“Man, fuck you!” he said, so fiercely it almost took my breath away, his voice trembling with rage. “What the fuck do you know about it? Sheeet. You don’t know nothing. You ain’t no motherfuckin’ musician. You just a writer. What do you know about it? So just shut the fuck up!”
“Hey, man, I was just kidding,” I said. “You can play whatever you want to. But it was you—not me—that said that you’d ‘rather die than play that old shit.’ That’s what you said!”
“Man, fuck you,” he said, taking a step forward toward me. “Get outta my house. Right now.”
He was livid, his face flushed, spit coming out the side of his mouth. I had never seen him this mad before. He was almost crazed. I started backing up, saying, “Miles, don’t think you can hit me and get away with it.”
Then, going on the offensive, ready to stand my ground, I got mad, too. “I don’t take no ass-whippings, so don’t even think about it.”
“Get out, motherfucka,” he said, almost spitting the words. “Just get outta my house, you hear me? Right now.”
“Don’t worry, I’m leaving, “I said, backing up toward the door, not trusting him not to hit me in the back of the head if I turned around. No. I wasn’t going to expose my back to this crazy man. No way.
“Just leave,” he kept saying. “Just leave. Right now.”
After I left, he slammed the door so hard I thought he had broken the door frame. I couldn’t figure out why he had gotten so angry. I really had been joking, pulling his leg as we so often did with each other, just teasing him. But he had literally exploded with rage. It was the angriest I had ever seen him.
Actually, there was one other equally strange time when he became enraged with me. This happened when we were still working together on the book and one day he convinced himself that I was dating Jo Gelbard just because she and I left Los Angeles for New York on the same day, even though we took different flights. That time, he called New York from Malibu to scream at me to send back a drawing Jo had made of him that he planned to use on the cover of Amandla. (It had been my idea to superimpose his image over a map of Africa for the cover, which is what was eventually done.) I had the drawing with me because I wanted to make a photo of it to use in our book.
“Send it back,” he kept screaming. “I trusted you like a brother and you stabbed me in my back. You thief. Send it back. Right now! Send back Jo’s drawin’ of me and that map of Africa. Send it back now!” Then he hung up on me.
Not knowing what this tirade was all about—since we had both agreed that I should take the drawing—I called him right back and said, “Don’t hang up on me. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Stole what? What did I steal? You gave the drawing to me!”
“Just send it back, motherfucka. That’s all. Just send it back. Now!”
Then he hung up the phone again. I was livid. If we had been in the same room, there is no telling what I would have done to him. So I picked up the phone and called him again. When he heard my voice, he hung up the phone again. I was defeated and fuming with rage. Later, Margaret called him, and he talked to her, said he didn’t want to talk to me. He told her the same thing. “Tell him to send back my fucking drawing and map.” Then he hung up on her. So I sent him back Jo’s drawing and the map. A few days later, Jo called me and told me why he had been so angry. Miles had thought we were sneaking around with each other. After she reassured him that wasn’t happening, he finally called and we talked as if nothing had happened.
This was also what he did after he got so mad at me for teasing him about him playing his old music at Montreux. He just shined it on. About three weeks after our argument, he called and acted just as if nothing had happened. Later, I figured out that maybe the reason he got so angry was because I had hinted at the possibility that he was dying—he did die later that year, and he may have had a premonition that he didn’t want to be reminded of. That question remains a mystery to me until this very day.
In both cases, he never mentioned the argument again. He never said he was sorry—he was incapable of apologizing, ever, at least in my relationship with him—but he would just act like nothing had happened. Perhaps in his mind, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Perhaps he thought that very angry disagreements were just part of having a relationship. People speak their minds, at times harshly. That’s the way life is, or at least that’s the way he was. After it was over, it was over, and you just went on with your life.
