Miles & Me

by Quincy Troupe

  He paused to collect his thoughts, then continued. “When Bill Cosby won all the awards for best series on television, you could hear a pin drop at the awards ceremony. Because all of those networks outside of NBC had turned his show down. I know because me and Cicely was there. We saw it go down. I think most of them didn’t want the show because it was black and positively black. People want to see blacks crawlin’ around and Uncle Tommin’. And they like to compare black people who are doin’ somethin’ with each other. They’ll compare Eddie Murphy to Richard Pryor. Compare me with Wynton Marsalis. Not me with Chuck Mangione. But me and Wynton. That’s the kind of shit I don’t like.

  “But if Wynton listens to all that shit,” he went on, “they’re goin’ to fuck him up. I don’t be listen’ to none of that shit. But he better watch out. They’ll make him comfortable and he’ll stay right where he is. That’s what they want him to be—comfortable. I don’t like a person that’s comfortable where they are. I like a person that’s always movin’, changin’, one that says, ‘What’s this? What’s that? Why they doin’ this?’ That’s the way Cicely is. And that’s the way I am. Been like this all my life.”

  Warming up to the subject, he went on. “Like, there could be some classical composers instead of a classical soloist like Wynton. Why don’t they take some young composers’ work and play that instead of all that old shit? I mean, they’re gonna have to change sooner or later. Time is gonna make them change. I mean, they gotta stop doin’ Tosca and all that dead old classical shit. And Wynton playin’ their music. The kind of stuff anybody can do. All you gotta do is practice, practice, practice.

  “I told Wynton they should be suckin’ his dick for playin’ that simple music. I told him I wouldn’t bow down to play that music, that they should be glad that someone as talented as Wynton is playing that tired shit. I wouldn’t. I did it once, but I wouldn’t do it no more.

  “I mean, Wynton takin’ time off from playin’ his own shit to play their shit. And, if he misses one goddamn note, they gonna be on his ass. Naw,” he went on, shaking his head, “I don’t think no honor should be bestowed on a black person just ’cause he’s playin’ some fuckin’ ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ shit! Hell, man,” he said, his voice almost a shout, “Wynton should be gettin’ a lifetime salary for playin’ that music! I mean, bein’ a black person, I don’t accept that shit that so-called jazz has stagnated. Old jazz, yeah, but not the new stuff. White people teachin’ jazz in schools now. Tryin’ to claim it as theirs. But I don’t see why our music can’t be given the respect of European classical music. I mean, Beethoven’s been dead all these years and they talkin’ about him, teachin’ him, and still playin’ his music. Our music is classical. They just don’t want to do it because black people started it.

  “My point is,” he said, biting down on a cheese Danish, “why should black people devote their time to learnin’ their music, their operas, their reason for fallin’ in love, their reason for committing suicide, the way they fuck, the way they talk, the clothes they wear, their problems, you know what I mean? Damn, at one o’clock on the fuckin’ TV, all you can see is them with their hair all fixed up and shit, talkin’ about, ‘Well, I don’t know if Jim’s gonna tell me not to go with Irving ’cause my mother used to go with his mother.’ That kinda shit! That’s not black! We don’t sit up there and listen to Billy Graham and that other motherfucka, Bishop Sheen, who be soundin’ just like Reagan. No,” he said emphatically, “I won’t ever do their shit no more and I don’t see no honor in no other black person doin’ their shit.”

  giving miles a lift

  It was getting dark outside. The sky was almost as gray as the walls and floor of Miles’ apartment. He’d grown silent, gone back to drawing again. He asked me if I had a car. I told him I did. He asked if I could give him a lift downtown. I was surprised but told him that I would. He left to get dressed and then we prepared to leave. He told Michael, his valet, that he’d be back tomorrow. Michael nodded his head as Miles and I moved out of the apartment and into the elevator.

