Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis

INTRODUCTION

Some called him the Prince of Darkness or the Picasso of Invisible Art. He was the consummate rebel, exuding the daunting aura of the Prince of Silence or even Mr. Don’t Call Me Cool. All of these monikers, however, contradict the man who brightens these pages with canny insights and droll humor as he expounds his philosophy about the skewed social order of his world. There is the mediocrity and the genius of his musical peers, his hatred of racism, his insistence that the word jazz is nothing more than a pejorative term for niggers: Jazz is a nigger word, he states to an unsuspecting interviewer. As if what Miles thinks about the word jazz is sheer nonsense, the interviewer goes on using the word anyway for lack of a better way to classify Davis’s music. And for certain, much of what Miles did accomplish is unclassifiable—much like the man himself.

Most times, Miles comes across as anything but the Prince of Darkness: he’s bright, comical, brutally honest, intelligent, in control, and entirely at ease even in the most trying or inauspicious occasion. He is honest to the extreme, so much so that at times he becomes graphic about things like sex, his copious heroin use, his short period playing the pimp. Then there’s his constant vernacular mainstay—motherfucker. He plays like a motherfucker, my band is a bunch of motherfuckers, those guys are dirty motherfuckers, my legs hurt like a motherfucker during that tour, she’s fine as a motherfucker. His language is colorful, leaving intact the vocabulary of a Midwestern black man from East St. Louis, raised in a middle-class household. He studied for a while at Juilliard, but absorbed the bulk of what he learned from the city streets, within the din of smoky Harlem clubs, or from watching on the sidelines the true masters of the form: Charlie Bird Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.

After a tour of duty with Parker, Miles was ready to leap forward confidently, a flashy zeal in his tailor-cut Italian suit, from under Duke Ellington’s elongated shadow. Ultimately, and conscientiously, by not Uncle Tomming to his audience, by not grinning like Louis Armstrong or performing upon a shoeshine box, he swore musical fidelity to self-respect, not only for what he was accomplishing but also because he, too, was a valid card-carrying member of the United States of America. He shone a whole new light upon his race. If Adam Clayton Powell was dazzling at the pulpit, then Miles Davis dominated the stage. He played with authenticity, with feeling, always challenging the audience not to underestimate just what he was doing when his back was turned away from them under his lonesome spotlight. He didn’t have to be poor and play his horn from the broken stairs of a southern chicken-shack to play the blues. His contribution was just as valid as those Mississippi Delta bluesmen who had forged the genre decades earlier.

Being a musician, oftentimes he wanted to discuss anything but music, because his music said everything he wanted to say by virtue of its existence. He hated discussing his past and despised detailing his guiding aesthetic. Most times he directed the topic toward his band members, as in Herbie plays like a motherfucker. This presents an undeniable challenge for the interviewer: either face the likely prospect of disdain for pursuing the role of an intrusive journalist or charge determinedly into the dark abyss hoping to emerge from the other side unscathed (and with enough material to complete the assigned article). When this doesn’t work, writers instead describe Miles’s surroundings or mannerisms or strive to capture his quick, deft sketching on a drawing pad. More banal is the avid attention the interviewers sometimes devote to how he eats, orders his food, or even how he breathes. In all of these things there lurks a distinct personality. Davis, for all of his quirks and foibles, comes across as a genius of music—but not of life.

A constant searing theme of these pages is racism in all its insidious incarnations. America—from the year of Miles Davis’s birth in 1926 until his death in 1991 (and beyond)—still judged people on the basis of their skin color rather than on the content of their character. Although government laws and constitutional amendments—dating from shortly after the Civil War—assured civil rights on paper, the pernicious air of racial prejudice still permeated America’s streets. It wasn’t going away anytime soon, if ever, and Miles knew it. His love for Ferraris and women (white women) made certain that his most envious detractors, enraged by his constant affronts to white entitlement, would cause the trumpeter incessant hassles.

