much resonance with it, but that I really liked what Miles Davis had done when he fused jazz with rock. Their reaction pushed me back in my seat. If looks could kill I would have died that very instant. They proceeded to unleash a degree of vitriol on Miles Davis, for 'selling out,' for playing 'kid's music,' for 'betraying the jazz community,' etc etc, which astonished me. This was not a simple disagreement about musical taste, this was pure hatred.

What amazed me most was that they were not traditional jazz musicians, but known and respected (in London) free jazz players. It amazed me because between 1980 and 1983 I frequently visited the BIM-Huis in Amsterdam, the Netherlands's premier free-jazz club. Hungry for more unusual sounds, I had witnessed many free-jazz concerts there, and even joined in with some of the tutorial jam session for young musicians. For me avant-garde was synonymous with open-mindedness, with an urge to boldly go where no-one had gone before, musically speaking. For me it was, and is, about a willingness not to dismiss any music genre or sound or structure a priori, but instead to stretch as far as possible in understanding and accommodating new sounds and styles of music. And here these two old avant-garde jazzers were as conservative, closed-minded, and dismissive as classical music tutors who reckoned that all music written after 1900 sucked. Perplexing.

It was my first direct encounter with the intense feelings that Miles Davis's venture into rock-influenced music evoked in certain sections of the jazz community. It enticed and intrigued me, and I ended up writing a dissertation on Miles's electric period for my graduation. In doing so I found out that there were no books available that covered the electric period well. After my graduation, in 1995, I approached a number of publishers with the idea, without success.

Finally, in 1998, I mentioned the idea to Bob Doerschuk, then editor of Musician, who advised me to get into contact with Bob Nirkind at Billboard Books. It turned out to be a moment of sychronicity. A fan of Miles's electric music, Nirkind told me he'd just had the same idea a few hours before my e-mail arrived.

What followed after I signed the book contract was lots of hard labor, as well as synchronicity, serendipity, and inspiration. During the next two years I travelled to New York, Los Angeles, Copenhagen, London, and Italy, interviewed about 50 associates, musicians, and partners of Miles Davis, and came to terms with almost 60 official electric Miles Davis CDs, as well as with dozens of bootlegs.

In the end, Miles Beyond was published in May 2001, to much acclaim. I set up this web site around the same time. I hope that both the book and this site will enrich and deepen your enjoyment and understanding of the electric explorations of Miles Davis.
© 2001 Paul Tingen

