Miles & Me

by Quincy Troupe

  After Gil died, sometimes when I visited Miles, he would tell me of a conversation he had just had with Gil earlier that day. He couldn’t believe Gil was dead. He wouldn’t accept it, believed only Gil’s flesh had left. At first, I was shocked because Gil had died, in the physical sense. But for Miles he had not died, not in the spiritual sense. I began to realize then that Miles believed in spirits, in a spiritual presence after the flesh was gone. So, as far as he was concerned, Gil was speaking to him. Every day. Miles also told me of visits from Coltrane, Monk, Philly Joe, Charlie Parker, and especially his mother and father. He would sit there, serenely talking about what they had told him and what he had said to them, without batting an eye. For him, they really had been there, carrying on conversations. He was always smiling when he told me of these exchanges across the divide, his face completely relaxed, at ease. After a while, I used to wonder if he talked to anybody else about these otherworldly conversations, and to this day, I still don’t know whether he did. But Miles was like that. He was in touch with things most of us weren’t. He saw and understood things differently, and he seemed to feel and know things spiritually, almost to the point of having extrasensory perception.

  I remember one evening eating dinner with him in his apartment on 59th Street when the doorbell suddenly rang, and his valet opened the door to a strange black man who appeared to be in his late thirties. When Miles saw the man, he asked him who he was and what he wanted. The stranger said he had come to talk to Miles about working with Gordon Meltzer, Miles’ road manager, as an assistant road manager. Miles, looking upset, told the man he was supposed to wait down in the lobby and come up only when accompanied by Gordon. The man said he had known that, but since he had arrived before Gordon, he had just come on up because he had the apartment number. Well, Miles ordered him to go right back downstairs and wait for Gordon.

  When Gordon arrived with the stranger in tow, we had finished dinner and were sitting in the very large front room facing the park. Miles, peeved with the man for his having come upstairs alone, immediately told Gordon that the stranger wasn’t going to work out. Gordon, who could really handle Miles, responded by saying that what happened on the road was his job, that he was the expert, that he knew this man was good, and that he needed him. Well, Miles looked at Gordon for a moment, then told him to tell the man to go into the kitchen and get everyone some ice cream. Gordon relayed Miles’ request, and the man started walking across the wide front room to the kitchen. Miles pulled up his sunglasses and peered intently at the man as he walked. When he disappeared into the kitchen, Miles dropped his sunglasses back into place, turned to Gordon, and said, “Gordon, he’s not going to work out.”

  “Aw, Miles,” Gordon said, a little exasperated. “Come on. Why isn’t he going to work out?”

  “’Cause he walks out of tempo, Gordon,” Miles said with a chuckle. “Can’t you see, he walks out of tempo. If we hire him he’s gonna drop and break everything.”

  “Come on, Miles,” Gordon said, laughing. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am,” Miles said. “Watch what I tell you. He’s gonna break everything.”

  Anyway, the man was hired and went to Europe with the band. Two weeks later my phone rang and it was Miles, laughing hysterically.

  “Quincy,” he said, “remember that motherfucka that I said walked out of tempo?”

  “Yeah,” I said, not knowing what was coming.

  “Well, he dropped and broke everything. We had to fire him and get somebody else. I told Gordon but he wouldn’t listen to me. I guess he will next time, huh? Later.”

  And he hung up. I could hear him chuckling just before the line went dead.

  back at work

  By the end of 1988, the personnel in his band had changed again. Having already added Kenny Garrett on reeds, he brought in Joseph Foley McCreary on lead bass and the great drummer from Washington, D.C., Ricky Wellman. He also fired his nephew, Vince Wilburn, who had been playing drums. Later, Miles said that firing his nephew was “one of the most painful things I ever had to do.”

  I was in Chicago when Miles fired Vince, and I can tell you it caused a lot of strife between Miles and his sister Dorothy, Vince’s mother. She refused to go to Miles’ concert in Chicago because she felt that he had embarrassed her son, who had been born and raised in Chicago, in front of all his friends by firing him when he did. Dorothy felt that it was a matter of extremely bad timing. She wanted to know why Miles couldn’t have done the firing at a later date. But Miles refused to relent, saying that the music came before family goodwill, and so Vince was out of the band even though it was embarrassing for him. For Miles, the music always came first.