When he was a boy, a white man calling him nigger chased him down the street. It was a hateful memory that echoed through the years, always resurrecting in an instant that harsh realization and harsher reality. Although critics, fans, and fellow musicians viewed him as an important and groundbreaking composer/bandleader/performer, whites waiting for Miles to entertain them still thought of him (as related in many of the following interviews) as just a nigger. The bitter diatribes Miles unleashed concerning racism succeed more in revealing the depths of his sensitivity than in labeling him as a ranting anti-white bigot. David Amram, who knew Miles as an acquaintance from 1956 until his death in 1991, remembers well that sensitivity. One rainy night in 1956 Miles entered the Café Bohemia. Amram decided to play it cool and not bother the man who’d successfully captured everyone’s attention and brought the bustling nightclub to a standstill. As he walked by, Amram caught a glimpse of Davis looking toward him from the corner of his red-rimmed eye, carefully considering him from behind his trademark impenetrable sunglasses. What Amram saw wasn’t contempt but a steely gaze of hurt.

For all of his contributions to music and visual arts (he took up drawing and painting during the 1980s), Miles still wanted to be accepted and remembered most by people of his own race, by black youth. He was never content to be thought of as merely a jazz musician, a label he came to disdain. By not looking back, he learned, he could pave a road into the future. He claimed he never read what the critics wrote, but the fact that he knew they were dismissing his latest offerings made him strive all the more to be less accepted.

In the 1970s his music became denser, cacophonous, dissonant, as if daring the listener to cut through the thicket, to slice through the vines, in order to absorb Miles’s intentions. Was he purposely alienating his audience? Was he catering to the audiences of the future? Since the critics couldn’t peg his personality, they tried to peg his music.

What do you want us to call it, Miles? they asked.

Call it music was his simple but right-on response.

What they could get was 1980s-era pop songs. This time they could decimate the musical deity that was Miles by calling his latter-day output purely sentimental drivel. Miles was really selling out, instead of changing the face of music like they’d been expecting him to do with each new album. He’d done so for roughly forty years, morphing his signature phrasing through all the variants that he made possible: bebop to the Birth of the Cool to Kind of Blue to Bitches Brew to On the Corner to Tutu. Each didn’t signal a musical compromise, but rather a daring musical direction.

What the critics said, we now know, was irrelevant. Miles, in the end, would have the last word—or the last note. These pages are but myriad mirrors to his life, reflecting not only Miles but also how the world understood and treated him. Because we love his music, we love the man despite his foibles, peccadilloes, addictions, quirks, indifference, violent outbursts, and even his percussive slap of downright rudeness. These are things we endure in order to have what we most want—our fix. Miles was especially adamant about the prospects of selling out. He told Les Tompkins in one of the interviews in this book: I mean, I wouldn’t do it, for no money, or for no place in the white man’s world. Not just to make money, because then you don’t have anything. You don’t have as much money as whoever you’re trying to ape; that’s making money by being commercial. Then you don’t have anything to give the world; so you’re not important. You might as well be dead.

The third millennium broadens our scope of what Miles Davis achieved in his lifetime. Columbia Records continues to open its vaults and unleash on an unsuspecting public a voluminous quantity of work of surprisingly consistent quality, music that his vigorous energy and voracious creativity made possible. We have jazz (for lack of a better word), bebop, funk, soul, and syncopated fusion. He tossed all he wanted into its cacophonous fray. One has to pine for how he would’ve addressed these post-9/11 years, what elegy would’ve exuded from the vibrating brass of his horn. But we still have what is perfect already—a dauntless musical legacy of emotion and, yes, integrity. In the view of the editors of this volume, his songs of rage, love, passion, fire, and bliss, as well as his wavering sound of profound sadness, are not felt elsewhere in music. He hangs it out there vulnerably and leaves it there. We hope this volume of interviews and encounters with Miles Davis succeeds in the best manner possible—by sending the reader back to those unparalleled records and transforming him or her into a listener again.

The final selection was compiled with the help of numerous Miles Davis collectors in the United States and Europe. Since Miles Davis’s death in 1991 and throughout his career, an underground trading circle passed these gems from hand to hand, many surfacing from actual audiotape, some so far removed from their original sources that it becomes difficult to hear the interviewer himself.