Chapter One

LISTEN
"I was put here to play music, and interpret music... I might do a lot of other things, but the main thing that I love, that comes before everything, even breathing, is music." - Miles Davis.
"Listen." Miles, The Autobiography, opens with this word, immediately hitting bull's eye. It goes straight to the heart of Miles Davis.
Listen before breathing. Miles had a different way of listening. To music. To sound. To people. To the rhythm of the times. To time and space. To understand Miles, we have to listen to the way he expressed himself, in music, words, life-style, and life-choices. Listening is central. It's what he taught the musicians who played with him. It's what he taught his audiences as well.
Bassist Gary Peacock described Miles as "by far the greatest listener that I have ever experienced in a musical group." His colleague Dave Holland observed that Miles had "the best understanding of time, space, and movement of anybody I have ever worked with." Keyboardist Adam Holzman stated, "It may be a funny thing to say for a musician, but Miles taught me how to listen." Percussionist Badal Roy said that the main thing he learnt from Miles was "to play from the heart and to listen."
Miles used to tell his musicians, "When you play music, don't play the idea that's there, play the next idea. Wait. Wait another beat, or maybe two, and maybe you'll have something that's more fresh. Don't just play from the top of your head, but listen and try to play a little deeper." Miles also advised his musicians, "Don't play what's there. Play what's not there." He might have said: "Don't listen to what's there, listen to what's not there."
Aside from during the second half of the '80s, Miles rarely rehearsed his bands, instead instructing his musicians to practice on the bandstand. He got angry with them if they practiced at home or in their hotel rooms, saying, "How are you going to rehearse the future?" He wanted them to be fully present with, to listen to, the music in the present moment. "Of all of those in the band, Miles is the most easily influenced by outside events. He reflects everything he feels in his playing immediately," remarked an unnamed band member.
Miles wanted his sidemen to enter into a relationship with music with what Zen calls "beginner's mind," never on auto-pilot, never just following habit energy, but always alert, ready for the unexpected, right here, right now. "Miles did not want me to come to the rehearsals," guitarist Pete Cosey recalled. "He wanted to keep things fresh. Part of that is knowing what to play and what not to play. The way you do that is to be able to listen what is going on around you. When you come into any situation, it's the best thing to do: to listen. That is how you learn."
Listening requires awareness, paying attention. Miles taught both by example. A word used by many musicians who worked with him is "focus." Dave Holland said, "There was a tremendous sense of focus coming from him that influenced everybody. We were all drawn in by it, it was almost like a vortex. Once you were in its sphere of influence, there was a certain magic that seemed to be happening." Drummer Jack DeJohnette remarked, "Playing with Miles was about being focused. And about being open to where the music takes you. His sound focused your attention on him and the music. Sometimes this meant leading and sometimes this meant following. He just had that magic, he had that power, that special gift."
Miles's unique listening awareness rubbed off on the musicians around him. In his presence they often found themselves raising their awareness and playing to new and unexpected heights. In doing so they exemplified Miles's adage: "Play what you know and play above what you know." Guitarist Sonny Sharrock only played with Miles one day in 1970, but this was enough to change his approach to the guitar, making him realize that playing music is about "really listening, the way Miles listened; to hear the piece to the end right from the first note, and to see what the space is going to be in the piece." Guitarist John McLaughlin commented, "Miles has the capacity to draw out of people things that even surprise the musicians themselves. He's been a guru of sorts to a lot of people. He was certainly a musical mentor to me."
Miles stated that when listening to his music, "I always listen to what I can leave out." He listened to what's not there, to the space behind the notes, the silence from which music emerges and in which it is framed, trying to find the best balance between that space and the notes that furnish it. One of Miles's big discoveries was that this often requires fewer notes, rather than more. As a result, his economy of playing and usage of space became legendary. Miles always played between the lines, implying notes, suggesting a mood with minimal material, stretching the "less is more" maxim to new levels.
Early 1985, when working on the album Aura, Miles told a Danish interviewer: "I don't believe in wasting any phrases, no matter how small, how soft. With phrases comes rhythm. I don't waste rhythm either. The rhythm can throw off the melody and it gets lost. So you have to know what the phrases mean, what the notes mean. A lot of musicians don't! They play a note, and they don't know what it means, they just know 'that's a raised 9th, that's a...' whatever. You should tell them what it means, then musicians won't go to sleep. That's very important."
Guitarist John Scofield said, "He expressed himself in a virtuoso way, but not with a lot of notes. He had this ability to strip things down and to make it profound. When most people play just one note, it's not so hot. But he found the right one to play. It was impossible for anybody else to do what he did because he was so unique. He was a teacher for us all." Jack DeJohnette, Gary Peacock, and Keith Jarrett wrote, "Miles was the authentic minimalist (where, although there are so few notes, there was so much in those notes). No matter how much noise there was around him, Miles always came from silence, the notes existing in a purity all their own." Producer and arranger Quincy Jones, concurred, "Miles always played the most unexpected note, and the one that is the perfect note."
By contrast, many musicians tend to overplay, and Miles joked that because "they play too many fucking notes," they need to go to "Notes Anonymous." He spent much of his life teaching musicians the virtues of space, of silence, of phrasing, of waiting, of economy of notes and ideas, and most of all, of focus and listening. He remembered about percussionist Airto Moreira, "When he first came with me he played too loud and didn't listen to what was happening with the music. I would tell him to stop banging and playing so loud, and just to listen more." According to Moreira, Miles just instructed him with the one-liner, "Don't bang, just play," leaving him to figure out what this meant. Moreira concluded, "He wanted me to hear the music, and then play some sounds."
Illustrating how his listening awareness was always present, not just in music, but in everyday life, Miles once remarked, "Rhythm is all around us, even if you stumble." An anecdote from his time in Malibu in the late '80s illustrates the same point. One day Miles was stopped for speeding. "My speedometer isn't working," Miles proclaimed. "So how can you know how fast you're going?" the police officer asked. "I can hear it," Miles replied.
So listen. Listen to what's not there. Focus on the meaning of the notes. Listen between the lines, of words, of music, and of Miles.
***
"Listen. The greatest feeling I ever had in my life—with my clothes on—was when I first heard Diz and Bird together in St. Louis, Missouri, back in 1944.... Music all up in my body, and that's what I wanted to hear.... I'm always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to feel it in and through the music I play every day."
Throughout his life, Miles's main focus was unearthing the meaning of music, delving for the feeling of that moment in 1944, which is the ultimate a musician can experience. Guitarist Robert Fripp described it as the point at which "we are fully alive in the present moment and totally alert to the musical impulse." Miles was single-minded and egoless in the pursuit of this aim, saying, "You gotta get rid of your ego," and "Men have the biggest egos! ... All of them will listen, but if they do it, they'll do it once. Then the ego comes back. A man's ego is something else."
Jo Gelbard, the artist who worked with Miles when he got into painting during the '80s and who was also his partner from 1986 to his death, commented, "He had no ego in music. That's why he had his back to the audience, because he could hear the band better and direct them. As opposed to, `This is Miles Davis, and who cares who's behind me.' It was never just about him and his horn. He was always part of the group that was with him."
Lydia DeJohnette, wife of Jack, knew Miles well. "In music there was no arrogance to his ego," she remarked. "Being on stage was never about him, but always about musical inspiration, no matter where it came from. It made him happy to feel that inspiration. Sometimes he'd look at Jack and say, `You know?' and Jack would go, `Yeah, I know.' There was a knowing that they shared about the musical field, and it is where Miles felt connected with other people."
Jack DeJohnette added: "People were often worried about their personal contributions and their egos, but Miles was thinking of it as a team. He also knew that, whatever was going on, the sound of his horn could galvanize everything. Miles heard the finished thing." Keyboardist Herbie Hancock made a similar point: "Miles is an incredible team worker. He listens to what everybody does, and he uses that and what he plays makes what everybody does sound better."
Miles's ability to focus and raise the level of awareness of the members of his bands was perplexing. Countless musicians who worked with Miles recounted stories of how he had a life-changing impact on them, and many talk about him in near-transcendental terms. Jarrett, Peacock, and DeJohnette called Miles "a medium, a transformer, a touchstone, a magnetic field." The people who were interviewed for this book used words like "mystical," "guru," "sorcerer," "shaman," "teacher," "magician," "Merlin," or "Zen teacher."
"Miles gave me myself," bassist Michael Henderson said. "He gave me something that belonged to me. When I came to play with him, I became `me.' Like everybody else who was with him. We all found ourselves. We found exactly who we were and what we should be doing as far as being in the music industry, and in life."
