Running the voodoo down
Director Stanley Nelson on the challenges of condensing Miles Davis's wild life into a two-hour documentary
ÒIF anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change,” said Miles Davis. It’s a fitting quote to kick off Miles Davis: The Birth Of The Cool –a cradle-to-grave journey through the life of an artist who changed the course of music several times. In two hours, veteran documentary maker Stanley Nelson whizzes through 65 years in the life of the self-styled Prince Of Darkness: from East St Louis to 52nd Street, via heroin and coke addiction, gruelling throat and hip operations, and troubled relationships with women – all accompanied by that haunted, Harmon-muted trumpet.
The filmmakers interviewed more than 150 people, including some big-name sidekicks – Kind Of Blue drummer Jimmy Cobb is joined by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Ron Carter from the classic quintet, along with Lenny White, Mike Stern, Marcus Miller, saxophonist Jimmy Heath, Heath’s son James Mtume and French pianist René Urtreger. Others are used fleetingly – Archie Shepp makes a brief appearance to tell us that Miles once told him to fuck off; Parisian muse Juliette Greco explains that, “Miles said he couldn’t marry me because he loved me too much”. With the help of Miles’s family, the producers were also able to track down old childhood friends of Davis from St Louis, plus friends and lovers from the last few years of his life.
“There were some great bits we didn’t have room for,” says producer Nicole London. “Footage from shows in Europe and Japan, transcriptions of his work while he studied at Julliard. We even had a recording of his voice before it changed – before the operation on his throat tumour, after which he spoke with a permanent growl.”
That distinctive growl is replicated in the film by the actor Carl Lumbley. “Initially we wanted to use Miles’s actual voice to narrate the film, taken from 40 hours of Dictaphone cassettes that we got from his biographer Quincey Troupe,” says director Stanley Nelson. “Sadly the sound quality wasn’t good enough. So instead we got Carl to re-voice all of the quotes, doing his best Miles impression. Carl is a very straight-up guy who doesn’t like cursing, but after a few ‘muthafuckers’ his delivery was just perfect!”
The film doesn’t gloss over Miles’s more unpleasant traits. The highlight is an interview with his first wife, the dancer Frances Taylor who died last November, aged 89. She lists the Hollywood stars she rejected for Miles and then explains how the jealous musician forced her to give up her successful dancing career – including a dream role that she’d landed in West Side Story. She also details Miles’s violent assaults upon her before she left him in 1965. “Miles said, ‘Whoever gets Frances after me is a lucky muthafucker’,” she says, with a grin. “He was right.”
Inevitably there is much missing, or unexplored. The police assault on Miles outside Birdland in 1959, which nearly started a riot in Manhattan, deserves its own documentary. The non-participation of ex-partners Betty Mabry and Cicely Tyson also hampers the story. “We could easily have done two hours on every decade of Miles’s life,” says Nelson. “But we’d have approached things in a completely different way. I wanted something concise to appeal to newcomers as much as obsessives. Streaming has encouraged filmmakers to go on forever. Things are too damn long these days!”
Miles Davis: The Birth Of The Cool is in cinemas now and on BBC2 early next year. The soundtrack album follows on February 7
“There were some great bits we didn’t have room for – we even had a recording of his voice before it changed” NICOLE LONDON, PRODUCER