This article was downloaded by: [82.158.102.

133] On: 21 June 2013, At: 05:16 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Jazz Perspectives
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjaz20

Kinds of Blue: Miles Davis, AfroModernism, and the Blues

Jeffrey Magee Published online: 11 Jan 2007. To cite this article: Jeffrey Magee (2007): Kinds of Blue: Miles Davis, AfroModernism, and the Blues, Jazz Perspectives, 1:1, 5-27 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060601061006

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Jazz Perspectives Vol. 1, No. 1, May 2007, pp. 527

Kinds of Blue: Miles Davis, AfroModernism, and the Blues

Jeffrey Magee
Miles Davis played the blues on his first recording datein late April 1945, a month before his nineteenth birthday. On these recordings, he performs as a sideman in a sextet accompanying the dancer, comedian, and rhythm-and-blues singer Rubberlegs Williams.1 Three of the four pieces they recorded were twelve-bar blues. One of them, a tune called Bring It on Home, features a straightforward R&B style whose standard harmonic palette serves as a foundation for a conventional poetic structure of AAB verses and a bereft lovers plea for the return of my woman and my used-tobe. Behind the vocal, Davis plays a muted obbligato that sounds so far away from the center of musical action that he might be in a neighboring practice room. A close listening reveals a musician steeped in bebop gestures, including scurrying doubletime passages and upper extensions of chords, such as major sevenths and ninths, that stand outside conventional rhythm and blues playing of the period.2 In short, the recording contains the seeds of a creative tension that charged Miles Daviss entire career. The recording session took place around the time Daviss Juilliard cohorts were studying for final exams. Davis himself, however, had effectively dropped out from his formal schooling. It was not as if he couldnt handle academic challenges. Daviss biographer, John Szwed, saw the first-semesters report card at a public exhibit at Juilliard. The record shows that Davis earned a solid B averagedespite a D in music historyin a varied curriculum that balanced applied and academic studies.3 Although some of his biographers, and even Davis himself, later belittled what the school had to offer, he had taken his Juilliard studies seriously at first, and he despised what he later called the ghetto mentality of his jazz peers who disdained classical scores and music theory as oppressive symbols of white culture.4

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

1 Daviss earliest recordings are available on Miles Davis: First Miles (Savoy Classic Masters 17169, 1993, compact disc) and Young Miles, Volume 1: 19451946 (Masters of Jazz MJCD 131, 2001, compact disc). 2 Thanks to one of the journals anonymous reviewers for transcribing a portion of Daviss obbligato, which encouraged more precision in identifying the passages bebop gestures. 3 John Szwed, So What: The Life of Miles Davis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 39. 4 Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 60 61. It remains important to distinguish, as Davis did, between his Juilliard teacherswhom he claimed werent teaching me nothingand his attitudes toward music learning, including music theory and the library scores he borrowed (from all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Prokofiev). These statements appear on the same pages of the autobiography.

ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17494060601061006

Kinds of Blue

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

What Davis could not abide was his music history teacher, a white woman who, he claimed, insisted that black people played the blues because they were poor and had to pick cotton. That a Juilliard teacher of the World War II era even mentioned the blues in class might seem progressive today, but Davis did not see it that way. He remembered having risen in class and declaredin words set down some four decades later, with a dash of his adopted street grammarIm from East St. Louis and my father is rich, hes a dentist, and I play the blues. My father didnt never pick no cotton and I didnt wake up this morning sad and start playing the blues. Theres more to it than that. Then he inserted a seemingly gratuitous barb that suggests that, for Davis, the incident may have challenged his manhood: Well, he added, the bitch turned green and didnt say nothing after that.5 Davis did not come close to graduating from Juilliard; in his freshman year, he was already too busy taking notes from the men he deemed his true professors, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. And he never stopped playing the blues. Afro-Modernism and the Blues Continuum Accounts of Miles Daviss career tend to emphasize change and contrast, because his musical path illuminates almost every major movement in modern jazz: from bebop, to cool jazz, to hard bop, to modal jazz, to a controlled version of free jazz, to jazzrock fusion, and, finally, to hip-hop hybrids at the end of his life. I have to change, he once said. Its like a curse.6 One of the most quoted statements of a highly quotable man, that remark has become the boilerplate thesis for many interpretations, a platitude: No other jazz musicianand few musicians of any stripeso consistently drove themselves into new artistic territory over such a long career as Miles Davis. Through all those changes, however, the blues acted as a connecting thread. (See Table 1.) In fact, at almost every critical juncture there appears at least one key blues piece that has become a fixture in the Miles Davis canon, and some that became modern jazz standards: Sippin at Bells, Israel, Walkin, Blue n Boogie, Bags Groove, All Blues, Freddie Freeloader, Eighty-One, Footprints, and finally Star People, also known as New Blues, which he played repeatedly in the decade before his death in 1991.7
5 Ibid., 59. The classroom incident and the language Davis used to recall it lend credence to Sherrie Tuckers claim that what she calls the men and masculinity school of gender analysis can be virtually equated with Miles Davis Studies. Sherrie Tucker, Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, Current Musicology 7173 (Spring 2001Spring 2002): 388. Although not the chief focus of this article, themes of gender and sexuality charge Miles Daviss engagement with the blues at almost every turn. What Tucker says about jazz history as a whole could well be claimed about the story of Miles Davis and the blues: The narrative itself is shaped by [problematic] notions of gender and sexuality and race (378). 6 Ian Carr, Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography (London: Harper Collins, 1998), 209. 7 The exhaustive website Miles Ahead documents sixty occurrences of New Blues in the period between June 1984 and July 1991, meaning that this piece, like the pop tunes Time after Time and Human Nature, remained a repertoire staple almost until Daviss death (September 28, 1991). http:// www.plosin.com/milesAhead/ (accessed June 7, 2006).

