sheets of sound
In 1965, for the first time since I had begun listening to him, I wasn’t paying much attention to Miles’ new recordings because they seemed out of sync with my musical tastes. When I’d returned to the States, after hearing James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” I was out on the dance floor shaking my booty again like everyone else in America. And though I was dancing my ass off to James Brown, it was the energy and passion of John Coltrane and his group that were moving my soul. Trane’s surging “sheets of sound” seemed to transcribe the political outrage of the inner cities into profound music. In his music, I heard the gunfire in the streets, the cries of rage, the urgent need to revolt.
In the 1960s, the great social upheavals the United States was experiencing were significantly altering long-standing racial relationships. That fact, and my own political beliefs and emerging artistic consciousness (helped along by Miles’ boundary-shattering music), was pointing me toward a fundamental reassessment of my life.
I had moved to Los Angeles to live in the black community called Watts after the riots there in 1965. I lived in a commune of writers, poets, and artists and met many other creative people from all over the community. I joined the Watts Writers Workshop and began to write poetry every day. The one constant presence in my life was John Coltrane. I listened to him every waking hour, sometimes all day long.
But as much as I was learning to love Trane, Miles remained my idol and role model. From the mid-to late 1960s I had memorized almost all of my favorite solos by both musicians. I used their riffs and licks as a foundation for the rhythms and cadences of my own emerging poetic language. Their horn solos helped me to pull myself away from the sonnets, sestinas, and villanelles I was composing when I first started writing poetry.
I kept trying to imitate the flow and structure of their musical ideas. With Miles I wanted to get something like his floating sound and jabbing, insistent staccato rhythms into my poetic lines. With Trane I wanted to learn how to generate the same kind of energy and passionate intensity that his “sheets of sound” did.
the second quintet
In 1966, I “rediscovered” Miles’ music. My ears finally opened to his new sound. By then the second quintet (and sometime sextet) had been working together for two years. It took me so long to hear what they were doing because the music was so difficult and different.
In fact, this band was one of the most liberated I have ever heard—then or since. Hearing that band live was like watching a chameleon go through its changes. Night after night, they never played the same tune the same way. Although they played the standards, they did them with extraordinary harmonies and rhythmic experiments. They freed themselves from all the conventional chord changes. But no matter how much they broke with traditions, they swung. They always swung.
The band members were all much younger than Miles and they led him into newer, more challenging directions. The drummer, the late Tony Williams, was seventeen years old, fresh out of Boston and Jackie McLean’s band, when he joined Miles. Many people think he was the most gifted drummer Miles ever had. Herbie Hancock was playing great Bud Powell–influenced piano, Wayne Shorter was Miles’ most imaginative saxophonist since Coltrane, and the rock-steady and creative Ron Carter on bass completed the core group.
Influenced by the band’s exuberant energy and the great tunes the other musicians were writing—especially those of Shorter, the band’s main composer—Miles’ approach to the trumpet had changed again. His horn had flown into the stratosphere. He played higher and faster than he ever had before, splintering off notes like wood chips flying out of a wood thrasher. The change was so evident it was almost like hearing a new trumpet player. At a club in L.A. one night I overheard music critic Leonard Feather marveling at how fast Miles was playing. He kept shaking his head in amazement about Miles’ great new sound.
In the few years that the quintet/sextet was together, the personnel and instruments kept changing and electric instruments were added. For Miles, electrical amplification represented the future of music—but it also led to the breakup of his second great band.
in a silent way
The year 1968 was a momentous one for Miles. He began a short-lived marriage to Betty Mabry, he suffered from a depression caused by the death of his friend John Coltrane in 1967, and he found himself searching for a new sound again. As Dizzy Gillespie once said, “Miles is like a man who has made a pact with himself to never repeat himself.” And, I, after hearing Miles play the memorable solo “Petits Machins” (“Little Stuff”) on the album Filles de Kilimanjaro, was altogether into his music again.
With the release of In a Silent Way, it was clear that Miles had found his new sound. At first, it was hard to listen to, because I had just recently become accustomed to the second quintet, and I wasn’t ready for him to move in another direction; but it wasn’t long before I was loving the new sound. By then, I understood that one important reason to love Miles was that you would never know what to expect from him. It wasn’t that his playing was so different on In a Silent Way but rather that he had placed himself in a new musical context. He had surrounded himself with an entirely new sound that brought his voice into sharp relief, allowing us to hear it in a more open and expanded way. There were deep, mysterious spaces in the music and there was something mysterious and magically compelling beneath its surface that bubbled like an underground river. It drew me back to listen to it over and over again.
In a Silent Way uses three electric pianos, an electric organ, and an electric guitar in addition to conventional acoustic instruments. All the musicians take long solos, but Miles’ are especially bright, haunting, and, at their core, sad. Miles had learned and absorbed so many new musical ideas from the members of his second “great” band that he had caught up with the musical language of the younger generation. And once he was comfortable with new instruments like the synthesizer, he felt it was time to move on. He wanted to move forward with his own musical agenda, and he knew he wanted to go in the direction of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Sly Stone, and Charles Lloyd. Years later, Miles told me that Charles Lloyd had served as a catalyst for how he had played In a Silent Way. Still, though Miles had loved the way Lloyd had fused elements of rock and jazz together, it was not Lloyd but guitarist Jimi Hendrix who was the biggest influence on Miles at this time.
