Silence, Exile, and Cunning: Miles Davis in Memoriam

Pronouncing the death of Miles Davis seems more sillyass than sad. Something on the order of saying you’ve clocked the demise of the blues, the theory of relativity, Ulysses, or any other definitive creation of this century. Miles is one of those works of art, science, and magic whose absence might have ripped a chunk out of the zeitgeist big enough to sink a dwarf star into. A friend of mine once said that you could not love being black and not love Miles Davis because Miles was the quintessential African American. African American, not as in two halves thrown together, but a recombinant entity born of sperm and egg to produce a third creature more expansive than either.

Quincy Jones has opined, if someone asks what jazz is, play them Kind of Blue. For some of us coming from the African-centric tip, Miles Davis is the black aesthetic. He doesn’t just represent it, he defines it. Music, poetry, philosophy, fashion, sports, architecture, design, painting, scholarship, politics, film, physics, femininity, even if not feminism-it don’t matter, Miles is the model and the measure for how black your shit really is. Miles rendered black a synonym for the best of everything. To the aris. tocratic mind of this East St. Louis scion of a pig farmer/dentist, it naturally followed that if you were playing the baadest music on the face of the earth with the baadest musicians living, then of course you were driving the baadest cars, wearing the baadest vines, and intimate with the most regal of women and celebrated of artists, thinkers, and athletes. What black also meant to Miles was supreme intelligence, elegance, creativity, and funk. Miles worked black culture encyclopedically-from the outhouse to the penthouse and back again, to paraphrase brother Stanley Crouch. He rolled up on symphony orchestras with greasy blues phrases and dropped Stockhausen over dopebeats. Like Bessie Smith, he wasn’t ashamed to show his ass in high society, or to take his Issey Miyake gear to the toilet stool. (I’m proud to say I nearly bore witness to that shit.)

Accepting Clyde Taylor’s definition of black music as "our mother tongue," no artist in history territorialized as many of its multi-accentuated language groups as Miles. And the way he worked those linguistic systems demands we interact as critically with his music as we do with the texts of Baldwin, Baraka, Morrison, or the slave narratives. The music of Miles Davis is the music of a deep thinker on African-American experience.

The reason black music occupies a privileged and authoritative position in black aesthetic discourse is because it seems to croon and cry out to us from a postliberated world of unrepressed black pleasure and self-determination. Black music, like black basketball, represents an actualization of those black ideologies that articulate themselves as antithetical to Eurocentrism. Music and ’ball both do this in ways that are counterhegemonic if not countersupremacist-rooting black achievement in ancient black cultural practices. In the face of the attempt to erase the African contribution to world knowledge, and the diminution of black intelligence that came with it, the very fact of black talents without precedent or peers in the white community demolishes racist precepts instantaneously. In this war of signifying and countersigning Miles Davis was a warrior king and we were all enthralled.

Paying tribute to the courtly airs of Jean Michel Basquiat, Diego Cortez compared Basquiat’s noblesse oblige to Miles’s, pointing out how important it was for black culture to have its own aristocrats. George Benson has spoken of how Miles made being a black jazz musician feel like the most exalted honorific one could achieve on this earth. In the business of reinvesting the devalued human stock of chattel slavery with a sense of self-worth, Miles was among the most bullish CEOs in the history of the company. Primarily because he’s a blues people’s genius.

Obviously, the notion of black genius is an oxymoron designed to send Eurocentrists screaming to the mat. Though considered an absurdity by academe, the artistry of a Miles or a Holiday or a Hendrix obliterates that prejudice with a vengeance. That Miles Davis ranks beside Picasso in the modernist pantheon has long been the stuff of journalistic cliché. All things being equal, Miles and Pablo will probably end up sharing a room together in a hell of mirrors being flogged by furies for all the women they dogged. That Miles looms as large as Warhol as far as postmodern thinkers go is an insight for which we can thank Arthur Jafa. Like Warhol, Miles came to use his visual presence and celebrity to manipulate the interpretation of his work and eventually made that stuff a part of the work as well, particularly in the ’80s, when his cordial stage demeanor attracted more attention than his band or his horn playing.

