Miles Davis was a musical Pablo Picasso. Like the painter, he was a great artist and an often unbearable person whose stardom became a magnet for the stray metallic debris of hangers-on and mindless admirers. Davis and Picasso both pushed their art forms forward in a sequence of easily demarcated periods but by the end remained famous for what they had once done, not for anything accomplished lately.
One of the most revealing books on Davis allows the musician to tell his story in his own words-as chosen by interviewers as estimable as Nat Hentoff and execrable as Stephen Davis. Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis (Lawrence Hill Books) is a collection of pieces edited by Paul Maher Jr. and Michael K. Dorr. The texts span the late-1950s through some excellent posthumous articles from the late-'90s, revealing a musician of many humors, some of them ill. Davis was insightful and crude, generous and self-absorbed, profound and shallow-an angry black man who admittedly made some of his greatest music with white collaborators.
Interviewing Davis was a notoriously difficult challenge, testing the resourcefulness of any writer. Alex Haley (whose famous Playboy article is not included here) wound up plagiarizing other interviews to fill the gaps. If Davis deemed the interviewer foe or fool, he might lapse into sullen silence or erupt in cutting assaults or wicked evasions. Sometimes he wore the burden of his legend too heavily. During some phases the drugs curdled his humanity. But when he felt like talking, he was almost unfailingly provocative.
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Arranged chronologically, the material collected in Miles on Miles traces the arc of his career as he reflected on the '40s bebop scene out of which he developed its opposite number, cool jazz. Many of the writers contributing to Miles on Miles suspected that Davis was a romantic at heart under the bluster and put-downs. The sad yearning of his trumpet, a melancholy that continued through the strutting syncopation of his later music, is introduced as evidence. Davis said that what he played was often less important than what he omitted. The silence with which the trumpeter often greeted a world he found hostile was at the core of his music like a walled garden in the heart of a crowded, noisy city.
Miles Davis occupies the climactic chapter of Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture (Faber & Faber) by Krin Gabbard. Surprisingly lucid for a cultural studies professor (evidence that the academic field is producing better fruit than previously?), Gabbard traces the trumpet to the ancient Mediterranean world of the Egyptians, Greeks and Jews, dwelling on the instrument's association with power and masculinity. The manliness of the trumpet is almost an obsession for Gabbard, who plays the instrument in his spare time. It was a musical phallic symbol, supplanted with the coming of rock by the electric guitar.
Trumpeting was transformed in New Orleans around 1900 by the mysterious Buddy Bolden, considered the likely father of jazz, and later by Louis Armstrong, who may have heard Bolden play. Miles Davis mocked Armstrong for being too eager to please, but admired his playing, commenting that the older musician had largely defined the instrument's possibilities. Gabbard's analysis of Davis' enduring influence is trenchant: His music from the late-'40s through late-'60s has become a signifier of sophistication in the hipper echelons of the upper class.