"I found my musical identity through playing with Miles," echoed Henderson's colleague Marcus Miller. "The first time I played with him, in 1980, I was scared like hell. We were recording a track called `Aïda.' He played me F-sharp and G and said, `That's it.' So I asked, `That's it?' `Yeah.' So I played only F-sharp and G. Miles stopped the band and asked, `What are you doing, man? Are you just going to play these two notes? Is that all you're going to do?' So I started to do all sorts of variations. He stopped the band again, and said, `Man, why are you playing so much? Just play F-sharp and G, and then shut up.' So I thought, `Oh, he's just playing with me. This is a test.' I realized I just had to play and not worry about him. That's what I did and this time he let the whole take go by. Miles had great people skills in the sense of bringing out the best in you as a musician. He was great precisely because he wasn't communicating that much verbally. He made you find it on your own. Just like those martial arts teachers who point you in a direction and tell you a puzzling story that you have to analyze yourself. Or like those student-master relationships where the student can't understand why the master has him painting fences, and later on realizes, `Oh yes, it's because ...' It was the same thing with Miles."
Miller's analogy with fence painting comes from the movie The Karate Kid, in which a Zen-like Asian martial arts teacher has his pupil painting fences as part of his apprenticeship. John McLaughlin also drew the Zen parallel, saying "Miles in the studio directed very closely, but with very obscure statements. He was like a Zen master. He would give you very strange directions that were very difficult to understand, very obscure. But I think that was his intention, as it is with a Zen master. They will say something to you, and your mind will not be able to deal with it on a rational level. And so he made you act in a subconscious way, which was the best way. He had this great gift of pulling the best things out of people, without them even realizing."
Palle Mikkelborg, the Danish trumpeter and composer who worked with Miles on Aura, wrote in his liner notes, "Musically, Miles is to me what a Zen teacher is spiritually." Mikkelborg explained, "I have talked to a lot of people who have been to Japan and who have studied Zen. They say that sometimes in Zen you'll be told things which you don't understand, but you just have a feeling that what they say ... is right. The same with Miles, he often said things that were very cryptic, but had a deeper meaning. During our first rehearsal for the performance of Aura in December 1984 he said to me about the drummer, `Let him play as if he plays to a tap dancer.' We were working on `Violet,' the last piece for the album, a very, very slow piece. I told the drummer what Miles had said and he asked me, `What does he mean?' And I said, `I don't know.' We thought about it, and we guessed that Miles wanted him to keep some energy back, and play with a mental awareness of a hidden, faster energy. It changed something in our attitude, and made the very slow rhythm lift off. I don't see it as anything else than a way of getting the best out of the present musical situation. I think it was an intuitive feeling he had for getting where he wanted to go. He once said to me, `When you conduct an orchestra, you have to smell good.' At the time, I thought, `What the hell does he mean?' Later on I understood that it means to be `on' all the time. `Smell good' means `be aware,' awareness. He was `on' all the time."
By being "`on' all the time," Miles exemplified the unsurpassed dedication and concentration with which he approached music. His attitude expressed a deep reverence and respect, demanding his total, egoless, here-and-now presence, almost as if music was sacred to him. Pianist Chick Corea touched on this when he said, "Miles set an example by the way he loved to make music. He was about making music. That kind of attitude created an atmosphere in which we all joined, because we all wanted to make music in such a very concentrated way." Guitarist Robben Ford recalled, "His presence created such an edge. I'd never been with anyone who could be so demanding just by his mere presence."
Twenty-five years after working with Miles, saxophonist Sonny Fortune's voice dropped to a whisper when he said, "The whole time I worked with him I was in awe over the magic he had. I walked away from the experience of playing with him feeling that it was something that I would never forget. I can't explain it at all. Because of this magic, he didn't have to say much, and he didn't say much. He was one of the persons that I've met who expressed the least amount of trivia. He didn't talk about much, he didn't gossip, he didn't seem to be affected by a whole lot of things. He was a cat who only said one or two phrases, but it would summarize what you were trying to get to. And he had a knowing about music that you could sense and feel, even if it wasn't necessarily visible or describable."
These quotes all describe the same essence, the same attitude, from different perspectives. The analogy with Zen, alluded to by Miller, McLaughlin, and Mikkelborg, is a good way of portraying this. It makes it possible to draw together the perspectives of many observers and to create a comprehensive framework for understanding the many characteristics that made Miles such a great musical teacher and innovator. Minimalism, here-and-now presence, being awake, awareness, going beyond habit energies, egoless service to a greater purpose, teaching by example—these are all at the heart of Zen. Miles's love of boxing has parallels with the martial arts aspects of Zen. And like Miles, Zen teachers are traditionally men of few words, while Miles's penchant for cryptic oneliners has parallels with Zen koans.
The listening sense, especially inner listening, is also often associated with Zen, and with spiritual awareness in general. "Be still, and know that I am God" is a central phrase in Christianity. The original title of The Tibetan Book of the Dead contains the word hearing, and its most-used invocation is "Listen, ye man of noble birth." In his book The World Is Sound, the German author and jazz critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt elaborated on many aspects of the listening sense in a widely known chapter called "The Temple in the Ear" (after a phrase by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke). Berendt argued that our television-obsessed culture has become overly focused on the visual sense, reducing the ears to an "auxiliary organ." He quoted scientific evidence suggesting that the listening sense is more pronounced in women and reasoned that listening reflects feminine qualities of receptivity and awareness, whereas the penetrating and projecting visual-spatial sense is a masculine trait. According to Berendt, revaluing our listening sense is crucial if we want to rebalance and heal our off-kilter culture; he saw Zen practice as one way of achieving this, since it is about "wakefulness" and "listening to silence." With his focus on the listening sense, Miles contributed to this rebalancing process.
* * *
The aim of introducing spiritual perspectives and making the analogy with Zen is not to put Miles on a spiritual pedestal. To his great credit, Miles undermined any attempts by others to turn him into a guru. "I stood next to him in Japan when somebody began kissing his feet, literally," Lydia DeJohnette remembered. "Miles was like, `Stop it!' Miles was aware of levels that other people aren't. He understood the vibration of music, what Jack called the `essence' of music. So he could have been a guru if he wanted to. The '60s and the '70s were the era of gurus. But he didn't want to be a guru. I think some of his obnoxious side came from that."
The era of gurus may be over, but the spiritual and transcendental aspects of Miles's being are hinted at too frequently to be ignored. Things transcendental get dozens of mentions in Miles's autobiography, for example when he says that he believes in "mystery and the supernatural," "superstition," and "numerology," and that he can "predict the future." Miles also stated, "I do believe in being spiritual and do believe in spirits ... music is about the spirit and the spiritual, and about feeling," and repeatedly referred to his clairvoyant side.
Eric Nisenson related how Miles often knew who called before he picked up the phone and could sense someone walking towards his house when they were still a block away. "Real Twilight Zone stuff," Nisenson commented. Quincy Troupe claimed in Miles and Me that Miles had a "spiritual, mystical" effect on him, and related how Miles talked to Gil Evans, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and others after they died. "He saw and understood things differently," Troupe wrote, "and he seemed to feel and know things spiritually, almost to the point of having extrasensory perception."
Miles always seemed to know much more than he articulated, and his often-short expressions were so enticing because they always hinted at a much larger, hidden awareness, an intuitive "knowing," as Sonny Fortune and Lydia DeJohnette called it. Miles's nephew, drummer Vince Wilburn Jr., said, "It was innate, a `knowing' gifted people have. With Miles it was almost a clairvoyant thing." And Miles's companion from 1969 to 1971, Marguerite Eskridge, remembered how he always gave the impression of knowing much more than he expressed. She added, "I honestly couldn't say whether this was because he was searching for the right words, or didn't want to talk about it, or maybe thought something like, `doesn't everybody also know these things and understand them?'"
Spirituality does not necessarily overlap with organized religion, for which Miles had little time. "He was not one for God," Jo Gelbard commented, "but he was convinced that all the concerts and all the sounds he'd ever made were still there, floating around somewhere. That, for instance, his concert on November 12, 1956, was intact somewhere in space, and that they would one day invent a machine to play it again. He loved that idea!" Miles's idea of music floating around in eternity conjures up associations with the notion of "music of the spheres" and has a striking parallel with the idea of the "Akashic Records"—an alleged huge cosmic database of everything that ever happened, and a popular concept in New Age circles.
***
Robert Fripp, who, like Miles, has a predilection for cryptic but captivating statements, wrote about the difference between the "understanding musician" and the "knowing musician." "Knowing is an ordering of experience on the outside of our perceptions; understanding is an ordering of our experience on the inside of our perceptions."
