FORGIVE US...:

Miles Passed, Miles Ahead (KRIN GABBARD, 5/18/2001, Chronicle Review)

From the outset, Miles Davis bore little resemblance to other jazz trumpeters. Louis Armstrong, Charlie Shavers, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, and the other African-American men who made their mark with the trumpet did not come from wealthy backgrounds. Following Armstrong, they all made flamboyant use of the trumpet to establish a masculine identity in a culture that viciously punished black men who demonstrated their manhood in more conventional ways.

The dominant trumpet style among African-Americans before Davis was bold, fast, and full of climactic assaults on the upper register. Although Davis could keep up with aggressively masculine trumpeters, he was more likely to use the middle register of his instrument -- often muffled with a stemless Harmon mute -- to create lyrical, haunting solos that revealed vulnerability along with virility. Especially on ballads, Davis's muted solos suggested the earthy whispers of a highly attentive lover. Women and men alike have found them to be the epitome of musical seduction.

Perhaps Davis's relatively low-key and introverted approach to playing was related to the unusual affluence in which he was raised. His father was a successful oral surgeon who raised horses on a 300-acre farm near the family home in East St. Louis, Ill. Although the young Davis had to suffer the same indignities as any African-American living in America in the 1930's and 1940's, he had the kind of economic security that few other blacks enjoyed and thus had less reason to prove his worth. As an adult, he did not feel obliged to smile in the face of racism, as did Louis Armstrong and other artists of previous jazz generations. In an episode that made headlines in 1959, he was beaten bloody after talking back to a white policeman who had told him to "move along" while he was standing in front of the nightclub where he was the featured performer.

Thanks to the largess of his father, Davis had already studied classical trumpet for several years with first-chair symphony players in St. Louis when he came to New York, in 1944, to enroll at the Juilliard School of Music. John F. Szwed of Yale University, whose brilliant biography of Sun Ra suggests that his much-awaited Davis biography may be definitive, argues that the timbre of Davis's midregister, almost vibratoless trumpet, which became the paradigmatic "cool" sound, was basically the result of a classically trained musician playing jazz.

But at Juilliard, Davis paid little attention to the classical canon and vigorously pursued Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and the "bebop" artists who were transforming jazz in the 1940's. Davis brought an education in classical music to the even-more-daunting college run by the beboppers on 52nd Street, and uptown at Minton's Playhouse. A photograph of Davis from that period shows him looking up in wide-eyed awe at the trumpeter Howard McGhee, a prominent peer of Gillespie.

Davis survived and even transcended the boppers' hothouse conservatory. Seeking a viable alternative to bebop, he arrived in 1947 at the apartment of the white composer-arranger Gil Evans, a mentor to a group of jazz experimentalists in New York. According to a forthcoming biography of Evans by the jazz journalist Stephanie Stein Crease (Gil Evans: Out of the Cool, to be published this year by A Capella/Chicago Review Press), Davis had taken note of Evans's arrangements for Claude Thornhill's unusual dance orchestra, anticipating cool jazz with a relaxed sound cushioned by French horn and tuba. Davis and Evans began a rich artistic collaboration and a lasting friendship that withstood the racial tensions that destroyed many relationships between black and white jazz artists in the 1950's and 60's.

Evans did some of the composing and arranging for the nonet recordings made in 1949 and released a few years later on LP as Birth of the Cool. But it was the 23-year-old Davis who exploited his contacts with club owners to find bookings for the band. Thanks to Davis, a rehearsal band ended up with a public forum in which to try out a revolutionary music that put musical textures in the foreground, rather than the soloists who were at the center of bebop performance.

For the rest of his career, Davis surrounded himself with young musicians who were either highly promising or highly unusual. John Coltrane, with whom he worked through much of the 1950's, was both. Kind of Blue, their 1959 collaboration (with Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb), has become the best-selling album in jazz history. At the time, however, Davis was reaching his biggest audience with the ambitious albums he recorded with large ensembles led by Gil Evans, especially Porgy and Bess (1958) and Sketches of Spain (1960). (My personal favorite will always be the 1964 quintet LP My Funny Valentine, only in part because it was a concert to raise money for voter registration in Louisiana and Mississippi.)

Twenty years after the revolutionary Birth of the Cool sessions, and 10 years after Kind of Blue and the LP's with Gil Evans, Davis took the audacious step of embracing electronic music and reaching out to a young audience more attuned to Jimi Hendrix than to Charlie Parker. Although Davis was almost universally reviled by the clerisy of jazz writers for abandoning the true faith of acoustic jazz, some of the music on albums such as Bitches Brew (1969), Live-Evil (1970), and Get Up With It (1970-75) is as complex and challenging as anything he ever recorded.

Although many saw Davis's jump from his acoustic quintet of the mid-1960's to the large fusion ensembles of the 1970's as an opportunistic move toward a larger market, it can also be regarded as part of a gradual progression toward more-abstract, texturally based music that began in his collaborations with Gil Evans.

,,,if we don't find bearing little resemblance to Louis Armstrong to be a plus for a trumpet player.

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Posted by Orrin Judd at September 14, 2008 10:44 AM