They sit there gently glowing in a display case, picked out by spotlights.
Above them, elegantly mournful music plays, and one by one the faithful come
to gaze. These burnished objects could be holy relics — in fact to some
music fans they are. A Martin trumpet and a Selmer tenor saxophone, the
brass scuffed and worn, played by, respectively, Miles Davis and John
Coltrane in the 1950s, sit in their own room serenaded by the music that
they once helped to create — the iconic Kind of Blue album.
This listening space is one of a series in the vast and brilliantly realised We
Want Miles exhibition, newly opened in Paris, complete with artwork,
instruments, the rakish stage clothes of the final years, and wall-size
video projections of key Miles Davis performances.
This has turned out to be quite a year for the Dark Prince. He may have died
after a stroke in 1991 but his brooding presence still looms large over the
jazz world and beyond. The 50th anniversary of Kind of Blue has been
marked with maximum hoopla: rereleases, books and a tour led by the one
surviving band member, the drummer Jimmy Cobb. Famed as the jazz album that
even jazz haters like to own, it’s reputed still to sell 5,000 copies a
week. A Miles biopic by the director Don Cheadle is slated for 2011.
A glance at the programme of this month’s London Jazz Festival reveals a list
of players who cut their teeth with Miles and who are now principal
performers: the guitarist John Scofield, the pianist Chick Corea, the
bassist Dave Holland, the drummer Lenny White. A later collaborator, Marcus
Miller, will be re-creating the chilled electronic textures of Tutu,
the trumpeter’s last great work. Christian Scott takes Miles’s role. And
that’s before we get to players who merely owe a stylistic debt to Miles —
such as Tomasz Stanko, the current master of ethereal trumpet melancholy,
also due in London.
Sony, which knows a phenomenon when it hears one, is about to release The
Complete Columbia Collection — 52 albums on 70 CDs, including some
little-heard material, such as the first full audio recording of the
electric assault on the hippies at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970.
So why, 18 years on, does the world still care? Miles’s celebrated urge to
keep moving — to play music that was one minute beguiling, the next baffling
(“It’s my curse”) is one reason. There are albums, such as the once-reviled On
the Corner, from 1972, that fans have only slowly learnt to love. But
music aside, Miles remains an eminently marketable star: the strings of
wives and girlfriends, the Ferraris, the rage, the battle against drugs ...
even the depression and illnesses add to his brooding charisma. His
cultivated anti-star persona — now copied by every shoe-gazing rocker — and
the obfuscation in press interviews about his childhood in St Louis long
added to the mystique. Today’s jazz names — from Diana Krall to Pat Metheny
— look a meek lot by comparison. And even if you don’t like the music, Miles
makes a cool T-shirt.
It’s significant too, that since his death, no other jazz figure has been able
to wield the same influence — which is reflected in the music’s current
disparate state (though you could argue that that was healthy). True, Wynton
Marsalis led a much-publicised campaign to ditch the heresy of electric
jazz-rock but the acoustic results were often not unlike what Miles had
already thoroughly explored in the 1950s and early 1960s.
There are dissenters, of course, who claim that the trumpeter took undue
credit for the work of collaborators — be they Gil Evans, Bill Evans, Joe
Zawinul or Marcus Miller — a sort of Forrest Gump of jazz. No one can love
every phase — from bebop to Hendrix freak-out to shiny synth-pop (for me,
beyond 1972 the pickings are slim). Miles’s changes of style every five
years or so left a trail of angry fans and shunned former colleagues — just
as, domestically, his ego left a trail of emotional wreckage.
But in this anniversary year, few would deny that something magical happened
in 1959 when six musicians convened in a high-ceilinged converted church in
New York and in two sessions totalling nine hours recorded Kind of Blue.
Compositionally, it was significant because the band employed a new approach
— playing off scales rather than improvising over chord sequences as jazzmen
had always done. The modal style would open up new musical possibilities and
it was the soulful, lyrical way that the band responded to the skeletal
musical notation that caught — and continues to capture — listeners’ ears.
The six managed to do that rarest of things — make an album that transcended
its own time and place.
Kind of Blue “is the most singular of sounds, yet among the most
ubiquitous. It is the sound of isolation that has sold itself to millions,”
says Richard Williams in his recent study The Blue Moment. Suddenly
jazz was no longer good-time Negro music: Miles had tapped into something
more profound, and its effect, Williams argues, can be appreciated only with
hindsight. “Kind of Blue’s atmosphere — slow, rapt, dark,
meditative, luminous — began to become all-pervasive.” It was music people
needed — a mood of calm contemplation for troubled Western souls. The author
goes on to divine an influence on artists as diverse as John Adams, The Who,
Brian Eno and U2. James Brown’s most copied riff, from Cold Sweat,
is a reworking of Miles’s So What. An entire, and very
successful, record label – Manfred Eicher’s ECM – was founded to make music
in the spirit of Kind of Blue.
And it’s one of the reasons for the queues snaking through the foyer at the
Paris exhibition. Over two floors and 800 sq m, We Want Miles divides
the 50-year career into thematic sequences. On display are manuscripts,
vintage albums, Miles’s letters demanding more money, images of him boxing,
with Juliette Greco, with his wives, and finally looking old and frail in
the back of a limo. There is art inspired by Miles and his own so-so oil
paintings. Visitors are given headphones for the interactive exhibits, but
the most impressive audio element is the “mutes”, oval-shaped listening
rooms within the display areas. Enter these dimly lit caverns and the sounds
of key albums envelop you. Sadly, the exhibition won’t be coming to London;
it’s due in Toronto next.
What would the trumpeter make of all the fuss today? Miles famously would not
revisit his old selves. The nearest he ventured to another Kind of Blue
moment was in the luminous calm of In a Silent Way ten years later.
Only months before his death, perhaps sensing that the end was near, did the
trumpeter consent to a couple of shows, in Paris and Montreux, playing old
material (what a contrast with today’s nostalgically minded, perpetually
re-assembling rock bands). The pianist Keith Jarrett once observed: “I think
that Miles would have preferred to have a bad group playing bad music rather
than to play as he did before.”
But with his brittle pride — and the trauma of growing up and working in a
segregated America — Miles often felt his successes were insufficiently
recognised. When asked in later years why he had stopped calling his style
jazz — he preferred the term “social music” — he replied: “Jazz means you’re
a nigger, and you play an instrument you didn’t study.” He was annoyed when
the bands of his protégés — Headhunters, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather
Report — won more fans than his own.
In later years Miles liked to boast that he had changed the course of music
five or six times. He may not have wanted to dwell on his achievements, but
he surely wanted the rest of the world to.
Miles Davis: The Complete Columbia Album Collection is released by Sony
on Nov 23; The Blue Moment by Richard Williams is published by Faber
and Faber; We Want Miles is at the Cité de la Musique, Paris, until
Jan 17;
for London Jazz Festival dates, visit www.londonjazzfestival.org.uk
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