Miles & Me

by Quincy Troupe

  Like that of Malcolm X, Miles Davis’ unsmiling, “unreconstructed black” male demeanor remains threatening to many whites and to those middle-class blacks who control institutional largesse outside of the record business—notably at universities, colleges, and Lincoln Center’s Jazz Program. In my opinion, this is the chief reason that Miles has been denied his true place in American musical history, in contrast with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, for example, both of whom present that smiling, genial, well-mannered, nonthreatening black male image that is digestible and commercially viable. Institutions like Lincoln Center and colleges and universities mostly rely on grants and the contributions of primarily white benefactors, while record companies rely on sales. Miles Davis has always done well at the cash register, and he will continue to do so.

  Despite the complexity and narrow audience appeal of European classical music, television programmers do not shy away from promoting it during prime time, in large part because European classical music has its own well-heeled, deep-pocketed advocacy groups, many of whom are positioned in high places in both broadcast and print media. These advocates view promoting this music as protecting and publicizing their own European ancestral roots.

  To their credit, the people who run Lincoln Center’s Jazz Program view their role with jazz—which they call America’s classical music—in the same way. They, too, view themselves as protecting American ancestral roots, but through the promotion of jazz—though it is mostly jazz dating from the mid-1960s on back, what some might call “mainstream” or “straight-ahead” jazz. Avant garde jazz has been, until now, unwelcome here. Yet, with the possible exception of the work of Wynton Marsalis, who plays both American classical and European classical forms of music, even “mainstream” and “straight-ahead” jazz find almost no space on American television airwaves because they don’t have the rich and well-positioned advocates in that medium pushing the art form.

  Like the music of Mozart and Beethoven, the music of Miles Davis is brilliant, challenging, innovative, fusionistic, and futuristic; it has grandeur and majesty and is orchestral in its sweep. Miles’ music should be required listening for all students of American music in high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels of musical education, but it isn’t.

  These educational programs are run by academics who have different agendas. Who gets taught often depends on whom the teachers like and who they think is deserving (far too often, their friends). These academics, always suspicious of Miles’ technical prowess on the trumpet, often say Miles is unable to play fast and in the higher registers of the instrument. Have they listened to Four and More, Miles Ahead, and the many other albums on which he played high and fast after the late 1950s?

  Or, citing his many innovations—such as fusing funk, rock, pop, hip-hop, rap, European classicism, and world beat trends with his music, utilizing electrical instrumentation in his own playing and group sound, and removing himself from the “mainstream” purist path—they shun, or at best downplay, his enormous achievements in their classrooms. Similar objections to Miles’ unorthodox ways have been made by those, led by Wynton Marsalis, who run the Jazz Program at Lincoln Center.

  As we’ve already seen, it’s no secret that the two great trumpeters didn’t see “eye to eye” about what constituted great music and even had problems getting along with each other during the last years of Miles’ life. At first, during Wynton’s first years on the music scene, they got along just fine, with Miles even serving as an early mentor to Wynton before other, more conservative, mentors came along—Stanley Crouch, Albert Murray, and the late Ralph Ellison. Still, these two trumpet titans are fundamentally different in their musical visions. Wynton’s vision seems to carry him backward to recover the great jazz—and European classical—music of the past. That’s OK. But Miles was steadily trying to move into the future—which is OK also—where jazz has always attempted to go. The fact that their visions clashed is not the problem; the problem is that Wynton has allowed their personal differences to color his judgment of what is or isn’t truly great music.

  Whatever one’s personal musical aesthetic, the fact remains that Miles Davis’ impact on and legacy to American and world music are indisputable. Whether Wynton (a great musican and educator in his own right), Stanley Crouch (who detests Miles’ music after his second “great quintet” period), Albert Murray, or the late Ralph Ellison personally don’t like Miles or his music is not, I repeat, not, the point. The point is that his music must be played and memorialized at American institutions because, in the final analysis, Miles Davis has made a great musical contribution to our culture, and it is in the interest of the listening public and future generations of jazz lovers that his aesthetic enemies cast aside their narrow agendas and allow the band of great, young musicians that Wynton has assembled at Lincoln Center to play the music of Miles Davis.

