How Don Cheadle became Miles Davis

[Dr. Nelson Harrison]

Sundance Film Festival

Marlow Sterling

THE MASTER

03.26.16 4:00 PM ET

How Don Cheadle Became Miles Davis

The Oscar-nominated actor opens up about his thrilling new film, Miles Ahead, in theaters April 1, and why he doesn’t give a shit about the Oscars. PLUS: Watch an exclusive song from the film’s soundtrack.

Do not mention the word “biopic” to Don Cheadle. He doesn’t want to hear it. He’s played that tune before, as streetball legend Earl “The Goat” Manigault, Sammy Davis Jr., and of course, his gripping turn as the refugee-sheltering Paul Rusesabagina in Hotel Rwanda, for which he received a Best Actor Academy Award nomination.

“I keep trying to shoot down ‘biopic’ every time somebody says it, but it doesn’t matter,” says Cheadle. “Every time they say a film about a historical figure, that’s how they categorize it. I’d rather people call it ‘historical fiction’ than a ‘biopic.’”

That’s because Cheadle’s new film Miles Ahead, which he co-wrote, produced, directed, and stars in, isn’t your typical biographical picture. While it borrows its title from Miles Davis’s landmark 1957 album, the movie takes place in the late ’70s—a period where Davis withdrew from the public eye and lived, as Cheadle says, like “the Howard Hughes of jazz,” holed up in his apartment engaging in copious amounts of drugs and sex.

“He was silent for five years. He did not touch his horn or play. He just played organ,” says Cheadle. “Vince [Wilburn Jr., Davis’s nephew] tells the story of how, the moment he tried playing again, his whole embouchure had gone, his facility was gone, and he couldn’t make a note. He just cried like a baby.”

Miles Ahead is equal parts drama and thriller, as it jumps back and forth between past moments that shaped Davis—including his turbulent relationship with his wife, Frances (played by the radiant Emayatzy Corinealdi), to the messy present, as the jazz legend teams up with a Rolling Stone journalist (Ewan McGregor) on a mission to retrieve a top-secret recording from a shady record executive (Michael Stuhlbarg). It’s a slice of free-form fiction that aims to capture the mad genius of Miles Davis. Which it does.

The Daily Beast sat down with Cheadle earlier this year to discuss his stunning transformation into the inimitable Miles Davis.   

You could have easily gone the Walk the Line route with a Miles Davis film, telling the story of Cicely Tyson saving him from heroin addiction.

I didn’t want to do that. We watched The Dewey Cox Story, and for every filmmaker trying to make a movie about a musician, Walk Hard should be their cautionary tale. Everybody should have to watch that before they make their movie. I heard Danny Boyle say the same thing—that he watched Walk Hard before making Steve Jobs and went, “Oh, no!”

Right. Miles Ahead isn’t like any film about a giant I’ve seen before. The narrative is free-form, and instead of chronicling the famous high points, takes you inside Davis’s head.

As we were looking through the work and read through all the biographies and source materials, the interesting part of his life, to us, was the five-year period where he wasn’t making music. Because on either end of that prolific career, what does it mean when the font of creativity has shut down? And what’s happening inside of that? Do you want to come back, or do you want to die?

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An exclusive clip from the soundtrack to 'Miles Ahead,' available April 1st on Sony Legacy.

And he did almost die.

He did. He almost died. It seemed to be a good jumping-off point for examining an internal journey that felt universal to us. We can’t all be Miles Davis, but any of us who are creative people know what it means to come face-to-face with that moment of, “I’ve run out of shit to say.”

The film follows Miles Davis during a very fraught time in his career, and one where he’s both a total recluse and a total live wire.

He was the Howard Hughes of jazz. But he was really a G and was behaving how we wish we could have—with no consequences—so there’s a wish-fulfillment element there, too. I didn’t want to show somebody sitting at a piano hitting a chord and going, “No, that’s not it,” and tearing up a piece of paper. Let’s make this the ride. When your guts are churning, that’s a shootout, that’s a fistfight, that’s your love going away, and that’s what allows you to write Bitches Brew.

Getting the estate onboard is a real struggle these days when it comes to making movies about musicians. It’s the reason why nobody’s made a Jimi Hendrix film yet with his actual music. How did you get the Miles Davis estate to back your vision?  

We had to talk to the family a lot and hip them to the fact that what we were trying to do was capture the essence and truth of Miles Davis, as opposed to the facts of his life. The facts didn’t matter to us, but the truth of the process did. We thought, let’s do what he did as an artist: Don’t do it the same as you’ve seen it before, don’t worry about mistakes—there are no mistakes, bash headlong into it, show people how the sausage is made, stumble down the stairs until you hit something that kind of works, then get your momentum and run with it. We thought, look, man, if you were in Miles Davis’s band and he heard you playing a solo in your hotel room, and then you came down onstage and played that solo, he’d fire you on the spot. We wanted to make sure that the movie that we made felt like an expression of improvisation.

Speaking of improvisation, there’s a great sequence where Miles Davis is creating Porgy and Bess in the studio that really does a fine job of showcasing his creativity. It reminded me of some of the best scenes of the Brian Wilson flick Love & Mercy.

“The whole work-through of Porgy and Bess, all it said in the script was ‘Miles works with musicians.’ There were no scripted lines. We had no idea what we were going to do until we did it. I just said, ‘Give me a bunch of musicians that can actually play, and we’ll figure it out.’ It will be an actual session.

Don Cheadle in 'Miles Ahead.'

This is a warts and all film, too. Was the Miles Davis estate at all touchy about the low points of the film—scenes of drug use and abusing women?

[The estate] put me onboard. They said, “You’re doing it,” so I didn’t have to pull them along. And if you read the autobiography he wrote with Quincy Troupe, Miles talks about it and he’s not trying to soft-pedal it or back away from it. I did this shit, he says. He owned it all.

Why do you think artistic geniuses are so prone to abusive and self-destructive behavior?

They have to consume. Everything gets consumed. Everything is fuel, and all must be consumed for them to create what they create. We are the beneficiaries of their agony, and sometimes people get left in the dust—which is tragic, sad, and painful, and sometimes those wounds never heal—and then what comes out on the other end of that is Bitches Brew. They consume. Picasso was the same way.

What’s your musical background like, and are you really playing the trumpet in the film?