In this sense, Miles was a "knowing musician." When listening to the essence of music, Miles had the capacity to hear things that eluded others. He heard "meaning" in notes other musicians missed. He was the aural equivalent of a visionary. This made Miles a great teacher and a great musician. It gave him the ability to spot potentially great musicians, and also to play the kid in the story of the emperor's clothes, ruthlessly pointing out when music or musicians were out of touch with "the musical impulse." Yet, crucially, his strength was not in musical conception. He didn't conceive of the many musical innovations that he spearheaded. Instead, he recognized the unique creative possibilities in what was being done by his contemporaries, appropriated and developed these in highly imaginative ways, and communicated his findings to a worldwide audience.
Miles's role was reminiscent of that of the English writer John Aubrey who, one day in 1648, walked up a hill next to the English village of Avebury, looked down, and saw something that no one had ever seen before. As long as people could remember, Avebury had included a mysterious circular earthwork and a collection of huge stones. On that day Aubrey suddenly saw the meaning of the stones and earthwork: they made up a prehistoric site—a larger sister to Stonehenge. When his contemporaries went up to have a look, they invariably recognized it, too, and could hardly believe that they had never noticed it before.
A shift in perspective like this is often known as an "aha" or "eureka" experience; we suddenly "get" something. Moreover, insofar as the new outlook also changed the view the villagers had of themselves and of their world, it can be called a "paradigm shift." The scientist Thomas Kuhn introduced the idea of paradigm shifts, defining paradigms as sets of fundamental assumptions and concepts on which particular views of the world are based. Most of the time, human knowledge is deepened by working from a particular set of generally agreed premises. But periodically new paradigms emerge. For example, at one point describing the movements of the sun and the planets based on the premise that the earth is the center of the universe became too complex, and a new scientific paradigm was accepted that sees the earth as circling around the sun. What made this into a paradigm shift, rather than just a shift in perspective on a particular issue, was the enormous ramifications for the way mankind looked at itself and its place in the universe. Another, very literal, example, is the discovery of the law of perspective in the early Renaissance. Suddenly, all earlier drawings and paintings with their wrong perspectives appeared hopelessly naive. Human evolution progresses through these kinds of paradigm shifts. The term can apply as much to new ways of looking at the world, art, or music, as to, on a smaller scale, new ways of looking at our village, or our personal life. To discover, say, that we have a different father than we thought we had, can be a paradigm shift for an individual.
Paradigm shifts are usually preceded by a prolonged period of personal, political, or cultural turmoil, signaling that the old paradigm doesn't fit anymore. We tend to forget about these wider cultural contexts in which paradigm shifts occur, only remembering the individual pioneers. Their names are familiar. Albert Einstein brought about a paradigm shift in our thinking about the universe at a time when the natural sciences were feverishly trying to find new solutions to emerging problems. As part of the rising political awareness in the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. helped shift the American psyche on race issues. Charles Darwin changed our thinking about our origins in a society that was trying to make sense of the data provided by numerous fossil finds. The Beatles, embedded in the historic events of the '60s, brought about a paradigm shift in the music and culture of their era.
Miles Davis, surrounded by the cascading musical and political developments of 1945 to 1975, was one of the select group of twentieth-century musicians who initiated several paradigm shifts. He had a remarkable capacity for capturing and transforming the zeitgeist, for pointing his finger at the stone circle at a time when people were ready to recognize it. It was this that made him into one of the great artists of the twentieth century, rather than an obscure visionary remembered only by music historians.
Miles's cool jazz, hardbop, and modal jazz experiments each changed the musical perspective of the jazz community, causing respected jazz writer Leonard Feather to proclaim, "He has manifestly changed the entire course of an art form three or four times in twenty-five years—an accomplishment no other jazz musician can claim." Miles's explorations into jazz-rock and ambient jazz were paradigm shifts that affected not only the jazz community but also those beyond. In the context of a visually orientated culture, his listening awareness can also be described in paradigm terms.
In addition, as the first black jazz musician who consistently crossed over into other music genres, other cultures, and other countries, Miles transcended the paradigm of musical, cultural, and racial segregation. He was one of the first truly universal musicians, going beyond categories, boundaries, and borders of any kind. The effects of his musical and personal odyssey rippled into the whole of twentieth-century music and culture, and are still with us today.
And finally, Miles instigated a paradigm shift on his musical instrument. Before Miles, the jazz trumpet was mostly played with a bright, brassy sound, rich in vibrato. But through Miles's stylistic developments we today hear the jazz trumpet being played very differently, sounding more vulnerable, soulful, like a cri de coeur. Trumpeter Olu Dara observed, "He's singing rather than playing the trumpet. He was using it like the human voice. He transformed the mechanical aspect of the instrument. He made it sound like a breath." Saxophonist Wayne Shorter remembered simply, "They called him the guy with the strange sound on the trumpet."
The absence of vibrato was the most characteristic aspect of Miles's style, resulting in an unadorned, introverted sound, often with a crack at the beginning of his notes, giving the impression of vulnerability. Miles also tended to play in the gentler, rounder-sounding middle and low registers, because he couldn't "hear" the trumpet's high notes. And in 1954 Miles popularized the sound of the trumpet played with a Harmon mute without the stem. Combined with the lack of vibrato, and played close to a microphone, this allows for an intimate, tender, but very expressive sound.
There is a widespread misunderstanding that Miles conceived of these approaches because of limitations in his trumpet technique, but he already displayed awesome chops on some recordings in the '40s. It is more likely that his innovations emerged from his astute listening awareness, which made him recognize the significance of sound. "Sound is the most important thing a musician can have, because you can't do anything without a sound," Miles remarked. "If a musician is interested in his sound, then you can look for some good playing."
Miles kept developing as a trumpeter until he reached his technical peak in the late '60s, playing an extroverted and virtuoso form of power trumpet that included its high register. He also established a very personal, wah-wah-inspired electric trumpet style in the '70s. Both his power and his electric trumpet styles retained recognizable elements of his characteristic cracked, voicelike, vibratoless sound, but neither was as influential. In the '80s Miles returned to his original trumpet style, often sounding more cracked and vulnerable than before because his technique only occasionally rose to its previous heights.
It was Miles's "strange" cri de coeur on the trumpet that had the most universal resonance and added another color to the palette of human experience. Even if he hadn't spearheaded several musical revolutions, his place in posterity would be secured purely for introducing this horn sound. It was the focal point, the pivot that drew everything he did together, the common thread at the heart of all the disparate musical styles and experiments that he traversed during his epic, forty-six-year-long recording career. Echoing the story of the Pied Piper of Hameln, the charismatic sound of Miles's horn made millions follow him into the undiscovered territory he probed.
"When Miles played his horn, everything fell into place ... [and] he spoke to the whole world," Jack DeJohnette remarked. His wife Lydia added, "Miles spoke more with his horn than with his mouth. His inner life came out in his music. When you listen to his horn you can hear sadness, you can hear pain, you can hear everything else. This is where he revealed himself."
Miles's touching, deeply human trumpet sound is so moving and compelling because of its apparent contradiction with the tough, inscrutable, macho persona that he displayed to the world. The poignant irony that the hard man with the legendary rough, raspy, almost demonic voice—the aftermath of a throat operation in the '50s—played his instrument with voicelike lyricism has inflated this contradiction to almost mythical proportions.
Miles's many contradictions, his fierce independence and his leadership abilities, his sensitive, vulnerable sound, his awareness, his listening capacities, and his violence and drug addiction, epitomized some of the extremes of our human nature.
Marguerite Eskridge recounted how Miles expressed aspects of these extremes privately. "Miles was the epitome of the Gemini, Jekyll and Hyde personality. The positive one was golden; [he] would give anybody anything that they needed, open his door and take in guys who were out of work, or homeless. The opposite one was just as extreme; [he] had a very violent temper and could be very violent."
A sense of unfathomable darkness and imminent danger often surrounded Miles. It is hinted at by the more ominous epithets that he received, such as "dark magus," "prince of darkness," and "a puzzle wrapped in an enigma." But the melancholy and vulnerability always shone through. In Miles's horn sound we can always sense the delicate sensitivity that was also there. We sense his spiritual qualities, the fire of his creativity, and the light of his authenticity and "knowing," as much as the surrounding looming shadows. We sense his deep humanity, which makes us feel for him and sympathize with him, and we sense the "unexplainable," larger-than-life qualities that urged him to go into places where most of us wouldn't dream of going. He was both one of us and a stranger in a strange land. He was someone on the brink of several paradigms conveying mysterious tales to which we cannot but listen.
© 2001 Paul Tingen

