During this period Miles was literally making up the music onstage, creating it as the concert went along. Songs grew longer and longer and he completely abandoned the traditional standards, like “My Funny Valentine” and “If I Were a Bell,” that had driven Coltrane out of his band. In 1971, when Miles toured the United States playing rock halls as the opening act for Carlos Santana, many jazz fans and critics were more confused than ever. But even if it didn’t appear that way from the outside looking in, Miles knew that he was moving toward the music of On the Corner.
on the corner
On the Corner, recorded in the summer of 1972, was released later that year. The critics and fans who had thought Bitches Brew the most controversial jazz album Miles would ever release had more surprises in store, because On the Corner was indeed just right around the corner. This album produced more shocked dismay among jazz purists than even Bitches Brew. I, too, was confused and disappointed when I first heard it. But I came to think, and still do, that On the Corner was a powerfully innovative album.
The album cover—paintings of black street scenes by California artist Corky McCoy—made it clear that Miles was reaching out to young African Americans. I could see that. I knew he was trying to play jazz with a James Brown funk groove. I could hear that. But, as I said, the music confused me at first, because it wasn’t James Brown and it wasn’t Miles Davis but something else altogether different, with lots of Indian instruments like sitars and tablas thrown into the acoustic and electric mix for good measure.
Initially, I was even disappointed by Corky McCoy’s cartoonlike drawings of black people on the cover. But the second time I listened to it and looked at the cover drawings, I heard the rhythm underneath that pulled me into the music, and I understood McCoy’s images, too. The album has not let go of me since. On the Corner is quintessentially an album that comes from the sounds, rhythms, and attitudes that permeate the culture of that great city, New York.
In 1972 I was living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in a sixteenth-floor apartment on Central Park West with a wonderful view of Central Park. I knew that Miles was living on 77th Street, a block and a half off Broadway. Yes, I was in New York City and I felt as though I was in heaven. Tall buildings, millions and millions of people, all kinds of cultures and sounds mashed together. Close up.
Had I not been living in New York, perhaps I wouldn’t have gotten into On the Corner on just my second hearing, but living there made me more receptive and helped me penetrate the music’s density and get right down into its rhythmic core.
On the Corner is definitely African-American urban funk tinged with jazz and Indian and African flavors. It’s a jambalaya or gumbo from New Orleans. It’s “hip-hop” before “hip-hop.” Indeed, it might have been the first hip-hop record released by a major label, with its recurring bass and high-hat drum rhythms punctuated by snare accents, its use of electrical instrumentation, and its looping use of the recording tape.
On the Corner is all about an urban musical attitude and its orientation is funk, while its wonderful displays of musicianship are the improvisational skills found in the best of jazz musicians. A deep groove is laid down from jump, a rhythm that bumps and bounces along like a hip black man or woman walking down a New York street and taking in all the sounds and images. You can hear the car horns.
Miles plays wah-wah guitar rhythms on his horn, wailing, screeching, screaming, and meowing like a cat in the night. And though there are fine featured solos, On the Corner is really about group ensemble playing. The drummers and percussionists anchor this recording and goose and push it with an unbelievable pulsation and synchronicity. In the background, bells shake, gourds are scratched and shaken, whistles are blown. The drummers make the sock cymbals shimmy and shake like the behinds of men and women bouncing up and down and side to side on Harlem streets. The rhythmic figures are repeated throughout in a hypnotic fashion, but everyone is part and parcel of the ensemble group sound that percolates and brews and boils and spills over everything.
With this record, Miles proved definitively his ability to absorb different musical genres and turn them into his own musical idiom. On the Corner is a great synthesis. Over time I have grown to cherish it as much as I do any other album Miles ever made. In my opinion, it is a masterpiece that captures the music and sounds and feeling of our times like no other. Of course, the purist jazz critics hated it and had a field day bad-mouthing it, but it was not only panned by mainstream jazz critics—it didn’t sell well, either. Initially, then, it sank like a stone. But time has done well by it because as many young music lovers have discovered it, it has become an indispensable record for them.