I play in the film. I started playing the trumpet when I knew I had to do this, so I’ve been playing for about three-and-a-half or four years. I grew up playing sax, so I played that from about fifth grade until I was a senior in high school, and I was also singing with the jazz choir and composing and writing. And then I went away from music. I had a couple of scholarships to pursue local jazz and instrumental jazz, and a couple to pursue acting, and I had been living in Colorado freezing my ass off and think I kind of made a weather choice. I thought, yeah, I’ll go to CalArts and study theater.

Have you ever seen Bill Clinton’s saxophone solo on Arsenio?

[Laughs] I’ve seen it. He was appealing to the kids! And I may show up on somebody’s show playing. But I’m gonna be in the band. I’ll play with The Roots!

That needs to happen. How long did it take you to make Miles Ahead?

Ever since Miles was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2006. It’s gone through many different iterations since then. A company went away, a money person went away, two different writers came and went, so the last five years with this script and this iteration is really how long it took to make Miles Ahead.

You were Oscar-nominated in 2005 for Hotel Rwanda, so did you use some of your juice to make this project happen?

Honestly, I was not out campaigning to do this. I literally had no dog in the Miles Davis fight. I’d done a lot of biopics—Hotel Rwanda, The Rat Pack—and was getting tired of them for the same reason we’re talking about: they were kind of standard. I was looking the other way, and the family came to me.

Were you at all disappointed by the opportunities you were given after receiving a Best Actor nod for Hotel Rwanda? Historically, white actors are given many more opportunities after something like that happens than people of color.

To be honest, there’s shrinkage in the industry for everybody. There are about seven people who the studios feel confident and comfortable putting their money behind. So, I understand hedging your bets, and that it’s a very corporate mentality that has to do with bottom lines and appeasing investors. So then there’s very little about, oh, let’s do something different and try to break the mold. That doesn’t usually happen. In those ways, it’s not surprising the kinds of movies that get made. Conversely, is it that great to win an Oscar? We could probably name 10 white actors who have won Oscars and think, well, what is that person doing today?

But I was never disappointed. Personally, I’ve been very fortunate. I can’t look back at my career and think of any movies that I thought I should’ve had a shot in. But I know that’s the story for many, many people. It’s a microcosm of a microcosm, and Hollywood is not going to be inured to the same things that affect the world in which it sits.

The #OscarsSoWhite conversation really exploded and led to not only Academy changes, but a lot of people discussing the issue of diversity—or the lack thereof—in Hollywood.

I blame my tweet! I’ve never seen a tweet go like that.

People keep conflating it—and I know why—with it being a black and white issue, but it’s about diversity. And it’s not just about the level of the Oscars. Because who gives a shit about the Oscars? If I win an Oscar, it’s going to be behind my couch with the rest of my awards. I put my kids’ trophies out, I don’t put my own trophies out. But what that can do for you business-wise, that’s the important part. And it starts way back at the green-light level with executives determining at the onset what they’ll make. So when we talk about #OscarsSoWhite, it’s a symptom of something that starts way further back.

How many more Marvel films are you signed on for? There are rumblings you’ll be kicking the bucket soon.

[Laughs] If I talk about Marvel I just start seeing red dots on my chest. Acting in these is a little tedious sometimes and couldn’t be more different than what I did on [Miles Ahead], but there is a real level of acting that’s necessary to live inside of those different realities and bring them to life. So it’s a challenge, and it’s ultimately fun when you’re getting to fly around, kick ass, and be a superhero.

[Dr. Nelson Harrison]

The trumpeter’s birthday is May 26 (he would have been eighty-nine), and a group of players connected both spiritually and historically to the Master are gathering to pay tribute. His fellow-trumpeter Eddie Henderson openly reveres him, and the saxophonist Gary Bartz worked with him in the early seventies. Joining them is another Davis-band veteran, the drummer Al Foster, as well as the bassist Ed Howard and the pianist Orrin Evans. (Smoke, 2751 Broadway, between 105th and 106th Sts. 212-864-6662. May 22-24.)

[Dr. Nelson Harrison]

The archives are still full of inaccessible treasures. Ben Ratliff, in his book on John Coltrane, reports that eighty-six CDs’ worth of live recordings of Coltrane from the early nineteen-sixties are locked up in Verve’s vaults. The aptly named Savory Collection, housed at the National Jazz Museum of Harlem and featuring such marvels as a collaboration between Duke Ellington and Django Reinhardt (I’ve heard it), remains unissued. And this most deliciously distracting Web site, the Jazz Discography Project, is speckled with the haunting phrases “not released” and “rejected.” The vagaries of the marketplace relegate vast zones of jazz history to legends and pipe dreams.

More of the year in review.

The history of jazz is coextensive with the history of recording; it’s a media-centric art form, but the essence of jazz is performance. Though recordings have proved central to jazz’s transmission to general listeners, aficionados, and musicians (whether with those who pumped coins into a jukebox to learn an early Charlie Parker solo or those who study the enduring musical template of Coltrane’s 1959 recording “Giant Steps”), the history of the art can be traced along the fortunes and conditions of live performance—and most of the treasures that emerge from the placards and rise up from the mists of time are previously unreleased, often privately made or bootlegged recordings of concerts.

The other function of record companies, besides releasing new music, is to compile and to restore. For instance, many of the great trumpeter Woody Shaw’s studio recordings were out of print until Mosaic produced a sumptuous box set last year. (I’ve got a few dream projects for them: Fletcher Henderson, Mary Lou Williams, and Andy Kirk.) This year’s exemplary jazz reissues are live recordings, some made professionally but never released, others made privately. They add to our appreciation of some of the genre’s mightiest geniuses—Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell. (I wrote here recently of the astonishing Coltrane rediscovery, “Offering: Live at Temple University,” from 1966.) And an upcoming release justly burnishes the renown of another musician of lesser originality but profound personality, Red Garland.

The virtual riot sparked by Bob Dylan plugging in, in 1965, was slight and short-lived compared to the outraged sense of betrayal after Davis’s electric turn several years thereafter, most famously in the double album “Bitches Brew,” from 1969. First, it entailed the breakup of his great mid-sixties working group, a quintet that featured the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the pianist Herbie Hancock, the bassist Ron Carter, and the drummer Tony Williams. (The rhythm section was replaced by the trio of Chick Corea, on electric piano; the bassist Dave Holland; and the drummer Jack DeJohnette.) Second, it entailed another near-total shift in the group’s repertoire. Third, along with the electric piano came a rock-style backbeat in lieu of the gliding four-four pulse that had been at the basis of classic jazz from the thirties onward. And fourth—and perhaps most important—it entailed a deliciously ungodly racket.

