Mo' Miles

Davis and his disciples keep his spirit alive

by Ted Drozdowski

If we were very, very drunk and talking about which dead musician would be most likely to return from the grave, my vote would go to Miles Davis. He was such a restless spirit in life, how could he be any more passive now that his ghost has given up the body? Could seven years in the tomb quell his relentless need for change, for exploration, for growth? As Miles might put it himself, "Shit no!"

As we head toward the millennium -- or at least another Thanksgiving -- Miles remains one of pop culture's main mystery men. Certainly he carried his armor wherever he went. His rasping demon's voice, his back-to-the-audience demeanor, and his healthy distrust of white people kept nearly everyone from getting too close to Miles's cage. Many of the musicians who played with him for years feel they never got a clear understanding of the trumpeter/composer as a man or a creative figure. Somehow Davis kept his thought processes and intuitive gifts to himself, with few exceptions.

One of those was Shirley Horn, whom Miles befriended early in her career. He telephoned her one morning when the '60s were young, after he'd heard her debut album, Embers and Ashes, and asked whether the pianist/singer would come visit his Manhattan home so he could hear her in person. Weeks later she was opening for Miles at the Village Vanguard, where he demanded that she sit in during his sets. Davis was especially fond of her way with a ballad, which is why Horn's new I Remember Miles (Verve) is full of gentle songs informed with the kind of melodic grace typical of Davis's early-'60s recordings.

By the end of that decade, however, Davis was in a completely different place -- just as he was a decade before and a decade later. As the '60s became the '70s, Miles was deep into exploring the textural possibilities of highly amplified electric music (including running his trumpet through stacks of Yamaha amps and effects pedals) played by large ensembles. The albums In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew -- his weirdest and most commercially successful works (Bitches Brew was his first gold album) -- were the result of these experiments. Of the two, Bitches Brew in particular seems a precursor of so much that would follow, from genre-blending world music to the defanged blend of jazz rock that typically passes for fusion today. (For the record, the latter is not Miles's fault. He got that shit nailed raw and right.) Bitches Brew's blend is so dense, colorful, and rhythmically moving that an argument can even be made for the album as a granddaddy of trip-hop.

Just reissued with previously unreleased rehearsal takes, alternate versions, and unheard music from the studio, The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions (Columbia/Legacy) remains a masterpiece of practically anything you want it to be. These four crystalline-sounding CDs percolate constantly with their blend of sitar, aggressive electric guitar, organ, layers of percussion, and pure bursts of sounds like the wah-pedal horn squawks and blaring sustained notes that erupt from Miles's horn. The original album -- a two-LP set that now occupies most of the reissue's first two CDs -- and its unearthed companion material are so full of ideas that they can be digested polyrhythm by polyrhythm, melody by intertwining melody, harmonic layer by harmonic layer, sound by sound. Or taken overall as a dynamic ticket out of the corporeal world to some surreal place to which only the greatest art can transport you.

If that seems a bit too much of a crypto-religious assertion, chill. Miles Davis's music has never been as mysterious as it may seem and has often been portrayed. Forget the theorists who would paint his body of work as a study in schizophrenia, color his late-period recordings as panderings to the pop marketplace (which they were, but they were more, too), write off post-Bitches Brew live performances like Agharta and Pangaea as mere "energy music," and claim -- insanely -- that Miles allowed his personality to be swept away by the tides of change in popular culture after 1959's Kind of Blue.

Think, instead, of Miles's body of work as a straight line -- a clear progression from goal to goal with solar flares of creativity along the way. Often those bright spots -- albums like Workin' and Steamin' and especially his icy-cool Kind of Blue, sonic flame thrower Bitches Brew, and, of course, his funky '80s comeback, The Man with the Horn -- were so blinding they'd set listeners off the trail he was taking. Campfires and distant flashlights mistaken for the rays of a rising sun. But Miles -- save for some years lost to heroin and physical infirmities -- always kept his eyes on the prize. Which was growth, expansion, the kind of godhead -- for want of a better term -- toward which all artists direct their creative vision in hopes of refining it to perfection, an unattainable but irresistible goal that not even they can define.

So it was natural for Miles to play popular, song-driven jazz when he took his first professional job with composer/vocalist Billy Eckstine's band in the early '40s. And natural for him to fall in with his Eckstine band mates Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and to tag along as they defined bebop. In such company he mastered harmony as he negotiated the music's modal leaps.