From Chapter 2 - Changes
Still to come: The orginal extended biography of Miles Davis's pre-1967 career that was written for Miles Beyond, but ended up being published in a severely abridged form, because of lack of space.

From Chapter 4 - "New Directions"

Miles's visionary qualities are illustrated by an anecdote told by Herbie Hancock:

John McLaughlin himself does not appear to have recognized the brilliance of his own playing, or that of the other musicians, on the In A Silent Way session. His bewilderment was illustrated by an anecdote told by Herbie Hancock. "After we finished we walked out of the studio," Hancock remembered, "and while we were standing in the hallway John came over and whispered to me, 'Can I ask you a question? I answered, 'Sure'. He then said, 'Herbie, I can't tell... was that any good what we did? I mean, what did we do? I can't tell what's going on!' So I told him, 'John, welcome to a Miles Davis session. Your guess is as good as mine. I have no idea, but somehow when the records come out, they end up sounding good.' Miles had a way of seeing straight through what happened and knowing that over time people would figure out what was really happening."

From Chapter 5 - "Sorcerer's Brew"

On the many ingredients that went into the making of Bitches Brew:

Teo Macero added mid-20th century studio trickery, a 19th century classical music awareness of musical structure, and a way of looking at music as abstract blocks of sound, which he freely cut and moved around. In other words, the two most heavily edited tracks on Bitches Brew were hybrids of "figurative" and "abstract" art. They combined, respectively, the traditional musical line of something akin to a sonata form with the cut and paste ideas that had come out of musique concrète, serial music, and studio technology. Add to this the strongly chromatic improvising of the keyboard players, which has echoes of classical atonal music, and it is clear that an impressive amount of influences went into the making of Bitches Brew. This is no doubt one of the major reasons for the recording's immense success and influence. Virtually anyone willing to listen to it with an open mind is able to recognize something familiar in the music, despite the fact that it contains few easily identifiable melodies, hooks, or vamps.

From Chapter 6 - "Kind of Blues"

On why Miles went into electric music:

In response to the question why Miles went into electric music, I'd like to offer two interpretations of Miles's approach to music that have only occasionally been touched upon. The first interpretation is founded on the scientific axiom that accepts the simplest explanation of the known facts as the most plausible hypothesis. The hypothesis proposed here is that Miles is best understood as primarily a blues player who moved into jazz and then into jazz-rock, rather than a jazz player who was influenced by the blues. This makes sense of many aspects of his career and trumpet style that have so far seemed inexplicable. The second interpretation follows from the observation that Miles built every new musical step on his previous steps, and asserts that the secret of his enormous success and influence is that he was a traditionalist and revolutionary at the same time.

From Chapter 9 - "On-Off"

Percussionist James Mtume about the direction of Miles's mid-1970s music:

"Miles and I constantly talked about music and the direction it was going," Mtume recalled, "and one of the things we talked about was fusion. My view was that the fusion movement was the emphasis of form over feeling. It became about how complex you can write things. This is not writing from the heart, but writing from the head. Playing bars of 11/8 for complexity's sake is great for school, but not for music. Miles went way past that. We went straight for the feeling. We were exploring how long we could keep one chord interesting. That was infuriating to the critics, who were glorifying fusion. But we said, 'Fuck fusion.' We were into emotion."

"The other thing that we talked about," Mtume continued, "was that Miles felt that his music had moved away from the pulse of African-American music. He felt his shit had become too esoteric and that he had contributed to that. Miles wanted to find a way back into connecting with the black community. But the aesthetic question was, 'How do we do that?' We discussed this more than anything else. At the time Miles was listening to a lot of James Brown, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and George Clinton, and that's what he wanted to put together. Miles's idea was to get back to the root of the music, to the funk, but to funk with a high degree of experimental edge. He wanted to take it much further."

From Chapter 12 - "Star On Miles"

On "Jean-Pierre":

"Jean-Pierre" was to become Miles's signature tune and concert closer until the end of 1987. It was also the concluding theme of his retrospective Paris concert in July 1991. Miles became strongly associated with this melody during the '80s, and this has symbolic value. Because of his grounding in the blues, Miles always had a proclivity for alternating major and minor thirds, one of the hallmarks of the blues, and the melody of "Jean-Pierre" contains both major and minor thirds. Some have criticized the "simplistic," childlike nature of the song, and many musicians would be reluctant to perform it for this very reason. But Miles showed courage in making the tune such an important feature of his live sets. The childlike nature of the tune is illustrative of the childlike sense of wonder and open-mindedness with which he approached his art. They led him never to dismiss any music out of hand, and to be constantly in search for the new and for the magic.

From Chapter 15 - "Alive Around The World"

Bassist Benny Rietveld on his time in Miles's band, April 1988-October 1989:

"There was never anything negative coming from Miles. He'd let me know if it wasn't happening, but always in a positive way, like 'Let's try this feel on this song.' You had to really pay attention, and be right in the moment all the time. He had an incredible presence, which was like a mystical part of him, drawing everyone in. His presence kept everybody on their toes, so that the music was still alive. When musicians play something they know already, the initial spark goes. He never liked that. So he would change things every night, not really radical changes, but things that kept the music fresh, as if you were playing it for the first time. It was like having a Zen mindset: everything is always now, there is no before or after, you should be totally immersed in what's happening in the moment. He didn't talk much. There is not a lot that needs to be said anyway, and he knows that people usually don't listen. So why talk? But he sometimes made these short cryptic comments, and they were like a nut you had to crack open, and find the meaning on your own."

