Jazz and the Ambiguity of Influence, Pt. 15: Thoughts on Miles
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| Miles with the Harmon mute in, 1950s |
My main achievement as a musician, I suppose, was mastering the Miles Davis Harmon-mute sound. I didn't have the chops to really play jazz, but I did get that aural part right. And that's not nothing. And it wasn't just the Miles muted sound I got good at. I was also inspired by the open-horn sound of Blue Mitchell, especially from his recordings with John Mayall, such as Jazz-Blues Fusion. It was a full sound that could really stand out and inspire interactive playing from the rhythm section. A quick anecdote, and then I'll move on to a discussion of what made Miles Miles. So it was the 80s in Denver, back when it still had a trace of the old Beat Denver of Kerouac and Cassady, when the warehouse district was actually full of warehouses instead of luxury condos. I was part of the horn section of our reggae/groove band and we were playing an outdoor festival downtown. During an improv section I did some mute playing, which, by the way, if you put the mute in close to the mic sounds incredible on a full "rock band" speaker system. At the end of the song, this black guy appears at the edge of the stage and says to me that he had been all the way across the other side of the festival grounds and when he heard the sound he could have sworn Miles was playing so he just had to come over. Well, I've never forgotten that. I've taken that to the bank, so to speak, and shall present that occasion as my bona fides for sharing a few thoughts on the great and legendary Miles Davis.
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Let's start with the sound, because that's where it begins and ends with Miles. If you listen to his first recordings, which were with Charlie Parker in the 40s when Miles had just arrived in NYC to attend Julliard, you can't really hear much of what Miles became. What you do hear is that he is improvising in a very compositional, if tentative, way. The intention of the lines isn't obscured by an excess of notes and flashy runs. Not only does this make the ideas themselves clearer, the sound of the horn carries more weight. He doesn't have his full Miles sound yet, but he is headed in the direction where this will be paramount. For apt examples of the mature sound, try "Stella By Starlight" from Kind of Blue or "'Round Midnight" from the album 'Round About Midnight. From that same album, "Bye Bye Blackbird" is another great example of the Miles sound. I don't think I'm alone in feeling that once I had heard his rendition of these melodies it's how I would always from that point onward hear them in my mind. Indelible.
And it was the sound and not the playing per se, in my view, that was the raison d'etre for his albums of '59 and '60 with the arranger Gil Evans, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain. Evans created rich and harmonically complex orchestral settings for Davis' solo horn that are in some ways maximal but which featured plenty of "clearings" for the emergence of the qualities that are both the essence of the Miles Davis of myth and a big reason why those records captured the late 50s - early 60s zeitgeist. Back then there was a bullfighting and matador craze, inspired by Hemingway. Now we romanticize kitchens and chefs, which is a bit of a comedown, but I digress. Do you remember the opening scene of Mad Men? Don Draper is hanging with some Beatniks and he puts Sketches on the turntable, and there may even have been a matador poster on the apartment wall. Miles was the matador, brooding and introspective, but heroically alone in the arena, facing death -- which also exemplified the Existentialist philosophy that dominated the postwar period.
Prior to Miles, the dominant trumpet sound was that of Louis Armstrong: ebullient and joyful. When Pops slowed things down it was usually for a mellow blues like "When It's Sleepy Time Down South," done in such a way that it was fun. But Miles did the soul-baring thing. The most memorable Miles performances are his ballads, and they are memorable because of his tone, and also because he was vulnerable enough, despite being a "man's man" type guy, to let people hear what he was saying, what he needed to say. Before moving on to the the attributes of his performance style, I'll just note that a big barrier for me to really loving his work from the 60s, which features his legendary second "great quartet," is his tone, which strikes me as too harsh and brittle. Maybe that's just me. But for my money it's when he starts "going electric" that his tone gets beautiful again. A prime example: In a Silent Way. Then, a little later, the highly-recommended Jack Johnson, where the tone is bright and ringing.