These pieces dispel the myth that Miles Davis was a recluse and misanthrope, or that he refused interviews and remained in the public’s eye as a taciturn personality. Nothing could be further from the truth; Davis was open to discussing anything but was intolerant of those interviewers who didn’t do their homework. He kept at arm’s length those who wanted to explore his music, or sought to talk about it as if the music itself didn’t do all the talking already. Although he would talk about his jazz contemporaries or composers as unlikely as Stockhausen and Stravinsky, he was often reluctant to discuss his own music. This poses a consistent roadblock to meeting the reader’s expectation of some kind of certain insight into Davis’s creative vision, process, and accomplishments. More often than not, what he chooses not to say tells us more about his personal desires and demons, the same demons that often created the music in the first place.

As one listens to the interview tapes, the growls and vernacular become easier to decipher, and one senses beneath Miles’s rough exterior a tender, sensitive heart open to embracing the world, but always ready to shrink back into his recalcitrance. This is usually when the subject becomes caustic, crude, sometimes just plain insensitive. But these are the things that make Miles Davis interviews a revealing, interesting, invaluable read.

As editors in an ideal world, we would have liked to include Playboy’s September 1962 interview, its first, with Miles Davis, conducted by Alex Haley, but the magazine denied our dogged efforts to obtain permission to reprint it. Racial tensions in America at the start of the 1960s were still bristling and violent. They contributed to a surge of African American art and culture as well as to a stifling of them. The forces at large stuck in Davis’s craw. He had considered himself an accomplished man of his own making as well as the product of a hardworking family. Davis took advantage of Playboy magazine’s broad platform (it aimed its pages at a white male demographic) to voice his hatred for racial prejudice and the constant demands, underscored by racial overtones, by the press to justify his actions.

For this reason the interview is valuable, but certainly not invaluable to a collection of this nature for two reasons. First, the interview is widely available in earlier and recent Playboy collections, as well as in Playboy Cover to Cover: The ’50s and online.

More importantly, despite its reputation as a revealing dialogue with Miles, the interview suffers from the defects of its interviewer. Alex Haley, author of the bestselling, award-winning Roots (which Stanley Crouch calls one of the biggest con jobs in U.S. literary history), was a plagiarist and fabricator, who settled a lawsuit out of court for $650,000 and whose genealogical claims have been roundly disproved. As Philip Nobile, the investigative journalist who helped expose the Roots hoax, only to realize that integrity often has no place in the consciousness of people who continue to profit enormously from the book and subsequent miniseries, has noted: "[Haley] did not begin stealing in Roots in 1976. Haley’s habit went as far back as 1962 in his legendary Playboy interview with Miles Davis. Unable to record the uncooperative Davis on tape, Haley faked parts of the Q&A by appropriating quotes from other writers."

We would have also wanted to include one of the interviews from DownBeat, a great jazz magazine that followed Davis’s career with care and clarity, but unfortunately its publisher was unnecessarily proprietary with reprint rights in order to assure the exclusivity of the magazine’s own published collection, the majority of which are record and concert reviews and news features rather than interviews. That volume and this one are more complementary than competitive.

The one interview that we seriously regret being unable to include is 60 Minutes’s interview with Miles. Simon & Schuster had paid a hefty advance for Davis’s autobiography (cowritten with journalist Quincy Troupe) and aptly titled Miles. Writing a reasonably accurate account of any legendary figure’s life, particularly one as long and complex as Davis’s, within a few hundred pages is a daunting and monumental task. In the case of Miles, the pioneering trumpeter’s visceral disdain for the past and his shredded memory, along with Simon & Schuster’s tight deadline, exacerbated the inherent challenges. In the end, as has been well documented, Miles’s autobiography relied heavily, sometimes word for word, on the work of three biographers: Eric Nisenson, Ian Carr, and Jack Chambers (especially the latter) and credited none of them. See the introduction to Chambers’s 1998 single-volume paperback edition of Milestones for a full, fascinating discussion of this issue.