You can look inside the book here
You can buy the book here starting from 4.50 dollars (new) or here starting from 5 pounds (new) or here starting from 3.70 euro (used)

Miles speaks...

2008-12-31T18:10:00.002+01:00

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud...

2008-12-28T20:12:00.000+01:00

Trailer of Louis Malle's film Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows, France 1957), featuring Jeanne Moreau and the original soundtrack by Miles Davis.
This is not Electric Miles, but one of the highest points in the Music/Music for films history, and deserves a little space here too...

Ascenseur pour l'echafaud 2

2008-12-28T20:11:00.002+01:00

Miles Davis playing 'Generique' in Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'echafaud, 1957 plus an interview with the director. Sadly, one of the most perfect pieces of music ever has been used for a shitty TV ad. That's the world, folks...

Bill Laswell & Miles Davis

2008-12-28T12:01:00.001+01:00

"Miles post mortem". Un court documentaire de Pierre-Yves Borgeaud sur le producteur Bill Laswell qui remixe (recontruction & mix translation) dans son studio à Brooklyn les bandes originales de Miles Davis 1969-1974 pour l'album "Panthalassa". Diffusé dans ler magazine Tracks, Arte (1998, 5').

Electric Miles' Era - The Music of 1969

2008-12-25T19:01:00.001+01:00

Harvey Brooks talks of Bitches Brew

2008-12-25T18:55:00.001+01:00

Harvey Brooks played Electric Bass on the Miles Davis classic, Bitches Brew. In this edition of his "View from the Bottom," video blog, Harvey shares his memories of Miles, and the session itself.

Miles Davis live at the Teatro Sistina, Rome, October 27, 1969

2008-12-24T00:42:00.005+01:00

Miles Davis (trumpet)
Chick Corea (keyboards)
Wayne Shorter (saxophone)
Dave Holland (bass)
Jack DeJohnette (drums)

Disc 1 (first set)
1. Directions (J. Zawinul) 6:51
2. Directions/This 4:31
3. This (C. Corea) (incomplete) 5:02
4. ‘Round Midnight (B. Hanighen-C. Williams-T. Monk) 10:47
5. I Fall in Love Too Easily (S. Cahn-J. Styne) 1:47
6. Masqualero (W. Shorter) (with applause) 12:17

Disc 2 (second set)
1. Bitches Brew (M. Davis) 15:06
2. Miles Runs the Voodoo Down (M. Davis) 15:08
4. Agitation (M. Davis) 8:16
4. I Fall in Love Too Easily (S. Cahn-J. Styne) 2:06
5. Sanctuary (W. Shorter-M. Davis) 3:44

FM radio broadcast

Info Only

Bookshelf: Miles by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe

2008-12-24T00:24:00.004+01:00

Details
Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (September 15, 1990)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0671725823
ISBN-13: 978-0671725822
Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches

MILES OF WORDS
by Mike Zwerin

It's too bad "Miles," the autobiography of Miles Davis, wasn't a compact disc. There's some good shit there but...please excuse the four-letter word. Reading this book gets you accustomed to being in their company. You would like to be able to program only half the tracks.

"Miles," though written "with" Quincy Troupe, does not lean on a ghost. It does not go begging for the mass market and it is anything but one of those "I love everybody and everybody loves me" puff jobs.

The musical passages deserve to be collected into a pamphlet for required reading in conservatories. There's material about racism in music that everybody knows but few people come out and say. The progammable half also contains some stranger than fiction information about colleagues and stars and ex-wives and girlfriends. There's enough gossip and sex, drugs and violence for one and all.

But you would expect somebody called the "Prince of Silence" to choose his words with more care. He calls it "no respect" when Ornette Colemen first "tried to play trumpet and violin. ...He couldn't play either one of those instruments. That was an insult to people like me and Diz [Gillespie]. I certainly wouldn't walk up on stage and try to play saxophone if I couldn't play." Whatever happened to the benefit of the doubt?

"Miles" is riddled with redundancy (we are told he learned phrasing from Frank Sinatra and Orson Welles at least three times), unnecessary detail ("'Freddie Freeloader' was a song named after this black guy I knew who was always seeing what he could get from you for free") and crippled prose ("my only connection with the outside world was mostly through watching television"). All of it buried under a heavy load of scatology.

Lenny Bruce taught us that there are no dirty words, just dirty minds. But the tone here is sour; sheer quantity offends. Irony, ambiguity and grace rarely enter the picture. The relationship of spoken to written words is like that of live improvisation to a recording. This reads like the first take of a master who doesn't want to bother hanging around the studio. (Word was out that he hasn't read his book and doesn't intend to).

It would be easy to criticize the editing but you can understand a collaborator not wanting to push the personality presented here too hard. People are afraid of him, he admits, "because of my reputation for bluntness and liking to be left alone."

After firing his manager, David Franklin, after the latter negotiated a seven-figure recording contract with Warner Brothers that gives the recording company publishing rights (without explaining why he himself signed it), the prince proves his mastery of revenge (which, as we have been told by Archie Bunker, is the best way to get even): "That's why you don't see my songs on my new albums: Warner Brothers would get the rights to use those tunes, not me. So until we renegotiate that point, you're going to always see someone else's tunes on my records."

Toward the end of his relationship with his wife - the actress Cicely Tyson - they had an argument and she "jumped up on my back and pulled my hair weave right out of my head." He slapped her and "before I knew it I slapped her again." He "punched out" his road manager Jim Rose "upside the head" in a dispute over money. Obviously, both deserved it.

He fired his nephew, the drummer Vincent Wilburn, because he kept "dropping the time." (Is that really essential public information?) Miles's sister and her husband both called asking that he at least wait until after a concert in Chicago, their home, so it would be less embarrassing for their son. Miles refused: "Music don't have friends like that." He admits to not being a "proper father, but that just wasn't my thing."

He used every drug from the Golden Triangle to Medellin by way of Cognac and Virginia (four packs a day). He stopped because he had a stroke and anyway it was getting boring. Which rings true. There is, thankfully, no moralizing. However, when he says that the only thing wrong with cocaine is that you can get busted for it, this is inconsistent at the very least. But he's even up-front about copping out: "I have few regrets and little guilt. Those regrets I do have I don't want to talk about."

