THERE
WAS A SOLID WALL of Yamaha speakers across the back of the stage,
12 feet high by 40 feet wide, and Miles Davis was standing in front of them
beside his synthesizer keyboard, bare chested under a gold sequinned bolero
jacket.
His band, a squad of tall black fellows with Afros who held
their electric guitars or basses in a manner that suggested spears, was spread
out on either side of their chief, and they had a deliciously ominous beat
going.
This was in Chicago in 1973, the beginning of Miles' African
period, and I don't know how I got there because everybody else in the
Auditorium Theater was black.
''I hear you, Miles!'' some guy was yelling, over and over. He
was too high and finally Miles tapped one key on the synth as if giving a signal
in Morse code.
A moment later, I noticed that a squirming body was being
passed from hand to hand over their heads by the fans in the front row. They
were disposing of the unhip one, who was still thrashing about and still
yelling. You could see the whole thing in silhouette against the footlights. And
you could see fists driving into this poor devil as he was dumped into the
aisle. He stopped saying "I hear you Miles."
BUT
IF YOU LOVE MILES, things like this have a way of happening around
you if not to you. He wrote about it, or someone took down his words.
A thread of self-confessed violence and cruelty marks his
autobiography, ''Miles,'' published by Simon & Schuster.
George T. Simon -- yes, the Simon & Schuster partner,
Carly's father -- dug him in the pages of Metronome. That was not long after
Charlie Parker dug him, hired him to replace Dizzy Gillespie when Bird was the
hottest thing on 52d Street and Miles was a teen-ager, a new kid in New York,
attending Juilliard on a stipend from his father, the St. Louis dentist.
But within a couple of years, the kid with the beautiful lyric
sound, just 21, was at his mentor's throat over a salary question. ''Here comes
Bird," writes Davis, ''after we get through playing, telling us he ain't
got no money. Me and Max (Roach) go up to Bird's room, and I see Bird putting a
lot of money under his pillow.''
"So I said, 'I want my fucking money, Bird.'
"Bird says, 'You will not get one penny, Junior, nothing,
no money at all.'
'''I picked up a beer bottle and broke it and with it poised
in my hand, I said to Bird: 'Motherfucker, give me my money or I'm gonna kill
you.' And I had him by the collar."
Miles got his money.
ONE
WAY OR ANOTHER, he always got his money. He stole Clark Terry's
horn to pawn for dope when the renowned Duke Ellington trumpeter let him use his
hotel room to crash. In his mid-20s, he took up pimping to support his heroin
habit.
''I had a whole stable of bitches out on the street for me,''
he writes with a touch of pride. ''I took them to dinner and shit like that. I
respected them and they would give me money to get off (by shooting heroin) in
return.''
This is candor of a sort, but one suspects certain certain
even more embarrassing details are being suppressed. You kinda don't believe he
went after Bird with a broken bottle, either.
The book is a lurid panorama of such reckless admissions, or
boasts, although many of them are followed by gruff and unconvincing
rationalizations.
''I wanted to leave Prestige (record company) because they
weren't paying me no money -- not what I thought I was worth,'' he explains.
''They had signed me for peanuts when I was a junkie. A lot of
guys thought I was cold-blooded to leave (Bob Weinstock of Prestige) like that
after he had done all those records with me when nobody else would. But I had to
look ahead and start thinking about my future, and the way I saw it I couldn't
turn down the kind of money Columbia was offering.''
Yet there are priceless glimpses in this book of the jazz
titans Miles knew and loved and came to call his family.
DAVIS
PAINTS a memorable picture of his youthful St. Louis idols and the
night in 1944 when he first heard Bird and Dizzy Gillespie together in Billy
Eckstine's band in East St. Louis. And there's a touching scene in Paris where
he watches as Bud Powell, his mind crippled by shock treatments, tries to play
''Nice Work If You Can Get It.''
''After a real fast and great beginning, something happened
and his playing just fell apart. It was terrible. I was shocked. Nobody said
nothing, just kind of looked at each other like we couldn't believe what we were
hearing. He looked real sad, like he knew what had happened.''
But more frequently, Davis remembers moments like the night in
1956 when he fired John Coltrane in the dressing room at the Cafe Bohemia: ''By
now he was really strung out on heroin and also drinking a lot. He was coming in
late and nodding on the stage. One night I got so mad with him that I slapped
him upside his head and punched him in the stomach. Thelonious Monk was there.
He got hot under the collar.
''He told Trane, 'Man, as much as you play on saxophone, you
don't have to take nothing like that. You can come and play with me any time.
And you, Miles, you shouldn't be hitting him like that.'