The next challenge was melody. Miles was already well on his way to becoming one of jazz's most distinctive melodists, with his firm, vibrato-less tone. But the refinement of his melodic craftsmanship took place over the course of his 1949 and '50 Birth of the Cool sessions through Kind of Blue 10 years later. One thing he came to understand about great melodies is the need for space. Not only between the notes in a lead instrument's line, to give those notes definition, but within the rhythmic framework upon which a great melody rests. If the beat doesn't ebb and flow with a melody's phrasing, and keep well out of the way of its variations, that melody's impact is lost.

So Miles headed into the '60s not as an accompanist turned bebopper turned again into a melodist (as many critics would have it), but as a complete and devoted musician who had mastered tone, time, tunefulness, and texture, seeking to broaden his command with a new sonic palette provided by amplification and the era's increased awareness of the music of other cultures, as well as the dynamism of improvisation and rock and roll. His strategy can be summed up more simply as "Onward and upward, baby."

That's a philosophy shared by two of today's greatest improvisers, guitarist Henry Kaiser and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. Together they've fashioned a tribute in their new Yo Miles! (Shanachie). Offering adaptations of post-Bitches Brew Miles numbers like "Ife" (from his 1972 Big Fun) and "Wili" (which he cut live only), Yo Miles! is relentlessly exciting. Kaiser and Smith, with a core band of guitarist Nels Cline, drummers Wally Ingram and Lukas Ligeti, and bassist Michael Manring, match Davis's recordings in virtuosity and intensity. And they bring in fresh splashes of instrumental color. It's easy to imagine Davis digging the way Elliott Sharp's lap-steel parts the sea of sound on the fiery "Black Satin" (which also features John Medeski's organ), or the way Kaiser's occasional flirtations with a pitch-change/harmonizing device send his guitar's tone on delirious sonic flights.

There's also a marvelous Smith composition, "Miles Dewey Davis III -- Great Ancestor," nestled on these two discs. In 11 minutes it sums up the last 30 years of Miles's music. Smith begins solo and contemplative, playing the lilting, sustained-note melodies on his horn that characterized Kind of Blue. Then, after Greg Goodman's piano has gently insinuated itself into the mix, Kaiser's guitar comes thundering up with a few distorted notes, and the race to Man with the Horn-era Miles, where guitarist Mike Stern was the genius's distortion-driven foil, is on. (Kaiser's fans will want to pay close attention to the "Willie Nelson" portion of "Themes from Jack Johnson," where Kaiser pays homage to his late mentor Sonny Sharrock, who played -- uncredited -- on the original with Davis in 1970.)

As you'd expect, Shirley Horn's I Remember Miles has a separate but equal set of virtues. The gentle swing of her voice and her band (whose line-up includes Davis sideman Al Foster on drums), the full-throated vibrato-less tone of Roy Hargrove's horns, the familiarity of the Gershwin, Rodgers & Hart, and other classic tunes that Miles also recorded -- all this makes her tribute perfect for a back-to-back playing with Kind of Blue. And her voice, which bears that smoky sort of lonely beauty so perfect for a Valentine's Day spent alone, seems to speak of Davis's absence in every syllable. On numbers like "Basin Street Blues," which he recorded on 1963's Seven Steps to Heaven, and "My Man's Gone Now," which he torched up on his 1958 Porgy & Bess, Horn's piano chords probe like the indicator of a ouija board -- searching for a sign from her friend.

Of course, the best place to commune with Miles's spirit is in his old haunts, which makes The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions such a delight. He's there with vitality, nudging swells of percussion through the unreleased "Trevere" as his trumpet issues splashes of brightness, Larry Young takes his keyboard halfway to church, and John McLaughlin quietly scrapes his pick on his guitar's strings. It's a towering sound sculpture that stands as high and solid as the swinging "So What" did on Kind of Blue, but built from different materials. Hell, on some of these tracks Miles was already a hovering spirit. In "Yaphet," for example, another previously unissued performance, his muted horn grumbles and groans beneath the broad, ringing buzz of a sitar and the burbling thrum of tabla that sets the tone. And is there a more relentlessly menacing pair of tunes in all of jazz than the title track and "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" from the original Bitches Brew album? The horn melodies cut across the driving rhythms like a jagged saw. Or Wayne Shorter's "Sanctuary," where Joe Zawinul's electric-piano chords drop like stealth bombs, stirring unease into the blend of Miles's arching horn lines and the shimmering, beat-less spray of the cymbal playing from Lenny White and Jack DeJohnette. "Sanctuary?" Sure, but a damn dark one.

Jazz, rock, textural music: art or pop? If Miles did come back from the grave, he'd probably dismiss all this defining and contextualizing with a grunt and a "dumb motherfucker." Then again, maybe he'd simply repeat what he told Encore magazine back in the '70s: "We play what the day recommends."