Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington begin their fine investigation-cum-reverie about the intertwined relationship between trumpeter Miles Davis and tenor saxophonist John Coltrane with a succinct and telling description of each man.
“Miles’ stance is graceful, poised, weight on the right leg, left hip slightly tilted. He wears dark glasses – keeping us out – white shirt stark against his dark skin, long sleeves opened at the cuffs but almost echoing the bell of the horn. The shirt is tucked neatly into his pants. He is tight and fit, in full control, in top form.”
The next paragraph presents Coltrane at the same moment.
“Behind him stands Trane. The most obvious thing about him is the horn positioned horizontally across his waist. He stand solidly on both feet, flat, grounded on the floor: there is no dancer’s grace, but a determination that anchors him there. He is wearing an untucked, short-sleeved plaid shirt, that fits tightly across a slight beer belly. Even the sleeves are a little tight. He is listening intently to what Miles is playing, hearing his way through his own response. Miles is the sure one, the center of attention, and the focus.”
This snapshot of the two jazz giants was taken during the legendary Kind of Blue sessions. These were recorded between March 2 and April 22, 1959 at Columbia’s 30th street studio in New York City.
Like any artistic collaboration of historical significance, this one stamped itself on the body of the creative world – they were both great musicians and innovators – then crept slowly inside the mind of their times. Not much later, their most intimate personal actions and thoughts would become iconic and would seep into the heart and soul of American and world culture.
These two men could not have been more different. But, this disparateness was only on the surface. Underneath the differences, they could not have existed without one another. Would there be Duke Ellington as we now know him without his groundbreaking collaborations with Billy Strayhorn? Could the flights of Charlie Parker (Bird) be reached without the knowing and clarity of John Birks Gillespie (Diz). No!
The authors wisely make the obvious difference in Miles and Trane’s background, upbringing, parents, social class, personal demeanor and reception by the critical press and public the core idea of the book.
Davis’ background of black upper- middle-class privilege can be seen as a kind of psychic entree into his eventual development of a style that is set in the ideas of economy of motion, clarity of tone, correct choice of collaborators (who’s gon’ be in the band), dynamic but controlled personal appearance, choice of instrument, expectation of success and even the idea of guarding and nurturing an art form in order to deeply inscribe a personal and group legacy.
Coltrane’s father and grandfather were both prominent persons in the African Methodist Episcopal church. His grandfather was a prominent minister and a respected elder in church and community. His family’s history as trades persons and small business people would serve him well as he developed a sense of self-sufficiency and patience. His early memories were those of tight-knit family and religious commitment. The candor, eloquence and spiritual striving of his most important music are traced to this source.
The authors spend time with some of the classic jazz traditions that draws parallels between Miles and Trane. One is the great tradition of mentoring. Miles came to New York from East St. Louis in the early forties in search of his idols, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. He soon located them and within months was working on the bandstand with Parker and rooming with him in Harlem. The musical training was harsh, no-holds-barred and revelatory.
Late in his life, in an interview at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Quincy Troupe, St. Louis poet and Miles’ biographer, asked Davis what it was like playing with Parker in those early years. Miles, in his characteristic profanity-laced response, said, “I wanted to quit every night. I kept asking him what he needed me for.”
Parker heard something in Miles. In fact, he heard what no one else at that time could hear. His velocity, technical innovations and speed of execution were perfectly balanced by Miles’ sense of the melodic and the big, open, mid-range of his tone. For instance, Parker’s immense knowledge of and feel for the blues was balanced by Miles’ almost sanctified Midwestern sense
of time. He possessed a lushness of tone and conception that Parker admired
and sometimes envied. This sense of how to balance the music would stay with Miles for the rest of his life and would eventually lead to his greatest collaboration.
This almost hermetic knowledge imparted to him from Parker, and later pianist Thelonious Monk, would serve him well. He would see the seals unfold and finally feel the earth shake musically when he met John Coltrane. The amazing thing was that Trane was not initially able to decipher these codes. He didn’t yet have the keys when he met Miles. He was the neophyte, and Davis was the master.
The dark side of genius is explored in this book. It isn’t pretty. It never is. Griffin and Washington approach both Coltrane’s and Davis’ heroin addiction without sentimentality or romance. They show that the use of heroin by musicians and other artists operating on the frontlines of creativity and the margins of society usually leads to social chaos and personal tragedy. The power relations of social and economic control between club owners, artists, a faddish sub-culture, predatory criminals, and the ability to generate huge amounts of quick cash lead a whole generation toward the temporary heaven of a good high balanced by the long fall into permanent hell.
Both these great musical minds would pull back from the precipice and go on to “change music five or six times,” in Miles’ words.
Miles Davis was a young acolyte to Parker and Gillespie in the forties. He created a sound in the fifties that came to be called “cool,” but was really more controlled and psychologically accessible to a public wearied by the unending musical intensity and attendant tragedy of the be-bop era. Novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison, in a famous essay, described Parker as “a man standing under a spotlight cutting himself with a dull razor.”
With the legendary recording Birth of the Cool, the authors show Miles moving into a time of what Louis Armstrong called “butter and eggs.” Next came Coltrane, Adderly and the modal explorations of Kind Of Blue, then the second great quintet with Hancock, Shorter, Carter and Williams. Miles would move on to Bitches Brew, the influence of Jimi Hendrix and finally fusion.
John Coltrane’s music would become a life’s work; it would be clarified as a true mission. In exquisite detail, the book chronicles his spiritual awakening and identifies it as the culmination of his sense of being chosen, yet something completely unexpected and unforeseen in the history of jazz, a completely new archetype.
Coltrane brought the sacred edifice of the holy into the profane space of the club. He made it make sense, and he made it work. His mission has yet to be understood. His collaboration with Miles Davis was the beginning of this new archetype: the holy man who dances wherever he wishes, without stepping on another man’s toes.