Jazz Perspectives

Table 1 Miles Davis and the Blues, 194591. For complete discography, session details, and other recordings of the tunes listed below, see Miles Ahead: A Miles Davis Website, at: http://www.plosin.com/milesAhead/.
Title (composer credit if not MD) Bring It on Home (R. Williams, T. Deig) Pointless Mama Blues (Williams, Deig) Deep Sea Blues (Williams, Deig) Billies Bounce (C. Parker) Nows the Time (Parker) Jelly, Jelly (B. Eckstine) Cheryl (Parker) Cool Blues (Parker) Buzzy (Parker) Sippin at Bells Parkers Mood (Parker) Israel (J. Carisi) Bluing Au Privave (Parker) K. C. Blues (Parker) ** Walkin (R. Carpenter) Blue n Boogie (D. Gillespie, F. Paparelli) Solar (C. Wayne) Weirdo (a.k.a. Sids Ahead) Bags Groove (M. Jackson) Green Haze Dr. Jackle (J. McLean) No Line Vierd Blues Tranes Blues (J. Coltrane) Blues by Five (R. Garland) Straight No Chaser (T. Monk) Wild Man Blues (F. Morton, L. Armstrong) All Blues Freddie Freeloader Pfrancing (a.k.a. No Blues) Blues No. 2 Eighty-One (w/R. Carter) Footprints (W. Shorter) Gingerbread Boy (J. Heath) Star People New Blues Date* 1945 1945 1945 1945 1945 1946 1947 1947 1947 1947 1948 1949 1951 Representative Davis album(s)*** [First Miles] [First Miles] [First Miles]

[First Miles] [Birth of the Cool] [Miles Davis Featuring Sonny Rollins; Bluing]

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

1951 1952 1954 Walkin 1954 ** Walkin 1954 Walkin 1954 Miles Davis, vol. 3 1954 Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants 1955 [The Musings of Miles; Bluing] 1955 Music Davis and Milt Jackson Quintet/Sextet 1956 [Bluing] 1956 [Bluing] 1956 Workin with the Miles Davis Quintet 1956 Cookin with the Miles Davis Quintet 1958 Milestones 1958 1959 Kind of Blue 1959 Kind of Blue 1961 Someday My Prince Will Come 1961 Someday My Prince Will Come 1965 E.S.P. 1966 Miles Smiles 1966 Miles Smiles 1982 Star People 1984

Note: Boldface indicates titles of tunes for which there are ten or more recorded performances by Miles Davis, according to the Miles Ahead website. * Date of composition and/or first recording. ** Tracks performed with Charlie Parker in 1946, but Walkin version is best known. *** Brackets indicate a later compilation.

The blues idiom not only allows us to make connections across the seams in Daviss career, it also opens up the possibility of considering his engagement with a phenomenon that has been dubbed Afro-Modernism. This broad term

Kinds of Blue

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

encompasses an impulse that peaked at mid-century and continued to resonate thereafter. Building on the work of Houston A. Baker, Jr., and others, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., sees Afro-Modernism as being grounded less in musical style or aesthetics than in a social phenomenon: the mass migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north in the first half of the twentieth century.8 Afro-Modernism manifests itself in efforts to blend or juxtapose the earthy and the urbane, the down-home and the cosmopolitan, the simple and the sophisticated. The chief musical conduit of Afro-Modernismand its richest and most flexible mediumis the blues. Ramseys rubric itself represents a movement in recent years to identify and analyze twentieth-century artistic movements that had been excluded by the concept and rhetoric of European high modernism, which, as Scott DeVeaux has pointed out, has served as a problematic framework for discussing bebop by insisting on arts autonomy from social forces such as race, politics, class, and commerce.9 Other alternatives include George E. Lewiss Afrological perspective for understanding a variety of post-1945 improvised music, and Miriam Hansens analysis of classical cinema as a form of vernacular modernism.10 Lewis argues that discussions of post-1945 improvisation frame the subject within a notion of American music since 1945, as defined by European modernist efforts to embrace aleatory, or chance, compositional methods. He finds that such discussions tend to omit improvisatory approaches developed in African-American idioms, such as bebop.11 Likewise, Hansen aims to free modernist aesthetics from the exclusive framework of high modernism in order to embrace a vast range of expressive forms and styles, including mass-mediated phenomena and even elements of everyday experience.12 Through the blues, we might say that Davis became an Afrological and vernacular modernist of music par excellence. Daviss own background and statements invite us to consider his work in this light. Poised between north and south, his hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois, situated him at a crossroads in black musical life. The region was rich in music history and
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press; and Chicago: Center for Black Music Research, 2003), especially 2730. 9 See Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 4, 2223. 10 See George E. Lewis, Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives, Black Music Research Journal 16 (Spring 1996): 91122; and Miriam Hansen, The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism, in Modernism/Modernity 6 (April 1999): 5977; reprinted in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill (London: Edward Arnold, 2000), 332350. 11 Lewis, Improvised Music, 92. 12 Although Hansen does not mention musical idioms under this rubric, the blues, for one, could easily find a place in the list with which she elaborates on her notion of vernacular modernist phenomena: I take the study of modernist aesthetics to encompass cultural practices that both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity, such as the mass-produced and mass-consumed phenomena of fashion, design, advertising, architecture and urban environment, of photography, radio, and cinema. I am referring to this kind of modernism as vernacular (and avoiding the ideologically overdetermined term popular) because the term vernacular combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability (59).
8

Jazz Perspectives

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

tradition. William Howland Kenney has recreated the areas rich musical texture to show that where Davis grew up, blues and jazz were emblematic not of lowlife, but of elite society, and to play the trumpet well there was a badge of race pride and manhood.13 Legendary predecessors such as St. Louis-based Charles Creath and, later, Clark Terrywho influenced and befriended Davisprovided models for the kind of elegant, expressive blues playing that came to be seen as a birthright of black trumpet players in the region.14 Moreover, coming from a well-to-do family, Davis enjoyed an unusual level of economic stability in his youth. All of these things prepared him for the moment when he stood and told off his professor in terms that revealed his belief in the blues as a crucible for merging ideas about race, gender, social class, and musical style. It was important for Davis to reject not only the notion that blues simply expressed sadness borne of suffering, but to dismiss the whole idea that the blues necessarily constituted a kind of transparent self-expression, unmediated by a critical sensibility informed by artistic choicesa point on which Albert Murray has insisted in his classic book, Stomping the Blues.15 In the blues of Miles Davis, we can hear the development of Afro-Modernity in microcosm.16 Of the dozens of blues pieces Davis performed and recorded through his halfcentury career, all can be heard as being charged with the Afro-Modernist creative tension between down-home tradition and cosmopolitan artistry. The following account, which only begins to suggest the subjects richness, will shift between considerations of composition and improvised solos in order to zero in on particular features that demonstrate that tension.