One of Simon & Schuster’s conditions was that Davis must promote his autobiography. Out of this came his interview with 60 Minutes’s Harry Reasoner. The ever-sharp Miles proved to be exceptionally irascible, thwarting with devious, mischievous pleasure Reasoner’s often inane questions (Do black musicians hurt more? and Do you feel young?) and his decidedly nonjournalistic judgments (You did a lot of bad things). Needless to say, ole Harry was neither amused nor pleased. But it makes for great reading. Unfortunately, according to CBS News Archives, "due to a restriction on this 60 Minutes episode we cannot give you permission to reprint the transcript of the November 12, 1989, interview with Miles Davis. Despite further inquiry, no further illumination was provided as to the nature and cause of this restriction."

But in the plethora of excellent interviews and profiles that follow, we see a man struggling with his own personality, when it’s easier to evoke the poison within through the brass of his trumpet than to rely on the dubious nature of words. It’s easy to sympathize with the interviewer, just trying to do his or her job. But so is Miles and it is he who earns the most sympathy.

—PAUL MAHER JR.

Fitchburg, Massachusetts

—MICHAEL K. DORR

Brooklyn, New York

SELF-PORTRAIT BY MILES DAVIS

Interviewer: George Avakian

Columbia Records Publicity, November 26, 1957

George Avakian was the man to see if one wanted to record for the prestigious Columbia record label. Since 1953, Miles had approached Avakian on several occasions seeking to break free from Prestige’s jazz label. Avakian was fully aware that Davis’s contract with Prestige didn’t expire until 1955, and he maintained a reluctance to show even a slight interest in taking on the ambitious and able trumpeter. In July 1955 Miles’s blazing performance on ’Round About Midnight at the Newport Jazz Festival (the music press labeled it Miles’s comeback, to which Davis retorted, What’s all the fuss? I always play that way) caught the attention of Avakian and his photographer brother, Aram, who encouraged George to sign Miles as soon as possible. After haggling with Columbia executives over Davis’s request of a four-thousand-dollar advance against royalties (they thought a known junkie would be dead before he could ever earn them back the money), the trumpeter was formally signed to Columbia’s thinning jazz roster. Davis maintained a solid, historic relationship with the label until 1986, when he jumped ship to Warner Brothers.

You want me to tell you where I was born—that old story? It was in good old Alton, Illinois. In 1926. And I had to call my mother a week before my last birthday and ask her how old I would be.

I started playing trumpet in grade school. Once a week we would hold notes. Wednesdays at 2:30. Everybody would fight to play best. Lucky for me, I learned to play the chromatic scale right away. A friend of my father’s brought me a book one night and showed me how to do it so I wouldn’t have to sit there and hold that note all the time.

My mother wanted to give me a violin for my birthday, but my father gave me a trumpet—because he loved my mother so much!

There was a very good instructor in town. He was having some dental work done by my father. He was the one that made my father get me the trumpet. He used to tell us all about jam sessions on the Showboat, about trumpet players like Bobby Hackett and Hal Baker. Play without any vibrato, he used to tell us. You’re gonna get old anyway and start shaking, he used to say, no vibrato! That’s how I tried to play. Fast and light—and no vibrato.

By the time I was sixteen I was playing in a band—the Blue Devils—in East St. Louis. Sonny Stitt came to town with a band and heard us play one night. He told me, You look like a man named Charlie Parker and you play like him too. C’mon with us.

The fellows in his band had their hair slicked down, they wore tuxedos, and they offered me sixty whole dollars a week to play with them. I went home and asked my mother if I could go with them. She said no, I had to finish my last year of high school. I didn’t talk to her for two weeks. And I didn’t go with the band either.

I knew about Charlie Parker in St. Louis, I even played with him there, while I was still in high school. We always used to try to play like Diz and Charlie Parker. When we heard that they were coming to town, my friend and I were the first people in the hall, me with a trumpet under my arm. Diz walked up to me and said, Kid, do you have a union card? I said, Sure. So I sat in with the band that night. I couldn’t read a thing from listening to Diz and Bird. Then the third trumpet man got sick. I knew the book because I loved the music so much I knew the third part by heart. So I played with the band for a couple of weeks. I had to go to New York then.

My mother wanted me to go to Fisk University. I looked in the Esquire book and I asked her, Where’s all of this? Then I asked my father. He said I didn’t have to go to Fisk, I could go to big New York City. In September I was in New York City. A friend of mine was studying at Juilliard, so I decided to go there too. I spent my first week in New York and my first month’s allowance looking for Charlie Parker.