Next to the sound, we think of his use of space as the essence of the Miles Davis style. He would leave many notes or even bars without playing, allowing the rhythm section to come to the fore, while the implications of what Miles had just played simmer in your brain. Leaving space enables the listener to internalize what the soloist is saying better. For some reason, many immature jazz players think that the best way to impress is by filling every measure with as many licks, riffs, and runs as possible. But it's just like conversing. If the person talking just goes and goes without a break, the listener soon zones out. Possibly all these players have been overly influenced by Coltrane. Whatever the case, Miles internalized the wisdom of the sculptural approach to soloing that exemplified early jazz and brought it into the modern era. He did this by utilizing considerable harmonic complexity. I don't have enough technical knowledge to say exactly what chords he's working with but I do know that his choices sound unusual and non cliche. He really embodied that notion of jazz as the "sound of surprise." When the ear hears a natural resolution here, the inventive player goes there. The big influences on harmonic development at the time of Miles' emergence, late 40s - early 50s, were the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and the arranger Gil Evans. Later, in the 60s, Miles explained his aesthetic to Herbie Hancock as avoiding the "butter notes," i.e., the notes that are too easy and comforting, that go down to easy, but which can become overbearing.
Herbie has a bunch of these Teachings From Miles that he loves to share. I won't look those up now, but will share a couple more off the top of my head. One of the most famous anecdotes relates how Coltrane, who was famous for his epic solos, once said to Miles that he often couldn't figure out how to conclude said solos. Miles said, "Take the horn out of your mouth." Another good one comes from the 80s, when Miles had reemerged with an electric band. After one performance, Miles asked the tenor player, Bill Evans, why he had played during a certain section. Evans replied that it sounded so good he just had to jump in there. Miles replied, "It sounded good because you weren't playing." He wasn't saying that Evans was a bad player. Not at all. But rather what the music needed at that time was to be left alone, since it was working just fine the way it was. Miles was the master of knowing when and when not to play. That's because he had a holistic conception of the music. He could step back from and outside of the music even while playing to understand the best aesthetic direction for a performance.
Over the winter I read a book that collected all of Miles' appearances in Downbeat Magazine over the decades. He did a few Blindfold Tests (in which the listener critiques unidentified tracks), and I found these especially revealing. Instead of just analyzing the playing, as so many musicians do, Miles would critique the overall performance and recording -- if tempos were wrong or voicings of instruments were ineffective or sections or motifs were overdone. You would think that this sort of big picture perspective would be more common, since that's a big part of what makes something "art." But jazz is a player's medium, and improvisation absolutely is an art in itself. Thus, the late live recordings of the legendary Sonny Rollins are hailed as indispensable. His playing on these is fierce and wildly creative, but I always react to them through that Miles lens, saying to myself, "Really great playing from Sonny, but the sound of that electric bass is atrocious and distracting, and the trombone player can't maintain the same creative heights as Sonny."
The thing that Miles excelled at above all was creating settings that would make himself sound good. And if you are smart enough and self-aware enough to do that, why wouldn't you? That's why he always got the very best musicians for his bands. His interest was in creating the best music possible, and as leader, this reflected well on him indeed. Let's look at a specific case. When Miles recruited John Coltrane for his 50s quintet, he was selecting a guy who actually had better chops than he did. But instead of drawing attention to that fact, which might make Miles look bad, this actually achieved two positive things aesthetically. First, it created a situation where there was stylistic variety between the two main soloists -- like a buddy movie where the two leads have wildly diverging personalities. It's fun and interesting that way, and it gives your movie, or your band, an identity. The other thing it did was set Miles' minimalist approach in high relief, creating that mood we spoke of earlier, the matador in the arena.
In the end, Miles was protean. Was it he who said, "I have to change, it's like a curse"? He always knew which way the wind was beginning to blow, and then, if he liked it, made it blow harder in that direction. Cool jazz, modal jazz, jazz with orchestra, hard bop, post bop, electric fusion: These are some of the main currents he either established or presented the artsiest take on. His closest 20th-century counterpart in this regard was Bob Dylan. Despite allegations of some critics of the time, these two didn't, for example, "go electric" in order to sell out. As Miles would say, it was just how he was hearing the music. And by the late 60s he wanted to play the music of the time, having been impressed with James Brown and Sly Stone and others. So if his move in that direction was popular in that it got him on the bill at big rock concerts, it most certainly was not popular among a considerable portion of the jazz community. But, in the end, Miles' choices carried the day in the art form. It was Emerson who said that "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." Miles made the case, time and again, that this doubly is so for the jazz musician who would be a master.
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