13

See William Howland Kenney, Just Before Miles: Jazz in St. Louis, 19261944, in Miles Davis and American Culture, ed. Gerald Early (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2001), 2439. 14 Clark Terry was the one who really opened up the St. Louis jazz scene for me (Davis and Troupe, Miles, 44). 15 In Stomping the Blues (New York: Da Capo, 1976), Murray strenuously challenges the stereotype that the blues bear the stigma of the yoke of slavery (65). Moreover, he argues that the blues reflect the technology of stylization, not simply raw emotion (90), and the idiom represents not natural impulse but the refinement of habit, custom, and tradition the end product of discipline, or in a word, training (98). Yet it was not just white observers like Daviss Juilliard teacher who insisted on the notion of the blues as raw expression borne of slavery. Black gospel pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey put it this way: blues were really born shortly after slaves were free and they were sung the way singers felt inside. They were just let out of slavery but they hadnt gotten used to freedom. Quoted in Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 98. 16 Although singular in the longevity, variety, and consistency of his engagement with the blues, Miles Davis is by no means a unique exemplar of Afro-Modernism. For a related interpretation of Thelonious Monks music, see Gabriel Solis, Hearing Monk: History, Memory, and the Making of a Jazz Giant, Musical Quarterly 86 (2002): 82116. Solis notes how the musicians he interviewed revealed a widespread interest in Monks ability to integrate and satisfy modernist and vernacular aesthetics in the creation of music in the context of a distinctly African American musical world (83). Fletcher Hendersons engagement with the blues anticipates some of the issues that arise in exploring the idiom within modern jazz, and Hendersons blues compositions from the 1920s and 1930s manifest the tensions of Afro-Modernism discussed here. See Jeffrey Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 6267 and 10410.

10

Kinds of Blue

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

Example 1 Chord charts for Charlie Parker, Blues for Alice and Miles Davis, Sippin at Bells.

Sippin at Bells We can begin with a piece that Davis himself composed. One of Daviss early original compositions, Sippin at Bells, has all the earmarks of a bebop blues. Several commentators have noted that Davis packed the piece with chord substitutions,17 but how he did so deserves closer attention. Sippin represents a harmonic obstacle course that owes much to Charlie Parkers blues approach, but it also goes a step further. That step further can be heard in the process by which the two musicians link the pillar chords, tonic and subdominant, in the first five bars. (See Example 1.) Compare Sippin with the Parker standard Blues for Alice, for instance, where the saxophonist begins on a major-seventh chord in an idiom whose most characteristic harmonic sonority is a major-minor seventh.18 As the piece continues, Parker packs the first four bars with a series of iiV chord substitutions, beginning with the Parkeresque slip down a half-step to the E half-diminished seventh chord (or Em7b5), an effect borrowed from the beginning of Parkers non-blues tune Confirmation, but a gesture that became a trademark of the so-called Bird
17

Szwed, 60; Max Harrison, Sheer Alchemy, for a While, and Gary Giddins, Miles to Go, Promises to Keep, in Bill Kirchner, ed., A Miles Davis Reader (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 83 and 252. 18 Considering that both musicians used the major seventh in their blues, it is interesting to note that Davis recalled arguing with Charlie Parker about whether it was possible to play a D natural in the fifth bar of a Bb blues (that is, the major seventh of the subdominant Eb). Davis said it should not be done; Parker insisted that it was acceptable. Later, Davis admitted hearing Lester Young play the note, and it sounded good. But he bent it. See Carr, Miles Davis, 36.

Jazz Perspectives

11

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

Blues.19 Sippin at Bells likewise opens with a major-seventh chord, and sets up expectations for a series of two-fives with the move from Fm7 to Bb (m. 2), a highly conventional progression. But then Davis throws in a series of unexpected twists with a descending chord sequence that continues thus: Bb7-Am7-Gm7-F#m7-B7. The last two chords are a iiV form of a familiar tritone substitution (for I7) that sets up the arrival of the subdominant Bb. But whats going on before that? If Davis wanted to continue in the Bird Blues vein, he might have used the A-minor chord to continue the series of iiV progressions in the sequence Am-D7-Gm7-C7-F7, leading naturally around the circle of fifths to the expected Bb harmony in m. 5. Instead, Davis suggests that pattern, but he omits the fives (D7 and C7). So the piece remains remarkable as much for the chords Davis left out as for the ones he put in.20 Given Daviss departure from the Bird Blues pattern, it is also notable that after arriving on the subdominant in m. 5, Sippin at Bells features a chord sequence identical to Blues for Alice (cf. mm. 69 in both pieces), a chromatically descending pattern of iiV progressions that lead to the expected dominant (C): Bbm7-Eb7-Am7-D7Abm7-Db7-Gm7-C7. Sippin at Bells resonates with the Afro-Modernist predicament, which might be summed up colloquially as The blues: cant live with it, cant live without it. Dizzy Gillespies claim that bebop musicians didnt like to play the blues may be authoritative, but even he must have recognized Miles Davis and Charlie Parker as two of the notable exceptions:
People wanted to hear the beat and the blues, but the bebop musicians didnt like to play the blues. They were ashamed. The media had made it shameful. When Id play a blues, guys would say, Man, youre playing that? Id tell them,Man thats my music, thats my heritage. The bebop musicians wanted to show their virtuosity. Theyd play the twelve-bar outline of the blues, but they wouldnt blues it up like the older guys they considered unsophisticated. They busied themselves making changes, a thousand changes in one bar.21

The title of Sippin at Bells conjures hazy but suggestive images of gentility. According to Davis, Bells was a classy bar that he frequented with Sonny Rollins where everyone was clean (that is, no drug users).22 John Szwed notes, however, that Bells was a soda parlor where Davis used to meet his girlfriend (and mother of his first child) Irene after classes at Juilliard. Despite their disparities, in both
19

In his autobiography, Davis recalls being woken up in the middle of the night by J. J. Johnson and Benny Carter to play (or, rather, hum) Confirmation for them to transcribe, because Parker had just composed it and all the musicians just loved that tune. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 61. 20 The Blues for Alice/Sippin at Bells comparison may be enriched by considering a later blues in F major: John Coltranes Just for the Love (1957). As Lewis Porter points out, although Coltrane usually liked a very down-home approach to the blues, Just for the Love features what Porter calls the trickiest chord sequence Coltrane ever wrote on the blues. [with] so many major seventh chords. In this latter respect its very much like Charlie Parker, and after a few hearings it becomes clear that Parker was his inspiration here. See Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 11617. 21 Dizzy Gillespie with Al Fraser, To Be or Not to Bop (1979; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1985), 371. 22 Davis and Troupe, Miles, 145.

