saying good-bye
When Miles Davis died on September 28, 1991, in Santa Monica, California, of heart failure brought on by diabetes and pneumonia, he died in Jo Gelbard’s arms. Jo’s mother, Iris Kaplan, also a painter, told me this when Margaret and I had dinner with her and her husband, Lenny, a few months after Miles’ death. Iris told me that Jo had sensed he was going and just climbed into bed with him right before the end.
Just like that, he was gone. All that fierce energy, all that light and all that darkness. Gone. Just like that. A stroke paralyzed him, put him in the hospital. Then a second stroke killed him. (His father had died of a sudden stroke, and in the summer of 1996, his oldest sister, Dorothy, would die of stroke, too, so they seem to run in the family.) The official cause of death was given as pneumonia and, I think, heart failure.
Margaret told me that Miles had had a stroke when she met me at the San Diego airport in the first or second week of September. Dorothy, Miles’ sister, had just called to let me know and had asked her to have me call when I arrived. I had just talked to Miles on the phone earlier that week from Minneapolis, where I was spending a month as writer in residence at The Loft. We had talked about meeting the following week to begin outlining plans to collaborate on a musical we had been discussing. So when Margaret told me the bad news, I was shocked. I called Dorothy right away and she told me it wasn’t looking good for Miles, that he was paralyzed on his right side, that he was hooked up to all kinds of tubes, and that he was unconscious. “Are you coming up to see him?” she wanted to know. If I was, she would arrange a pass for me to get into the hospital.
I thought about it for a while and told her, “No, I’m not coming. I want to remember him like he was the last time I saw him.” I told her I didn’t want to see him lying up there helpless, with tubes running all up into him, up his nose. Told her I wanted to remember him—selfish as this might sound—alive, full of great energy, with that fierce attitude about him, told her I couldn’t bear seeing him helpless. I told her that I just couldn’t take that, that I was sorry, which I was. (A few years later, Ricky Wellman, Miles’ last drummer, told me he had gone to see Miles right before he passed and was shocked by the image of him lying there inert, seemingly waiting for death. Ricky said he found himself wishing sometimes he hadn’t seen Miles in this way, because this image seemed to dominate all the rest of the remembrances he had of Miles.)
Dorothy said she understood, that the family was there and that Clark Terry, Miles’ boyhood idol and old friend, was calling every day. She said that although he was unconscious, he would move his left hand ever so slightly every time he heard Clark Terry’s voice. I thought it was wonderful that Clark was calling Miles. It seemed that Miles had come full circle and was depending on his old friend again for emotional sustenance.
I was in Statesboro, Georgia, when Miles passed. I had gone there as the last stop on a ten-city poetry tour of the state. I found out about Miles’ death from the television when I came back to my hotel room in Statesboro. I saw his face flash on CNN and started to realize that he was gone. Although after talking to Dorothy I had known that he probably wouldn’t make it, his death still stunned me and left a hole in my heart. I loved the man, no matter what.
Miles’ death was peaceful and, considering the condition he was in, probably for the best. Had he survived, he would have been paralyzed and most likely bedridden for life. He would have been unable to play ever again and probably would have gone crazy in that condition. It would have been pure torture. Yes, I think under the circumstances, it’s best that he died and did not have to live as an invalid. He would have hated that.
After his death, I began to think that he knew he was dying, and perhaps that was why he got so angry with me when I reminded him that he had said he would rather die before he “played that old-time music again.” If he felt himself dying, maybe he thought that I had peeped his hold card. I don’t know. I do know that the last time I saw him he seemed weaker than he had ever seemed before.
Miles never talked about death; he even hated the subject being brought up. He hated going to funerals, too. In 1987, when I told him that James Baldwin had died, he hadn’t heard the news yet and couldn’t seem to get it together in his head that Jimmy was gone. They had been long-time friends, and Jimmy’s place in St. Paul de Vence in southern France was the only friend’s home I knew about that Miles stayed at when he was traveling.
After hearing of Jimmy’s death, Miles kept saying that he had just seen him earlier in the year when he had played France. He had known that Jimmy was sick but was convinced that of all his friends, Jimmy would outlive him. I thought I saw tears in his eyes, but if there were, Miles covered them up well by excusing himself and going into the bathroom. One thing was certain: Miles Davis wasn’t going to let me or anyone else see him cry. But I think on that cold December day in 1987 Miles Davis did cry for his great friend. He stayed in the bathroom for quite a while and when he came out there was no sign of tears, though his eyes were red and he was sniffing and blowing his nose into a handkerchief. “Man,” I remember thinking to myself, “Miles is one tough, thick-skinned motherfucka.”
After I asked him if he was going to attend Baldwin’s funeral, he said, “I ain’t going to no funeral. I don’t like no goddamn funerals, even if it is Jimmy Baldwin’s. I want to remember him in life, in the flesh, when he was livin’ and was a bad motherfucka and not some ghost of himself layin’ up in no coffin. That ain’t Jimmy,” he said in his hoarse whisper of a voice, “but just a pile of lifeless flesh and bones. Naw, man, I want to remember him how he was: a bad motherfucka. That’s all.” (That’s why I didn’t visit Miles in the hospital or go to his funeral; I wanted to remember him as the “bad motherfucka” he was.)