That racket is the subject of the crucial release “Miles at the Fillmore–Miles Davis 1970: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 3” (Columbia/Legacy), a four-disk set that brings out all four nights of concerts at the Fillmore East, from June 17-20 (plus three cuts from the Fillmore West, on April 11th).

The musical idea behind Davis’s Fillmore East band is density—and density is the hidden theme of modern jazz. Early jazz from New Orleans framed soloists’ interjections with a raucous polyphonic texture; big bands, in the thirties, provided a thickness of intricate arrangement or urgent riffs. But bebop is a soloist’s art: the small combos mainly left the soloists on their own with the harmonic and rhythmic backing of a trio (piano, bass, drums)—and when jazz freed itself of harmonic structure, the piano dropped out. With modern jazz, the soloist’s art was proving increasingly solitary.

Davis knew it from the start. In the late nineteen-forties, barely in his twenties and still with Charlie Parker’s small group, he collaborated with Gil Evans on a new kind of ensemble sound, neither a big band nor merely a soloist showcase. There emerged a working group that gave live performances and made a series of records from 1949-50, released as “Birth of the Cool,” in which Davis’s unique trumpet tone, relatively tempered and introverted, was matched by a new kind of dense yet translucent ensemble texture. Davis would return to the concept in the late fifties and early sixties in large-group recordings orchestrated by Evans. Then, when free jazz emerged in the early nineteen-sixties, musicians such as Ornette Coleman (“Free Jazz”), Albert Ayler (“New York Eye and Ear Control”), Coltrane (“Ascension,” plus live concerts where he was joined by three or four other saxophonists), and Bill Dixon (“Intents And Purposes”) made the textural reinvention of the musical collective a key part of their innovations.

When Davis plugged in—or, rather, when his bands plugged in, with electric piano and organ and bass, and then with electric guitars, and finally with his trumpet—he pulled away from the familiar sound of jazz, but did not yield to the familiar sound of rock. He made the volume and the rhythms of rock a basis for jazz improvisations that, in their over-all contours, hadn’t drastically changed from, say, 1966, but which, in their radically different context, delivered a radically different affect.

For the April 11, 1970, date, Davis led a sextet that featured Corea on electric keyboards and the percussionist Airto Moreira; for the June concerts, the band was a septet that included another keyboard player, Keith Jarrett. The April sextet is looser and freer—Davis is in terrifying, screaming, ecstatic form—but its performances seem more of a continuation of the music from 1966, with Davis out front with drums as a keyboard sprinkles harmonies and filigreed counterpoint.

The septet achieved a truly new density. The backbeat was a little harder, and Jarrett and Corea unleash screeching and bleeping fire from the electric keyboard. Davis’s solos, with his jabbing notes and blasting phrases, were a little more percussive. By this time, Shorter, the saxophonist, had left the band; his replacement , Steve Grossman, was more straightforwardly vehement, less off-kilter, less original, but his buzzing, swarming gloss on early-sixties Coltrane adds to the thicket of sound, filling lots of musical space. The four nights of concerts find the band growing in stature by the moment. The first night seems a little tentative: Davis seems to be working out the mood of his playing, fronting the band with a slightly inhibited momentousness. But in the other three nights, he sounds as if he’s thrilling to the sound, as if the hall-filling fury that his new band raises pushes him to make some big noise, too. The noise would get bigger—the guitarist John McLaughlin would join the group by year’s end and, after experimenting with several combinations, would come up with a mighty three-guitar band (I saw them live at Carnegie Hall in 1974, in a concert enshrined on record as “Dark Magus”) that offered a colossal, terrifying, post-Spectorian wall of sound. “Miles at the Fillmore” belongs to the rise of that idea, with all the expansive energy that’s entailed in artistic self-rebirth.

Another Davis issue, of a May 21, 1966, concert from the Oriental Theatre in Portland, Oregon, shows what was lost—and what was gained. It features the mid-sixties quintet (but with the bassist Richard Davis, in place of Carter). The music is acoustic and very free. Williams had played with the saxophonists Eric Dolphy and Sam Rivers, and he pushed the band toward an oceanic, pulse-free swirl that came to the fore when the young bandmates Shorter and Hancock soloed. Though Williams snapped into rhythm for Davis, it was one of wide-ranging, impressionistic broadness, with shimmering cymbal-smacks and tom-tom rumble pushing the beat into uncharted territory. Davis’s solos were increasingly untethered; he shaped them impulsively, with outbursts and shrieks that raised his exquisitely pointillistic drama to Van Gogh-like slashes and gashes of sound. But the sonic world of this majestically coherent yet wildly audacious band was still that of bebop; the instrumentation was still that of the quintet in which the nineteen-year-old Davis played alongside Charlie Parker in 1945.

The pianist Bud Powell (born in 1924) was on some of those mid-forties recordings with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. He was, in effect, the Parker of the piano—the great liberator of the instrument from swing style. As his left hand crashed surprising chords at unexpected moments into the bass, his right hand delivered mercurial, chromatic, exhilaratingly long and vehement high-register runs with a seemingly inexhaustible inventiveness. As with Parker, his exuberance was tinged with tragedy that was as much personal as musical; in Powell’s case, it arose from an absurd and horrifying beating on the head by a policeman with a nightstick, in Philadelphia, in 1945. Though some said that Powell was already a troubled soul, whatever his troubles were grew instantly and irreparably worse. In 1953, after years in and out of mental institutions, he was taken in hand by the music promoter Oscar Goodstein, who hired his trio to play at the New York club Birdland.

In his book “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell coined the “ten-thousand-hour rule,” to indicate the investment of time required to achieve world-class mastery of any art or craft. The work of the masters of jazz seems to take ten thousand hours per day. They were so busy, with live performance, jam sessions, travel, study, composition, practice, and personal drama (sometimes self-inflicted), that they seemed to live faster, harder, more, cramming lifetimes of work into months or weeks and then doing it all over again. That’s what Powell did at Birdland, starting in February, 1953. Peter Pullman’s “Wail,” a magnificently researched and detailed biography of Powell, details the remarkable circumstances of that gig. Powell played at Birdland for twenty-three weeks, “at six nights per week and four sets per night,” according to Pullman. “As the leader of a trio on virtually every one of those sets, with a horn player seldom taking solo time from him, those sets were nearly all piano.”