12

Kinds of Blue

accounts Bells represents a respectable venue, and Sippin evokes a certain propriety compared to other modes of consumption. The title thus appears to reinforce Daviss effort to challenge social connotations of the blues. Davis recorded Sippin at Bells in 1947, in his first recording date as a bandleader, with Charlie Parker as a sideman playing tenor saxophone (instead of his usual alto). Out of deference, Davis gives Parker the first solo, then plays his own with a decidedly smooth, unshowy gloss on the complex and unpredictable chords, of which Davis does not miss a single change. No Dizzy Gillespian pyrotechnics herenot in speed, range, or volumejust a fluent, no-sweat sprint through the form. Altogether, in both conception and performance, Sippin at Bells may be heard as a calmly defiant musical response to his Julliard teachers stereotyped claims about the blues. Israel
Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

The same characterization equally applies to Daviss performance on Israel, Johnny Carisis unique blues composition recorded by the Miles Davis Nonet in 1949 and issued on the legendary Birth of the Cool album in 1957. The works sleek surface, subtly shifting orchestration, and generally moderate dynamicsall markers of the so-called cool styleobscure its clear and remarkably straightforward blues structure and harmony. The influential French critic Andre Hodeir identified Israel as one of the two incontestable masterpieces of cool jazz (the other is Boplicity).23 His description of the piece as a rather astonishing renewal of the blues, and of how Daviss solo interacts with the harmonic support, matches well with efforts to construe Daviss blues as emblematic of Afro-Modernism: the blue notes help to make the piece sound like the blues but do not have the kind of expressive singularity that makes them stand out from the other degrees in the regular blues scale.24 Although Hodeir calls Israel a blues in a minor key, modal ambiguity is one of the pieces remarkable qualities, a quality that helps to neutralize, or conceal, its melodic and harmonic bluesiness. That quality comes through clearly when we examine the scoresnow available in Jeff Sultanofs published transcriptionswhile hearing the recordings, a luxury that Hodeir did not enjoy.25 Davis takes a two-chorus solo after the head. (See Example 2.) The first (beginning at 0:44 on record and m. 33 of the published score) stands out above a spare rhythm-section background. Even here, we get a glimpse of the brief but piquant dissonances that arise from altered chords (as in the second measure of the solo, where Davis emphasizes a D against the G7 chords flatted fifth [Db]) and from major-minor modal clashes (as in the third measure of the solo, where Davis plays an Eb over a Cmaj7 chord). In Daviss second solo chorus (beginning at 1:01; m. 45), the rest of the band returns to weave a tapestry of interacting motifs that further enrich, and destabilize, the tunes modal implications. Here Daviss solo voice emerges as the principal line in a polyphonic web, and the
23 24

Andre Hodeir, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 117. Ibid., 13132. 25 Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool, Original Scores (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, n. d. [ca. 2001]).

Jazz Perspectives

13

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

Example 2 Johnny Carisi, Israel, Miles Davis solo (transcribed by Jeff Sultanof). Copyright # 1954 (renewed 1982), Beechwood Music Corp. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

14

Kinds of Blue

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

tangy cross-relations come more quickly and regularly. In m. 51, blues implications can be heard in the brief, simultaneous minor-second (E and D#) between Daviss improvised trumpet line and the composed trombone part in a Cmaj7 chord, and, in m. 54, and in the major seventh between the French Horns B-natural and the unison Bbs in the composed alto saxophone and improvised trumpet parts over a G7b5 chord in m. 54. Davis, it seems, strove to exploit the potential of modal clash suggested by Carisis composition. That Carisi and several of his Nonet colleagues were white raises an important point: the phenomenon of Afro-Modernism is at once both racially grounded and transcendent of race. As George Lewis has argued at length, African-American music, like any music, can be performed [or composed or conceived] by a person of any race without losing its character as historically Afrological.26 The blues ultimately forms the meeting ground in which musicians of many backgrounds worked on the cultural and musical problems posed by preserving, extending, and disfiguring blues traditions. The Walkin Blues The year 1954 is now routinely recognized as a decisive moment in Daviss career and creative outlook. The change manifested itself through the blues, especially in the pieces Walkin and Blue n Boogie, both of which Martin Williams has identified as watershed moments in the jazz tradition. As Gary Giddins put it, these tracks helped trigger and codify the new counterreformation in jazz known as hard bop.27 Davis himself recognized the pieces as a breakthrough. Walkin, Davis claimed, turned my whole life and career around. In his autobiography, he further adds a comment that suggests a memory filtered through the history books: I wanted to take the music back to the fire and improvisation of bebop. But also I wanted to take the music forward into a more funky kind of blues.28 During the same period, boxer Sugar Ray Robinson became Daviss role model as an African American hero whose no-nonsense attitude and confident mien came from knowing he was the best in his field. Davis cites Robinson as the reason he quit drugs: In 1954, he was the most important thing in my life besides music.29 Davis experienced a new clarity of purpose in 1954, and it emergedlike the Juilliard classroom incident a decade earlierfrom a convergence of the blues, race pride, and empowered masculinity, now reinforced by what would become a lifelong fascination with boxing.30
Lewis, Improvised Music, 93. Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition, new and revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 2056; Giddins, Miles to Go, 253. 28 Davis and Troupe, Miles, 177. 29 Ibid., 183. 30 David Ake cites Miles Daviss jazz-musician-as-boxer masculinity as a foil to Ornette Colemans alternative masculinity, as embodied musically in Colemans composition, Lonely Woman. See Ake, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 73.
27 26