On the Corner was a harbinger for the direction Miles would take from 1972 until 1975, when bad health, cocaine addiction, alcoholism, and disinterest in what he was playing—and with the entire music scene—forced him into five years of silence. From 1975 until 1980, he did not play a concert, cut a record, or even pick up his horn to practice. He just slid further down into drug and alcohol addiction, sex orgies, and a lifestyle that kept him prowling the streets of Manhattan during the hours after midnight like a madman or predator.
backstage at a very fisher
The last time I heard Miles play live before he retired was at the Kool Jazz Festival at the Avery Fisher Hall. It was a great and strange night. I went to the concert with my homeboy and friend pianist John Hicks and another friend, writer Steve Cannon. Hicks had told me that Miles had asked him to play at the concert, so he had gotten us great balcony seats overlooking the stage, and backstage passes so we could hang out with Miles and the musicians after the concert. Hicks was overjoyed to be playing with Miles, and I was happy for him and for the opportunity to be there to celebrate with him. After all, he was one of the guys who used to sit up in the bleachers at Tandy Community Center back in St. Louis and say—along with me and some other guys—that he was going to “run away to New York City and be just like Miles Davis.” So here we were, hanging in New York City, chilling, with me thinking I was finally just about to meet Miles. I remember thinking that it just couldn’t get any better than this.
When the band took the stage I saw that the working band had changed again—this time Miles was on trumpet and on the electric organ and keyboards. Sonny Fortune was on saxophones, Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas on electric guitars, Michael Henderson on electric bass, Al Foster on drums, and Mtume on percussion. But no John Hicks. Where was he? I thought that he would probably come out in a short while, but he didn’t. It was very strange. He didn’t join us in the extra seat we had, either. I remember thinking he would show up sooner or later.
The concert was great, one that brought people to their feet many times with whistling and standing ovations. Miles was playing with fire that night. The rest of the group played what music critic Howard Mandel later called “scorched earth music,” saying they were “burning the house down” with their music that night. Music critic Greg Tate called that band “the world’s first fully improvisational acid-funk band.” And it was that, too. I also remember the crowd being younger and blacker than previous ones, but with lots of Latinos, whites, and Asians, too. It was certainly a more multicultural audience than any I had ever seen at Miles’ concerts in the past.
When the concert was over, Steve and I went backstage to see if we could catch up with John Hicks. We found him standing just outside Miles’ dressing room door, ranting and raving, madder than a motherfucker. When he finally calmed down he told us that Miles had been so high he had forgotten that he had asked Hicks to play. Miles told Hicks that he, Miles, was going to play piano that night, which he did. Well, that just about sent Hicks off the deep end, and he threatened to hit Miles upside his head with a beer bottle; but some of the musicians stepped in, stopped him, and cooled the whole thing out. When we were leaving, Hicks said it was the drugs that were making Miles trip that way.
The energy backstage that night after that concert was awful. I had never seen Hicks so a
ngry—and I had known him for twenty years. He was always smiling, even while playing some of the “baddest” piano around. I remember feeling very bad and sad for him when we left the hall that night to get ourselves a stiff drink. I also remember thinking that Miles couldn’t keep going on like that, being so fucked up on drugs that he would forget something as important as who he had asked to play with him at a concert. John Hicks wasn’t a liar; he took his music and everyone else’s seriously. So I knew the problem had to be with Miles, and that disturbed me. It also disturbed me that he could do such a hurting thing to so fine a musician. My respect for Miles slipped that night. I remember thinking that just because someone was a legend, that didn’t give him the right to treat a person as badly as Miles had treated John Hicks. It was awful. A year later, in the summer of 1975, Miles retired from the music scene, and he didn’t come back for five long years, leaving a big hole in the music and in many of our lives.
miles points the way
Miles’ New York comeback concert, on July 5, 1981, again at Avery Fisher Hall, during George Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival, was a huge musical and media event. He had already played Boston’s Kix Club on June 27 to packed crowds, but Boston isn’t New York City and on July 5 a host of important music critics and celebrities like Bill Cosby, Mick Jagger, Dustin Hoffman, Quincy Jones, Clint Eastwood, Elizabeth Taylor, Woody Allen, and Richard Gere turned out to greet and hear Miles. A slew of great musicians, like Max Roach, Clark Terry, Jackie McLean, Ornette Coleman, Jack DeJonette, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Abbey Lincoln, Mtume, the late Julius Hemphill, and Dizzy Gillespie, also were in attendance, along with many, many others.
