One hundred years after his birth, the revolutionary scope of Davis’ music is an essential point of reference
The destiny of genius is to live in advance. AND Miles Davis, an incomparable musical geniushas never had a peaceful relationship with the present: he has often found it too slow, too predictable, too tied to nostalgia. Because of this, one hundred years after his birth (26 May 1926)listening again to the countless masterpieces of his artistic trajectory, we realize that his work has not aged at all: we are the ones who continue to chase it. Even today his music is far ahead of any attempt to define it.
Miles Davisfrom Alton, Missouri, was not only an innovator, he was the architect of the sonic future whose foundations can still be felt today. The first trumpet at 9 years old, the first concert at 17, and then off to New York. Objective: the “swing street” or the clubs of fifty-second street, the soul of jazz in the heart of Manhattan. His nights in the Big Apple were spent for months within the walls of Minton’s Playhouse, in Harlem, where all the protagonists of the be-bop revolution (an innovative form of jazz compared to the traditional sound of the 1920s) met for endless jams.
He knows Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk. He plays with Parker, he absorbs everything, but he doesn’t recognize himself in the frenzy of virtuosity. His is a natural instinct for control, for subtraction, for space. Davis’ approach is that of a lateral thinker, the intuition of a musician who has always looked beyond: “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” And then: «It is the silence between the notes that creates music». Revolutionary words followed by coherent artistic acts. As Birth Of The Cool, recorded between 1949 and 1950: at that time jazz was made of dizzying speeds, complex harmonies, overflowing solos and Miles decided to “cool it down”, created a super band that played like an orchestra and drew freely from African-American and classical music (Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy). His accomplice in this radical change of perspective is another genius: Gil Evans. With just one album, Miles reveals his most precious quality: knowing how to listen to what isn’t there yet.
The summary of his musical thought is that fewer notes mean more meaning, a lectio magistralis that many will make their own: from Sting to Mark Knopfler, from Radiohead to Brian Eno. With Kind of Blue (1959)the best-selling jazz album ever, over five million copies, music becomes space, breath, meditation. Kind of blue is a mental place that the viewer can enter freely, regardless of musical culture and knowledge of jazz standards. It is the new that advances and makes its way, years later, into the folds of Pink Floyd’s sound and Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks. As his fame exploded, Davis found himself with a bleeding head in a New York police station for having refused to move off the sidewalk where he was smoking a cigarette during a break between one set and another of his performance at the Birdland Jazz Club. Accused of resisting a public official, he was later acquitted. His image, between two police officers, with his jacket, shirt and tie soaked in blood, goes around the world.
Davis has not only reinvented the music but also the way we show up to play it. In the early years of his career with tailored suits, narrow tie, pocket handkerchief and highly polished shoes, then, in the Sixties, with a nouvelle vague aesthetic in the style of a European architect or designer. But that’s not all: at the beginning of the Seventies he showed off leather trousers, boots, shirts unbuttoned up to the navel, flashy jewels, gold necklaces (rappers didn’t invent anything), while in the Eighties he alternated solemn designer dresses with sportswear items accompanied by huge glasses. Changing your look in harmony with the change in musical direction: this is his attitude, a path followed with determination by icons such as David Bowie and Prince.
Even the body language on stage is part of the look: remaining for a good part of the show with your back to the audience, with your back closed like a chest becomes a new visual code (criticised by many) and a clear distancing from the idea of the frontman who has to please. Among the thousand artistic connections in its history there is a formidable one with Zuccheroa legendary episode that the Emilian bluesman told Panorama: «He arrives at the studio in New York dressed in black leather with dark glasses. He doesn’t talk to anyone, he heads towards me who was playing my Dune Mosse on the piano. “What the fuck are you doing? You’re playing it in the wrong key.” And I, intimidated: “Look, I wrote it and I assure you that this is the correct key. Great embarrassment. Then, we understood that he had listened to the piece on a recorder with flat batteries. The tape was running slowly and therefore the key was lower. At that point he played, did wonderful things, then placed two fingers on my throat and said: “Your voice excites me”.
Memories that are fragments of the life of the most important and visionary artist of the twentieth century. A sound shaman who in 1970 with the album Bitches Brew carries out the definitive revolution, destroying the categories, jazz, rock, funk, and creating a music that didn’t exist before and which has taken root and continues to take root everywhere, in electronics, rap, soundtracks, rock and psychedelia. To celebrate Miles’ centenary, his historic bassist Marcus Miller, accompanied by an all-star band of great jazz musicians, will perform (on 22 July) in the Scavi Amphitheater in Pompeii, the site of Pink Floyd’s legendary show in 1971, the concert without an audience where for four consecutive days, the four English musicians created a total and absolutely unprecedented work of art. Like Bitches Brew…