Throughout that day he talked about many of his friends who had died—Monk, Bird, Coltrane, Fats Navarro, Freddie Webster, Bud Powell, Red Garland, Jimi Hendrix, Clifford Brown, and many, many others. But he talked about his old drummer, Philly Joe Jones, the most, shaking his head and chuckling to himself every time he mentioned Philly Joe’s name. Miles didn’t laugh; he kind of chuckled, sometimes emitting a raspy, throaty shaking. It was clear that Miles had loved Philly Joe, and that day it was also clear that Miles had loved James Baldwin deeply.
That conversation was one of the rare times I heard Miles talk about death. That day I realized that Miles had lost many great friends; that with the exception of Dizzy Gillespie (who would die soon after Miles), Max Roach, Clark Terry, and a few others, Miles was almost the last of the beboppers.
Miles believed in the spirit, in life after death, and the last time I saw him—at his new Central Park West address, in the summer of 1991—he was talking about death. Maybe he knew that his time was coming, felt it in his body, or maybe his doctors had told him he didn’t have long. Miles talked about how he missed his father, Gil, and Coltrane. With his raspy voice and knowing chuckle he said that he would see them all soon enough and that he and Gil and Trane would play some great music again, together.
epilogue
Miles Davis has been dead for almost a decade now and not a day goes by that I don’t miss him and his galvanizing presence. Today his five-story-high, black-and-white photographic image is on view on the sides of buildings all across America, in Sony’s “Make a Difference” ads. His trumpet and later group sound—as in Tutu, Decoy, and Amandla—are imitated in commercials we hear every day on America’s television and radio airwaves. New jazz luminaries such as Cassandra Wilson, Mark Isham, Leo Smith, and many others pay homage to his work. He had an immeasurable influence on my life—and countless others—both as a black man and as an artist. His was a singular spirit, one who marched only to the tempo of his own St. Louis bugle and the rhythms and teachings of his own heart.
Such individuality of spirit can be trying in a country like ours, especially if you are, like Miles Davis, a proud black man who insists on taking risks, doing things his own way, and standing up for his beliefs. Be
yond being a risk-taker, Miles was a truly great band leader whose ability to spot great talent launched many distinguished careers. Musicians like Cannonball Adderley, Ron Carter, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Kenny Garrett, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Joe Zawinul, and many others all got their first important exposure working with Miles.
The musical environments that he created for himself and other musicians set up such fertile conditions that everyone who worked inside these innovative scenes flourished. Consider the recording environments he set up for Kind of Blue, In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and On the Corner. By bringing into the recording studio only sketches of what was to be played, Miles forced the musicians to improvise more, to listen more intently to each other, and, further, to respond instantly to the musical flow. Thus, what took place in the studio was the spontaneous sound made in the clubs that musicians love best, where they can improvise and create a coherent collective statement.
Miles was also a great composer and he left us some masterful compositions on Kind of Blue, On the Corner, Bitches Brew, Filles de Kilimanjaro, and many other memorable albums. In his own music, he was a voodoo-hoodoo-shaman-man, a witch-doctor-medicine-man-of-roots-music of the highest order. In his most innovative periods, especially after Kind of Blue, both his musical theory and his sound were more African than European. He was vilified for this, for moving into a music rooted in group dynamics, such as rock and zouk, rather than staying with Western-oriented jazz, which depends more on individual inspiration and improvisation.
Today, it is a truism that the United States is a multicultural, multiracial country that is home to all kinds of racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious persuasions and institutions. Miles’ music reflected all of this diversity before the word “multicultural” was even coined. He listened to and learned from all musical genres. His musical tastes were more than eclectic. They mirrored the changes that were happening in music all over the globe. His last studio recording sessions were for an album that would have included rap. That’s why I call him a risk-taker. He was never afraid of failure because failures taught him what he needed to know as much as successes did.
Miles was a great instrumentalist. He had a great melodic, lyrical, and rhythmic approach to playing the trumpet. His beautiful “running” trumpet style has had a lasting impact on younger players. Listening to Miles play, I was always conscious—way before I met him—of being in the presence of a great poet, one who constructed great metaphors through the medium of sound. His sound was very close to that of a human voice. It was a mysterious voice that made me dream. And it wasn’t just his tone that was so masterful. Miles’ sense of time was phenomenal. Max Roach, the great drummer, said that Miles’ “basic quarter note, his time was [always] there: that’s why Miles was so profound, because he worked at that.” And there was always an edginess about the way he played, a scary intensity and moodiness, something unpredictable. He kept us on our toes.
For at least thirty-five years, Miles Davis was the dominant force in jazz. He just kept listening, playing, and moving toward his own vision. He was an artist whose greatest wish was that he never become, in his own words, “a museum piece under glass.” His focus was always on the present and the future, never on the past. In this sense, he was the quintessential American “New World” artist, because he knew that the future is where it is at. He knew that language, technology, instruments—everything that goes into making sound and producing music—changes, and that, to continue to be relevant, music must change, too. He knew that nothing is forever. Everything is forever changing, being torn down or erased to make way for something new. That’s just the way it is.
