Interview by Nick Kent:
Wynton Marsalis, whose virtuoso prowess as a trumpet-player is coupled with his controversial and reactionary views on staying true to the fifties spirit of jazz, has provided the media with their most recent opponent to Miles Davis. Dr. George Butler signed Marsalis to Columbia, and when the latter, at the precocious age of nineteen, successfully fronted Miles's classic sixties quintet--Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams--when Davis himself refused at the last minute to take part in a one-off reunion gig, a confrontation was inevitable.
"Wynton...well, he's a good player," mutters Miles reasonably. "No two ways around that. But see, I don't want to get caught up in some jive feud thing here. That may be his style but it's not mine! He's good but his whole style of presentation, his look, his manner--it's dumb! Plus he could do with a few lessons in couth! What's he doin', messin' with the past? A player of his caliber should just wise up and realize it's over. The past is dead. Jazz is dead! The whole context has changed and people gotta...Why get caught up in that 'old shit? Music shouldn't be this stuff you play to kid your audience into thinkin' that's the way it was. Don't no one start telling me the way it was. Hell, I was there! They weren't!
"Some people, whatever is happening now, either they can't handle it or they don't want to know. They'll be messed up on that bogus nostalgia thing. Nostalgia, shit! That's a pitiful concept. Because it's dead, it's safe--that's what that shit's about! Hell, no one wanted to hear us when we were playin' jazz.Those days with Bird, Dizz, 'Trane--some were good, some were miserable. But see, people don't understand whey I get so touchy sometimes. I just don't want to talk about that stuff. People didn't like that stuff then. Hell, why you think we were playin' clubs? No one wanted us on prime-time TV. The music wasn't getting across, you dig! Jazz is dead. Goddammit. That's it. Finito! It's over and there is no point aping the shit."
Miles isn't angry, just adamant. His rationale is often wrought from a logic that is genuinely ingenious. At other times his philosophy is shaped from one overall point of view that he is Miles Davis and you're not. Musing over the previous outburst, he sttles back to consider the simple fact that, finally, black music has overtaken the white folks' watered-dpwm approximation of same in the market-place.
"Hell, y'know, Lionel, Quincy, Michael, Prince and me together...Now wouldn't that make for one hell of a movie?"
This where Miles Davis chooses to pitch his tent in 1986. After thirty years as a Columbia recording artist, Miles Davis is releasing his first Warner Bros. album. Initially entitled The Perfect Way, after the Scritti Politti number on side two, it has since been renamed Tutu after one of five Marcus Miller originals that predominated among the product's contents. Speaking to Warners' A&R kingpin, