On the centennial of trumpeter and composer Miles Davis’ birth, there’s nothing I can say about him that hasn’t already been said by writers and historians far more knowledgeable about his music – and about jazz in general – than I will ever be. But I can remember the earliest time and place where my life and his music intersected.
First, the well-documented basics: He was born 100 years ago this week on May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, less than twenty miles north of St. Louis. He studied at Juilliard but dropped out and joined Charlie Parker’s bebop quintet in 1944. After four years with Parker, he struck out on his own and recorded on the Capitol and Prestige labels, somehow making good records while battling a heroin addiction at the same time.
He signed a long-term deal with Columbia in 1955 and released ‘Round About Midnight that same year. The album marked the beginning of his relationship with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers.
Beginning in the early 1960s and for the next three decades, Miles explored virtually every corner of jazz – bebop, post-bop, fusion, electronic and more. Along the way he frequently crossed over into other genres and redefined the parameters of not only jazz but popular music in general. By the time he died in 1991 at the age of 65, he had not only left an indelible mark on the music and its various subgenres but also extended his creative reach into the realms of rock, funk, hip-hop and beyond.
Rolling Stone called him “the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century.”
For me, Miles and his music will always be tangled up with memories of the first place that I called home that wasn’t under my parents’ roof – a studio apartment on the third floor of a retail building at the corner of Lee Road and Van Aken Boulevard in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb just east of Cleveland.
This was the late 1980s, when I was in my mid-twenties. I was an associate editor for a magazine that covered workplace safety and health. Not the sexiest job in the world by any means, but I was making just enough money to live on my own.
The compact disc had just entered the mainstream consumer market a few years earlier, and the high-tech entertainment center in my tiny apartment consisted of a rectangular stereo box perched on a wobbly bookshelf with a stack of no more than fifteen or twenty CDs next to it. The selection consisted of mostly rock, blues and jazz albums. Somewhere in the pile were copies of ‘Round About Midnight and Kind of Blue, Miles’ 1959 release that is considered one of the most popular jazz records ever recorded – at least according to a sales figure of 6.4 million copies worldwide to date.
I didn’t go out much in those days, because my discretionary funds were almost nonexistent. So was my list of friends. I saved gas by taking the local public transit line to work almost every day. I stocked the fridge with groceries from a store around the corner. There was usually a modest supply of beer in house, but nothing harder than that, and the consumption rate never got out of hand. I spent my time far from the fast lane.
I owned a portable black and white TV that didn’t get much use. The reception was sketchy. My first color TV set and VCR were still a few years off – in an entirely different apartment – so I spent a lot of my time in that third-floor cubby hole with books and music.
It was a quiet life, and generally uneventful. But it was my life.
It was the kind of existence that enabled me to get to know ‘Round About Midnight and Kind of Blue pretty well. I learned exactly what Miles and other jazz artists meant when they talked about how the space between the notes was just as important as the notes themselves. Miles literally raised this concept to an art form, and nowhere is his mastery of it more evident than on Kind of Blue.
The exploratory and innovative aspects of his music felt like the perfect backdrop at a time in my life when independence and autonomy – and all the complexities that come with them – were revealing themselves to me. And at the same time, his cool jazz sound helped take the edge off when the challenges of that same adult world seemed overwhelming and the future seemed uncertain.
Miles once said: “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” In hindsight, I was spending those early years in that first apartment figuring out who I was and what I was supposed to be doing. At the time, writing was just a job. It would be a few more years before I realized that it was a life. I was just starting that long stretch of playing that would lead me to the place where I could play like myself.
I didn’t know it then – nobody did – but Miles’ time was already winding down when I was immersing myself in his early masterpieces in my tiny third-floor space nearly forty years ago. Nevertheless, he turned out to be one of my most reliable companions in a time that was filled with uncertainty but also opportunity.
I’m glad he was part of the journey.