Miles Davis at 100 – Part 2: Miles and Friends

by Fritz Byers

In yesterday's post, I noted something striking about Miles Davis at nineteen: even while playing in Charlie Parker's quintet, alongside the most revered innovator in jazz, and while still absorbing the methods and challenge of bebop, Miles was already forging his own aesthetic in his own sound, his own relationship with silence, his own sense of where a melody wanted to go. The point warrants a second look because it illuminates something that would define Miles's entire career.

Even in his apprenticeship, Miles treated Bird as a collaborator. Not as a superior. Not as a standard to be aspired to or as a model to be emulated. As a peer, even at nineteen, even in the presence of that incandescent genius. This is clear in his playing on those 1945 Parker dates, which I mentioned yesterday. But consider as well the date Miles led under his own name in August 1947, a Savoy session that featured Parker in the band. Imagine that: at twenty-one years old, booked to lead a recording date on a label synonymous with greatness and innovation, and you call Charlie Parker to invite him as a sideman. To burnish the point: Miles also invited John Lewis to play piano, Nelson Boyd for bass, and the nonpareil drummer Max Roach. So yes, he was a confident young man.

He wrote three new tunes for the date, including his marvelous early take on the blues, "Sippin' at Bells." Miles allowed Bird (who played tenor on the date) all the room he needed for his flights, and Bird took it B check out his his solo on "Little Willie Leaps." But Miles was in charge, as he would be again in the Birth of the Cool sessions, when he was again surrounded by authentic genius. He was unthreatened.

That quality – the ability to recognize genius in others, to draw it toward him, to give it room to flourish, and to remain the organizing intelligence at the center of the enterprise – seems to me the distinctive and the most revealing thing about Miles as a leader. His taste in collaborators was impeccable, and it operated at every level: not just in the choice of the towering figures who helped define his landmark recordings, but in every chair of every band he led.

His collaborations with Gil Evans illustrate the point. Their relationship began in the late 1940s, in Evans's basement apartment on West 55th Street, the open-all-hours sound café where musicians talked theory and experimented with sonic textures. The result was Birth of the Cool.  A decade later, Miles returned to Evans for a trilogy of orchestral recordings – Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain – that remain in a subgenre their own: music of extraordinary beauty and complexity, Miles's trumpet floating above Gil's luminous, billowy arrangements. These records are a hallmark of the way brilliant artists can complement each other, each individual's vision enhancing the other's and moving it even further along.

And then, another decade on, as Miles was veering toward rock and electric sound, he turned to Evans once more. Gil obliged, creating "Mademoiselle Mabry" from the defining three-note riff of Jimi Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary."  I find this thrilling: the theorist and arranger who twenty years earlier had shaped the cool period, now bridging Miles and Hendrix to abet yet another of Miles's insurgencies.

Or consider Miles's relationship with John Coltrane. When Miles assembled the First Great Quintet in the mid 1950s – with Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones completing the band – he landed on Coltrane in the saxophone chair, knowing that Trane's searing, labyrinthine approach would provide a dramatic foil to his own spare, lyrical lines. The contrast was one of the great musical counterpoints of the era: Miles's resonant silences and spare notes against Coltrane's torrents of sound. Miles had enormous respect for Coltrane, enough to absorb the complications that came with it, including the drug and alcohol problems that led to Coltrane's departure from the band. When Coltrane returned, having faced down his addiction, Miles welcomed him back and placed him at the center of Kind of Blue, a show of faith in a collaborator who had not always made faith easy.

While we're thinking of Kind of Blue – something we never really stop doing; nor should we – let's think about Miles's gift for selecting pianists. Red Garland was an inspired choice for the First Great Quintet. It's a bit formulaic to say so, but his familiar pattern in solos of beginning with lightly dancing single-note runs and concluding with forceful block chords sometimes strikes me as replicating the tensions between Miles's and Trane's styles. 

But by the time Miles was ready to make Kind of Blue, he had someone else in mind for the piano contribution; well, two someones. The album is unimaginable without Bill Evans, whose impressionistic harmonic sensitivities and compositional instincts were essential to the album's conception, plays on four of the five tracks, and likely wrote two. (The weight of evidence strongly suggests he composed "Blue in Green," although Miles consistently claimed credit, and took all the royalties. When Evans, characteristically understated, raised the subject of the royalties, Miles wrote him a check for twenty five dollars. Let this vignette be the placeholder for any comments anyone wants to make about Miles's less appealing sides.)

Wynton Kelly, who had recently joined the band, plays on only one track: "Freddie Freeloader." His contribution, in addition to his expert comping, is a single solo, and it is brilliant – warm, swinging, rooted in the blues idiom of that piece in a way that sets it apart from everything else on the album. Miles knew what he had in Bill and Wynton and used each precisely where he belonged. (I unabashedly recommend the recent episode of the Strong Songs podcast, in which Kirk Hamilton assays Kind of Blue. His breakdown of Wynton's solo is a masterclass on how to showcase the technical intricacies of the music without losing its visceral allure.)

That same instinct for finding just the right musician for each musical setting extended into Miles's electric period, where Miles drew in musicians from realms that jazz had not previously surveyed. Joe Zawinul, the Austrian keyboardist who wrote "In a Silent Way" and would go on to cofound Weather Report, and John McLaughlin, the British guitarist whose ferocity on A Tribute to Jack Johnson is unlike anything else in the Miles catalog – neither was an obvious choice for the project. Miles heard what they could bring before the rest of the world did.  

To my ears, Miles's surpassing achievement in assembling collaborators is his construction of the Second Great Quintet. Wayne Shorter. Herbie Hancock. Ron Carter. Tony Williams. Each belongs on the short list of the greatest practitioners of their instrument in the history of jazz. Shorter belongs as well on the short list of the music's greatest composers. Miles conceived this band, put it together, and then gave each musician unconstrained space within which to pursue their own muses. The result was not chaos but a new kind of coherence B five imaginations operating simultaneously at the highest level of musical invention, organized by Miles=s unerring taste, his supreme confidence, and his unquenchable drive to be surrounded by greatness.

Tomorrow, this band gets the attention it deserves.