Jazz Perspectives

15

That Walkin and Blue n Boogie found their most influential form in Daviss 1954 recordings has obscured the fact that both pieces had existed for years before that. Blue n Boogie was already almost a decade old, a Dizzy Gillespie piece conceived in the white heat of the bebop years and preserved in a broadcast by Charlie Parker and Davis himself as early as 1946. Even then, the number had been a retrospective glance back at swing: a riff-based uptempo blues that could have found a home in the bands of Count Basie or Fletcher Henderson (whose 1936 Jangled Nerves marks one forerunner of the style). Walkin had been around for several years as well, in various guises and under various titles, first as Gravy and later as Weirdo and Sids Ahead. The Walkin album featured a group identified as the Miles Davis All Stars that formed into both a sextet and a quintet, each of which was recorded at two different Prestige sessions in April 1954. The sextet that recorded Walkin and Blue n Boogie included trombonist J. J. Johnson, tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson, pianist Horace Silver, bassist Percy Heath, and drummer Kenny Clarke. In these sessions, the musicians set the two pieces in the authoritative form that laid down the gauntlet for the newly streamlined, fiery power of the hard bop style. The sextet performs both tunes in a transparent form that features a head followed by a long sequence of solos and a closing out-chorus restatement of the head. Along the way, both tunes feature throwback passages. An ensemble riff chorusalmost de rigueur in swing-era big-band bluesprecedes the final head of Walkin. (In 1958, Jimmy Smiths band, with trumpeter Lee Morgan, played an almost identical passageat a much faster tempoin its extended hard-bop blues jam, The Sermon.31) In Blue n Boogie, the band launches Lucky Thompsons first two solo choruses with a four-bar ensemble stoptime break whose conception has its roots in such early standards as Bugle Call Rag, a 1920s tune that became a swingera staple. Daviss solos on Walkin and Blue n Boogie alternate between engagement and distance from blues melodic figures. In Blue n Boogie, Davis reiterates a falling major-third figure (D-Bb) so insistently, across several chorusesand usually at prominent cadence pointsas to suggest a deliberate avoidance of traditional blues references (see Example 3, where the major third is bracketed). Chorus 3, based on a two-bar riff containing the third-motif, even appears to play with the contrast between the major and the minor third. Yet the solo is also chock full of familiar blues devices, like the fall to Ab (the blue seventh) at the end of the first phrase of the form to prepare for the subdominant, as in Chorus 3 (m. 28), Chorus 4 (m. 39), and Chorus 8, where it appears a little late, on the downbeat of bar 5 (m. 89). In Walkin, Davis likewise explores a non-blues figure beginning on a falling minor second, that usually takes the form of Bb-A-F or F-E-C, that effaces the blue note (lowered A and E). (See Example 4, where the figure is bracketed.)
31 Jimmy Smith: The Sermon! (Blue Note 4011, 1958, LP). The riff begins at 18:54 of the twenty-minute recording. Compare it to the passage that begins at 11:33 of the Walkin recording.

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

16

Kinds of Blue

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

Example 3 John Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Paparelli, Blue n Boogie, Miles Davis solo, choruses 16 (transcribed by Jeremy Allen). Copyright # 1944, Universal Musical Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Jazz Perspectives

17

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

Example 4 Richard Carpenter, Walkin, Davis solo (transcribed by Jeremy Allen). Copyright RichCar Music, Inc. Used by permission.

18

Kinds of Blue

Example 5a Victor Herbert, Gypsy Love Song, refrain, beginning.

Example 5b Louis Armstrong solo, Tiger Rag (1933).

Example 5c Miles Davis, Bluing, second Davis solo, m. 1.

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

Example 5d Milt Jackson, Bags Groove (take 1), Miles Davis solo.

Example 5e Bags Groove (take 2), Miles Davis solo, chorus 5.

Example 5f Bags Groove (take 2) Davis solo, chorus 6.

Example 5g Bags Groove (take 2), Davis solo, chorus 8 Example 5 The Gypsy Love Song motif.

The improvised melodies that launch Chorus 4 (m. 37) and Chorus 7 (m. 73) relate to a figure that appears in several other slow-to-medium blues by Davis in the early 1950s. He revisits, and varies, this figure regularly, especially at the beginnings of choruses as in his second solo in Bluing (Example 5c), which shows clearly that the figures extension derives from Victor Herberts turn-of-the-century hit, Gypsy Love Song, from the operetta The Fortune Teller (1898) (Example 5a).32 Although it is possible that Davis heard the original tune, a more likely intermediate source is Louis Armstrong, who used the same phrase in his Tiger Rag solo in the early 1930s (Example 5b).33 Both takes of Daviss solo in Bags Groove (Examples 5d, e, f, g)
32 33

Bluing can be heard on Bluing: Miles Davis Plays the Blues (Prestige 11004-2, 1996, compact disc). The transcription here is based on a filmed performance of Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra from a Danish film in 1933, on At the Jazz Band Ball: Early Hot Jazz, Song and Dance from Rare Original Film Masters (19251933) (Yazoo Video 514). It is also available on various DVDs.

Jazz Perspectives

19

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

also feature variants and extensions of this famous tune at the top of a new chorus.34 By invoking an old operetta melody, probably transmitted through Armstrong, Davis craftily unites disparate musical traditionsoperetta, early jazz, hard bopin a way that extends the tunes blues contexts. The third track on the Walkin album, Solar, also evokes the blues, as David Ake has pointed out, yet the composition stands far from the traditional blues pocket of Walkin and Blue n Boogie. Although the album credits Miles Davis as the composer of Solar, the pieces true creator was probably guitarist Chuck Wayne, who gave it the title Sonny.35 Solar features a twelve-bar form, and a harmonic progression that, like the blues, leads from the tonic C minor to the subdominant F (in m. 5), which the piece sustains for three bars. From there, it rounds a circle of fifths (with a half-step shift up between Db and D to set up the turnaround, which runs F/Fm-Bb-Eb/Ebm-Ab-Db-Dm-G) that leads the tune far from a blues format. A iiV turnaround (Dm-G) is built into the progression, so, after a few choruses, the casual listener starts to hear the sustained C harmony as the end and not the beginning of the progression. Taking a cue from the pieces title, the form of Solar might thus be said to contain an orbital progressionone that gets launched from a blues foundation into another harmonic world before landing back on the original chord as the form begins anew. In Solar, the blues are not a goal but simply a jumping-off point for an urbane harmonic excursion, one in which Lewis Porter hears echoes of another sky-bound tune: How High the Moon.36 If heard as a unique hybrid of that tune and the blues, Solar stands out as step away from the straight-ahead hard-bop blues that precede it on the album. Whether or not we construe Solar as blues-related, the Walkin album marks an important step in Daviss ongoing Afro-Modernist negotiation with a traditional African American form.