  There are still those who will never understand that African Americans don’t have to grovel, grin, or kiss white America’s collective ass anymore. Those days have long since passed. As we keep trying to move forward as a multicultural country and exploring the ways we see and record our culture and ourselves, I hope that more people will look to Miles Davis as an example of an artist who changed American music in important ways because of his openness to so many musical idioms. Within Miles’ flexible, evolving artistic vision, we might find a kind of cultural blueprint that could serve our best interests and point to a more harmonious future. After all, that’s what great artists do: they provide us with a perspective that enables us to better understand ourselves and our roles in this rapidly changing world.

  Miles Davis has often been justly compared to Pablo Picasso. But most of these comparisons are made in Europe, Latin America, and Japan—not in the United States. Throughout those parts of the world he is revered as a genius who made major contributions to world music and culture. Why not here, in the country of his birth? This question is something that we as a nation are going to have to sort out if we are truly to know ourselves as a people. Perhaps it’s the same reason that caused most people in the United States to reject Jimi Hendrix before he was embraced in England, and why Benny Goodman was called the “King of Swing,” Paul Whiteman (what an appropriate name!) the “King of Jazz,” and Elvis “the King” of whatever. All white men. Today, there are many Americans who hate it when Michael Jackson is called the “King of Pop,” because he’s black. Well, he is the “King of Pop,” because nobody else has ever sold as many records in one year as he did Thriller or packs more screaming fans into stadiums all over the world. We’ve got to come to terms with our deep racism and stop pretending that it no longer exists.

  What I’m saying is that Miles Davis was just as important to the cultural well-being of the United States as Mozart was to Austria and Picasso to Spain. But the reason that Picasso and Mozart are accepted as true geniuses is that they were white European men and Miles was a black American man. In the end it’s alright for Mozart and Picasso to be remembered as arrogant, even imperial, figures. It was part of their birthright to be that way—but it’s not supposed to be OK for a black man, not in America. Miles Davis was one our most important cultural barometers despite how we may feel about him as a black person. He represented the best—and worst—of what we are, of our national character (whatever that is), just as Picasso and Mozart represented the very best and worst of their countries’ national characters.

  Miles Davis was one of the most remarkable creative artists to grace this globe during the entire twentieth century. He changed the course of modern music six or even seven times—an unprecedented feat. For more than forty years, he was our musical Pied Piper, always leading us to the edge of the precipice—the limits of our ability to hear and understand what his music was saying. He led us, sometimes protesting, years into the future. It’s uncanny how on the mark he was. Listen to the music of this week’s commercials or next year’s movie soundtracks. His musical vision is ubiquitous and the sounds that he pioneer
ed are heard everywhere.

  Great art has mystery and magic, an attitude, a stance. A reason for being beyond entertainment or decoration, though both of those may also be present. Great artists move the collective spirit by transforming whomever they touch on a deep personal level. Miles Davis was such an artist and he touched, lived with, and permanently transformed the spirits of many of us.

  Miles Davis’ music and spirit also live on in the creative expression of the countless musicians, visual artists, dancers, and writers who were influenced by his example and carry forth his vision.

  Miles once told me, “When I think about the ones who are dead it makes me so mad, so I try not to think about it. But their spirits are walking around in me, so they’re still here and passing it on to others. It’s some spiritual shit and part of what I am today is them. It’s all in me, the things I learned to do from them. Music is about the spirit and the spiritual, and about feeling. I believe their music is still around somewhere, you know. The shit that we played together has to be somewhere around in the air because we blew it there and that shit was magical, was spiritual.”

  It is still here with us. We whose lives were changed by Miles can still hear that unforgettable trumpet voice and still feel it going straight into our hearts.