  On the street, Fifth Avenue, heads turned in recognition when they saw Miles, but no one spoke; they only nodded their heads. He didn’t acknowledge them. He was dressed all in black and was walking with that hip-dedip stride. He was wearing dark shades but I could see that his eyes, moving quickly from side to side, didn’t miss anything. Nothing. And I was there, too, trying to walk and look as hip as I knew how. When we arrived at my car, a brownish-bronze 1983 Saab 900, he said to me, laughing, “What kind of piece of shit is this?”

  “It’s the piece of shit that’s gonna give you a lift downtown if you keep your mouth shut,” I answered right back before I could even think about it.

  He kind of grinned and chuckled to himself as he got in. Then he said, “Man, besides being funny lookin’, you’re about a crazy motherfucka, too. Does the tape deck work?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well then, turn the motherfucka on,” he said again, chuckling to himself. “I wanna play you some real new shit I just recorded. See where your head is at.”

  I turned the radio and tape deck on and he slid the tape in and pushed the play button. The music bloomed out in waves, music that would later be on his Tutu album, the first record he would make for Warner. I liked it and told him so. He just smiled and then looked at me and said, “You know, you’re alright, but you still one of the funniest looking motherfuckas I’ve ever seen.”

  Then he sank into silence, shaking his head, chuckling to himself, eyes darting here and there behind his dark glasses as we rode downtown through the New York streets. We rode all the way downtown in silence, but when he got to his destination, a large apartment building next to the Hudson River, in an area now called Noho, I got the feeling that something good had happened between us in some weird, edgy, wonderful sort of way. After he got out of my car, he started to walk away, then turned around and walked back up to my car. He looked in, pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, and wrote something on it. I looked at the paper. It was a telephone number. He told me it was his private telephone number and not to give it to anyone. I took it and said, laughing, “Oh? What do you expect me to do? Walk down the street waving your telephone number in the air saying, Hey, this is Miles Davis’ telephone number. Any of you motherfuckas out there want it?”

  He looked long and hard at me for a moment, his eyes inscrutable behind his wraparound dark shades. Then he pushed them up on his forehead, and I saw that he was eyeing me humorously, incredulously, as if he didn’t believe what he’d just heard. A twinkle flashed into his eyes, and he laughed that sneaky laugh of his under his breath and said, “Man, you sure are a crazy motherfucka. Call me if you need anything else, OK? Later.”

  He turned and walked away, bouncing up and down in that hip bop strut of his. When he disappeared into the building, I felt I was on top of the world. I drove off exhilarated, not the least bit tired, feeling like we’d connected in some real meaningful way, though I had no idea what this relationship would lead to. The first thing was to get those tapes transcribed and write a good story for Spin. After that, I remember telling myself, whatever happens will take care of itself. And it did.

  Yes, it sho-nuff did.

  up close and personal

  The Spin article turned out great. In fact, the piece, published in November and December 1985, was the first two-part feature Spin ever ran. Rudy Langlais, my editor from the Village Voice who had moved to Spin, did a fantastic editing job on it. My future wife, Margaret’s, criticism was very helpful, too. (She called the first draft “a piece of shit” and it was. So I rewrote it, and she loved the rewrite.) Everyone who read it was knocked out by it. But, most important, Miles loved it. He called me and told me so. After our brief but to-the-point conversation, I was thrilled. I was up there, floating on some clouds. Nonetheless, when the call came through from Bob Bender and Malaika Adero, both editors at Simon and Schuster, that Miles wanted me to write his life story, I was shock
ed. Marie Brown negotiated a coauthorship deal for me, and I signed the contract in the spring of 1986 and began spending hours upon hours interviewing and taping him, in New York and at his seaside home in Malibu, California.

  getting acquainted

  During the summer of 1986, I came to know Miles as almost childlike (which was a shock), delicate (which was a bigger shock), and much softer than I could ever have imagined him being. Of course, he could turn tough and hard again in a flash. One thing was certain: it would have been damn near impossible to take advantage of him because he was always alert to such a possibility from any-and everyone. At first he seemed to be on guard most of the time, even when he was pretty relaxed. Still, if he liked and trusted you, he was quite generous with his time, ideas, and feelings. After we had been working together for a while, he started giving me live tapes of his concerts on the condition that I not give them to anyone else, and I never did.