34

Bags Groove is on many compact discs. Take 2, the more widely accessible one, first appeared on Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants: Bags Groove (Prestige 7109/OJCCD-012-2, 1954, long-playing record). 35 The belief that Chuck Wayne wrote Sonny/Solar, claimed by Wayne himself, has a long history in the jazz community. See, for example, the biographical sketch of Wayne at www.billcrowbass.com (accessed May 31, 2006). See also Ake, Jazz Cultures, 195, n. 17, for a balanced perspective on the issue. Thanks to Lewis Porter for calling this matter to my attention. Curiously, of all the music that might have been used to commemorate Miles Davis, it is a phrase from Solar that appears on his headstone in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. A photograph of the headstone appears in David Dunlap, Architecture: The Life of a Cemetery, New York Times, July 16, 2006, sec. 2, p. 27. 36 Ake hears Solar as an altered twelve-bar blues (Jazz Cultures, 195, n. 17), whereas Lewis Porter hears it as based on How High the Moon (Porter and Michael Ullman, with Edward Hazell, Jazz: From Its Origins to the Present [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993], 340.) In my view, they both may be correct. Porter wrote to this author in an email of August 17, 2006: This is an abbreviated form of How High, where the C minor chord at the start of Solar stands in for the G major of How High, and the several cadences that follow the Eb chord in How High are abbreviated in Solar. Miles could have arrived at the title by changing moon to sun, or by changing Sonny to Sunnyeither way, this would be typical Davis humor.

20

Kinds of Blue

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

Example 6 Miles Davis, All Blues, head, mm. 16. Copyright # Jazz Horn Music. Copyright renewed. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

All Blues Daviss turn to modal approaches in the late 1950srepresented most notably on the album Kind of Blue (1959)marks a seemingly paradoxical punctuation to a decade in which he recorded more blues than any other, paradoxical because modal jazzs focus on scales deemphasized a foundational element of the blues as Davis had always played it: harmony. I think Miles was genuinely uncomfortable with chord changes by that point, recalled Teo Macero, who participated in post-production for the record Kind of Blue and became a key figure in Daviss creative development.37 Yet modal jazz did not eradicate harmony so much as shift its emphasis from a vertical to a horizontal musical plane. In composing All Blues, Davis uses a single pitch alterationfrom B-natural to Bbboth to effect a subtle modal change and to signal the harmonic move from tonic to subdominant. (See Example 6.) While suggesting a merely modal shift from G mixolydian to G-natural minor, the Bb simultaneously invokes the subdominant chord (C) by emphasizing its blue flat-seventh degree. The bass vamp, founded on G, continues to support this subdominant passage because the C scale shares all of its pitches (G, D, E, F) with the G mixolydian scale. In his autobiography, Davis writes several telling but cryptic comments about an unnamed composition on the Kind of Blue album. He characterizes the track as this blues, as well as describes a running sound in the number that approximates the sound of the African finger piano (or mbira). These two details suggest that he is describing All Blues. Overall, the description indicates that Davis once again had a very traditional sound in mind even as he pushed the blues into new territory:
37

Quoted in Eric Nisenson, The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece (New York: St. Martins Griffin, 2000), 146. It has been often said that Macero produced the LP, but it was produced by Irving Townsend, who is clearly addressed by Davis on the session tapes, as reported by Lewis Porter (Coltrane, 325). Porters graduate student Ryan Maloney did extensive interviewing and research with Macero for his M. A. thesis. Maloney determined that Macero was present at the March 2, 1959, Kind of Blue recording session, and participated in the post-production work on the album.

Jazz Perspectives
I wrote this blues that tried to get back to that feeling I had when I was six years old, walking with my cousin along that dark Arkansas road. So I wrote about five bars of that and I recorded it and added a kind of running sound into the mix, because that was the only way I could get in the sound of the finger piano.38

21

Earlier in the autobiography, Davis describes the music he heard on that dark Arkansas road: I think that kind of stuff stayed with me, you know what I mean? That kind of sound in music, that blues, church, back-road funk kind of thing, that southern, Midwestern, rural sound and rhythm.39 Eighty-One As noted, Sippin at Bells, Israel, the Walkin blues pieces, and All Blues each represent a distinct style in the standard narrative of jazz history (bop, cool, hard bop, modal). Nevertheless, for all their obvious differences, each of these numbers co-exist within a conventional framework that assumes a hierarchical relationship between subsections of the band, frontline melody instruments, and supporting rhythm section. In playing the piece Eighty-One, Davis and his group perform a more complete deconstruction of the traditional blues, and of assumptions about conventional instrumental roles. Co-composed by Davis and bassist Ron Carter, the piece appeared on the 1965 album E.S.P. by Daviss so-called second quintet, which featured Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Tony Williams on drums, Herbie Hancock on piano, and Davis and Carter. Their innovations had been foreshadowed by this groups public performances of Walkin in the early and mid-1960s. In different ways than Eighty-One, the earlier performances present radical reformations of traditional blues by taking blistering tempos that liquefy any sense of harmonic foundation.40 Yet, as a composition, Eighty-One represents a fundamental rethinking of the harmonic, melodic, timbral, and textural possibilities of the blues, and of the underlying role of a groove. At the same time, the pieces links to traditional, even pre-war, blues traditions are stronger than any bebop or hard-bop piece Davis ever recorded. In a way, the piece sounds like an abstraction of James Browns mid-1960s style. Browns brand new bag of the period emphasized earthier grooves, repetitive, cyclic patterns, static harmonic scaffolds, taut brass shouts, and a rich blues foundation. This distinctive sound developed around the same time as Eighty-One, and this idiom crystallized in Browns seminal I Feel Good and Papas Got a Brand New Bag recordings of 1964 and 1965, respectively. With these recordings, Brown launched the musical style that came to be known as funk. Even if Davis
38 39

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

Davis and Troupe, Miles, 234. Ibid., 29. 40 Two extended versions of Walkin were recorded later in 1965 at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago. On the album Highlights from the Plugged Nickel (Sony SRCS 2461, 1995, compact disc), Davis launches the performance at a tempo close to 350 beats per minute. For listeners who know the tune, the tempo makes a joke of its title. The original 1954 version moved at a deliberate tempo of ca. 128 beats per minute.