Still, I always thought it strange to have such intense arguments with someone whose music had always given me great pleasure and joy. Miles’ music had been the place where I always retreated to when I needed solace or to be energized. His music was, and is today, my safe harbor.
listening to miles
“donna” on the jukebox
I entered the world of jazz through a Miles Davis record I heard back in 1955, when I was fifteen years old. I had gone into a fish joint—on Fair Avenue in my hometown, St. Louis, Missouri—to get a jack-salmon fish sandwich (actually a kind of whiting that St. Louis blacks called “jack-salmon”). It could have been a a summer weekday or a Saturday during the school year. I don’t remember. All I recall now of walking into that small, nondescript place, since destroyed by so-called urban renewal, is that it was daytime and the sun was shining.
The joint had a yellow linoleum floor and the prefabricated look of vinyl and plastic that later became so popular at McDonalds, Jack in the Box, and all the other banal fast-food restaurants that swept over America and inundate our culture today. Back then, this fish joint was cutting edge, even though the black people in the neighborhood hated the way it looked. We called its sterile style “clean looking,” to distinguish it from the usual “greasy spoon” style that most local black eateries wore back then. As we liked to say, this joint was “trying to look white.” But we loved the great food that was served up there, and we came back time and again despite our reservations about their “fried hair” and “white look.”
Once inside, I immediately noticed a booth filled with four black, hip-looking older guys wearing the latest “in” clothes. Smoking cigarettes and wearing shades, their wide-brimmed hats hanging majestically on the prongs of two steel poles, which seemed to grow beside their booth like facing trees.
The men were sitting there talking and eating deep-fried “jack-salmon” sandwiches doused with hot sauce, with sides of potato salad and cole slaw. They were also listening to the jukebox that was jamming sounds I had either never heard before or never paid attention to. Whatever it was, it was new to me, and at that moment, I was drawn to it like the rabbit to the tarbaby.
I remember being struck by the music easing out of the brightly colored jukebox, which seemed to match the cool style of the four men sitting there nodding their heads in time with the rhythm. In unison. Although I had intended to buy a takeout sandwich, I decided instead to sit down in a booth to eat and listen to those men talk, and to drink in the music they were nodding their heads to.
They talked about the sounds they were hearing on the box. One man said the trumpet was played by a “homeboy” from across the river, someone named Miles Davis. Another said the tune was called “Donna.” I also recall one of them saying that “the young alto player sounds almost like Bird. Man, he’s something else.” Well, I didn’t know who Miles was, or “Bird,” or the young alto player who sounded like him, either, but I found the conversation fascinating and I listened intently while they played the record over and over again. Jazz music made sense to me that day for the first time in my life.
Until then, my choice in music had always been black rhythm and blues, music I could move my body to—though I suspected that I could also move my body to “Donna,” the same way those hip guys were dancing on their hind parts in that booth, nodding their “processed” heads. At that time, I liked the Platters, the Dells, the Cadillacs, Sam Cooke, Johnny Ace, Clyde McPhatter, Jackie Wilson, and the alleged wild man of music who was then living right down
the street from me, Chuck Berry. But this music was totally different. It had no words, no voices, no vocal dancing to slide words around, over, ahead, behind, and still land right back on the beat.
It was a completely different kind of music and, after the four men left, I found myself getting up, reaching into my pocket for a nickel, and walking up to the jukebox. I found “Donna,” dropped my coin in, turned around, and eased my way back to my booth as the music poured out of the box. As I polished off my second fish sandwich, I kept nodding my head to the tune’s insinuating rhythms and moving my hind parts in time to the beat.
becoming hip
When I left that joint that afternoon, I felt as though I had undergone a secret initiation, a rite of passage, one that would separate me forever from the rest of the students who attended Beaumont High School, to which I had just transferred. The school was overwhelmingly white and the students there were “square” to the bone. To my way of thinking, hardly anyone there had any sense of style at all.