“jimi”
I met Hendrix in California around the same time Miles was introduced to him in New York. I met Hendrix when I was reading poetry on the beach in Venice, but I didn’t know who he was because he told me only that his name was “Jimi.” He liked my poetry and offered to play behind me, and I accepted. His amazing guitar blew me completely away, so I asked for his full name. When he told it to me, I was so astonished I couldn’t read anymore. My mouth dropped down somewhere around my knees and he just stood there laughing at me. Laughing and watching my reaction. He was a shy man and was flattered that I loved his music so much and that I knew who he was, because, as he later told me, most blacks had never heard of him. That was because the kind of music he played appealed mostly to the young white fans of rock and roll.
The following week I came back to Venice to read at the beach and Hendrix was there and played behind me again. That was the last time I ever saw him up close. I didn’t know that he knew Miles, nor did I ever mention to him how much I loved Miles’ music. But I did find out later that Hendrix had influenced Miles so much that Miles had tried to transpose his guitar style for the trumpet.
bitches brew
Miles had plunged deep into electric instrumentation for the first time on In a Silent Way, and he continued in this direction even further with his next album, the ground-breaking Bitches Brew, which rose to the top of the jazz charts and eventually sold five hundred thousand copies, becoming Miles’ biggest-selling record. Like Kind of Blue, it exerted a tremendous influence throughout the worlds of jazz, pop, rock, and blues.
But more than any other album until then,
it polarized his audience into two distinct groups: those who loved his music before Bitches Brew and those who loved it after hearing Bitches Brew. In the first group were the older lovers of jazz and European classical music, perhaps evenly divided among all racial groups. His new audience was equally diverse but decidedly younger and more tuned into rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and funk. When they came together at Miles’ concerts, the two groups were like oil and water; they were loudly contentious and even got into arguments about which way Miles should take his music.
However, it was the younger group that raved about Bitches Brew and bought it, and it was on the hook of the younger group that Miles hung his musical hat. One thing is certain: Miles knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that his new approach would reach the younger generation and, like the true innovator that he was, didn’t care what anyone else thought. He once told me, “Old people don’t buy records but young people do.”
He sure was right in this assessment, because many of his older fans never bought a record of his again after Bitches Brew, and this included many of my older friends. I think it was a class difference as well as a generational one. His older audience liked to wear suits and ties and go to concert halls. Many of them also liked European classical music and opera. The kids who liked Bitches Brew were not only younger; they were raunchier. They dressed down instead of up and danced in the aisles and cheered in the “wrong” places. They were bored by classical music or opera but loved rock and roll, funk, and soul.
I, for one, appreciated Miles’ courage, especially because it seemed to me that he was at the top of the music world when he made these changes. In my opinion, it’s a lot easier to change when you’re closer to the bottom than when you’re on top. Miles always initiated change when he was riding high and being richly rewarded for what he was doing. The cause of his many changes was never financial need. It was what he needed to do to advance as an artist.
Others didn’t see it that way, especially the critics. After Bitches Brew, Stanley Crouch called Miles “the most brilliant sellout in the history of jazz” and a “traitor.” Leonard Feather, who had been one of Miles’ biggest fans, didn’t appreciate the change, either. But then, until a certain point in time, Feather hadn’t liked John Coltrane, and he’d urged people not to buy Trane’s records or to listen to him live because they would only be listening to “noise.” Miles once told me that Feather had urged him not to include Trane in his first great group. Time sure proved him wrong on that point.
Miles went his own way despite the beating he knew he would take from hostile critics and fans. Miles knew that all forms of art reflect their own societies and cultures. In 1969, despite the furious objections of the purists, he knew that electrical instrumentation was here to stay. As Ralph Gleason wrote: “Electric music is the music of this culture and in the breaking away (not the breaking down) from previously assumed forms a new kind of music is emerging. The whole society is like that. The old forms are inadequate. Not the old eternal verities but the old structures.” Miles, according to Gleason, was always reaching for “new ideas and new forms, and in music this has meant leaving the traditional forms of bars and scales, keys and chords, and playing something else altogether which maybe you can’t identify and classify yet but which you recognize when you hear it and which when it makes it, really makes it—is the true artistic turn-on.”
If Miles and his band were excited about what they had accomplished with the recording of Bitches Brew, it did not equal the shock that his fans went through when they first heard it—whether they loved it or hated it. The first thing I noticed when I bought the album was the cover. It was truly strange. It was a “cosmic” painting by Abdul Mati of three black people looking at sea and sky, two men and a woman. The woman’s hair seems like a small tornado connecting her head to the dark clouds in the sky. She has an arm around a man’s waist and he has an arm around her shoulders. They are nude above the waist. Another black face juts out of the left margins above a flaming pink flower. All three seem to be Africans looking westward toward what could be America. This was the first time Miles had used original art on an album cover, and it seemed more suited to a rock album than to jazz. Even the title of the album seemed more in keeping with rock and roll than with jazz, and the cover announced the psychedelic orientation of the music within.