22

Kinds of Blue

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

Example 7 Miles Davis and Ronald Carter, Eighty-One, lead sheet. Copyright # 1965 Jazz Horn Music and Retrac Productions, Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights on behalf of Jazz Horn Music. Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

claimed that his interest in Browns music appeared a few years later, we can already hear some important parallels in the mid-1960s.41 Built on Ron Carters funky ground bass, the head of Eighty-One consists of twenty-four bars comprising two complete blues choruses (see Example 7). The theme contains motivic fragments, long tones, and long silences shattered by brass and saxophone blasts. A lead sheet of the headtypically lacking the bass and drum activityis laughably sparse: the last half of both blues choruses contain two bars of rest (mm. 78, 1920), followed by a single long tone (F) held out to the end. Only the beginnings of each blues chorus contain anything like a conventionally linear melodic idea. But even these melodic ideas are fragmentarylike remnants of a melodic conception shredded by an ideal of collective interaction. The tunes harmonic progressionwhich features the down-home blues moves to the subdominant in bars 2 and 10could hardly be simpler and more familiar:
41

In his autobiography, Davis recalls that James Brown was starting to get hot in 1964 (Davis and Troupe, Miles, 271) but that he only began to listen to a lot of James Brown after he returned from an overseas tour in late 1967 (88).

Jazz Perspectives

23

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

Example 8 Miles Davis and Ronald Carter, Eighty-One, Davis solo (transcribed by Jeremy Allen). Copyright # 1965 Jazz Horn Music. Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

24

Kinds of Blue

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

I-IV-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-IV-I-I. The simplicity of this design is superficially undermined by the fact that each chord is a sus4 chordthat is, a chord featuring the suspended fourth degree, instead of the more conventional, and blues-oriented, third degree. Interestingly, Daviss solo consistently emphasizes the flat-seventh degree in the tonic region (first four bars) of each chorus, a traditional blues inflection. (See Example 8.) Though cleanly played herewithout any slurs, growls, bends, or other gutty blues devicesthis detail marks a sharp contrast with earlier tunes and solos that featured a major seventh, as in the head of Sippin at Bells and the Gypsy-LoveSong figures that reverberate through Walkin, Bluing, and Bags Groove. Played over Carters bass groove, the solo also evokes a playful, almost dance-like, style marked by lots of silence alternating with quick and sudden scalar outbursts, as in Chorus 2 (beginning at 1:14, mm. 2021) and Chorus 3 (beginning at 1:34, mm. 3233). Despite the traditional harmonic and melodic gestures of Eighty-One, the effect of the quintet members engaged in a five-way dialogue sounds difficult, and even abstract. Carter and Williams add a level of variety and complexity by changing the groove for the last chorus of each solo, from the funky, straight-eighths pattern used for the head, to a more traditional swing feel that features a walking bass and a familiar shuffle rhythm on the ride cymbal. All of this points to a key feature of Daviss second quintet: equality between melody instruments and rhythm section to create a balanced interaction among the musicians. Like Daviss hard-bop blues pieces, Eighty-One stands out as a blues vehicle that moves both backward (in form and harmonic foundation) and forward (in melody, texture, and groove). That is, it stands out as another solution to the Afro-Modernist predicament. New Blues When Davis turned to electrically charged rock- and funk-inspired music in the later 1960s, he also turned away from new approaches to the blues form. The blues continue to fuel his work, however, as in Miles Runs the Voodoo Down from the Bitches Brew album, and in his regular return to earlier standards, such as Walkin, No Blues, and All Blues.42 But nothing he conceived in the decade and a half between 1966 and 1981 came close to re-engaging with the blues as much as his piece Star People, from the 1983 album of the same name.43 Throughout his last decade, Davis played this piece over and over again, usually under the title New Blues. The latter moniker is both revealing and deceptive. It is indeed a new blues: the sound of
Table 1 reinforces (but perhaps exaggerates) the point that Davis turned away from the blues, as he continued to play Walkin, No Blues, and All Blues. Similarly, both Footprints (Wayne Shorter) and Gingerbread Boy (Jimmy Heath) were regular features in the late 1960s after they were first recorded in 1966 on the Miles Smiles album (Columbia/Legacy 9401, 1967, LP; reissued on Sony 1216, 2006, compact disc). For details on Daviss public and studio recordings of these tunes, see the Miles Ahead website, under titles listed in the Tunes link. 43 Miles Davis, Star People (Columbia FC 38657, 1983, LP; reissued on Sony International 25395, 2001, compact disc).
42

Jazz Perspectives

25

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

the electric bass, of Daviss silence-filled solos, and, especially, of the electronic mashed-potatoes sound of the Oberheim synthesizeremblematic of American pop circa 1980make this piece sound far removed from traditional blues as one can imagine. Yet its slow tempo, funky grooves, and loping compound duple meter (with each vast beat divided into three) echo the urban-blues sound of the 1950s and early 1960s, as defined by such figures as Muddy Waters and B. B. King.44 In other words, the tension between tradition and innovation (or at least novelty) that charged Daviss first recordings with Rubberlegs Williams, remains on display some four decades later. In the eighteen-minute version recorded on the Star People album, we can hear an extension of what Robin D. G. Kelley calls Daviss pimp aesthetic, which is marked by a confident, alpha-male sensibility keenly aware that all behavior is role playinga quality that Kelley himself finds in many of Daviss blues recordings45 From title to musical core, Star People parodies that sensibility. It starts with a nebulous wash of harmony from the Oberheima deceptive herald of the blues to come, and one that (adding to the impression of artifice) was recorded in a different time and place.46 The piece hits its blues groove at an astonishingly slow tempoa slow strut marked by an exaggerated shuffle in the drums and bass. Now and then, the sound of miniature chimes sprinkles the texture like sequins on the space-age suits Davis wore in his later years. Some twelve minutes of blues solos follow, featuring Davis in a ruminating rhapsody marked by his trademark Harmon-muted tone thatlike a method actors interior monologuebetrays the soulful vulnerability behind the swagger. At the same time, the solo features some repeated figures evocative of a basketball dribble, a sports reference that Davis acknowledged.47 At 12:39, the Oberheim interrupts with a dreamy interlude, as if the blues had never happened. And then the process begins again (at 13:20), built from the ground up with a firm but glacially slow groove. Acting the Blues All of the blues pieces considered here, and many others, manifest Miles Daviss ongoing effort to maintain contact with the blues tradition while keeping it contemporary, urbane, and cosmopolitan. Although they represent disparate aesthetics, the blues pieces can be heard as unifying features in a constantly changing style. They all exhibit variations on the Afro-Modernist impulse to reconcile tensions between the rural, Southernand, as Dizzy Gillespie pointed out, sometimes
44

In Kings Five Long Years (recorded in 1963), to cite a famous example, the slow groove articulates an explicit 12/8 meter at just over sixty beats per minute (The Best of B. B. King, Vol. 1, Flair V2862-30, 1991, compact disc). Daviss Star People recording clocks in at a tempo that is only slightly slower. 45 Robin D. G. Kelley, A Jazz Genius in the Guise of a Hustler, New York Times, May 13, 2001, sec. 2, p. 1, 20. 46 See George Cole, The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis, 19801991 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 119. 47 Quincy Troupe, Miles and Me (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 81.