There were broadcasts from these gigs, and some were recorded privately, off the air. They were issued in the sixties, then reissued on bootlegs, and now have been released, with greatly improved sound, as “Bud Powell: Birdland 1953” (ESP-Disk), an authorized three-CD set, which also features rare extra cuts from the gig with appearances by Parker, in ardent and playful form late in his short life (he died in 1955), and the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

The set reveals Powell’s rapid musical shifts in the course of that year. He began playing a combination of popular songs and bebop classics (such as “Ornithology” and “Woody’n You”), but then took to his own angular yet moody compositions (including “Dance of the Infidels,” “Parisian Thoroughfare,” and “Un Poco Loco”). His performances grew increasingly assured and explosively energetic. He combines the flickering play of blinding light with sudden shafts of darkness, the strut and whirl of bluesy bop mixed with ballads’ agonized sentimentality, a craving for simple emotion that gets tangled on the way out. It’s among the finest collections of Powell’s art that exists.

Thelonious Monk was the molecular jazzman. His idiosyncratically percussive and fragmented piano style was inseparable from his distinctive compositions, of which there are relatively few, yet they are almost all definitively classics. He was a theoretician of the first order, working with Bud Powell and John Coltrane, among others, to deepen jazz’s rhythmic and harmonic ideas. It’s precisely because of his involuted, infinitesimal style that his obsessive reversions to the same themes, the same bands (he worked mainly with a quartet fronted by a saxophonist, who, throughout the sixties, was Charlie Rouse), and the same tropes nonetheless yielded a constant sense of novelty and reinvention. This year’s two-disk bootleg, “The Complete 1966 Geneva Concert” (Sonar Records), from March 27, 1966, with its air of relaxed rumination and sudden discovery, is a prime example. There’s a version of “Round Midnight” that slides from the familiar adagio into a rollicking strut, in which Monk seems to deconstruct the very idea of stride piano with the ingeniously timed spacing of his hands. It’s like catching a scientist and his associates in their laboratory—and it’s fortunate that the moment was preserved.

A quick plug for last year’s Monk rediscovery, “Paris 1969,” in which Monk and Rouse are joined by an extraordinary drummer, the seventeen-year-old Paris Wright, an unheralded musician who didn’t have a major career (though he played in New York in 2010) but whose recording here is decidedly major. Unlike Monk’s previous drummer, the formidable Ben Riley, Wright wasn’t deferential or even really respectful. He played coltishly, romping through tunes by pushing the tempo ever faster, teasing Monk by imitating his keyboard rhythms, unleashing quickly thunderous interjections where most drummers would offer light accents—plus, his broad and bright cymbal-centered tone is vaguely reminiscent of Tony Williams (who, for his part, started with Miles Davis at the age of seventeen, in 1963). It’s not clear, watching the accompanying DVD, that Monk was enjoying it, but he was indeed responding, and his playing has a taut, uneasy urgency that’s thrillingly different from his other recordings of the late sixties, live or in the studio.

Miles Davis’s first stable working band, a quintet that he formed in 1955, featured John Coltrane on tenor sax, the drummer Philly Joe Jones, and the pianist Red Garland, whose distinctive style, with bouncy chords chimed out by his interlocked hands, lent the earnest and even brooding band a sideline of warmhearted relief. Garland’s own recordings had the same bright-toned flair (as in this live 1959 recording). Garland was scarce on the scene for a decade or more, but returned in the mid-seventies, when I saw him perform, at a strange ballroom-like club on Long Island. A new release, coming January 20th, “Swingin’ on the Korner” (Elemental Music), features Garland and his trio from December, 1977, at San Francisco’s legendary Keystone Korner, home to some of the finest of all live recordings (such as Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Bright Moments,” a set by Mary Lou Williams, and four volumes of Woody Shaw from the late seventies). Garland is in astonishing mettle here; the space and the mood are more congenial than was the formal cavern where I saw him. What’s more, he’s accompanied by Jones and the bassist Leroy Vinnegar, and their chemistry is passionate. Jones, whose own career had been intermittent for almost a decade, matches Garland in inspiration and enthusiasm; the trio condenses a lifetime of wise love into a few evenings’ exuberant exertions. The performance’s modern inflections are imbued with the spirit of dance; it’s a set of inventive exuberance and jaunty joy.

[Dr. Nelson Harrison]

A little background regarding Miles Davis’s 1964 Downbeat blindfold test, alluded to by my colleague Macy Halford, in which he flung insults at Eric Dolphy (who, by the time the text ran, in June of that year, would be dead, of diabetic shock), at Cecil Taylor (a pianist of virtuosity to match his intellectual brilliance and fearless individuality), and even at Duke Ellington, for his role in the recording “Money Jungle” (a collaboration with Charles Mingus and Max Roach which is the one jazz record I know that gives me the same feeling as when I listen to Beethoven’s late quartets).

Davis was, at that moment in early 1964, torn apart: he was nearing forty; he had only recently formed a new band, featuring the seventeen-year-old drummer Tony Williams, the bassist Ron Carter, and the pianist Herbie Hancock; and that band had a taste for the new thing in jazz. Carter had recorded with Eric Dolphy several times (playing cello on the superb 1960 quartet recording “Out There,” which happens to be the album that got me into jazz, at the age of fifteen), and Williams played with the modernist Sam Rivers in his native Boston, made his first recordings playing some very challenging music with Jackie McLean, and, on Dolphy’s last major-label studio recording, “Out to Lunch,” played with a rhythmic freedom—a calculated indeterminacy—that was closer in spirit to the work of Sunny Murray or Andrew Cyrille (of Cecil Taylor’s bands) than to anything Davis was up to. When Davis was looking for a new saxophonist, Williams suggested Dolphy; Davis said no. He recommended Archie Shepp; Davis listened and rejected the notion. When Williams proposed Rivers, Davis took him on briefly (and recorded with him in Tokyo).

The tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter came on board soon thereafter, and in the studio played a brave, honorable, somewhat involuted supporting role (though he also did the lion’s share of the composing), but on such club dates as “Live at the Plugged Nickel,” Shorter, Williams, and company play one way with Davis and another way when Davis lays out—at which time their music rises to a furious, free-jazz expansiveness, and Shorter’s playing seems most closely reminiscent of that of the late Dolphy. (Here’s a 1967 concert performance that highlights the contrast.)