During the summer of 1954 my mother had moved us from our old black neighborhood. She had wanted us to be the first black family on the block, but actually we were the second. We were a family of six: my grandmother, Leona Smith; my mother, Dorothy Smith Troupe Brown; my stepfather, China Brown, blues bass player, leader of his own band, and clothes presser at a large cleaning plant; my uncle Allen, unemployed wino, a gentle, harmless man; and my younger brother, Timothy. Our white neighbors hated all of us immediately.
We lived next door to the first black people on the block: a couple, Thomas and Margaret O’ Guin. He was a doorman at a local hotel and she was a homemaker. They were older, more conservative than we were, and had no children, which probably explains why they had never had a problem living on Ashland Street before we arrived. Our family brought not only children but young black men into the neighborhood. After we arrived, the whites on the block began leaving faster than people in a movie house when someone’s yelled “Fire.” Our white nextdoor neighbors never spoke to us, not once.
In this hostile racist environment, I was fast learning to hate myself just for being black. Earlier in my life, living in a black neighborhood, I had never felt any self-hatred. In fact, it was the other way around; I was proud of who my father was, and of what our family name meant in the black community. My father, Quincy Trouppe (he added a second “p” to his last name because he liked the way it was pronounced when he played in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico), was a great star in the old Negro baseball league, and his older brother, James (“Pal”), was a leading black political and labor leader around St. Louis, who had also made a ton of money from real estate and “other” investments. A distant cousin, Ernest Troupe, was a lieutenant on the police force. So, within the St. Louis black community, our name was well known and well respected. But, of course, none of the white people in the new neighborhood knew any of this. To them, we were just a bunch of “niggers.”
Naturally, I hated the new block and would walk back to my old neighborhood every chance I could get (a distance of about four miles). When I asked my mother why she had moved us, she simply said it had been in our “best interests.” She, however, travelled outside the neighborhood to work as a telephone operator every day, just as my stepfather, China, and my grandmother did. But my brother Timmy and I had to go to school with the racist neighborhood kids every day, and they were like a pack of howling, rabid dogs.
During my first two years in my new home, the white kids (mostly boys) called me every vile name they knew. They called me “nigger,” “coon,” “monkey,” “gorilla,” “jiggaboo,” “shinola,” and “boy,” to name just a few. We fought on many occasions. With the exception of one Italian kid, Tom Palazolla, who invited me to his home, they hardly ever spoke to me or even looked my way during my ears at Beaumont, except when it came to sports (which is how most whites prefer dealing with black men even today). The entire experience seemed designed to drain me of my racial identity and pride.
That’s why Miles Davis and his music came to mean so much to me. The white kids at Beaumont High were into Bill Haley and the Comets and Elvis Presley. But what they really loved was Pat Boone’s rendition of “Ain’t That a Shame.” I hated Boone’s version of that song, because I had heard the “real thing” by Fats Domino, and I knew that Pat Boone had “borrowed” it from him and become famous singing it because he was a white man. Boone made a career of such “borrowings.” He also made a “mint” with his cover of Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruity.” But my white schoolmates didn’t know or care about any of this. They didn’t give a flying fuck if Boone was getting over because he was covering black songs. It certainly didn’t matter to them that Elvis Presley was doing the same thing. Chuck Berry lived in the neighborhood, but the white kids didn’t even know his name, not to mention what a great contribution he was making to American music.
But I knew. I knew the “real deal” and it bothered the hell out of me that these white teenagers didn’t even care that they didn’t know shit; that they could think of black people as stupid and uncreative while all the while their musical heroes were stealing our songs, music, and language and calling them their own.
When I discovered Miles Davis, I knew I had found something these white squares didn’t and couldn’t know. I was hip. I wanted to be seen as someone completely different from the squares. And, “quiet as it’s kept,” I really saw myself apart from all my high school classmates, the black students as well as the whites. I had no respect for my black classmates because they had bought into the idea of their own inferiority. They believed that their culture, language, and music were beneath those of their white counterparts. So they tried their best to be as white as they could in their speech, dress, and manners. It sickened me to see my old friends change that way. I refused to change, and I guess that sickened both my black and white classmates because we all quickly drew apart.
