You could sum up Miles Davis's attitude toward liner notes, discographies, and
jazz criticism in general with three words: "Don't read: listen." Miles didn't
like including liner notes with his recordings. But words love jazz. At least
since the hard-bop era of the '50s, jazz albums have been covered in words
(though the practice has abated somewhat lately, with marketers trying to move
jazz once again closer to pop). As in classical music, liner notes were used to
demystify but also to validate. What better way to establish the seriousness of
jazz than to expose its technical content? But Miles didn't even like listing
personnel. Names of people were just another way to name -- to label -- the
music, to predetermine how it will be heard.
The paradox is that Miles remains one of the most-written-about artists in the
history of jazz. A casual scan of Amazon turns up 11 biographies of one form or
another (including memoirs) since his death in 1991, at the age of 65. And
that's not counting critical monographs and other detailed studies of his
music, or the shelf full of books that preceded his death.
But to judge by the evidence of the new biography So What: The Life of
Miles Davis, by Yale professor John Szwed (Simon & Schuster, 488
pages, $28), and several other recent books on jazz, there's still plenty to
read, and plenty to write. And if handled well, prose can actually bring us
closer to the music, make us want to listen more -- to music we haven't heard,
to music we thought we knew.
Of course, there's another reason, too. "Biographies are about behavior," John
Leonard argued in a piece about the Miles-like mythic Bob Dylan. "Caring about
the music is what makes our interest in the behavior more than merely
prurient."
Szwed gives us the whole boatload of Miles bad behavior -- but there's little
here to scandalize those who have already read Miles: The Autobiography
(Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1989). He's still slapping around the bitches
he already told us he slapped around (including his wives Frances Taylor and
Cicely Tyson). And there's the mountains of white powder he snorted, the
predictable Behind the Music cycle of self-medication, the endless
series of ailments -- sickle-cell anemia, diabetes, gallstones, broken bones,
ulcers, chronic walking pneumonia, degenerative bone ailments that required
numerous hip surgeries, and strokes. And there's the late-'70s five-year
"retirement," when Miles holed up, paranoid and drug-addled, in his West 77th
Street townhouse, like, Szwed writes, "Norma Desmond in Sunset
Boulevard."
How does all this help explain the music? Probably no more than it ever did.
The reconciliation of the brutal, manipulative narcissist with the tender
rhapsodist, the creator of one of the most recognizable instrumental voices in
jazz, and an indelible body of work, remains confounding. Except that, nasty
behavior aside, one loyal friend after another testifies to Miles's
"shyness."
Miles Davis
 |
But Szwed doesn't merely dish the obligatory dirt. Consolidating previous
research, and conducting his own interviews with musicians, friends, wives, and
children, he comes up with a portrait that feels true to the man and the
artist. Davis's insecurities -- his "shyness" -- were real, and they accounted
for both his brutishness and his tremendous ambition. But Szwed uses the
context of the life, the behavior, to give us a fuller sense of the artist at
work. The author's reconstructions of various recording sessions, of the
marketing strategies that along with Miles's own talent and savvy propelled him
from Charlie Parker sideman to icon (the face of jazz as well as the image of
cool), are revelations. Again and again, Szwed reveals Miles's astonishing
musical intelligence and intuition -- his ability to tailor arrangements to a
given group of musicians, to edit other musicians' compositions
instantaneously, to "correct" another player's mistake on stage by supplying
just the right complementary note with his horn.
And of course there are the famous Miles epigrams. To John Coltrane when Trane
complained that he had trouble ending his solos: "Try taking the horn out of
your mouth." To John McLaughlin at the In a Silent Way sessions: "Play
like you don't know how to play." To saxophonist Dave Liebman: "Finish before
you're done." And, speaking in anticipation of untold hundreds of would-be jazz
renegades, to Wynton Marsalis: "So here's the police."
Szwed confirms the image of Miles as supremely in command of his music even
when his life was chaos. But he also confirms another cliché of genius:
that Miles was always able to see the music simultaneously whole and in all its
parts, including his own role as soloist. On stage he was composer, arranger,
conductor, performer -- and doing it all on the spot.
Szwed even gives Miles a touching reprieve, as the physically crumbling master
feels the end is near and begins to get in touch with his old friends and to
look back for the first time. And there's a bit of haunting poetry when Miles
lists his ailments to an interviewer from Le Monde and complains that he
has "no stomach left. . . . I no longer have eyes, nothing. Just
a face . . . severe, straight, like the face of my mother."
ASHLEY KAHN comes at the jazz biography from another angle. As he did in
Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (Da Capo, 2000),
Kahn gives us the biography of a single work. In A Love Supreme:
The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Work (Viking, 293 pages,
$27.95), he takes us into the minutiae of the recording process -- but like
Szwed, he has a knack for putting the work in the context of the artist's life,
and that life in context of the history of jazz and of African-American history
itself. We see how jazz records were marketed to college students; we
experience Coltrane's well-documented religious awakening, and we're taken
through the preparation, both musical and spiritual, that led to the creation
of this 1965 recording.
