CITY OF GABRIEL:

Miles Davis was still in diapers (what a ludicrous thought, that burning, old-before-his-time genius bowlegged with a saggy diaper) when his family moved to East St. Louis. His dad--as brilliant, ambitious, and easily angered as his son would be--built a dentistry practice there (and owned a pig farm in nearby Milstadt). Miles grew up in a gable-roofed house on Kansas Street at North Seventeenth.

It is now a historic landmark, and why am I only now visiting? I love Miles's music so fiercely, I feel entitled to drop the surname; that much appreciation of an artist brings (one-sided) intimacy. I know he spent his childhood here, and I have always felt proud, which is absurd, of that proximity. But I focused on the New York years, Miles chasing Charlie Parker around the city, and the sexy months in Paris, and that inimitable style he had, that concentrated energy.

You see it the minute you walk into the House of Miles: his eyes, glowing light, stare back at you from a huge black-and-white photo, the one where he wears a sleeveless shirt and has his arms raised, maybe after one of the boxing workouts that helped his breath control. He learned to box right here. And Bird was not his first mentor; Elwood Buchanan was. A trumpet player, music teacher, and band director at Lincoln High, Buchanan was probably tilted back in Dr. Davis's chair with his mouth open when he first heard of his dentist's prodigy son. Miles was not yet in high school, but Buchanan gave him private lessons.

I think of Miles walking to school, spitting out raw rice kernels on the way to practice his embouchure, then stopping on the way home to buy snoots. When he was old enough to join the high school band, Buchanan instructed him to play without vibrato and rapped his knuckles every time he forgot: "Stop shakin' that note! You're going to shake enough when you get old."

A mannequin wears Miles's black jacket, fringed in small tight rows, androgynous and timeless. I knew he had style, but standing an inch from that jacket brings it home.

Up steep, narrow stairs to the top story, just an attic when Miles lived here, is a little alcove where he used to practice his horn. Now neighborhood kids come up here and sit for hours, spilling dreams into a journal or staring out the window, maybe seeing the same trees he saw.

The House of Miles director, Lauren Parks, says their next project will be to fix up the basement--that was where Miles brought his first band to practice. By then Buchanan had sent the kid on to his own teacher, Joseph Gustat, first trumpet in the St. Louis Symphony. And introduced him to the inimitable Clark Terry, another reason St. Louis is the City of Gabriel.

Miles kissed his first girl in this house, at his sixth birthday party, and his sister told. He and his high school sweetheart, Irene, had their first child, Cheryl, while he was still living here. He had finished high school early and was already music director for Eddie Randle's Blue Devils. (Irene had dared her boyfriend to call up Eddie Randle and ask for a job.) Soon Miles would fill in for a trumpeter with Billy Eckstine's band and decide that his future was in New York. There, he would write and record a song he named "Cheryl" for his baby girl--and when he came back to St. Louis four years later, it would be with the Jazz at the Philharmonic tour.

Tweet   @brothersjudd