A HOT TAKE ON COOL
New PBS documentary examines Miles Davis’s talent and turmoil
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool Tuesday, PBS
They say cats have nine lives. Some cool cats, like Miles Davis, seem to have even more lives than that.
Born in 1926 in the small town of Alton, Ill., and raised in East St. Louis, Davis was drawn to music from an early age. At 13, his father gave him a trumpet — a bone of some contention, since his mother had wanted him to play the violin. That parental discord sadly gave Davis an early exposure to domestic violence, later to infect many of his own marital and other personal relationships.
Growing up amid an abusive relationship “has to affect us somehow,” Davis says in his own words narrated by actor Carl Lumbly, “although I don’t really know how.”
Davis’s father was a dentist and gentleman farmer — as one family friend says, even as a black man, “the second-richest guy in the state of Illinois.”
But neither skill nor financial security could protect them from the inherent prejudice of the U.S. South in the Jim Crow era. St. Louis, Davis tells us, “was racist to the bone.”
Salvation and escape came through that horn.
“Music has always been like a curse for me,” Lumbly as Davis says.
“I’ve always been driven to play it. … It’s always been there. It comes before everything.” But alas, music did not always come before everything. Sometimes — in fact, several times — alcohol and hard drugs would bar the way.
In Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, part of the PBS American Masters series, documentary maker Stanley Nelson covers a six-decade musical roller-coaster in two hours through the words of Davis himself and through friends, family and music historians. Also on tap is an impressive array of fellow musicians and collaborators — Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones and more. That’s the level of talent that Davis, at his height and even in his depths, could attract.
He moved in 1944 to New York, partly for serious study at the famed Juilliard music school (“I wanted to see what was going on in all kinds of music,” Davis says.
“He wanted to be an artist just like Stravinsky,” Jones says. “Just a pure artist.”)
But the other draw was the jazz clubs of 52nd Street, “where the action was.”
A tour in postwar Paris introduced him to French artists and intellectuals (Picasso, Sartre) who treated him as an equal. So a return to the U.S., its racial segregation still very much alive, hit him hard and led to serious alcohol and heroin abuse. “I lost my sense of discipline,” he says, “and started to drift” A self-imposed detox later got him back on track. At least for a time.
With the 1957 album Birth of the Cool, Davis found a mellow, improvisational sound that put him on the musical map and secured a lucrative deal with Capitol Records. But it was 1959’s Kind of Blue that solidified his fame. At more than four million copies sold in the U.S. alone, it remains the bestselling jazz album ever.
But even at those heights, racism can intrude.
While Davis was headlining New York’s famed Birdland club in August 1959, his name in lights on the marquee under which he’d taken a break to smoke a cigarette, a cop on the beat accosted him for loitering. But it was a passing off-duty New York detective who joined in and bashed him on the head, sending him to hospital bleeding.
Davis broadened his musical style in the decades that followed, arguably helping lay the foundation for everything from acid jazz to electronica to hip hop. But a car accident and severe depression led to more drug use and spiralled him into a dark period of living in squalor. From 1975 to ’80 he didn’t even touch his horn. But actress Cicely Tyson, his third wife, helped him get clean, return to music and even become a successful painter.
He returned to the concert hall and later to jazz festivals, Vancouver and Montreux among them. But years of drug and abuse and other health issues finally caught up with him in 1991, when he died in a California hospital.
Fellow painter Jo Gelbard was with him at the end and has nearly the final word in this documentary: “He said, ‘When God punishes you, it’s not that you don’t get what you want. You get everything that you want. And there’s no time left.’”