So many people disappointed him - Bird, Duke, Blakey. This insomniac seemed to spend his time with his valet in his Central Park South apartment and Malibu beach house, brooding and stroking his ego: "Some of the critics were talking about how aloof I was, but that didn't bother me; I had been this way all my life." He and John Coltrane did not get along at first because "my silence and evil looks probably turned him off."

The author looks in the mirror and says to himself how handsome he is.

"Many people he's known don't call any more," Quincy Troupe told Vanity Fair. "I saw Max Roach and Sonny Rollins the other day. They said 'How's Miles?' They used to all be like brothers. Miles still says 'Max is my brother.' But they don't see each other."

Only music - and Gil Evans - never let him down.

About the present vs the past: "When I hear musicians today playing all those same licks we used to play so long ago, I feel sad for them. I mean, it's like going to bed with a real old person who even smells real old. Now, I'm not putting down old people because I'm getting older myself. But I got to be honest, and that's what it reminds me of. Most people my age like old, stuffy furniture. I like bold colors and long, sleek spare lines."

Take a look inside here

Miles Davis' It's About That Time: 'creativity' and music

2008-12-14T17:26:00.000+01:00

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a professor of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago... and an authority on creativity.

The way his theory of creativity works - is that if you have what you feel is a great and novel idea... and potentially you get these ideas all the time... and maybe you also happen to dapple with art and have done some paintings recently that your friends like, and you're a good cook, etc.... this sort of 'stuff' doesn't make you creative. It makes you interesting and talented:
- one who experiences the world in novel and original ways
- has 'fresh' perceptions / insightful judgments
- an innate ability to do something very well, etc.

What separates this type of person from someone truly Creative (with a capital C) is that a Creative person leaves a trace in the cultural matrix... does something that allows humankind to go beyond it's present power... more specifically, he or she:
1. masters a domain (i.e. art, physics, law, music, etc.) and develops something 'better' within that domain that is understandable to others

"The old Italian saying applies here: Impara l'arte, e mettila da parte (learn the craft, and then set it aside). One cannot be creative without learning what others know, but then one cannot be creative without becoming dissatisfied with that knowledge and rejecting it (or some of it) for a better way."

2. that 'development' then needs approval of the experts in the field, and finally,
3. it must be included in the cultural domain to which it belongs -- a very difficult task, obviously.
So, Steve Jobs is creative, Bill Gates, Edison, Picasso, Einstein, Nobel Prize winners, John Lennon, etc. whereas a 'personally creative' individual contributes nothing of permanent significance -- sad, but true.

So, yes, by this definition, "van Gogh's creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art... w/o such a response, van Gough would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases."

It's therefore so ridiculously difficult to develop something of 'lasting significance' -- would we be better off primarily listening to music by these truly Creative people who are so unique? Or should we just stick to what we 'like'...

There was a study done that measured the happiness of people who favored trying new foods versus those who mainly ordered meals they knew they liked. The result: people that simply ordered what they knew they liked were happier with their selections, overall... but that's just a random study I remember from college -- and I don't think it applies here, because when someone tried a new meal, it wasn't from a Creative chef.

In terms of music -- I'm not sure there is an answer. However, this week I have a song (actually, part of a song) from one of the most influential musicians of our time, Miles Davis. If you listen and don't like it, all I think it means is that you haven't heard enough of his stuff -- that's about it. But, given Miles Davis is who he is - the burden is on us to figure out why it's good. I personally happen to like this song because of the way he builds the tension... the song is sort of like going up the front part of a roller coaster - the further up you go the greater the suspense, as you're waiting anxiously for something drastic to happen. Same thing with this song, only rather than there being a steep cliff to release the tension - there is a symbol hit at the apex of the tune... and they tease you a bit as well, making it sound as though you're about to reach 'the top' when you haven't just yet. Quite honestly, it's one of those songs where in order to get the full effect you kinda need to just chill on your couch and close your eyes. They build it up really slowly though -- whenever I pay close attention to the entire tune the tension they build can be quite fascinating.

Miles Davis live at De Doelen, Rotterdam, November 9, 1969

2008-12-14T11:30:00.003+01:00

Miles Davis (tpt)
Wayne Shorter (ss, ts)
Chick Corea (el-p)
Dave Holland (b, el-b)
Jack DeJohnette (d)

1. Directions (J. Zawinul) / Bitches Brew (M. Davis) / Sanctuary (W. Shorter-M. Davis) /Masqualero (W. Shorter)
VARA radio broadcast (intro and outro announcements included)

Info Only

A Miles Davis' Exhibition

2008-12-14T11:28:00.007+01:00

The Miles Davis Drawing Art

2008-12-14T11:28:00.001+01:00

A montage of paintings created by Miles Davis and an interview with his collaborator.

Miles Davis Quintet - Antibes Jazz 1969

2008-12-11T23:24:00.001+01:00

Miles Davis live at Antibes Jazz Festival, Antibes, France, 1969: Spanish Key
Miles Davis (tpt); Wayne Shorter (ss, ts); Chick Corea (el-p); Dave Holland (b, el-b); Jack De Johnette (d)

Bookshelf: Miles Davis, The Definitive Biography by Ian Carr

2008-12-11T23:10:00.003+01:00

Details:
Paperback: 688 pages
Publisher: Da Capo Press (December 20, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1560259671
ISBN-13: 978-1560259671
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 1.8 inches

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews
In the 17 years since Carr's biography of the mercurial trumpet genius was published, Miles has died and lots of new material has surfaced (including Davis's hilariously profane autobiography). So Carr has produced a new life, nearly twice the length of the original. Throughout his career, Davis seemed an enigmatic genius, brusque to the point of rudeness, yet capable of a warm lyricism in his art. Although he was the product of an affluent, upper-middle-class family, he cultivated the demeanor of a surly street hustler. Carr sums up the legendary Davis temperament nicely: ``The inscrutability, the unpredictability, the refusal to be pinned down, the sudden juxtapositions of gentleness and violence.'' The same qualities could be found in his art, as he moved restlessly from the pioneering days of bebop and a youthful apprenticeship with the music's founder, Charlie Parker, through his own rapid-fire series of innovationsthe brilliant ``cool'' and orchestral recordings with arranger Gil Evans, the development of modal-based post-bop with his excellent small groups of the '50s and '60s, his developing interest and work with electric bands, right up to his fascinating, if uneven, post-modernist works of the '80s. Carr recounts these developments intelligently. A musician himself, he is particularly good on the micro-level analysis of recordings and concerts, but his macro-analysis is plagued at times by odd generalizations about ``Western'' and ``non-Western'' elements ostensibly struggling for the upper hand in Davis's music. Though some fans may think he overrates the late recordings with their funk/pop backings, he offers a useful corrective to other writers' casual dismissal of those experiments. Finally, this leviathan would have benefited from some judicious cutting; Carr lets interviews run on too long, and there is a certain repetitiveness that strains the reader's patience for the new material. Despite minor flaws, a generally thoughtful and perceptive reading of the turbulent life and singular work of one of the giants of American music. (40 b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Description
This exhaustively researched, revised edition of Ian Carr's classic biography throws new light on Davis' life and career: from the early days in New York with Charlie Parker; to the Birth of Cool; through his drug addiction in the early 1950s and the years of extraordinary achievements (1954-1960), during which he signed with Columbia and collaborated with such unequaled talents as John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly and Cannonball Adderly. Carr also explores Davis' dark, reclusive period (1975-1980), offering firsthand accounts of his descent into addiction, as well as his dramatic return to life and music. Carr has talked with the people who knew Miles and his music best including Bill Evans, Joe Zawinul, Keith Jarrett, and Jack DeJohnette, and has conducted interviews with Ron Carter, Max Roach, John Scofield and others.