  Miles released Siesta in 1987. It was the score for a film of the same name set in Spain. The film starred Ellen Barkin and Jodie Foster and was released by Warner Bros. The music echoed back to the sound of Sketches of Spain and was produced by Marcus Miller, who arranged and wrote all the tunes except for one, “Theme for Augustine; Wind; Seduction; Kiss,” which he cowrote with Miles. The album was dedicated to “Gil Evans, The Master.” Here, for the first time in the last years of his life, Miles returned to the music he had played in the past. On the title tune, his style echoed the open horn playing he did on Sketches of Spain, an album that I come back to from time to time.

  Another big event in 1987 was that Miles’ first album for Warner, Tutu, won the 1987 Grammy Award for jazz. That year Miles toured all over Europe, South America, Japan, China, New Zealand, Australia, and, of course, the United States, managing during this same time to go into the studio to begin recording Amandla, a joyous, exuberant album that was Miles’ last real studio effort with some of the members in his working band of the time. The recording, which he finished in 1988 but which didn’t come out until 1989, is an amalgamation of many styles, from West Indian zouk and American go-go—a black musical style that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s from Washington, D.C.—to hip-hop, pop, and straight-ahead jazz. Even some elements of fusion found their way into the music. The album has a marvelous cut called “Jo-Jo,” named for the new love in Miles’ life. This album finds Miles in top form on all the tunes, whether he plays muted or open trumpet.

  I think it was in late 1988 that Miles started telling me how much he was getting into rap and hip-hop. He said he had started listening to it because some of the younger musicians in his band, like Ricky Wellman, played it on the bus whenever they were touring. Miles said that at first he hadn’t paid much attention to it, but he had gotten to know people like Freddie Brathwaite (better known as “Fab Five Freddie”), who was a rapper, DJ, and graffiti artist, and he had begun to like the sound. He recognized it as a new form—a departure—and then he began to hear the new sound in his heart and body. (Max Roach once told me he thought hip-hop and rap were the “first departure in American music since bebop.”)

  I had been listening to rap ever since 1979, when I moved up to Harlem and the kids from my neighborhood played it and rapped it right across the street from my apartment on 116th Street and Seventh Avenue into the wee hours of the morning. (My apartment was around the corner from where Minton’s, the legendary jazz club, had been located in the 1940s and 1950s.) The kids rapped and played their music in A. Phillip Randolph Square, a little fenced-in mini-park between Lennox and Seventh avenues and 116th and 117th streets. The park was a mecca for the neighborhood kids, as it had been for the musicians who played at Minton’s, and everybody would come there summer evenings, especially on Saturday nights. Other times, I caught young black kids hustling for money by rapping and break dancing on street corners and on the ferry rides to Staten Island, where I taught on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

  But all that was outside the house. In 1979, my daughter Tymmie and my oldest son, Quincy Brandon, ages fifteen and thirteen respectively, came to live with Margaret and me and brought the music into our house.

  So by the time Miles started talking to me about it, I had been listening to it for nine years.
He said he wanted to do a record mixing rappers and electronic music with Brazilian and Caribbean beats, especially zouk. He told me once that he was going to talk to Quincy Jones about the project, but whether he ever did, I don’t know. Although Miles didn’t know a lot about rappers, they knew a lot about him. I used to hear them mentioning his name and talking about how “bad” they thought he was, how creative, how he was “the joint.”

  That same year, on November 13, Miles was inducted into the Knights of Malta at the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain. But by the end of 1988, Miles was in bed, floored by bronchial pneumonia, which the tabloid The Star reported as AIDS. He was so sick he had to cancel his winter tour, which he said cost him “a million dollars.”

  a mysterious virus

  He was laid up in a hospital in Santa Monica, with tubes up his nose and in his arms, and needles everywhere. He said about that hospital stay, “Anyone who came into my room had to wear a mask because there was a danger I could be infected by germs brought in by visitors, or even by doctors or nurses. I was pretty sick, but I didn’t have AIDS like that bullshit gossip rag The Star said I did. Man, that was a terrible thing that paper did to me. It could have ruined my career and fucked up my life. That story made me madder than a motherfucka when I found out about it. It wasn’t true, of course, but a lot of people didn’t know that, and they believed the story.”