There’s a lot more to Davis’s vastly complex aesthetic psychology and artistic transformations and conflicts. It’s enough to note that he knew he needed something from Dolphy and Taylor—and that he needed it more than they needed, at that point, anything from him—and that this would have sufficed to arouse the lion’s wrath and provoke him to a mighty artistic challenge.

P.S. The Dolphy piece in question isn’t “Mary Ann” but “Miss Ann”; the video above has the version Davis listened to for his blindfold test, from the album “Far Cry.” The composition also happens to be one he played at a 1964 club session, recorded shortly before his death and released as “Last Date.” That late perfomance (if anything recorded by a thirty-six-year-old can be considered “late”) is a masterwork of intricate, spontaneous, impassioned construction.

[Dr. Nelson Harrison]

Richard Brody

September 11, 2015

Rosh Hashanah with Miles Davis

By Richard Brody

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Miles Davis performing at the concert the author missed, in Central Park on September 5, 1975 Credit Photograph by Jack Vartoogian/Getty

The accidental confluence of three event-streams—the recent departure of children for college; this weekend’s celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year; and the forthcoming première, at the New York Film Festival, of “Miles Ahead,” a bio-pic about Miles Davis, directed by and starring Don Cheadle—gives rise to a single flood of memories, centered on this very week in 1975.

That’s when I was getting ready to leave home on Long Island for college—and when almost all of my friends from high school, whose colleges ran on a different schedule, had already left. A strange few weeks of sentimental suspension followed their departure, between the tough goodbyes already said and the others, to my parents and sister, still to come.

But one of those goodbyes came with a gesture of immeasurable sweetness; my friends and I weren’t much for material presents, but we were good with symbols, and my best friend took his leave of our house, on his last night in town, by slipping an envelope onto my bedroom desk unnoticed. It contained a pair of tickets to a concert in Central Park by Miles Davis that was scheduled for September 5th, several weeks later but still—as he knew—a week or two before my own departure.

Miles Davis! My friend knew me well, but pretty much anyone who knew me at all back then knew that jazz—modern jazz, free jazz—was the art of my life, the one aesthetic passion into which I threw energy and time and money: buying records, blaring them from my discount stereo, dashing into the city for concerts, and chattering with enthusiasm about genius and trivia that equally, for the most part, remained remote from my friends’ concerns. Most of my listening and most of my concert-going were done alone—and the solitude was precious—but, back on the Island and out of my room, I couldn’t shut up about having done it.

Miles Davis was one of the geniuses I couldn’t shut up about—mainly, the Miles Davis of the mid-sixties quintet, powered by the drummer Tony Williams and by his newest music, his (for me) somewhat bewildering yet thrilling electric incarnations, culminating in his Carnegie Hall concert of March 30, 1974, which I attended and came back from in a state of astonishment at the sonic barrage—a sort of wall of amplified sounds that pounded and clashed, its mighty and sharp-edged blocks crashing into each other and giving off kaleidoscopic sparks. (The concert is preserved on the double album “Dark Magus.”) Years later, another friend captured the emotional realm of this music in a lapidary phrase—“as mean as the subway”—which said as much about New York at the time as it did about the music.

But in the run-up to the Central Park concert, a detail came up: September 5th was also the first night of Rosh Hashanah (which begins at sunset); and though my family was hardly observant (we were members of a Reform synagogue, with a choir and organ, and didn’t attend it often), the key to being High Holiday Jews was to at least unfailingly attend synagogue on the High Holidays, and so my parents simply forbade me to go to the concert.

Unless minor trauma has provoked an outsize erasure and blotted out bad memories, my frustration and even rage hardly burst into argument. I suppose I could have gone to the city on my own, attended the concert, returned to the house, and defied my parents to do anything about it—and they wouldn’t have done much—but it wasn’t from fear, deference, piety, or even a conscious show of respect that I didn’t wage domestic war at a time of impending separation that drew on an overflowing subterranean well of rising sentiment. It was a bland fiat that had the simple finality of fate. Besides, I figured, there’d be another concert some time soon.

Well, there wasn’t. It turned out that Davis, who was suffering both from health problems and from drug problems, withdrew both from the concert stage and from the recording studio (he made a few efforts at albums, which didn’t come to fruition), and didn’t perform again in public until 1981. The successive musical revolutions that Davis fought, from the forties through the seventies—of which his music bore the scars—had come to an end; he came back, but he was no longer advancing. I haven’t seen the movie “Miles Ahead” yet—it hasn’t yet been premièred—but, according to Variety, those years away are its very subject:

The film is set in New York in 1979, when Davis was ending a five-year “silent period” and teaming with a Rolling Stone reporter — played by Ewan McGregor — to start a career revival.

By then, however, I cared much less. A mere few weeks after missing the concert and a very short while into my freshman year of college, a new friend there recommended that I catch a movie that was playing that night at the university film society—Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.” Jazz suddenly came second, and I found a new capital of my soul, and that was Paris. I also found some friends who weren’t Jewish and weren’t from Long Island, and some other friends who were both Jewish and from Long Island but altogether freer in thought than I was, and whatever remainder of religious sentiment I had was quickly dispelled. I haven’t been to synagogue more than a dozen times since then, and vestiges of zeal vanished quickly with those of practice.

Of course, these threads of detail are pulled from the tapestry of oneself that one weaves ahead as it unravels from behind in the inevitable effort to become a person who differed from the one that was formed by family and to get an education that differed both from the one I got at home and from the one I got at school, through contact with worlds of experience far from those that I shared with my friends in a quiet suburb. But the story of a consciousness remaking itself, the story of stories, is also a story of self-deception. The quest for a substitute reality is also a variety of fragile artifice, and Saul Bellow says as much in a letter, from 1948, that’s one of the most brilliant, revealing, and dynamic passages of Zachary Leader’s majestic biography of the novelist. It’s a letter to his friend Mel Tumin about their mutual friend Harold Kaplan:

Kappy has made himself after his own image, has chosen to be the Parisian Kaplan and has put behind him the part of his history that doesn’t fit the image. . . . Why should he be the Kaplan his mother bore and Newark stamped when he has the power to be the Kaplan of his choice? You have felt that, I have, Passin has. Only some of us have had the sense to realize that the man we bring forth has no richness compared with the man who really exists, thickened, fed and fattened by all the facts about him, all of his history.