What happened to us was sad. But at the time I had no language to explain myself to them, nor they to me. We were mute in our separation and pain. We couldn’t explain why we were drifting apart. We only knew that we were and that we were powerless to stop it. But I had Miles Davis in my life, and they didn’t, and that’s what saved me: his music and his living example of what a black man could be: someone completely independent, amazingly creative, fiercely proud.
As a teenager in the late 1950s, I had few fiercely proud black role models and heroes: Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Paul Robeson, and my father’s older brother, Albert, were at the top of my list. Of these men my Uncle Albert was the only one with whom I had a real personal experience—though Chuck Berry lived three blocks down the street from me and I would see and speak to him on occasion. Uncle Albert taught me firsthand what it meant to be what I later came to know as an “unreconstructed black man.” This was a dangerous, lonely, and unrewarding position in which to place oneself. Uncle Albert didn’t take anything off anyone—black or white—and the reason my father’s family had to leave Dublin, Georgia, during the late 1920s was that Uncle Albert, as a teenager, threatened to kill a white man who had called him a “boy” and a “nigger.” He refused to be disrespected, whether by a boss, his friends, or anyone else. As a consequence he kept his self-respect but had a hard time keeping employment and making a living. And although they managed to make a much better living than did Uncle Albert, Chuck Berry, Paul Robeson, and Miles Davis were like that, too.
I began to look for more records by Miles. I found out who “Bird” was by finding Miles Davis’ name on some of Charlie Parker’s records. In the same way I also found out that the “young alto player” who sounded just like “Bird” was Jackie McLean. I wanted to learn everything I could about Miles Davis. So I started asking some of the older guys about him, which led me to my cousin, Marvin, a very good drummer and everyday criminal and junkie. (He was a junkie so obsessed with getting money to support his large habit that he later broke into his own father’s house, my Uncle, James “Pal” Troupe, and stole ev
erything that wasn’t tied down. It was the talk of the family for years.) Marvin—dead now—always liked me. He was always telling me I had “potential.” Somewhere around 1955 he turned me on to the album Bags Groove, which completely blew my mind because it was so different from “Donna” and all the other music by Miles I had heard until then.
bags groove and hard bop
The title track “Bags Groove,” named after the vibraphonist Milt “Bags” Jackson and recorded in 1954, was the first jazz music that went straight to my heart and brain, not to mention my body. It had something in it that just moved me to my core, something way beyond what I expected to experience listening to a jazz tune. I had liked “Donna” a lot—still do—and “Walkin’,” the signature tune of the “hard bop” movement, and “Blue ’n’ Boogie.” But “Bags Groove” had something in it that took me completely outside of myself. Maybe it had something to do with the sense of space Miles created, or maybe it was Thelonious Monk’s spare, eccentric piano that unlocked the feeling of wide-openness the tune has always had for me, even now. Whatever it was, I know it affected me like no other song I had ever heard.
Even though I had been moving fast through all of Miles’ records I could wrap my ears around, I still wasn’t prepared for his wide-open, soaring, lyrical voice on “Bags Groove.” I loved Monk’s wonderful solo in the middle of the song. I loved Bags’s vibe work underneath it all, with Percy Heath walking the hell out of his bass lines. And I loved the way that Miles comes back in that clear, crisp, beautiful tone of his. Man, when I first heard “Bags Groove,” I felt I had died and gone to some very hip heaven. I also felt I could dance some very cool steps to this music, and, on a number of occasions, I did. But even more than that, more than making me want to move my body, more than challenging me to think about what sound is all about, “Bags Groove” went straight to my heart. It made me feel older and “cool,” on the inside of something new. It confirmed my sense that I was a cut above the group I was hanging with, people who weren’t into Miles or jazz. And, to be sure, after a short time I found myself uncomfortable with most of these old friends and moved on, eventually finding a place for myself with an older, more adventurous crowd.
Miles & Me Page 10
