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Miami Herald, September 29, 1991, p. 1A He was not all that crazy about the word jazz. Nor did he like the word legend, especially when it was applied, as it often was, to him. He hated the thought of being considered an entertainer, hated it so much that often, he would turn his back on his audience, point his instrument at the floor or simply leave the stage. He was prickly, idiosyncratic, had a terrible temper and was quite unpredictable, his career a stylistic scavenger hunt that took him on a winding course through music's back alleys and rural roads in search of treasure. He was the greatest jazz trumpeter of his generation. He was Miles. Miles Dewey Davis, 65, died Saturday morning at 10:46 at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, Calif., of a combination of pneumonia, respiratory failure and stroke. It seems fitting that they had to gang up on him to bring him down. After all, Davis had battled cocaine and heroin addictions, hip joint problems, diabetes, sickle cell anemia, arthritis, throat polyps, a bleeding ulcer, and an auto accident in which he broke both ankles, and had managed to come back strong each time. Perhaps because of what he had to come back to: his music. Davis played with a sweet lyricism that belied the turbulence of his life. His tone was intimate, insinuating. When he played, there was no one in the room but him and you, and he laced the air with tendrils of sound that wound themselves around you like a vine on a trellis. Or maybe not. Because again, spontaneity -- that ability to surprise, challenge and provoke -- was his signature. Davis was born in Alton, Ill., and moved to East St. Louis as an infant. He was the second of three children born to Cleota Henry Davis and Miles Davis II, a dentist. As a boy, Davis enjoyed sports usually winding up the smallest person on the team. But he refused to be intimidated. The inability to back down landed him in street fights when local kids, picking on his small stature and dark skin, called him Buckwheat after the Our Gang character. Davis refused to tolerate any racial disrespect. In later years, Miles would stir controversy time and again by angrily, bluntly excoriating white America for its racism. His rage was the result, perhaps, of growing up with a strict father who was, in the parlance of the times, a strong "race man" and an admirer of the pioneering black nationalist, Marcus Garvey. But Davis' stern father didn't fail to see the musical potential in the boy. By the time he hit his teens, Davis had become absorbed in his music. Recognizing his son's talent, the elder Davis bought the boy a new trumpet for his 13th birthday. It was a propitious gift; by that time, music had become the most important thing in Davis' life. At 13, he was playing in the school band. By the time he was 15, he had turned professional. And at 18, he went on the road, winding up in New York City where he fell in with two of his heroes, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie "Bird" Parker. When Gillespie quit Parker's band, the job went to Miles. Davis played behind his idol for several years before striking out in search of a different sound. He found it by forming his own band and opting for a sweeter, more tuneful style than he had played with Parker. Capitol Records recorded Davis live and the result was The Birth of the Cool, an album that was a flop at the time, but which later came to be seen as one of the most influential recordings in jazz. And that came to be the career-long pattern: Davis striking out in stylistic directions that infuriated or, at best, perplexed his followers, only to have it later turn out that he was simply ahead of his time. Miles Ahead, to use the title from a famed 1957 recording. After The Birth of the Cool made cool jazz the "hot" thing of the moment, Davis turned his back on the style, aligned himself with the be-bop rebels of the day and founded what became known as the school of hard bop -- spare, streamlined and no-nonsense. In the '60s, that restless nature took hold once again and Miles changed, opting for a free-form, come-as-you-are style of music heavy on poly-rhythmic experimentation. Later that decade, of course, came Bitches Brew, the prescient 1969 double album whose weird electronic sounds and rock 'n' roll influences set the stage for what came to be called fusion jazz. Critics and fans howled over Bitches Brew, but then, where Miles was concerned, they were always howling. With each new stylistic leap, he gained new fans and left old ones behind. But Davis had no choice. He had to follow his muse. And he did. Followed it through the wreckage of three marriages (to dancer Frances Taylor, singer Betty Maybry and actress Cicely Tyson). Followed it through a heroin addiction that he kicked in the early '50s and a cocaine addiction that plagued him into the early '80s. Followed it through all the illnesses, including the 1956 throat operation that gave him his trademark burlap whisper of a voice; he had been told to rest his throat in silence for 10 days, got into a shouting match with a record exec, and blew his voice out. At the end, Davis was still chasing his muse into places where others would rather he hadn't gone. His performance of Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time raised eyebrows, to say the least. In Miles: The Autobiography, published just two years ago, Davis was still looking to the future, expressing his admiration of Prince and even talking about the possibility of exploring rap. He wrote: "For me, the urgency to play and create music is worse than when I started. It's more intense. It's like a curse. Man, the music I forget now drives me nuts trying to remember it. I'm driven to it -- go to bed thinking about it and wake up thinking about it. It's always there. And I love that it hasn't abandoned me; I feel really blessed." |