''I fired Trane that night. I couldn't see what else I could
have done.''
SO
REPELLANT are some of these confessions, particularly concerning
the way he treated his girlfriends, wives and would-be girlfriends, not to
mention his employees, that one fears for Miles' place in the hearts of his
admirers.
On the other hand, as I've followed him through the years,
he's always turned out to be a couple of steps ahead of that game.
The book details how he broke open the whole fusion gold mine
with the bands he led in the 1960s, and although his trumpet playing has
wandered off into the underbrush over the years, it indicates that Davis' savvy
about contemporary musical form and where it's going has never left him.
Still, he seems rather lonely as the years advance.''The
people in my band are good friends and so are my horses out in Malibu,'' wrote
the 63-year-old Davis, a bachelor once more. ''I don't go out much, hardly ever
these days.''
He and the woman who saved him from a previous health crisis
and became his wife, Cicely Tyson, had parted.
His only friends, he said, were the musicians in his bands.
They wouldn't say it to his face, but many of them did not see themselves in
that role.
- WHAT
GOES around comes around.
In the old days, the days of the Cafe Bohemia in New York
City, the Plugged Nickel in Chicago and the Blackhawk in San Francisco, the
trench coat in the fog days, he liked to turn his back on the audience, as if to
say, "I turn my back on fame."
If it was a coy ruse, it succeeded. Fame courted him, fame
kept him, fame may have done other things to him. But it'll be a long time
before the world -- and not merely the jazz world -- forgets the man.
This immortal left the jazz stage for the hospital a few weeks
before his death in 1991 with the echoes in his ears of a late summer triumph at
the Montreaux, Switzerland, jazz festival.
There, an orchestra under the direction of Quincy Jones
re-created the Gil Evans arrangements of "Porgy and Bess" and
"Sketches of Spain" that had made him a pop star in the 1950s.
"It was like watching Muhammad Ali climb back into the
ring with his jab intact... A monumental comeback... A welcome return to the
fold after years of jiving and vamping," wrote the critic for Down Beat,
Bill Milkowski.
BUT
THE TWILIGHT had been deepening for this captive media demigod,
this fictive prince of darkness, who'd been devoting himself more and more to
painting and to horseback riding on the bright blue Pacific shore where he had
built an $8 million house.
Still, of all the Jimmy Deans of his era, of all the Clifts,
the Brandos and the Dylans, Davis was probably the least open to the charge of
gift abuse.
At 19, he entered the world of jazz in competition with two of
its most daunting figures, Parker and Gillespie.
"I hung in there and I learned," he said of his
experience replacing Dizzy in Bird's band. This was characteristic Milesian
understatement. His playing became the reverse of theirs, cool and ironic. And
just as brilliant.
Surrounded by the uncompromising fires of Philly Joe Jones,
the drummer, Paul Chambers, the bassist, Red Garland the pianist and John
Coltrane the tenor saxophonist, Davis, in his bandleading debut, stood as an
oasis of artistic candor in the Eisenhower era, the heyday of the Hemingway
clones like Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac, of action painting and bongo
playing.
HE
SEEMED TO SPEAK directly from somewhere deeper in the 20th century
soul, bittersweet and underplayed, innocently sophisticated, beyond the past and
yet not contemptuous of it. If that speech had anything to do with racism, it
has stayed a secret ever since.
Davis' ability to self-metamorphose became legendary over the
decades, as he focused the brilliant soundscapes of the Gil Evans full-band
collaborations for Columbia, devised a radically reconstituted small band
setting with Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley, and pioneered jazz-rock-fusion
in an electrified band with Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.
To some, it was like watching a portrait of Dorian Gray --
with each successive reincarnation, with each deeper plunge into the lucrative
media stream, he leaned more heavily on his young band mates, and the memory of
his heroic youthful visage, when people told him he had eyes like a girl, seemed
to crust over with the stories of pimping, dope addiction, violence and cruelty.
His partners in revolution gradually dropped away as the
fugitive esters of jazz sublimated into mass culture: first Parker in 1955, then
Coltrane in 1967, Chambers in 1969, Adderley in 1975, Bill Evans in 1989,
Garland in 1984, Jones in 1985, Gil Evans in 1988.
AND
THE LONELINESS gathered.
"When I wake up in the morning," Davis wrote two
years before the end, "and I want to see my mother or father or Trane or
Gil or Philly or whoever, I just say to myself, 'I want to see them,' and
they're there and I'm talking to them."
In the end, they turned out to be the ones on whom the great
Miles Davis was unable to turn his back.
Ran in Hollywood Reporter, Sept. 30, 1991