About the Author

Ian Carr was born in Scotland and educated at Kings College, Newcastle. He is a professional musician who has done regular jazz broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 and has written for the BBC Music Magazine. He is the author of Music Outside (1973) and Keith Jarrett, the Man and his Music (1991).

You can look inside the book here
You can find it here

Miles Davis Quintet - Ronnie Scott's London 1969

2008-12-07T23:35:00.001+01:00

The Electric Miles Official Discography 1968-1979

2008-12-05T01:02:00.007+01:00

Miles In The Sky 1968

Filles De Kilimanjaro 1968

In A Silent Way 1969

Jazz Greatest Hits 1969

A Tribute to Jack Johnson 1970

Black Beauty: Miles Davis At Fillmore West 1970

Bitches Brew 1970

At Fillmore: Live At The Fillmore East 1970

What I Say, Vol. 1 1971

Live-Evil 1971

On The Corner 1972

In Concert: Live At Philharmonic Hall 1973

Dark Magus: Live At Carnegie Hall 1974

Big Fun 1974

Get Up With It 1974

Agharta 1975

Pangaea 1975

Water Babies 1977

Circle In The Round 1979

Directions 1979

Miles Davis Quintet - Berlin, November 7, 1969

2008-12-03T01:04:00.003+01:00

Philharmonie, Berlin (Germany)
Sender Freies Berlin TV broadcast
Miles Davis Quintet

Miles Davis (tpt); Wayne Shorter (ss, ts); Chick Corea (el-p); Dave Holland (b, el-b); Jack De Johnette (d); Joachim-Ernst Berendt (ann)

The program:
Directions (J. Zawinul) 6:46
Bitches Brew (M. Davis) 13:39
It's About That Time (M. Davis) 14:11
I Fall in Love Too Easily (S. Cahn-J. Styne) 3:44
Sanctuary (W. Shorter-M. Davis) 3:51
The Theme (M. Davis) (with applause) 1:14

Miles Davis live in Central Park, New York, July 7, 1969

2008-12-03T00:57:00.002+01:00

Miles Davis (tpt)
Wayne Shorter (ss, ts)
Chick Corea (el-p)
Dave Holland (b, el-b)
Jack DeJohnette (d)

1. No Blues
2. Miles Runs the Voodoo Down
3. Masqualero
4. Spanish Key
5. Sanctuary
6. The Theme

Info Only

Miles Davis Quintet - Copenhagen, November 4, 1969

2008-12-01T00:13:00.004+01:00

Tivoli Konsertsal, Copenhagen (Denmark)
Danish Radio broadcast
Miles Davis Quintet

Miles Davis (tpt); Wayne Shorter (ss, ts); Chick Corea (el-p); Dave Holland (b, el-b); Jack De Johnette (d)

Program:
Directions (J. Zawinul) 6:57
Miles Runs the Voodoo Down (M. Davis) 8:58
Bitches Brew (M. Davis) 15:35
Agitation (M. Davis) 10:25
I Fall in Love Too Easily (S. Cahn-J. Styne) 3:40
Sanctuary (W. Shorter-M. Davis) 3:28
It's About That Time (M. Davis) 18:55
The Theme (M. Davis) (with applause) 0:35

The Electric Miles Concerts: 1969

2008-11-29T00:55:00.000+01:00

The full concert's list

March 11-17, 1969 Duffy's Backstage, Rochester

May-June 1969 Village Gate Club, New York

June 4-14, 1969 Plugged Nickel Club, Chicago

June 21-29, 1969 Blue Coronet Club, New York

June 21-29, 1969 Blue Coronet Club, New York

July 4, 1969 Festival Field, Newport

July 7, 1969 Central Park, New York

July 25, 1969 La Pinède, Juan-les-Pins

July 26, 1969 La Pinède, Juan-les-Pins

July 27, 1969 Rutgers University Stadium, New Brunswick

August 4, 1969 Davis's House, New York

October 26, 1969 Teatro Lirico, Milan

October 27, 1969 Teatro Sistina, Rome

October 31, 1969 Stadthalle, Vienna

November 1, 1969 Hammersmith Odeon, London

November 2, 1969 Ronnie Scott's Club, London

November 3, 1969 Salle Pleyel, Paris

November 4, 1969 Tivoli Konsertsal, Copenhagen

November 5, 1969 Folkets Hus, Stockholm

November 7, 1969 Philharmonie, Berlin

November 9, 1969 De Doelen, Rotterdam

Miles Davis Quintet - Rome, October 27,1969

2008-11-29T00:45:00.004+01:00

Teatro Sistina, Rome (Italy)
Radio Televisione Italian (RAI) radio broadcast
Miles Davis Quintet

Miles Davis (tpt); Wayne Shorter (ss, ts); Chick Corea (el-p, wood fl); Dave Holland (b, el-b); Jack De Johnette (d)

Program:
1 Directions (J. Zawinul) (incomplete) 6:45
2 This (C. Corea) (incomplete) 9:15
3 'Round Midnight (B. Hanighen-C. Williams-T. Monk) 11:02
4 I Fall in Love Too Easily (S. Cahn-J. Styne) 1:30
5 Masqualero (W. Shorter) (with applause) 14:29
6 Bitches Brew (M. Davis) 14:41
7 Miles Runs the Voodoo Down (M. Davis) 15:02
8 Agitation (M. Davis) 8:20
9 I Fall in Love Too Easily (S. Cahn-J. Styne) 2:59
10 Sanctuary (W. Shorter-M. Davis) 4:02
11 The Theme (M. Davis) (with applause) 0:33

Bookshelf: Miles on Miles

2008-11-28T01:50:00.001+01:00

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...)