  The most striking thing for me about Miles’ physical makeup besides the extraordinarily beautiful color of his deep black skin was his eyes. They were riveting. You could see his resolute sense of self in his eyes, which were large and round, with a lot of white surrounding the iris. When he looked at you, it was with a direct, unflinching, hard gaze. You saw and felt his genius in those eyes. Feminine, like his face, his eyes when he was happy could be very soft, almost delicate. When he was angry, they could be as fierce as his words.

  Sometimes, when I was looking at him, he had an almost spiritual, mystical effect on me. I remember looking at his face many times while we were talking and actually hearing some of his tunes, especially “All Blues.” I would always hear the music distinctly, clearly, as if it were emanating from somewhere inside his being. It was weird but fascinating. At first, I thought he might be playing a record player in another room. But then I knew that couldn’t be true, because Sandra DaCosta had told me that he never listened to any of his old music, that, in fact, he loathed even talking about the past.

  This fact was brought home to me in many of my early interviews with him because it was like pulling teeth to get him to talk about the past, especially about his old music, friends who had died, or his children, whom he always seemed to be protecting. “What chu wanna know that for?” he would ask if my question had really bothered him. I would respond that it was his life, but he had “picked me” to write it—so I had to know. Then, over time, he would relent and answer my question, but always grudgingly. After a while, maybe six months or so, he became more relaxed and our conversations flowed more easily. Eventually, he seemed to relish telling me some of the old stories about Charlie Parker, “Philly Joe” Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane. But he still never played any of the old music.

  As I got to know him better, my awe of him was replaced by a healthy sense of respect. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the complexities of his genius and his character, Miles was very unpredictable. He was subject to rapid mood swings, especially after he had injected insulin for his diabetes or had had a bad day. He used to say that the reason his moods shifted so quickly was that he was a Gemini. He enjoyed telling me, “I’m a double six, the Devil, so don’t fuck with me.” Then he’d smile that mischievous smile of his. I noticed that his most severe mood shifts occurred right after he had taken his insulin shots. If I came around at those times, he would have such a low energy level that he would soon get drowsy and want to sleep. And if I stayed around too long, he’d get edgy, incommunicative, and sometimes downright hostile.

  But when his energy was high he could be very funny, with a sly, wicked sort of humor. Like the first time I walked into his Malibu home after I signed the contract to write his autobiography—he cracked me up. He was seated at a table on his beautiful veranda, which overlooked a dazzling flower garden. Beyond the garden, the sparkling blue of the Pacific Ocean shimmered with light that looked like glinting razors or slivers of glass. When I sat down with him, he looked at me and the first thing he said, with a sly grin, was, “I got you a great gig, didn’t I? A damn good gig.” I had to laugh, because he was right. I had heard through the grapevine that he had fought to get me over many other writers because he’d liked my Spin piece so much and because he thought I could do the job.

  Miles’ humor could also have a cold edge when he wanted to make a point. For example, he was always putting down my Saab because he was used to all those expensive foreign sports cars he owned and drove. So about the third time I was scheduled to fly out to California for a work session with him, he told me not to get my usual rental car because he was going to pick me up and show me a real car.

  When I arrived, there was no Miles to meet me. I wondered where he was. I went down to the carousel to pick up my luggage. No Miles there either. So I picked up my baggage and walked out of the terminal and there, parked by the curb, was Miles in his yellow Ferrari Tesstarosa.

  “Get in,” he told me, grinning. “Now this is a real car, motherfucka. This is the real thing.”

  “Sure is,” I said, smiling, relieved he hadn’t forgotten to pick me up.

  He sensed this and said, “Thought I wasn’t going to be here, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, curious as to how he knew. I didn’t find out, because the next thing he said was, “You wanna drive this bad motherfucka?”