  Q & A

  Quincy Troupe, with Dan Simon

  Dan: In his introduction to this new edition of Miles & Me, former Village Voice and Spin magazine editor turned celebrated film producer Rudy Langlais shares how you first came to get to know Miles, as he remembers it. We wanted to start with Rudy because that takes us all the way back, kind of to the beginning, 1985.

  Quincy: Rudy tells the history, where we met and all that. Which was cool with me, because he was talking about me as a writer, which took me a little off guard, and because he left it to me to talk about the book.

  Dan: Miles & Me feels so natural, because the friendship between you and Miles propels the story forward. How did this book happen?

  Quincy: When I first spent time with Miles, it was to interview him for Spin magazine. But almost from the first meeting, it was bigger than that. And it was kind of strange because, how Miles was, well, he was very idiosyncratic. I had a bad knee at the time, which he didn’t know of course, but he liked to test people, find out what you were made of, so he made me wait, standing upright, on my feet, for about a half hour while he was drawing.

  Miles and I had met before. He had said he liked my sense of style. But he didn’t remember that. So for him, this was our first time meeting. Of course, I knew him as a musician. We were both from St. Louis—East St. Louis, Illinois, in his case, St. Louis, Missouri, across the Mississippi River, in my case. The first band he played in, when he was about seventeen or eighteen, was my mother’s first cousin Eddie Randle’s band. Eddie was an undertaker, one of the leading undertakers in St. Louis, but also a great musician. And I loved the music, but I don’t think I ever meet Miles back then.

  So when I went over to Miles’s apartment in New York City, standing, waiting for him to be ready to be interviewed, that really pissed me off. So, finally, he invited me to sit down. He was staring at me from behind his sunglasses. Then all of a sudden he reached across the table with his long fingers, and grabbed all the hair in my dreadlocks, and said, “How did you get your hair like this, is this your real hair?” First off, I was shocked when he grabbed my hair like that, and since I didn’t like anyone invading my personal space, I slapped his hand, just by reflex. And he pulled his hand back, and he said, “Motherfucker, are you crazy? Why you hit me like that?” And I said, “No, I’m not crazy.” And I pointed at him and then at myself, and I said, “Miles’s space, Quincy’s space. Just because I’m here to interview you, and you’re a famous person, does not give you a right to invade my space.” And then I repeated it again, “Miles’s space, Quincy’s space.” And then his mouth flickered a little, kind of like he was thinking a smile but the smile hadn’t completed the journey yet. And then he said, “Motherfucker, where are you from.” And I said, “St. Louis.” And he said, “Now I know you’re crazy.” And I said, “Not only that, the first band you played in was my cousin Eddie Randle’s band.” And he said, “Eddie Randle is your cousin?” And he took his glasses off then, and he said, “Well then, motherfucker, ask me a question.”

  Dan: I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an interview that started like that.

  Quincy: I was supposed to be there for one hour and a half. He only gave one or two interviews a year to American journalists. When Rudy Langlais, my editor at Spin, asked me who was on my wish list to interview for Spin, I had told Rudy Miles Davis was at the top of my list, followed by Michael Jackson and Chuck Berry. But Miles was at the top. The publicist at the time for Columbia Records was Sandra Trim-DaCosta, who happened to be one of my former students. So when Rudy put my name in and it came across her desk, among the probably hundreds of requests to interview Miles at that time, she plucked my name from the pile, which is how that all happened, a little luck came into play in that way.

  So she told me I’d have an hour and a half, then she told me Miles lived at 79th and Fifth Avenue, on the fourteenth floor. So a week or so later I drove down in my bronze 1983 Saab, and went up.

  Dan: Now that you were sitting down, and had Miles’s attention, what happened next?

