The six lives of a subversive genius
Miles Davis, who would have turned 90 on May 26, still enchants and beguiles, writes Oyama Mabandla
‘SOMETHING feels not quite right about subjecting Don DeLillo to the ordinary critical apparatus. I don’t read a DeLillo novel for its plot, character, and setting: for who betrayed whom and how hard life with mother was; for Phoenix days and Bombay nights; or for how to tune a fiddle. I read a DeLillo novel for its sentences. And sentence by sentence, DeLillo magically slips the knot of criticism and gives his readers what Nabokov maintained was all that mattered in life and art: individual genius. Sentence by sentence, DeLillo seduces. And I don’t just mean on the question of thumbs up or down; I mean that his sentences juke and weave around the best defences, so that not only is the playing field of the past 50 years strewn with conservative critics of all stripes, but text, subtext, ultimate meanings remain elusive and the game, at least in part, seems so original to him.”
The author of this extract from a review of DeLillo’s latest offering, Zero K, could have been writing about Miles Davis, who has been dead for 25 years, and would have turned 90 on May 26. For six decades Davis enchanted, beguiled and infuriated all of us with his subversive, transgressive genius.
“With one note, his lyricism gripped the heart’s attention. His spacious solos gave room to life’s mystery. Over six decades he proved to be a stylistic shapeshifter akin to Picasso in the visual arts: Davis was never content with complacency,” read the programme note for the celebration of Davis’s 90th anniversary, by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, in New York, under the artistic direction of jazz prodigy and noted Davis critic Wynton Marsalis.
“He followed his artistic muse, from varieties of jazz in an acoustic vein from the late 1940s to the mid-’60s, to electronic music fusing rock, pop, funk, and even elements from the soundscape of the German classical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in the late ’60s through 1991,” it continued.
That Marsalis was honouring Davis with a three-day programme at his temple of jazz, the Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, was a commendable volte-face.
“Miles Davis: The Sorcerer at 90” marked a symbolic rapprochement, and an end to the schism between jazz purists and those who believe jazz is an evolving groove.
Marsalis’s embrace of the iconography of Davis connected him to a legacy and history that has been a missing link in his orchestra’s oeuvre. I mean, you can’t really style yourself as the pre-eminent interpreter of the jazz idiom and omit from your repertoire that idiom’s most influential innovator.
Davis is said to have changed the shape of jazz no fewer than six times.
His genesis was in bebop and he featured on the seminal Charlie Parker 1945 recording of Now’s the Time. The 19-year-old, who had recently dropped out of the Juilliard School, contributed Donna Lee (co-written with Parker), to the recording session, although he was dominated by Dizzy Gillespie, the other trumpeter on the album.
Four years later, Davis would take jazz in a different direction with the “cool” movement, inaugurated by his Birth of the Cool sessions, where, playing with a nonet, he sought to “cool” the frenetic edge of bebop with a classical sensibility.
This was his first revolution and would be followed about five years later by “hard bop”, featuring John Coltrane on saxophones, Philly Joe Jones on drums, Red Garland on piano and Paul Chambers on bass in his first great quintet.
Hard bop, which was characterised by tight chordal arrangements, reached its apogee with Coltrane’s Giant Steps in 1959.
But a new direction was needed, and Davis would find it, with 1959’s Kind of Blue, the biggestselling jazz album in history, introducing the modal revolution and jettisoning the chordal structure dominant in the Western harmonic tradition. Scales and modes were used instead of chords to free up the feel and texture of the music. The breathtaking innovation signalled his fourth change of direction in a decade.
Coterminous with his hard bop foray, Davis would also introduce the “third wave” with Gil Evans, essentially an infusion of swing with classical tropes, encapsulated in groundbreaking recordings such as Sketches of Spain, and Miles Ahead.
And then, following Coltrane’s departure from the first great quintet, came the era of Davis’s “second-greatest” quintet — Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and Ron Carter. The music defied easy taxonomies. Its output was protean: bebop, cool, hard and modal. Listen to a tune like Nefertiti, and you hear echoes of Ravel’s Bolero. Davis had long been a fan of classical musicians such as Chopin, Debussy, Stravinsky and Ravel, a result perhaps of his classical training at Juilliard.
And in Filles de Kilimanjaro, the fusion revolution is prefigured. This era introduced the incomparable musicianship of Shorter, the musical director of this quintet, the sublime Hancock on piano, the stentorian syncopation of Carter on bass and the sorcery of Williams on drums. Williams, who was in his teens when he joined the quintet, was arguably the dominant figure of the band — the creative spark, as Davis described him. The band was every jazz lover’s wet dream.
Davis, never content to rest on his laurels, would change direction again — seismically and radically — with his move into the sonic vibe of fusion jazz, an amalgam of jazz, funk and rock. Davis was responding to the ’60s zeitgeist — to the tumult on US streets, to Woodstock, flower power and the Vietnam War protests.
You can feel the tumult, anomie and ’60s rebellion in Bitches Brew. This is the music Davis would play from around 1968 until his five-year “retirement” from music in 1975 and featured such coruscating gems as In a Silent Way, On the Corner and Live-Evil. This was Davis’s fifth and most consequential movement. It would also be his most controversial, eliciting vitriolic criticism, notably from Marsalis.
After returning from five years in self-imposed exile, Davis would assume a pop persona, rearranging popular tunes such as Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time and Michael Jackson’s Human Nature. But with Marcus Miller he would also produce such luminosities as Tutu and Amandla, an ode to the struggle for liberation in South Africa. Borrowing from Edward Said’s exegesis of Beethoven’s later works, I want to call this era — Davis’s sixth — the late style.
The 15-piece orchestra Marsalis assembled for this celebration were faithful to all six eras. They opened with Donna Lee and the floodgates of musical wizardry opened. We were hustled, mauled, importuned, mugged and ultimately upended by what the band threw at us. It was sheer sorcery. Marsalis melded into the background as a sideman, allowing trumpeter Marcus Printup and drummer Ali Jackson — the musical directors of the programme — to dominate. But he led with explosive solos in Boplicity and Deception, both from the Davis “cool” school. They went through Dear Old Stockholm, My Funny Valentine and FranDance from the hard bop era; ESP and Eighty One from the era of the second-greatest quintet; Gone, from Porgy and Bess (the third wave); Selim — the ananym of Miles — from the fusion era; Someday My Prince Will Come and Seven Steps to Heaven, from the modal school. They finished with Tutu from the “late style” era.
Now, imagine listening to a 15piece orchestra wrestle, tussle and joust with Tutu. It’s otherworldly. It was particularly satisfying to see Marsalis, the purist, engaged with this piece. I just wanted to holler with delight. Miller, the composer, was in the audience, not far from where I was sitting. I turned in his direction, bowed and mouthed: “Je suis Tutu. Merci beaucoup frère.” I am not sure if he noticed me. It did not matter. And why I was afflicted with Gallic affectation at this particular moment remains an imponderable. It must have been a “Pentecostal moment” — when people moved by the celestial spirit speak in tongues. The majesty of the Arch and Miles Davis could do no less. And in my Pentecostal delirium, I glimpsed the possibility of our country emerging from the morass of its increasingly rapid putrefaction.
Mabandla is a businessman
His lyricism gripped the heart. His solos gave room to life’s mystery We were hustled, mauled, importuned, mugged and upended