  I was taken aback. I looked at his face, half-hidden by his everpresent sunglasses and asked, “You really don’t mind?”

  “Go ahead,” he said, opening the door and getting out of the car. When I came around the back and passed him, he added, “But you better not wreck it, motherfucka, ’cause you know your poor ass can’t pay for gettin’ it fixed.”

  He was smiling again when he said this. He knew he was right. But he was generous in this way—he liked to share what he had with appreciative people.

  Outside of the public’s relentless scrutiny, Miles Davis was a relatively simple man, a person who loved movies, sports, great food, and all kinds of music. His fame wasn’t a big deal to him. If he liked you, he would cook and serve you a great meal and not think anything of it. (He cooked a lot of dishes, but his chili was memorable.)

  Miles loved all kinds of music. When I went over to his house or apartment, he might be listening to anything—Mozart, Beethoven, James Brown, Prince, Phil Collins—anything except old jazz. He never, ever listened to old jazz because he thought it was dead—even his own older recordings. His new music, yes; he listened to that.

  I think Miles felt a detachment from the music of Mozart that allowed him to continue to appreciate it and that was unlike his feelings for old jazz, some of which he had helped to create and which he felt a need to evolve away from into something new. The tradition of African-American music—all of it—has always been to try to move forward, to constantly create new styles and new forms, to live in the present moment and not the past. “Don’t look back, someone might be gaining on you,” Satchel Paige, the great African-American baseball pitcher, once said, and many black musicians seem to take this statement as an article of faith. That’s why most young African-American musicians (and, I might add, music lovers) don’t listen to blues, which, like much of jazz, has a white audience—because it’s in the past. Rap and hip-hop culture are now the rage because they’re in the present, and that’s where younger African-Americans’ heads are at. Miles was like this, too, always dealing with the present and the future, instead of the past.

  Miles liked being alone; he told me that being alone was the price he had to pay to always be open to the flow of his creative juices. To that extent, his isolation was self-imposed. It was something he orchestrated in order to create the space he needed to soliloquize with himself. This isolation kept him focused on his music and painting and helped him elevate his contribution to jazz to high art. He changed his personal style of music and of jazz itself at least six times.

  the child in miles

  As I said, at times Miles seemed very childlike to me. He once told me he believed tha
t great artists have to retain a childlike fascination with what they do. They have to remain open to the world in the way that children are in order to do the work they do. Miles believed that when artists grow too adult in their thinking and emotions, they lose the ability to let their imaginations run free. Then, they become closed to the many creative possibilities that are always emerging. He thought that young children, especially those of kindergarten age, who are still relatively unburdened by the rules and regulations of the adult world, are free in this regard. He believed that the rules governing adult conduct stifled and eventually strangled creative imagination and expression.

  Miles loved my son Porter from the first time he met him. I had described to him how two-and-a-half-year-old Porter used to come into my study when I was writing the piece for Spin and go directly up to a photograph of Miles I had lying on the floor and just stare at it. I would tell Porter, “That’s Miles Davis,” over and over again, and he would just sit there, staring at Miles’ face. Porter was fascinated with the photo and over time he began to say “Miles Davis” every time he saw it. I told this story to Miles a few times and he, always on the alert for the con, acted like he didn’t believe me. He would say, “Aw, Quincy, you don’t have to tell me that kind of bullshit to be friendly with me.” I would protest, and swear that what I was saying was true, but he would dismiss the subject with a wave of his hand and we’d go on to something else.

  Finally, in the summer of 1987, when Porter was four and a half, Miles called me one Saturday to see whether I was coming down to his apartment on Fifth Avenue. I told him I was planning to and he told me to “bring that boy—I want to see if you been bullshitting me all this time, saying he recognizes me.” I said, “OK,” and Miles came back with, “And don’t tell him you’re coming down here to see me, either. I want to see if you’ve been telling the truth all this time or putting me on.”