  When I was writing his autobiography with him and Miles told me this, I didn’t know what to believe. I had read the story in The Star, too, and I had heard Miles blame Cicely Tyson for leaking it. He thought she did it to get back at him over the breakup of their marriage. I once asked him point-blank if he had AIDS, and he angrily denied it. I do know that he was always suffering from bad cases of some mysterious flu-like virus that sometimes confined him to bed, without visitors. Also, a short time after the story in The Star appeared, when I asked him about some pills he was taking, he said they were AZT. Now, AZT, as is well known, is the drug widely taken for AIDS. I don’t know whether he was pulling my leg or not when he told me the name of the pills, but I do know that when I asked him, “Isn’t AZT the drug used for AIDS?” he clammed up and told me, “It’s none of your business,” which it wasn’t. So I never brought it up again. Later on, he told me that he had had a complete blood change, somewhere in Switzerland, to clean up a virus he said he was carrying. When I asked what the virus was, he told me again, “It’s none of your business.” I didn’t bring up the subject again after that.

  Whatever the truth was, whether Miles had AIDS or not, it wouldn’t have made a difference to me. I do know that he had relationships with many women. I met many of them myself. It was also rumored that he had homosexual relationships with friends like his hairdresser, James Fenny—who died of AIDS after Miles passed away—and his former drummer, the late Tony Williams. I never saw Miles in a homosexual relationship, although I can say that he had many close homosexual friends, including Jimmy Baldwin, Fenny, the dancer George Faison, the late great Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace, and others. But so do most artists. Me included. He never “hit” on me during the entire span of our relationship.

  (I felt I had to address this issue in this book because so many different people have asked me whether Miles died of AIDS. I say that I don’t know and that the question should be put to his physician, not to me. What I can say is, as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter; what mattered for me then and matters to me now is the music he played and my friendship with him.)

  the studio museum interview

  During the fall or winter of 1988, some friends at the Studio Museum of Harlem asked me whether a public discussion / interview could be arranged between Miles and me for their series “Vital Expressions in American Art.” I told them I would ask Miles, and when I did, to my surprise, he agreed to do it. The Studio Museum people were ecstatic. Miles had never done an interview in front of a live audience before, but he said he would do it because he knew of the museum’s work with African and African-American visual artists and he wanted to help them in any way he could. When they offered to pay him, he told them to keep the money as a donation. It was a nice gesture and one that Miles did on a regular basis for people and institutions he believed in; he just didn’t announce his generous gifts to the public.

  In the spring of 1989, the buzz began to go out all over New York’s cultural wires and, for those in the know, all around the country’s wires, too, that Miles and I were going to sit down and do a live interview at the Studio Museum. All the tickets sold in a flash. For days, Miles kept telling me about how nervous he was because he had never done anything like it before. I kept reassuring him that he should think of it as just playing a concert. But this didn’t work at all, because most of the time he hated talking about himself, even in private situations. So the thought of talking about himself in front of a live audience—who would also be asking him questions—was not exactly appealing. Suffice it to say the man was terrified.

  When the big night arrived, Miles and I met at his apartment and drove up to Harlem together in his limousine, along with his road manager, Gordon Meltzer. There were so many people outside, we had to go in by the back door to avoid the crush. Some accounts said that about five thousand people were turned away. I was told later that some people were so pissed off about not being able to get in that a riot almost took place.