Perhaps what's most interesting is the way A Love Supreme was originally
received -- by those college students and by other jazz musicians. Saxophonist
Frank Lowe heard the album as a kind of "urbanized" spiritual. Producer Joel
Dorn, who was a jazz DJ in Philadelphia at the time, recalls, "There was a
spiritual response. . . . It wasn't just the record -- Giant
Steps and My Favorite Things were big jazz records, and established
Trane as a legitimate giant -- but he became this spiritual slash political
slash iconic something."
That "iconic something" is what New York Times critic Ben Ratliff has a
clear bead on throughout his remarkable Jazz: A Critic's Guide to the 100
Most Important Recordings (Times Books, 271 pages, $16). Ratliff is
refreshingly unbuttoned here outside the pages of journalism's great Gray Lady.
And he cheats on the unstated rules of such "list" books. An entry from his
"100 most important recordings" can be a single out-of-print album or an
eight-CD set. Listing in chronological order, he admits to favoring post-World
War II recordings, and you can argue from here to Miles's house about the
inclusions and omissions.
But the joy is in each of these 800-word essays. Like Miles, Ratliff has a
genius for seeing a work simultaneously in detail and in its historical
context. His descriptions enliven technical detail with metaphor, and the life
of the artist with pithy storytelling, salty, enlightening personal prejudices,
and a keen historical and musical awareness. Coltrane's Live in Japan is
"a landmark of terrifying stamina." In "China Boy," Benny Goodman's "ascent
into the high register is palpable, like a time-elapsed film of a tree shooting
out of the ground." Of the Chet Baker 1955 Paris recordings, he writes, "That
strange drifting feeling, as if tonality is all relative and the established
rhetoric of exits and entrances is for squares, meant only one thing in the
1950s: heroin."
Yes, Ratliff understands jazz history as "a series of great stories," but he
also has a sense of what those stories mean. Throughout these 100 essays, he
argues that the most vital jazz often compels us to ask what jazz is. And he
sees the music in a continuum of high and low culture. Of Parker's recordings
with strings, he asks, "But what is jazz if not a complete confusion of popular
and esoteric, highbrow and middlebrow and even lowbrow?" Considering the career
of Pat Metheny, he says, "There's a rare dualism here -- the narrow, academic,
chess-club concentration of the Boston guitar school and Metheny's natural
disposition toward making music that sounds popular." He also has plenty of
heart, as when he writes about Betty Carter that "she made you feel her
commitment to the idea that all successes are hard-won, and you were flattered
that such an imposing person was working so hard for your benefit."
ALL UNHAPPY JAZZ STORIES, though, are unhappy in their own way, and
there probably aren't any sadder than that of Nelson Riddle (1921-1985). Riddle
made his name as an arranger for Nat "King" Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary
Clooney (with whom he had a lengthy affair), Linda Ronstadt (on her "standards"
recordings of the early '80s), and, most famously, Frank Sinatra. And as an
arranger, he was a second banana in every way. He was a passable jazz
trombonist and an unprolific original composer; his specialty was orchestrating
other people's music. He began as a big-band arranger, but his genius was in
setting songs for singers, and nowhere can you hear that better than on
Sinatra's "I've Got You Under My Skin," where Frank's voice is carried from one
peak to another, a beautifully arranged brass chorus leading to Milt Bernhart's
now legendary trombone solo.
But the arranger's job is a thankless one, as Peter J. Levinson writes in
September in the Rain: The Life of Nelson Riddle (Billboard
Books, 320 pages, $21.95). Such journeymen were paid by the piece, or they
worked as house arrangers, cranking out material on demand, often trying to
turn sows' ears into silk purses. The crooner Al Martino recalls of Riddle,
"When he wrote for me, the tunes were nowhere as good as his charts."
Levinson drums up a song for his unsung hero, but Riddle comes off as a moody
alcoholic, as responsible for his travails as anyone. When Sinatra moves on to
find other arrangers, other sounds, it seems a natural part of his own artistic
search. But Riddle takes it as a personal injury. A weak orchestra conductor,
and never able to find his niche as a composer of soundtracks, he toils in a
purgatory between fame and obscurity. Levinson's last biographical subject,
Harry James, had his own unhappy demise, but at least he compelled as a
one-time jazz-pop superstar. The author's next subject, who will complete this
"swing trilogy," is big-band leader Tommy Dorsey. Levinson's valuable, dogged
research may not be uncovering lives as compelling as Davis's, but like Szwed,
Kahn, and Ratliff, he changes how you listen.
Issue Date: December 20 - 26, 2002
