Miles Davis at 100 – Part 4: Why His Music Matters

By Fritz Byers

Here at Jazz Spectrum Central, it’s Miles Davis week in honor of the centenary of his birth. On the blog, the week began with a reminder of the Miles Davis was a serial revolutionary (Part 1 - The Six Revolutions of Miles Davis); we then took some time to reflect on the musicians he gathered around him and with whom he created enduring masterworks (Part 2 - Miles and Friends); yesterday, we made the case for the most sophisticated small group in jazz history (Part 3 - The Second Great Quintet).

For the music side of things: tonight on Jazz Spectrum Friday, four hours of Miles’s music; four more hours straight after that on Jazz Spectrum Overnight. And tomorrow, the same.  Across four shows, and sixteen hours, you’ll hear the full arc of what we've been talking about. (The playlists are elsewhere on the Jazz Spectrum site.)
    
But first, a final verbal flourish: Why does Miles’s music still matter?

It's a fair question, and not merely a rhetorical one. Jazz is not the dominant music of our time, and by some measures it is receding from view, sheltering in a shrinking home on the far outskirts of the culture. Miles’s most important recordings were made between fifty and seventy-five years ago. One might reasonably take account of those things and conclude that Miles, his muses, and his music are meaningful, if at all, as historical artifacts – estimable, worth preserving, but not urgently alive in the present.

If that’s a straw man, I want to burn it. If it’s a real expression of a cultural argument, I want to push back against it because I think it misunderstands, or at least unfairly confines, what great art is and what it means.

Miles made music of extraordinary beauty. Not beauty in the purely decorative sense, not music designed to please or comfort or flatter. Beauty in the deepest sense: art that is true to an aesthetic vision, that helps us feel and understand more fully what it means to be alive and human and in the presence of other people.  That kind of beauty doesn't age. It doesn't go out of fashion. It doesn't yield to the pride of presentism, the assumption that what is happening now is inherently more relevant than what happened in the long ago. A thing of genuine beauty makes a permanent claim on us.  And our obligation, as listeners and as people who care about what human beings are capable of, is to sustain the life of that thing; to keep returning to it, to refuse to let it fade from consciousness simply because it is old, or familiar, or has been superseded by something shiny and new.
    
Kind of Blue was recorded in 1959. It remains the best-selling jazz album ever made, and not because it has been successfully marketed.  People hear it and feel something they couldn't have predicted they would feel. That is not nostalgia. That is the music doing what only the best art does – reaching across whatever distance separates you from it and making contact, drawing you in, making you at once comfortable and curious.
    
The recordings of Second Great Quintet ask more of the listener, but they repay that attention in manifold ways. Every careful listen reveals something that you missed before: a Ron Carter bass line doing three things simultaneously, a Tony Williams cymbal color that appears once and never returns, a Wayne Shorter phrase that resolves somewhere you couldn't have anticipated. This music is inexhaustible in the way that only the greatest art is inexhaustible.
    
That’s the music; now, a few thoughts about why Miles endures as an artist:
He was faithful to his own vision. Over a career spanning four decades and six complete reinventions of his musical world, Miles never chased the popular or the lucrative or the fashionable. He followed his muse wherever it led, even when it led somewhere his audience wasn't prepared to follow, even when it cost him critical approval and commercial success and the goodwill of people who had loved what he'd done before. He created music from his own sense of the true and the beautiful, and he trusted that sense absolutely.

Any artist who does that is worthy of admiration. Sometimes the world catches up quickly – as it often did with Miles, whose more radical reinventions alienated audiences for a while, but within a few years the world – musicians and fans alike – recognized that Miles had reshaped the music entirely and they happily returned to listen and learn. Sometimes, as with Thelonious Monk, recognition takes decades. Sometimes centuries. And sometimes, we must acknowledge with sadness, it never comes. 

But the artist who keeps their own counsel, who refuses to let the market or the moment determine what they make – that artist has done something genuinely rare and genuinely important, regardless of whether the world recognizes it on schedule.   Miles Davis kept his own counsel for forty-five years. The world recognized it, eventually, comprehensively, and permanently.

And third, a few thoughts about how Miles’s legacy works within the spectrums of jazz. Jazz is a music built on a dynamic exchange between tradition and innovation. The greatest musicians at any moment in its history have been fully conversant with the luminaries of the past - absorbing what they found meaningful, incorporating those things into their own identities, and then, from that grounding, bringing their own visions to life. In the phrase promulgated by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, "Ancient to the Future.”

The future of the music is not a rejection of the past but its transformation, the old made new by each generation of musicians who encounter it and make it their own. Miles Davis is now permanently part of that received history. His innovations –   the cool, the modal breakthrough, the electric period – are not merely landmarks to be admired; they are living presences in the music, absorbed by musicians who may never knowingly have listened to him, passed forward through the chain of influence that connects every jazz musician to every other. Anyone entering the music today will encounter Miles, consciously or not, and weave something of what he did into whatever new fabric they create. That is a different kind of permanence from the beauty of the recordings themselves: not the permanence of a finished object, but the permanence of a creative force forever in forward motion.
    
These are the reasons his music still matters a hundred years after his birth: because it is beautiful; because it was made by someone who refused to be anything other than exactly what he was; and because what he made has become part of the living bloodstream of the music itself.
    
Tonight and tomorrow, Jazz Spectrum and Jazz Spectrum Overnight are devoted entirely to Miles. But before I hush up, I want to say one more thing about his music.

His recordings constitute a world - vast, richly varied, endlessly rewarding - and the entry point doesn’t matter. You can begin with the cool, spare beauty of the Birth of the Cool and work forward. You can begin with Kind of Blue, as millions of listeners have, and work outward in every direction from there. You can begin with the ferocity of the Second Great Quintet, or the electric avalanche of Bitches Brew, or the stately tenderness of Sketches of Spain. None of these entry points is the wrong door to open.  Each of them leads somewhere worth going.  And from there to the next place.  And on, and on . . .
    
Don't worry about where to start, or whether you know enough, or whether you're the right kind of listener. You are. Come in whenever you're ready, and stay as long as you like.  Miles’s music will always be there.  Although don’t expect him to say hello.