I was there, too, along with my future wife, Margaret. Everyone was “dressed to kill.” And although his comeback album, The Man with a Horn (1980), had been totally savaged by the critics (I too was deeply disappointed with the music on this album), everyone was there to hear what Miles was now into musically, since its release had been some months earlier. In the end most went away happy, because the music was popping—even though Miles’ trumpet chops still weren’t all the way back, his musical ideas were almost there. Still, his playing was much better and stronger than it had been on The Man with a Horn, where it had been dismal. He sounded much better, richer, more adventurous in his playing, and this encouraged almost every Miles fan there. His band that evening was first-rate: Marcus Miller on electric bass, Mike Stern on guitar, Bill Evans on saxophone, Al Foster on drums, and Mino Cinelu on percussion, with his guest artist for the evening the beautiful and outstanding percussionist Sheila E.
His fans’ encouragement was rewarded with his playing on his next album, We Want Miles, which is a compilation of Miles’ 1981 summer concerts at Kix and Avery Fisher Hall and his September tour of Japan. By his Japanese tour there is a marked improvement in Miles’ playing over what I heard in July at Avery Fisher Hall; his sound, tone, and attack are much richer, stronger, and more confident. We Want Miles sold over a hundred thousand copies (extremely well for a jazz album) and won a Grammy—a “sympathy vote,” I remember one of his detractors saying after the award was announced. I didn’t think so, because there were some very nice cuts on that album, including “Back Seat Betty,” “Jean-Pierre,” and “Fast Track,” all composed by Miles.
By the time his next album, Star People, was released in 1982, his playing chops were even better. And although I liked this album—especially “Speak,” “It Gets Better,” and the blues tune “Star People”—it was his next album, Decoy (1984), that fully got my attention. Even though it was awarded the Grammy for that year, I don’t think it’s one of his greatest albums, although it includes some good tracks, notably the title tune, “Code M.D.” (for “Miles Davis”), “Freaky Deaky,” ‘What It Is” (a favorite expression Miles used when greeting friends with one of his rare smiles), and “That’s Right.” The music on this album is open, airy but tight, and very, very rhythmic, with catchy contemporary musical hooks, funk grooves, and a group sound so large it seems like a big band is playing in many places.
Miles’ next album, You’re Under Arrest, also sold over a hundred thousand copies, in a very few weeks. This was due in part, in my opinion, to Miles including the very popular songs “Human Nature” and “Time After Time” on this album, tunes that would remain in his live performance repertoire until his death. Again, this wasn’t one of my favorite albums, though it had some moments, like those two lovely pop ballads, the opening track entitled “One Phone Call Street Scene” (which features Miles, Sting, and others talking), “Intro M D 1,” and “Katia” (two other songs he kept in his concert repertoire).
Miles said he made this album because of “the problems that black people have with policemen everywhere.” He personalized this belief when he said: “The police are always fucking with me when I drive around out in California. They didn’t like seeing me driving around in a sixty-thousand-dollar yellow Ferrari, which I was doing at the time I made this record. Plus, they didn’t like me, a black person, living in a beachfront house in Malibu. That’s where the concept for You’re Under Arrest came from.” Miles sometimes drove around with an expired license and old Georgia plates, but his logic was, “The police know who I am, so why do they have to stop me?”
Still, the arresting part of this album—at least for me—is the striking photo of Miles on the cover and back of the album. He’s dressed in all black, with a wide-brimmed black hat and a no-nonsense look on his face, and is holding what looks like an automatic rifle. It’s a stunning photograph.