I remember getting ready to listen to the record by fixing myself a stiff drink, going into the front room of my home in Athens—I was teaching at Ohio University at the time—and placing the first of the four sides (Bitches Brew is a double album) on the turntable. When the drumbeat opened up the music, I sat down eagerly. It was early afternoon and I kept listening until late into the evening, even bringing my dinner into the front room to eat with my plate on my lap as I absorbed every note and chord of this at first very weird music. Before the night closed down, it had deeply impressed me.
It took a while for me to understand what Miles was doing and to hear the music’s roots. Bitches Brew went even deeper into the rock-funk-blues bag than had its predecessor, In a Silent Way. Yet it is a direct descendent of that album, with its modernist edge and its expansive search for freer modes and ways to express musical ideas.
The album begins with Joe Zawinul’s tune “Pharaoh’s Dance,” which opens in a swirling maelstrom of electrical pulsations that carry the listener into a strange new place where nothing is predictable. Guitars and electric pianos lay out short runs that widen like the concentric circles a rock makes when it is thrown in a river. Then comes Miles’ first mournful, very short solo, and after that, when the other musicians start up again, Miles seems to jab and punch his way like a boxer through an enveloping sound that swirls all around him. His horn almost screams a few times as if frustrated at not finding a way out of all that sound. The group mimics the traffic noise of rush hour in Manhattan, with car horns honking and millions of people talking and yelling in a hurricane of voices. It is a remarkable opening. Even today, whenever I think about Manhattan, I think about “Pharaoh’s Dance.”
The title tune starts slowly. Miles opens with a marchlike, trilling solo that moves into a long passage that rises, falls, and spreads out as if the trumpeter were descending into some kind of private hell. His voice sometimes screams, other times pleads. The trilling, marchlike figure, reminiscent of his drum and bugle beginnings, is repeated throughout the composition like a refrain. Miles’ solo in the middle of this twenty-seven-minute piece is stunning in its creation of a feeling of profound loneliness and isolation.
In contrast, “Spanish Key,” which opens up the second side of the album, pulsates throughout. It churns and boils like water in an iron cauldron over a large fire. Everyone who solos here does so splendidly—John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Benny Maupin, Zawinul, and, of course, Miles.
“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” is a memorable Miles Davis composition. From the opening bass line punctuated by drum accents and guitar blues licks to the bass clarinet moaning in the background of Miles’ opening statement, you know this is the blues, but the blues played in a way you’ve never heard before. The music seems to be boiling, with voices emerging from whatever the concoction is that is being cooked down there. “Sanctuary” closes out this very controversial album more in the style of his second great quintet. When set against the rest of the songs on this album, its haunting tune seems almost tame.
Bitches Brew broke down the barrier between rock and traditional jazz. Some critics, fans, and musicians never forgave Miles for doing this, but he was celebrated by millions for pushing the envelope of innovation and creativity in that direction. The album also pushed Miles into larger venues than the small jazz clubs he had played for years. Bitches Brew not only generated controversy; it made Miles richer, too, and more famous than he had ever been. He played gigs with the Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana, and the late Laura Nyro, taking his music to an evergrowing, larger audience.
miles’ “stock” bands and recordings
After Bitches Brew, Miles drew more and more from the same pool of musicians—his “stock recording band” as he liked to call it—to make his new recordings. This was true for Circle in the Round, Live-Evil, Big Fun, Get Up with It, Jack Johnson, and On the Corner, all recorded in the early 1970s, though some, like Circle in the Round, were released much later. Live-Evil was an extension of what Miles had done on Bitches Brew, using some of the same musical concepts and figures, only this time around, in his words, they were “more worked out” because on Live-Evil he knew exactly where he wanted the music to go.
He was moving away from everyone having a solo to using more ensemble interplay and group improvisation, a hallmark of funk and rock. This caused an even larger rift between Miles and the jazz purists because jazz has always been considered the soloist’s art form, the place where an individual can improvise and solo to his or her heart’s content. Now Miles was moving away from even this sacred tenet. There were still solos, but they were shorter, more intense bursts within the group context. For many of his older fans, this change proved to be the last straw; but their places in Miles’ audience were eagerly taken by younger, rock-and funk-oriented fans.
Between 1965 and 1970, Miles released many albums that carried his name as leader. All of them used members of the stock recording band that he had developed over the years. It seemed as though he was living and sleeping in the recording studio. Most of the albums I liked, listening to them over and over again; some I was indifferent to, listening to them only occasionally; others I listened to once and never played again. But if Miles was becoming more prolific during these years, he was also becoming more improvisational when he played live at concerts.
Miles & Me Page 12