I roomed with Charlie Parker for a year. I used to follow him around, down to 52nd Street, where he used to play. Then he used to get me to play. Don’t be afraid, he used to tell me. Go ahead and play. Every night I’d write down chords I heard on matchbook covers. Everybody helped me. Next day I’d play those chords all day in the practice room at Juilliard, instead of going to classes.

I didn’t start writing music until I met Gil Evans. He told me to write something and send it to him. I did. It was what I played on the piano. Later I found out I could do better without the piano. (I took some piano lessons at Juilliard, but not enough.) If you don’t play it good enough, you’ll be there for hours and hours.

If you can hear a note, you can play it. The note I hit that sounds high, that’s the only one I can play right then, the only note I can think of to play that would fit. You don’t learn to play the blues. You just play. I don’t even think about harmony. It just comes. You learn where to put notes so they’ll sound right. You just don’t do it because it’s a funny chord. I used to change things because I wanted to hear them—substitute progressions and things. Now I have better taste.

Do I like composing better than playing? I can’t answer that. There’s a certain feeling you get from playing that you can’t get from composing. And when you play, it’s like a composition anyway. You make the outline. What do I like to play? I like ’Round About Midnight. In fact, I like most any ballad. If I feel like playing it.

What do I think of my own playing? I don’t keep any of my records. I can’t stand to hear them after I’ve made them. The only ones I really like are the ones I just made with Gil Evans (Miles Ahead), the one I made with J. J. ( Johnson) on my Blue Note date about four years ago, and a date I did with Charlie Parker.

People ask me if I respond to the audience. I wouldn’t like to sit up there and play without anybody liking it. If it’s a large audience, I’m very pleased because they are there anyway. If it’s a small audience, sometimes it doesn’t matter. I enjoy playing with my own rhythm section and listening to them. I’m studying and experimenting all the time.

I know people have some rhythm and they feel things when they’re good. A person has to be an invalid not to show some sign—a tap of the finger even. You don’t have to applaud. I never look for applause. In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.

If you play good for eight bars, it’s enough. For yourself. And I don’t tell anybody.

AN AFTERNOON WITH MILES DAVIS

Interviewer: Nat Hentoff

The Jazz Review, December 1958

In 1958 Miles Davis’s reputation as a formidable jazz musician in his own right was affirmed by both his fiery concert performances with his great quintet of John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Red Garland (piano), Paul Chambers (double bass), and Philly Joe Jones (drums) and by its transformation into a sextet when he included Julian Cannonball Adderley (alto saxophone) in the band. The long-playing records of Milestones, ’Round About Midnight, and the Gil Evans collaboration of Miles Ahead placed the young trumpeter within the American jazz pantheon. Nat Hentoff was a jazz critic with a reputation both within his profession and among jazz musicians. He was, along with Leonard Feather, one of the only critics for whom Davis expressed any respect and admiration.

Miles lives in a relatively new building on Tenth Avenue near 57th Street. The largest area in his apartment is the living room. Like the other rooms, it is uncluttered. The furnishings have been carefully selected and are spare. Miles has a particular liking for good wood and explains thereby why his DownBeat plaques—and even his Four Roses Award from the Randall’s Island festival—are all displayed. He has a good piano and an adequate non-stereo record player.

The idea of the afternoon—the first of a series of observations by Miles to be printed at regular intervals [Editors: It would be the first and the last due to financial restraints.] in this monthly—was to play a variety of recordings for him and transcribe his reactions. This was not a blindfold test, for while I find those adventures in skeet shooting entertaining, I doubt if they serve much purpose except transitory titillation.

First was Billie Holiday’s 1937 I Must Have That Man with Wilson, Clayton, Goodman, Young, Green, Page and Jo Jones. I love the way Billie sings, Miles began. She sings like Lester Young and Louis Armstrong play, but I don’t like all that’s going on behind her. All she needed was Lester and the rhythm. The piano was ad-libbing while she was singing, which leads to conflict, and the guitar was too loud and had too much accent on every beat.