The good thing I would say about this album is that Miles plays very well here; his sound and tone are bright and clear, his playing and attack are very confident, very strong. Throughout this album he shoots off flying riffs in high and middle registers with ease—his playing chops are fully back!—and he has perfected the big-band sound that will remain a signature of his band until his death.
I liked the huge sound, the way it was structured, layered, and arranged, the way each musical instrument was voiced. Miles had learned much from Duke Ellington, Stockhausen, and Paul Buckmaster about using rhythm and space, about how to manipulate the band’s sound from high to low and all points in between, in the blink of an eye. Among the modern jazz musicians he was, in my opinion, unsurpassed in achieving this huge, layered big-band sound with relatively few—six or seven—musicians. You’re Under Arrest was the last album Miles recorded for Columbia Records, ending what had been a very rewarding recording relationship of almost thirty years.
Miles moved over to Warner Records, and on his first album, Tutu, named after South Africa’s black Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu, he reaches the highest plateau with his layered “big-band” sound. From the opening track, “Tutu,” on, Miles’ manipulation of the band’s sound is masterful. For me this is the most completely rewarding of his final albums—although I truly like Amandla, Aura, and Live Around the World. All of these albums are rich and nourishing, and in different ways.
Aura is outstanding for its inventive, adventurous spirit and structure. Recorded in 1984 in Copenhagen, in collaboration with the remarkable Danish composer and trumpet player Palle Mikkelborg, this record was released by Columbia (because Miles was under contract with them when it was recorded) in 1989. The album has a wonderful experimental edge to it, both in its compositional structure—all by Mikkelborg—and in the musicianship on display here.
Miles’ playing on this album is really outstanding. His solo riffs at times soar into the stratosphere. On other occasions, he plays a more thoughtful horn, open or muted, his solos sometimes long and sometimes fragmented, seemingly bitten off just as they get started. On still other occasions he plays with a pure introspective beauty reminiscent of his earlier, pre-electric phase. All in all, it is a wonderful album.
Amandla (meaning “freedom” in Swahili) is also a truly first-rate album, continuing the layered big-band sound, only funkier. The album has more of a Caribbean and Afri
can touch because Miles was really listening to Kassav and zouk and Franco, the late great Zarian guitarist. (I know because, as the reader will recall, I introduced Miles to their music.) Amandla has splashes of guitar and synthesizer colors patched into the group sound that echo Kassav’s wide use of the guitar, electric bass, and synthesizer. It’s a subtle effect, but it’s there underneath it all.
Live Around the World is rewarding for other reasons, mainly because it captures how really magnificent Miles’ last bands were live and in concert.
Although very, very interesting in places, doo-bop—like Ralph Ellison’s last novel, Juneteenth, published in June 1999—is an unfinished project, because Miles died before the album could be completed. Had he lived, I am convinced, doo-bop would have been more fully realized, and possibly the innovative, truly outstanding record that Miles told me he wanted to make. As is, doo-bop is only an indication, a musical index finger, if you will, pointing in the direction music might go in the future. Already some musicians, like Branford Marsalis, Greg Osby, and Russell Gunn, have released intriguing musical albums that move confidently in that direction, and perhaps beyond.
i see things
When I listen to Miles play I see things. I hear birds sing. I see and hear rivers and midnight trains as they cross a lonely midnight, midwestern landscape. I see beautiful women floating, naked and clothed; I see stylish men, pimps and slick-dressing gangsters. See ghosts all up in and between his chords, and I hear old and young people talking on southern porches after the sun has gone down. I hear horses whinnying and dogs barking. I mean, the way his sound flows is, for me, like seeing a parade of very hip people, magical in their elegance, flow by in an unending stream of eloquence just as the sun sets in the west and all those marvelous colors are singing their sundown song. He was magical for me when I first heard him and he was magical at the end, and he still is. Not despite all the changes in style his music and playing went through, but because of them.
Miles & Me Page 13
