I offer this to you straight, no chaser: Miles Davis was a rock star with hip-hop swagger amplified on to a prophetically jazzy American idol. That is what comes to mind for me as this nation—and the world—waxes scientific over essence of one Miles Dewey Davis III becoming 100 this year.
Like the multitudes, my intro to Miles was Kind of Blue, one of his masterpieces. I realize I’ve played said titanic record as much as any album I’ve ever listened to.
For sure, when I was a young writer struggling in New York, my boss and mentor Sam Anderson, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, was clear I knew nada about jazz. So he instructed me to begin with Kind of Blue. My wig was blown by its inborn beauty, its mystical sense of time and place, its silky improvisations, its graceful sound collages. In short, I wanted to feel how Miles’ trumpet sounded: at peace, and in a permanent state of chill.
Miles Davis during recording sessions for the Columbia Records release “Kind Of Blue.”
To say that Miles Davis was a Goliath of 20th century American creativity would not serve justice to why he still matters. He was the son of an East St. Louis, Illinois, music teacher mother and a dentist father. Miles only kissed the sky for 65 years, but he was there for the universe-shaking scenes we call bebop, cool jazz, hard bop; and, for good measure, he kick-started a jazz fusion conglomerate that married his foundation with rock, funk, soul, global grooves. I mean, this is a prodigy who held space with Charlie “Bird” Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, who rode shotgun with Prince and hip-hop producer Easy Mo Bee.
Miles was likewise a certified fashionista, from the snug, manicured suits of jazz’s heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, to the hippie and Black Power gear of the 1970s, to the colorful, wear-whatever-you-feel excesses of the 1980s. And like jazz itself, Miles, as artist, bandleader, cultural influencer, was the embodiment of what freedom should mean. We play on and feel out the stage, together; there is something for all, if willing to share. In other words, Miles was in the trenches with everyone, and counted a white man, Gil Evans, as his favorite arranger/collaborator.
Yes, the more I dove into Miles’ genius, the more I fell in love with various aspects of his persona: the butt-naked racial pride of a man manifested in 1920s America where the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age co-existed with dead Black bodies dangling from trees and attacks on Black communities like Greenwood, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Miles did not suffer fools, was that rare Black person of any gender identity who spoke and did exactly what he felt, even when it led to New York City police savagely beating him while standing outside a nightclub, merely because he, as the head performer there, refused to move.
Beautifully dark-skinned and lean and chiseled because of his boxing exercises, Miles had an iconically raspy voice the result of a throat surgery where he disobeyed doctor’s order not to speak for days. He did, some say he yelled, thus the prince of darkness vocalese.
I thought of all this and more while at Jazz at Lincoln Center for its orchestra’s centennial tribute to Miles Davis. Led by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis for nearly 40 years, one could argue that the equally legendary status of Wynton and the existence of said Center is a result of jazz forebears like Miles. Before a diverse and packed house the orchestra took us on a captivating voyage through some of Miles’ most important work of the late 1950s and early 1960s other than Kind of Blue. With trombonist Christopher Crenshaw as the musical director for this royal affair, it felt, well, peaceful. That is the magic of Miles Davis: even 100 years since his birth and 35 years after his death, his spirit hovers, like the smoke from a cigarette he once puffed, caressing every contour of a room.
West Side Highway, New York, 1969.
I think that is why this question comes up so often as it regards Miles Davis: How could someone who made such hypnotic music, and such revolutionary music, and such healing music, and such provocative music, also be so terribly violent toward women? That Miles talked about his serial abuse against women in his autobiography, written with the noted poet Quincy Troupe, was at least honest. But there never was any real apologies, any real remorse. It just was. This is why award-winning writer Pearl Cleage penned her brilliant short book, Mad at Miles, on the tail of his telling. Pearl’s words to me the other day:
“I think we have to honor the artistic genius but still acknowledge his abuse of women. We have to. The reason I was so mad at him was that his violence toward women robbed me of the pleasure of wrapping myself up in Kind of Blue. It’s a terrible contradiction that women have to confront regularly when our geniuses and heroes abuse us.”
Painful, tragic, but what Pearl taught me with her torment about Miles, what the women in Stanley Nelson Jr.’s excellent doc film, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, also teach us, is that we men cannot expect to be regarded as wholly great—anybody—if our mentality includes an unwillingness to take ownership for our ugliest contradictions. The perpetual violence against women is part of Miles’ legacy too, alas. He heard and saw his father damage his mother as a youth. He had his own traumas from being a man, a Black man, in America, with and without drugs. He made eternally powerful music. But he also hurt a lot of people, a lot of women.
So as we approach this country turning 250, visible wounds and all, I think the same about Miles Davis turning 100. What are the lessons, what can we do differently, so that, one day, how albums like Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain and Tutu make us feel is actually who we are?
Kevin Powell is a GRAMMY-nominated poet, humanitarian, filmmaker, public speaker, frequent contributor to Newsweek, and author of 17 books, including his newest poetry collection, A Poem for Evangeline, And Other Songs (Get Fresh Books Publishing). Kevin lives in New York City. You can find him on social media platforms by typing poet kevin powell.
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