  Once inside the museum, we were ushered—along with my wife, Margaret, who met us there—up to the green room on the second floor, where the trustees and board members were gathered. The museum staff had laid out a spread of cheeses, fruit, bottled water, and juices on a long table. The people there were delighted to see Miles and they greeted him with pleasure. He was gracious and told them all how nervous he was. It was all going very nicely until an elegantly dressed, beautiful black woman and her husband came up to speak to Miles. The woman extended her hand in greeting and said she was so happy Miles had graced them with his presence. He shook her hand and watched her warily from behind his dark glasses. She went on to say that many people had thought that Miles wouldn’t show; that although she was a board member, she hardly ever came to anything at the museum; that she was here tonight because she considered this the high point of the museum’s history.

  Margaret, Miles, and I were shocked when we heard her say this, but Miles responded to her immediately with, “This is a great place, and I wouldn’t have you on my motherfuckin’ board if you didn’t show.” And with that he clammed up.

  The woman was stunned. Her husband looked as if he wanted to say something but he thought better of it, so they turned around and left the room, as Miles was saying under his breath, “Bourgeois sorry-ass tired black motherfuckas.” Everybody in the green room heard the exchange but nobody said anything about it. It was deep.

  Then it was time to go downstairs and do the interview. Miles told me again how scared he was. With a nervous grin playing around his mouth he said, “I don’t know why I let you talk me into doing this.” But he was doing it. My longtime friend Pat Cruz, the wife of the painter Emilio Cruz, had given us both fabulous introductions while we were upstairs. When the crowd saw Miles standing at the top of the stairs, following after me, applause and cheers erupted like you wouldn’t believe, because the audience had not been sure that he would show up, either. He was all decked out in a purple silk flowing shirt and black balloon pants that pegged around his ankles, his black wraparound sunglasses securely in place.

  Because of Miles’ nervousness, the interview started off slowly, but it picked up speed after he felt the crowd was with him and he relaxed. Then he told some great stories about Charlie Parker, James Brown, Prince, Max Roach, and John Coltrane. He talked about how the sound of dribbling a basketball was a rhythm he sometimes used in his music, in his playing. He talked about African-American history and art, about how if black children knew about their African history, then they wouldn’t feel so disconnected in America.

  He commented on his own drug use,
how it had almost destroyed him, what a scourge it was in the African-American community, and the need for our young people to stay drug-free.

  He was really funny, wise, and informative for about an hour and a half. The people fortunate enough to be there that night were absolutely enthralled, and they asked questions that he freely answered. He was playful with me and showed a side of his personality that most people never expected to see, or even knew existed. He was fabulous, and that thoroughly integrated audience (it looked like the United Nations) applauded like crazy when he finally said, “Can I go now, Quincy?” We gave each other high fives and hugged and he left, just like that, signing autographs as he made his way back up the stairs.

  I was really proud of him that evening, proud that he was able to overcome his fear and pull it off. The next day, after I told him how great he had been, he told me he was “glad he did it” but that he wouldn’t do it again. I took him at his word, even when the question came up about whether he would do a book tour to support our book. I told the editors at Simon and Schuster that he wouldn’t tour or give talks or sign books. They didn’t believe me, and when he refused to do it, bad feelings developed between Miles and the company.

  In the end, I had to go out on the road and do the book tour on my own. Many people were disappointed when I showed up without Miles, especially in our hometowns of St. Louis and East St. Louis. But the book sold extremely well, reaching the bestseller lists in several newspapers, most notably the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Village Voice. But I have no doubt the book would have done even better if Miles had relented and done the tour.

  the radio project

  In 1989, radio producer Steve Rowland and I came together around an idea that I proposed to him about doing a Miles Davis radio show. After first refusing, Miles finally agreed to participate after I convinced him that it would be a historic event. The end result was a seven-part series, “The Miles Davis Radio Project,” narrated by Danny Glover. Steve Rowland and I, along with Jay Allison, won a 1990 Peabody Award for excellence in radio broadcasting for the series. But it was an incredibly taxing and difficult project. In the end, it cost me my friendship with Steve Rowland, whom Miles quickly grew to detest. Now, I’m not saying that the fact that Miles disliked him so intensely was Steve’s fault, because Miles could be a very irascible, contemptuous, and difficult person to get along with. But the truth is that Miles did dislike Steve, and he disliked him intensely. Let me relate a couple of instances here to illustrate my point.