Befitting his status as black aesthetic signifier in the flesh, Miles cannot merely be read as a fascinating subject. He’s also for many of us an objectified projection of our blackest desires, a model for any black artist who wants to thoroughly interpenetrate Western domains of power and knowledge with Africanizing authority. For those who approach him as a generator of musical systems, metaphors, metaphysics, and gossip, Miles was the premier black romantic artist of this century. It’s difficult to say at what point the legend of Miles enveloped his work. The mythologizing process began as early as the mid ’50s. You can’t interpret Miles’s work if you don’t acknowledge his syncretism of life and music. This has less to do with trying to read his music through his clothes or his sex life or his choice of pharmaceuticals than with him being as his biographer Quincy Troupe says, "an unreconstructed black man," a Stagolee figure who makes the modern world deal with him on his terms if it’s going to deal with him at all. Few black men receiving their pay from major white corporations could get away with saying they’d like to spend the last minutes of their life choking a white man and suffer no repercussions for it. No one else in jazz could have chucked a following built over a lifetime to pursue the wild and wacky musical course Miles took from In a Silent Way onward.

The funny thing is that as disorienting as that period was for his old fans, Miles stepped into the era of black power politics and hippie rebellion like he’d had a hand in creating it all along. He never seemed like the old jazz hand who was trying to get hip to the Youth and Soul movements of the day. Homeboy came off like he was redefining cool for that generation too. As in the ’50s and ’60s, in the ’70s he emerged as chief prophet of musicality for the next 20 years. Punk, hiphop, house, new jack swing, worldbeat, ambient music, and dub are all presaged in the records Miles cut between 1969 and 1975. There’s no other figure whose work can be said to have laid the cornerstone for the advances of Brian Eno, Parliament-Funkadelic, Prince, Public Image Ltd., Talking Heads, Public Enemy, Living Colour, Marshall Jefferson, and Wynton Marsalis. Miles? Yeah, they named that one right. Only thing more to the point might have been Moebius.

On the other hand, the reason Miles was always so fresh was because he was so rooted. When I met Miles for an interview in 1986 it immediately struck me that the person he most reminded me of was my late maternal grandmother. Like her, a barber who spent her last years cutting heads at an Air Force base, Miles not only seemed to be a country person thoroughly wise in the ways of cosmopolitans but the type of country person who seems to become even more country the longer they stay among so-called sophisticates. Not as a ploy, like you’d find in folktales, playing dumb in order to get over on city slickers, but more like recognizing countryness as a state of grace. I imagine this sense of transcendence comes from knowing you are of ancient, enduring, and obdurate stock and that the rest will soon fade.

Lester Bowie once countered Wynton Marsalis’s line on the tradition by saying that the tradition in jazz is innovation. Perhaps the median between these poles is that you become an innovator by working your way deeper into the tradition rather than by working out of it, recognizing that there’s gold in them haunted hills. If the trick is to advance the tradition without refusing, abusing, or deifying it, then Miles wrote the book of love there. You could reduce everything Miles ever played to an obsession with four elements: deep bass, open space, circular time, and blues falsettos. In a mystical or metaphorical sense you could read these constants as earth, air, water, and fire. No matter how avant his music might have seemed to the rear guard, Miles held to those constants. Miles is a nomad, and nomads are famous for being able to re-create their way of life anywhere. I think it was his clarity about where he came from that gave him his urgency to keep moving on, a fugitive for life.

Baraka says black musical tradition implores us to sing and fight. I disagree. I think we’d do that anyway, just out of human necessity. What I do think it teaches us is more Joycean in tenor: silence, exile, and cunning. Miles’s music makes you think of Nat Turner, proud without being loud because it was about plotting insurrection. In this sense Miles never changed. His agenda remained the same from day one: stay ahead.

Writers only have their style to leave behind said Nabokov. Miles says he was always looking for musicians who had a style, a voice I think he meant, of their own. In a music built on celebrating democracy and the individual, Miles developed a voice that was not only singular, but critical of all who picked up the instrument afterwards. After Miles, you couldn’t just be a good trumpet player. You had to sacrifice your soul and maybe give some blood in the process. Others might have played trumpet from the heart; Miles played it like he was having open heart surgery. At the same time, every note thanked God for putting Louis Armstrong on the planet. Miles’s tight-lipped sound conveyed the gaiety of Armstrong’s wide vibrato while conjuring up the calculating pockets of dark sarcasm and meanness that at times ruled his spirit.

These qualities were nowhere more apparent than in his treatment of women, if we take him at his word for the gloating accounts of physical and psychological abuse in the as-told-to Troupe biography. Much as I love Miles, I despised him after reading about those incidents. Not because I worshiped the ground he spit on, but because I’d loathe any muhfukuh who violated women the way he did and relished having the opportunity to tell the world about it. Miles may have swung like a champion but on that score he went out like a roach.