  Quincy: I started to talk to him and ask him my questions. After a while, he said, “You want some food?” I said yes and he ordered in for us. “Do you want to hear some music?” And we did that. After a couple hours, Sandra came in to see how we were doing. And she suggested that we wrap up. But Miles said to her, “You ain’t my fuckin’ mother, we cool.” So she left, and we kept going. And I was there that day for thirteen hours, and back the next day. And I had the tape recorder on and we just kept going. I had to call home to tell my wife, Margaret, that I wouldn’t be there for dinner, and she asked me, “Can I speak to Miles?” And when he said yes and came on the phone she called him Mr. Davis, but he said, “Call me Miles.” When I had to leave, he asked me if I could drop him off downtown on my way home. And when he sees my car, which I was proud of, he said, “What kind of piece of shit is this?” And I said, “It’s the piece of shit that’s going to take you downtown if you shut your mouth.” He laughed and said, “All right, Quincy.” And then he asked me if he could put something in the tape deck. And I said sure, and he put in the music that would become the album Tutu. After two tunes he asked me what I thought. And I said I didn’t like them. “You didn’t like them?” And then he played some more of it, and I liked those.

  Before I dropped him off, I asked him if I could call him if I had any more questions. So he gave me his New York and LA numbers, but told me not to give them to anybody, and I teased him about that, saying, “Oh, you don’t want me to give them to everybody?” And he liked that I teased him like that. And that was the first day, the first of many when we spent real time together, but it was a very long meeting, and by the end we knew each other, in the sense that we knew we could trust each other.

  Dan: I get that.

  Quincy: So, later on, after I transcribed everything and dropped it on Rudy’s desk, it made a sound like a gun going off, because there was more than enough for a whole book right there, and after Spin published the two-part article, and Miles loved it like he did, he didn’t want anybody else to write about him but me. So when the publisher called about doing Miles’s autobiography, saying Miles wanted me to do the book, I didn’t want to do it at first, but then I did it. In the autobiography, you don’t see me in that book anywhere. I decided that I was going to write that book in his voice only, because he had a unique voice and I thought I could capture it and make it the book he wanted it to be. He was a great storyteller and I thought I could capture that too. I had no thoughts of mine in it. That was the way to do that book, and I’m really glad I did it that way.

  So this book, Miles & Me, would be about our friendship. I wanted the readers to see another side of Mi
les, through my eyes, and as honest as I could make it. No holds barred. How he talked about me, and to me. And what kind of person he was. Because Miles was a beautiful person. He was very shy. He did not trust people. But if he trusted you he was very generous. Like, for example, he asked me to go talk to Jimmy Baldwin. Now James Baldwin was a friend of mine also, I didn’t know Miles knew him as well as he did. Miles wanted me to talk to Jimmy for the autobiography. Miles thought he would have something to say that would be important. I said, “But he’s in France.” And he said, “Yeah, I know he’s in France. I’ll pay for your airfare, first class, and I’ll cover your hotels and give you some money to spend while you’re there.” So he made a call and gave me five or ten thousand dollars in spending money for my trip. And he gave me names of people to see in Paris and Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where Baldwin lived. This was all for the autobiography.

  And after the autobiography came out, he said, “I know you want to do a book about me, but don’t write about me for a while.” And I told him I wouldn’t. And so I waited, like he wanted, until after he died in 1991.

  Dan: Friendship takes so many different forms. There’s not one way. But I feel the strength of your friendship was all in the unexpected ways in which you have helped each other, and that the autobiography and this book are both examples of that.

  Quincy: Later, I went out to teach at the University of California, San Diego. Miles still was alive. And I was going up to LA to see him. And the book had come out and had been very big. It happened that I had to go to Minnesota for a residency to do some readings. And when I got back Margaret was at the airport in San Diego waiting for me when I got in, and she said, “I have to tell you, Miles had a stroke. And his sister wants to know if you want to come up to see him.” And so I called Dorothy up at his house in Malibu. And I asked her how he was, and she said not good and that he was all wired up and unresponsive, strokes ran in their family, and that she didn’t think he was going to make it. Miles and I had been talking about doing a project together, a musical, with me doing the libretto and him doing the music. And our last conversation, that very week, we’d been laughing and talking about the project on the phone when I was in Minnesota. So, no, I told Dorothy I didn’t want to see him in that state. I wanted the last memory to be of our last conversation that had been so good.