Those who try to bring themselves forth, if they’re lucky, find that their new identity doesn’t efface the one that was born and raised but merely puts it into new perspectives, provides new angles and new tools to plumb and reveal its hidden depths. And those who are very lucky, such as Bellow, Davis, and Godard, move back by moving ahead, giving form to their vast worlds of experience and rendering the substance of those worlds as iconic and immortal as their art is. Such artists invest even the hollow vessels of lost faith and discarded fealties with a newly full measure of passion that both enfolds and transcends the treasure and the horror of memory, the sweetness and the delusion of sentiment.

[Dr. Nelson Harrison]

When I heard that “Miles Ahead,” the bio-pic about Miles Davis starring and directed by Don Cheadle, would be set in the late nineteen-seventies, when Davis had stopped performing in public—and would be centered on the story of Davis’s friendship with a white journalist—I was excited, because I knew of such a real-life story, and it’s a good one. The journalist Eric Nisenson (who died in 2003) was befriended by Davis in that period and wrote about the story of their friendship in his biography of Davis, “ ’Round About Midnight.” It’s the story of an earnest lover of jazz who spent lots of time in the combination apartment and music studio of the bassist Walter Booker. One night, Davis came to Booker’s place, met Nisenson, and, to the journalist’s surprise, became a pal. The resulting portrait of Davis by Nisenson was an unsparingly intimate, complex, and oddly whimsical view of the artist in retreat.

That’s not the story that’s told in the movie “Miles Ahead.” There, the journalist, Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor), a Scotsman who writes for Rolling Stone, is looking for a scoop. He knocks on Davis’s door, gets a punch in the face for his troubles, then darts past Davis and locks the jazzman out of his own home. Davis proceeds to pull a gun on him, Braden claims to have been sent by Columbia (the record company with which Davis was under contract), and Davis gets Braden to drive him there in Davis’s Jaguar. When, at the record company, Braden’s ruse is exposed, Davis is ready to dump him and ignore him, until Braden promises to score him some top-quality cocaine. That score proves to be the start of a none-too-beautiful friendship.

Fact checking a movie that’s based on a real and famous person and a true story is only one—and not the most significant—way to criticize it. The truth may often be stranger than fiction, but the point is usually less clear, and a movie director with insight into character and a comprehensive worldview can transform true stories into better ones—albeit not without risk. One of the revelations of interviewing artists about their activities is the discovery that their transformative powers often carry over into their own versions of their lives. A tale told by an accomplished writer or filmmaker is likely to shear off many piquant details and bend some lines to make them meet up in meaningful ways. When the same incident is described by a participant of more modest narrative talents, it’s usually filled with a range of details and a spray of loose ends that may pique the imagination but don’t bear much dramatic shape or make a sharpened intellectual or moral point.

Nonfiction’s profusion of details has an intrinsic fascination that fiction risks emptying out. It takes a high level of creation to redeem the dramatized, tailored version—particularly of an artist’s life, because whoever’s telling the story needs to bring a level of insight and imagination comparable to that of the protagonist. The bio-pic of an artist is a severe test for a filmmaker, because the subject will be reduced and deadened by anything less than great inspiration. Unfortunately, Don Cheadle, a superb actor who invests the role of Davis with a sculptural majesty, doesn’t achieve anything comparable with the movie’s direction—or, in particular, with the script, written by him and Steven Baigelman (based on a story that they, Stephen J. Rivele, and Christopher Wilkinson wrote).

Cheadle and his collaborators give the story a double-flashback framework. The movie starts with a filmed interview that Davis grants Braden, and then it cuts to a chase—a car chase, in which Braden is driving, Davis is the passenger, and pursuers in another car are shooting at them and wound Davis. The MacGuffin is a tape of Davis’s music that he made on his own during his time of quasi-retirement and that he’s keeping from his record label, and the pursuers are revealed to be working on behalf of the record label.

This is supposed to have happened in 1978 or ’79. In fact, Davis was shot in a car—on October 9, 1969. He discussed the incident in his autobiography. It took place in Manhattan, when he was in a parked car with a woman, after he performed a concert at a Brooklyn club called the Blue Coronet (which was on Fulton Street). He explained it in terms of his playing at a white-owned club when a black-owned club in the neighborhood wanted him to perform there instead. Here’s how the owner of the Blue Coronet, Dickie Habersham-Bey, who died in 2013 (and who, in fact, was black), told the story in a 2011 interview aptly titled “Who Shot Miles?”:

The week I had Miles . . . he was working for me regularly. Anytime he had a week off, he would call and say, ‘Hey, Dick, I’ll bring [the band] in. This guy who was monopolizing the business—he’s dead now, he got shot on Flatbush Avenue. . . . The name is not important. I booked Miles that week [the week Miles was shot in an altercation in Manhattan after a gig at the Blue Coronet]. The Village Gate had Gloria Lynne. Now, he made a deal with me to have Gloria Lynne at my place. I told him I couldn’t, so he told Miles, ‘Don’t show up [at the Blue Coronet].’ Certain people tried to bulldoze musicians at that time.

But Davis played there anyway—and, for good measure, Habersham-Bey said, Davis’s attorney insulted the extortionist, who then hired a gunman “to make a point, to show you how bad he was.”

As for the tape in question, the one for which (in “Miles Ahead”) an agent looking to get into Columbia’s good graces was willing to kill, there was one (or, rather, two), from 1978. The songwriter Eleana Steinberg was indirectly responsible for the recording—Davis spent several months as a guest at her home in Connecticut, where the idea of making music suddenly and unexpectedly coalesced. There was a cassette tape that Davis recorded with Larry Coryell and other musicians in Connecticut, and it prompted Davis to bring that impromptu band to Manhattan to make a recording at Columbia’s studio. The company’s executives were in attendance, and the session was widely reported on at the time. Though the music done there—supposedly multiple takes of a single piece—was never released commercially, Davis gave the Connecticut tape to Coryell (who declined to release it). The story of those two sessions, which Steinberg and two other participants, the keyboard player George Pavlis and the bassist T. M. Stevens, have discussed, could be a terrific movie in itself.