26

Kinds of Blue

shamefulresonance of the blues tradition, as well as the urbane, middle-class Northern lives of Miles Davis and his post-war generation of jazz musicians. Although Davis himself never discussed the music in these terms, this perspective does complement a theme in the bountiful Miles Davis literature, which regularly highlights the identification and analysis of duality in his life and work. Not all of these writings necessarily relate to the Afro-Modernist idea, yet it seems worth noting that something about Miles Davis inspires interpreters to note oppositional forces in his life and work. Davis himself reinforced the notion of a bifurcated self-conception in his autobiography, where he notesplayfully or dead seriously?that being a Gemini Im already two.48 One of his biographers, Ian Carr, perhaps overstates the case when he links Daviss bisexuality (an inclination that has been rumored but one that no other biographer or memoir has confirmed or documented49) with the Janus-like power of his musicits arresting strength and the immense subtlety of its more emotional resonances.50 Similarly, the feminist scholar Hazel Carby identifies the basic tension in Daviss autobiography as gender charged, as she argues that Davis sought freedom from confinement associated with women, and freedom to escape to a world defined by the creativity of men.51 She sees Davis himself as promoting a split perspective on his artistic sensibility, which she describes as female-male, bodysoul divisions.52 More to the point of the Afro-Modernist approach advanced here, Gary Tomlinson identifies yet another duality as foundational in Daviss life and work. Tomlinson writes of Daviss ambivalent background. [and] values shaped by two contrasting statuses, a disenfranchised ethnic one and an empowered economic one. He adds that almost from the beginning, then, Daviss musical achievement was an acutely dialogical one, reveling in the merging of contrasting approaches and sounds.53 The classroom incident at Juilliard aggressivelybut only temporarilyrelieved the tensions by bringing together race, class, gender, and musical impulses in a single act of defiance that took a lifetime of music-making to resolve. The Afro-Modernist blues aesthetic complements and enriches such dualistic views. For all his changes in style, Davis always found an ideal frame for selfconstruction in the blues, from the smooth, urban sophisticate in Sippin at Bells, to the self-parodying yet poignant pimp strut of Star People. In 1986, Davis played the role of a pimp and drug dealer in an episode of the television program, Miami Vice (NBC). When I did that role, he recalled, someone asked me how I felt acting
Davis and Troupe, Miles, 338. Whether or not Davis was bisexual has been the subject of notable speculation. Carr presents no evidence for it; Szwed does not address it; and two men who worked closely with Davis, Quincy Troupe and Chris Murphy, address it frankly but claim they could not confirm it. See Troupe, Miles and Me, 77 78, and Murphy, Miles to Go: The Last Years (New York: Thiunders Mouth Press, 2002), 21214. Not surprisingly, in his autobiography, Daviss discussions of sex appear only in discussions of women. See, for example, Davis and Troupe, Miles, 4024. 50 Carr, Miles Davis, 48182. 51 Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 138. 52 Ibid., 146. 53 Gary Tomlinson, Miles Davis, Musical Dialogician, in Miles Davis Reader, ed. Kirchner, 24041.
49 48

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

Jazz Perspectives

27

and I told them, Youre acting all the time when youre black.54 The point might well be extended to the blues, where instead of expressing unmediated emotion, Davis reinvented himself and his music at every turn. The blues became his ultimate stage for musical role playing. At the root of that self-construction lies a tension understood keenly by a man perpetually ready to tap the blues, while reminding everyone within earshot that blues authenticity can belong to an upper-middle class African American man whose father never picked cotton. Over a recorded career extending across nearly half a century, we can hear in Daviss blues his continual restatement of his defiant classroom declaration: Theres more to it than that. Acknowledgements This article took root as a brief essay in a Bloomington, Indiana, arts and entertainment monthly (Kinds of Blue: Shades of Miles Davis, The Ryder, February 2005, 18, 20). Expanded versions were presented as lectures at Indiana University, Georgetown University, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Im grateful to Jeremy Allen, David Baker, Richard Crawford, Luke Gillespie, John Howland, David Lasocki, Gayle Sherwood Magee, and Gary Potter for discussions and correspondence that helped to enrich and refine this article, and especially to Lewis Porter and the journals anonymous readers for extensive commentary on earlier drafts. Thanks to Jeremy Allen also for transcriptions of the solos on Walkin, Blue n Boogie, Bags Groove (take 1), and Eighty-One, and to Jake Rundall for preparing the musical examples. This article is dedicated to Miles Magee. Abstract Musicians and scholars alike tend to view Miles Daviss career through the lens of change, emphasizing his stylistic shifts among modern jazz styles from bebop to cool to hard bop to modal jazz to fusion and beyond. Davis himself supported that view with his famous claim that I have to change. Its like a curse. Through all the changes, however, the blues form a connecting thread that runs from his earliest recordings as a rhythm-and-blues sideman to his final years on tour. Although Daviss diverse blues compositions and improvisations reflect his many stylistic shifts, they are also linked by the cultural phenomenon recently dubbed Afro-Modernism, expressed as a tension between tradition and innovation, rural and suburban, south and north, downhome and cosmopolitan. Seven blues recordings spanning almost four decadesincluding Sippin at Bells, Israel, Walkin, Blue n Boogie, All Blues, Eighty-One, and Star People (a.k.a. New Blues)reveal that tension in the ways in which Davis and his collaborators treat melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, form, texture, groove, and other musical elements. Such an approach aims to integrate cultural and musical perspectives on Daviss life and work, and by extension, illuminate a key theme in postwar American life.

Downloaded by [82.158.102.133] at 05:16 21 June 2013

54

Davis and Troupe, 375.