The Man Miles

 

Miles The Autobiography by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe

 Sometimes, to really develop an understanding of the life of a great artist, it’s not enough to go to the internet and read Wikipedia. I have listened to the music of Miles Davis for nearly thirty years, more or less since the time of his passing. His mid-period music was a companion to me in my 20s, and the electric era of the late 60s in my 30s. I knew only a little of his life and his development.

It has been long overdue, but this spring I bought The Autobiography, rolled up my literary sleeves (do I have those?) and dived in.

Miles’ autobiography is a remarkable doorstep of a book. It is a little over 400 pages in paperback, and considering he died in his mid-60s it is a record of an amazingly full life. I can’t say a well-lived life, because Miles admitted frequently that he made lots of mistakes. His output, however, was prodigious despite several years in isolation and a similar period handicapped by heroin in the early 1950s.

This book comes with an elephant-sized caveat: it is written as Miles spoke it, full of swearing. In a similar way to Irvine Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’, in the end you stop seeing the language and listen to the voice. I’d like to know more about how much time Quincy Troupe took putting the contents of the book together, and how he came around to deciding how much to include and what to omit. It’s Miles’ voice coming through loud and clear, and because of that it’s such an important book for the history of music. It’s interesting to find out that as well as being a biographer, Troupe is a poet.

Miles began his life in East St Louis, and it is an important part of his life that his parents were successful, wealthy people. His father was a doctor and politically active, and his mother musical. He was lucky to learn music at the right place at the right time, and Miles was taught by Elwood Buchanan, his first teacher and mentor. Buchanan was important in helping Miles to find his musical voice, to the extent that he is credited right at the end of the book and not forgotten. From East St Louis Miles made a series of fortunate choices and began his musical journey in New York City in 1944, where he met Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. They became the Holy Trinity of Bebop, and ultimately of all jazz. Bird died young, a victim of excess, but Dizzy and Miles remained friends throughout their lives.

It might be easy to assume that Miles’ talent was God-given and that he didn’t have to work at it. The book makes it abundantly clear that Miles was a student of music for all of his fifty years of playing. He studied at Julliard in New York, read music, and read and listened widely to a wide range of musicians.

His first great period was from 1944 until 1949. He was a few months too young to be involved in the Second World War. In immediate post-war New York, he was right at the centre of a vibrant melting pot of new ideas. Miles makes it clear that this initial period was joyous, and changed quickly when the audience changed from largely a black population to returning GIs, the latter of whom wanted to be entertained rather than to listen.

Drugs played a big part in Miles’ life and he is honest in his assessment of how damaging they were for him. Like Bird, he developed a heroin habit in 1949 and spiralled downward into addiction. He did not emerge from the swamp until 1954. From 1954, with his health returning to him and a creative spark of new collaborations, he entered a period of breath-taking creativity. Right through to the early 1960s, he was at the forefront of amazing music. He spoke so warmly of his collaboration with Gil Evans in this period, and called him his best friend.

Something that confused me about the book is how the process of creating his greatest music is not at the centre of the text. Instead, he tended to talk about the musicians and the revolving door of talented performers that he used to create the sound he needed. He quickly became a leader. I had expected a deeper dissection of the process of recording, for example, ‘Kind of Blue’.

Opinions vary, but I think his greatest recording is ‘InA Silent Way’ from 1969. I have returned to the album many times over the last twenty years. I would love to have seen more about how he recorded it.

The second great trial of his life, after beating heroin, was a retirement in the mid to late 70s and a hermit-lie existence dominated by cocaine. As with heroin, he is blunt and honest about the mistakes he made and the way he managed to pull himself up and out of a dark time. He is generous in the way he acknowledged the support of friends and partners, but clear that in the end he had to make the decision himself to step back into the world and clean up.

Miles’ book is dominated by race. He doesn’t mince his words. It is impressive how his thoughts, written in the late 80s, are still on the mark today. He would despair at the racism that has overtaken America in the latest wave of fascist Trump ideology. The dominant theme for Miles was that the creativity of people of colour was always appropriated by white promoters, and the originators disenfranchised. Any time that a studio head could replace an original voice of colour with a white face, he would do. Hindsight reveals that it has happened many times since Chet Baker was promoted as a sanitised alternative to the real geniuses of jazz and is still happening today. Miles’ brutal put-down of the grinning hangers-on when he was invited to a dinner at Reagan’s White House was brilliant and intelligent.

In the final quarter of the book Miles ruminated on the future of music. He recognised that Jimi Hendrix was a musician with the same spirit as him, and they were close to collaboration before Jimi’s untimely death. And finally, in a far-sighted look into the future, Miles chose Prince as his worthy successor. That says everything you need to know about how well he understood music and knew what would last and what would fade away.

He was a musical forefather, largely unrecognised today, who needs to be studied and discussed far more widely. The current soul-searching by the Biden administration as they pick over the smouldering wreckage of Trumpism should be an opportunity to re-evaluate. Maybe all music students should be asked to study Miles as closely as Mozart.

Four pages before the end of his book, he said,

“I think the schools should teach the kids about jazz and black music. Kids should know that America’s only real cultural contribution is the music that our black forefathers brought from Africa which was changed and developed here. African music should be studied as much as European (‘classical’) music”.