Or, to put it another way, Davis’s life itself would have made a fine movie—it couldn’t have been a worse movie than the one that Cheadle and the other writers inflate with major chunks of movie-land clichés. (Even the unusually fragmented and impressionistic narrative makes its leaps in time through unfortunately facile visual rhymes and echoes.) Nonetheless, the filmmakers do unfold significant elements of the historical record, and they catch some noteworthy details (such as the derelict state of Davis’s luxurious home during his time of troubles in the late seventies). They pay apt attention to two white police officers’ beating and arrest of Davis outside Birdland, in 1959—but they miss a few remarkable aspects of the incident, including the instant protest of a crowd that blocked traffic, and the remarkable declaration of the judge who dismissed charges against Davis with the affirmation that there’s no such crime as resisting an illegitimate arrest.

The movie depicts Davis’s possessiveness toward his first wife, the celebrated dancer Frances Taylor (played with calm grace by Emayatzy Corinealdi)—including his demand that to be with him she stop working, and his drug- and alcohol-induced jealous paranoia. But it also attributes a chronic injury to Davis’s hip to a knock-down, drag-out fight with Taylor around 1965, in the course of which Taylor strikes the first blow before Davis hits her back. In fact, Davis, in his autobiography, admitted to hitting Taylor early in their relationship, before their marriage, and to having done so thereafter on several occasions. As for his hip, he had been suffering for years from a degenerative condition. (As early as 1963, it caused him to miss many concerts.) Even the suave scene of their meeting is a clichéd fabrication, and the stories that Davis tells in his autobiography of their first date are deeply imbued with the fear of racist violence from the Los Angeles police (something that’s completely absent from the film’s version of the story).

Davis had hip-replacement surgery in 1975, spent nearly a year recovering, and drank and used cocaine and heroin to deal with the pain. In his autobiography, Davis discusses those years away from the music business: “Sex and drugs took the place that music had occupied in my life until then and I did both of them around the clock.” He writes about going to after-hours joints, about a brief time in jail in 1978 for “non-support” of one of his children, and also about living like “a hermit” for months at a time. Nisenson was a witness to that time of reclusion, when Davis often relied on Nisenson for errands, including drug runs. Davis also spoke with Nisenson at length for a planned authorized biography, which led to “ ’Round About Midnight,” in which (in the second edition, published after Davis’s death) Nisenson is plain about Davis’s “inexcusable treatment of women.” Here’s one scene:

One night he called me up and asked me to come over. I had not heard from him in a few days and I could tell from Miles’s voice that there was a problem. When I got there, he was by himself. He had broken Daisy’s jaw, he explained, and she was hospitalized. “So, what do you think, Eric. Am I an asshole?” . . .

“Yes,” I said, “you’re a damned asshole, Miles. How could you do such a thing?”

“I meant to pull my punch. I know how to pull my punch.”

In the movie, Davis’s return to performance, and his healing, are sparked by his unwilling but inevitable connection to a young trumpeter who seems to have sold out but has a true musical mind. In fact, Davis was more or less nursed back to health and coaxed back into activity by the actress Cicely Tyson; they married in 1981. There’s no sign of her, or any cognate character, in the film.

Davis’s life, in his own telling, is a trouble-filled adventure, in which racism and drugs, hedonism and violence, artistic vision and brute desire are intertwined. The hardest thing for an artistic biography to accomplish is to associate the art with the life without reducing the pure artistic drive to psychological and sociological determinism. Even though “Miles Ahead” fails in this regard, I have sympathy for Cheadle’s odd uses of some of Davis’s greatest music. For instance, Davis’s violent fight with Taylor is depicted as occurring while the other four members of Davis’s superb “second quintet” are rehearsing in the basement; the effect is to associate the saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s composition “Nefertiti” with domestic violence. Similarly, a snippet of a heavily electric and percussive performance of the sort that Davis was giving in 1974-75 is used as the soundtrack for the car chase and shootout.

Even though these scenes cheapen and reduce the music to mere atmospherics, they make a significant point, one that is all too often lost in the romanticism of artistic creation: great artists whose lives are filled with trouble, including of their own making, aren’t great artists despite such behavior and experiences but, rather, in inseparable relation to it. The long-standing desire of art lovers to separate the art from the artist, to appreciate the work while disdaining the behavior, reflects the kind of fastidious oversimplification that good artists avoid. The messy complexity of character and of the world at large, the expression of realms of experience that most prudent spectators or readers would rather avoid, is precisely what the best art embodies. Artists’ turbulent lives are their very stock in trade, and if they were purified to fit the moral standards of Supreme Court nominees art itself would be the poorer for it. Nisenson’s use of the word “inexcusable” is exactly right. It’s almost unbearable to consider the creator of great beauty to be responsible for actions of great ugliness. That’s why Cheadle and the other writers, in their extreme filtering and altering of Davis’s experiences and actions, do his art no favors but, rather, an injustice.

Yet the fact remains: Cheadle is a majestic performer, whose acting captures something of Davis’s fierce, proud, volatile radiance. Though much of Cheadle’s direction is photographically undistinguished, the one figure of style that stands out is his close-ups of himself as Davis. They suggest no vanity or actorly preening but a keen self-awareness—and understanding of Davis—through the lens. Like Davis, Cheadle is complete in repose; Davis’s existential force emerges fully through the still frame of a single photograph, and Cheadle embodies it vitally. It’s precisely the actor’s own power to incarnate Davis as one artist to another that makes the movie’s reliance on artificial dramatic conventions unnecessary, even absurd. Davis is a drama unto himself, and to bring it into being Cheadle doesn’t have to do anything but be there.

[Dr. Nelson Harrison]

Richard Brody

July 11, 2015

Miles Davis’s Boldest Heights

By Richard Brody

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Miles Davis in Paris, 1973. Credit Photograph by Dominique GonotINA via Getty

The greatness of great musicians is in more than their mere skill at performing; it’s in self-challenging creation and emotional exposure—a self-challenging that’s all the more audacious when it takes place in public, in the presence of an audience, rather than in the studio, where the failures can be erased or shoved into a drawer. Music is like sports; the improvising musician faces a special vulnerability in public, and one of the crucial improvisers of modern times, Miles Davis, rose to bolder heights in concert than he did in the studio. Many of his concert recordings have been official releases, but many more, and many of the best, have come out as bootlegs, which is why “The Bootleg Series,” Columbia/Legacy’s ongoing multi-disk issues of concert recordings by Davis, most of which were previously unreleased (at least, officially), is among the treasures of the recent jazz catalogue. (I wrote about Volume Three last year.) The fourth volume, “Miles Davis at Newport, 1955-1975,” which comes out next Friday, is the most revealing of them to date. That’s because it reflects crucial musical ideas and decisions in the twenty crucial years of Davis’s musical development, from the age of twenty-nine through forty-nine—and his personal evolution and musical revolution is itself one of the grandest artistic dramas of the dramatic time.