Miles was asked whether he agreed with most of the writers on jazz that the Billie of twenty years ago was the best Billie and that she is now in decline. "I’d rather hear her now. She’s become much more mature. Sometimes you can sing words every night for five years, and all of a sudden it dawns on you what the song means. I played ‘My Funny Valentine’ for a long time—and didn’t like it—and all of a sudden it meant something. So with Billie, you know she’s not thinking now what she was in 1937, and she’s probably learned more about different things. And she still has control, probably more control now than then. No, I don’t think she’s in decline.

"What I like about Billie is that she sings it just the way she hears it and that’s usually the way best suited for her. She has more feeling than Ella and more experience in living a certain way than Ella. Billie’s pretty wild, you know.

"She sings way behind the beat and then she brings it up—hitting right on the beat. You can play behind the beat, but every once in a while you have to cut into the rhythm section on the beat and that keeps everybody together. Sinatra does it by accenting a word. A lot of singers try to sing like Billie, but just the act of playing behind the beat doesn’t make it sound soulful.

I don’t think that guys like Buck Clayton are the best possible accompanists for her. I’d rather hear her with Bobby Tucker, the pianist she used to have. She doesn’t need any horns. She sounds like one anyway.

Miles’ reaction to Clifford Brown’s Joy Spring as played by the Oscar Peterson Trio on The Modern Jazz Quartet and The Oscar Peterson Trio at the Opera House (Verve MG-V 8269) was intensely negative. "Oscar makes me sick because he copies everybody. He even had to learn how to play the blues. Everybody knows that if you flat a third, you’re going to get a blues sound. He learned that and runs it into the ground worse than Billy Taylor. You don’t have to do that.

Now take the way he plays the song. That’s not what Clifford meant. He passes right over what can be done with the chords, and here Miles demonstrated on the piano, as he did frequently during the afternoon. "It’s much prettier if you get into it and hear the chord weaving in and out like Bill Evans and Red Garland could do—instead of being so heavy. Oscar is jazzy; he jazzes up the tune. And he sure has devices, like certain scale patterns, that he plays all the time.

"Does he swing hard like some people say? I don’t know what they mean when they say ‘swing hard’ anyway. Nearly everything he plays, he plays with the same degree of force. He leaves no holes for the rhythm section. The only thing I ever heard him play that I liked was his first record of Tenderly.

"I love Ray Brown. As for Herb Ellis, I don’t like that kind of thing with guitar on every beat—unless you play it like Freddie Green does now. You listen and you’ll hear how much Green has lightened his sound through the years. If you want to see how it feels with a heavy guitar, get up to play sometimes with one of them behind you. He’ll drive you nuts.

Back to Oscar. He plays pretty good when he plays in an Art Tatum form of ballad approach. And I heard him play some blues once at a medium tempo that sounded pretty good. But for playing like that with a guitar, I prefer Nat Cole. I feel though that it’s a waste to use a guitar this way. If you take the guitar and have him play lines—lines like George Russell, Gil Evans or John Lewis could make—then a trio can sound wonderful.

The next record was a track from Kenny Clarke Plays André Hodeir (Epic LN3376). It was Miles’ own Swing Spring and these are Hodeir’s notes on the arrangement: "Swing Spring is also treated as a canon, after an introduction featuring an elaboration of the main element of the theme, the scale. Martial Solal’s brilliant solo is followed by a paraphrase with integrated drum improvisations. Both Armand Migiani (baritone sax) and Roger Guerin (trumpet) take a short solo."

Miles hadn’t looked carefully at the liner notes and was puzzled for the first few bars. That’s my tune, isn’t it? I forgot all about that tune. Goddamn! Kenny Clarke can swing, can’t he? That boy Solal can play, but the pianist I like in Europe is Bengt Hallberg. Damn! You know, I forgot I wrote that. That’s the wrong middle—in the piano solo—why does he do that? Because it’s easier, I suppose. The arrangement is terrible. It was never meant to be like that. It sounds like a tired modern painting—with skeletons in it. He writes pretty good in spots, but he overcrowds it. Kenny and Solal save it. I think I’ll make another record of this tune. It was meant to be just like an exercise almost. Miles went to the piano