Some critics put down his later music as meaningless or trivial. They say that his many musical changes were driven by commercial reasons rather than artistic ones. But the great majority of music lovers cherished his willingness to go out there on that risky, experimental edge. Ralph Gleason got to the core of this when he wrote: “The greatest single thing about Miles Davis is that he does not stand still. He is forever being born. And like all his other artistic kin, as he changes, leaves behind one style or mode and enters another, he gains new adherents and loses old ones. . . . Miss him at your loss. He is amazing.”
He was also amazing as a role model of black pride and defiance. Miles was what I call an “unreconstructed black man.” One who is, to put it simply, someone who doesn’t “take shit off no one.” Paul Robeson was such a man, as were Malcolm X, Nat Turner, Robert Johnson, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Toure), and Tupac Shakur, to name just a few who have passed. Unreconstructed black men with us today include Muhammad Ali, Prince, Chuck Berry, Amiri Baraka, and Ishmael Reed.
Unreconstructed black men don’t have the manners of their reconstructed “Negro” brethren, who are always trying to put a “civilized” face on their blackness, especially in the company of white folks. Unreconstructed black men will have none of this; they will not play the farcical game they consider beneath them. They get a hard time, therefore, from white people and other “people of color,” including black people, many of whom feel threatened by them.
Unreconstructed black men don’t submit to power games. “Negro” servants do, and gladly if money is involved. Those “Negro” servants who play along are the ones who get along and receive most, if not all, of the white power structure’s patronage. Those who don’t play along receive no breaks, and the power structure is always looking for ways to break them. Not because they aren’t good Americans, but because they won’t kiss ass. Miles Davis refused to play this game and, although he garnered much success in this country, he frequently paid for being an unreconstructed black man.
Unreconstructed black men go their own way and will go to the mat any time they are challenged. This “unreconstructedness” can cause strange personality quirks that manifest in a highly personalized and self-centered way of looking at and evaluating things. Miles had many of these quirks. Everything in the world revolved around him and the way he looked at it. No compromises: “Either you do it my way or fuck you.” I’m not praising this attitude; I’m simply saying that that’s the way he was.
In the end, it was very difficult, if not impossible, for Miles ever to see himself as wrong in any situation, because he was focused on what he wanted. That’s why he could never say he was wrong, or sorry. Was this a side effect of genius and forty years of success? Of being proven right most times regarding the artistic decisions he made? Maybe. I can’t answer that question. What I do know is that it would have been very hard not to be affected by the amount of fame, money, and power Miles acquired over the span of his long career.
Miles had an intuitive grasp of what was right or wrong when it came to blacks, whites, and race relations in this country. This understanding came from the influence of his father—who was a wealthy dentist, a “race man,” and one of Miles’ biggest supporters—and from his own experiences with racism. Still, ironically, he was deeply insecure about being so dark. Like many dark-skinned blacks he preferred lighter-skinned women to darker ones. “I don’t want no woman blacker than me,” he used to like to tell me, though it would have been difficult to find such a woman, because there weren’t many women darker than he was. It was ironic on another level, too, because many women loved him precisely because of his smooth black skin, and men of all races envied him because of it. The fact that Miles was one of the very first dark-skinned superstar sex symbols in the entertainment industry makes his insecurity over his skin tone even more ironic.
More troublesome was his sexist attitude toward women, which I found deplorable, though I must say here that I never saw him beat or even slap a woman. But his basic attitude was obvious in the language he used when addressing women: “Bitch this” and “Bitch that.” His attitude left much to be desired, though in the the last years of his life he found a peaceful serenity and mutual respect in his relationship with Jo Gelbard. I never saw him m
istreat her or heard him call or refer to her as a “bitch.” Jo seemed to smoothe out his rough edges, and that was good. Maybe she was changing him. I don’t know. It appeared so. What I do know is that it was good to see him treat her with the respect that she deserved.
Miles was a sometimes strange, really odd, aloof, seemingly arrogant man, whose contradictions and faults were many, but whose gruff, blunt, even hostile exterior hid from public view a funny and caring person; this was the Miles those who truly knew him loved. I knew all sides of him and I can tell you that his caring and funny side manifested itself in some of his relationships as well as in his art and music.
When we look at the accomplishments of Miles Dewey Davis III over the forty-five-year span of his musical career, we see that he did creative and innovative work in almost all the genres of popular American music—from roadhouse funk all the way to hip-hop. Miles was one of the great artists of the twentieth century, but the music critics and other arbiters of American cultural taste, out of racism and envy, still try to marginalize him, to deny the true measure of his incredible achievement.
Jazz, as a musical genre, is always relegated to the back of the bus in America. People in the music industry, and in the country at large, always say, “It’s not commercial enough.” But neither is European classical music “commercial enough,” and it is hyped and promoted in most big cities. Racism plays an important part in this; European classical music is made and performed mostly by whites for whites. Blacks have been the main innovators and performers during the history of jazz, and, although there have been many white players and fans, it is still thought of as a black art form.
Miles & Me Page 14