The four-disk set features eight gigs, five (1955, 1958, 1966, 1967, and 1969) performed in Newport itself, and three held elsewhere under the Newport aegis (1971, in Dietikon, Switzerland; 1973, in Berlin; and 1975, in New York). The earliest of them captures a major moment in Davis’s career: the 1955 performance, in an ad-hoc sextet featuring Thelonious Monk, finds Davis performing three numbers. Davis’s perfectly placed and balanced phrasing, with his spare and involuted tone, create a sort of highest-order mood music, a passionately contained romanticism reflecting the ominous elegance of vast power held in reserve. (Monk abstains from accompanying Davis on “Now’s the Time,” a vestige of tension between them that issued from the 1954 studio recording “Bags’ Groove.”) One of these three performances, of Monk’s “’Round Midnight,” won him a major recording contract (with Columbia) and allowed him to form his first steady quintet, featuring the saxophonist John Coltrane, who was only a few months younger than Davis but whose musical personality was still inchoate, even if his sound was already distinctive. (Monk himself wasn’t thrilled with Davis’s performance of the number; he eventually provided his own musical response.)

The 1958 concert (long available on its own) includes an updated edition of that band—a sextet including Coltrane, the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and the pianist Bill Evans. The 1958 concert finds Davis in a state of fine excitement; he opens with an uptempo blast from the bebop songbook, “Ah-Leu-Cha,” and follows with a solo on Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser,” one of his classics of tense lyricism, built on solid, jaunty phrases that are as singable as an aria. Yet the contrast with Coltrane’s solos is sharp: though Davis takes most of the first solos, one could be excused for thinking that Coltrane is the band’s lead soloist, because he plays at greatest length and also seems to be bursting through the musical boundaries of jazz with his dizzying succession of rapid-fire flurries and dissonant leaps.

Soon thereafter, Coltrane went out on his own, and his innovations were among the dominant forces of jazz in the nineteen-sixties. Davis faced a few years of unstable groupings and musical uncertainty—until he formed his second great quintet, filled with the much younger musicians Wayne Shorter (saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums). Shorter is eight years younger; Carter, eleven years younger; Hancock, thirteen years younger; and Tony Williams, born in 1945, was all of eighteen when he joined Davis’s group. This band is heard on the second disk, featuring concerts from 1966 and 1967, and they’re both wild rides. Davis’s splintered phrases and fierce shrieks are recognizably descended from his earlier style, but the very metal of his trumpet seemed hotter, the sound reflected the glint of the flame. Williams’s shimmery, polyrhythmic glide and Shorter’s oblique constructions pushed the music occasionally in the direction of free jazz—a tendency that’s all the more pronounced in the 1967 concert, where the major difference is Williams’s playing, which has swapped sheen for thunder, pulse for a seemingly omnidirectional wall of sound. Even the ballads (“Stella by Starlight” and “’Round Midnight”) kick quickly into uptempo broken-field runs.

Davis was more than a heroic soloist; he was a bandleader with a group sound in mind, no less than was Duke Ellington; Davis played his trumpet but he also “played” his band, and from the acoustic tumult of the second quintet, he took his sound to a new dimension, forming an electric-instrument-based group that proved to be as controversial in the realm of jazz as Bob Dylan’s plugging-in had been for his folk-centric fans. (Davis’s famed electric coming out, of course, is the album “Bitches Brew.”) For Davis, electric instruments, first of all, made lots of noise; they made crystalline piano fills sting, made bass lines rumble and throb, and their sheer volume embodied his sense of musical aggression, of snarl and fury that got into a listener’s face and felt as confrontational as the times.

The 1969 performance finds Davis in fierce form (it’s already available, too), backed by a trio (Chick Corea, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette) that was both pliable and inventive. In 1970 (as in the recordings heard in Volume Three), Davis added Keith Jarrett on keyboard and made the group’s sound denser and rougher. In the 1971 Switzerland performance, Davis has just one keyboard at work, Jarrett’s, and despite some blazing riffs from Davis’s (electric) trumpet, he seems to be doing all the work himself; the band behind him is too spare, too recessive, and Davis’s exertions sound frustrated, the band’s extended solos meander. Davis seemed to be temporizing, awaiting his next big move; the 1973 Berlin concert displays it in fury.

The Berlin band features no keyboard player; instead, it’s got two electric guitarists, Pete Cosey, a slashingly wild soloist whose deliriously rapid lines sound as if they had been made on a piano keyboard, and Reggie Lucas, whose distortedly blues-based phrases have a sharp-edged, angular dissonance. Davis makes wider use of his electric trumpet (complete with wah-wah pedal) that meshes ideally with the howling strings, and the drummer, Al Foster, fills in the crashing and bashing of his cymbals with intricate bluster. Here, at last, Davis finds his real wall of sound, one that was as chromatic and dissonant as it was loud and thick; it’s as if the forward motion of the driving pulse were matched by the howling stasis of the group’s mighty mesh of electric energy. Davis’s solos snarl and rip, shriek and cackle, but for all their electro-funk ferocity they fit into the group, and often seem to melt into its overwhelming collective vortex. Davis sounds as if he’s conducting the group as much as he’s performing within it; he also has an electric organ on stage that he sometimes plays in ensemble passages to add to the colossally rugged textures. The forty-six-minute concert from Berlin in 1973, with its blend of razor’s-edge improvisations and its over-all sonic invention, is a major discovery; it’s one of the high points of Davis’s discography.

The single, seven-minute cut from New York, July 1, 1975, is a lovely lagniappe. Davis, playing with mostly the same group, rarefied its electric wildness to a sort of Beckettian blankness. Davis wasn’t in the best of health at the time; his concert in Central Park on September 5, 1975 (I had a ticket but couldn’t attend; long story), was his last until 1980. But by that point, he had already nearly single-handedly propelled jazz itself, along with his own musical imagination, into that future and beyond.

[Rev. Dr. Bobby Fulton, Ph.D.]

An interesting read.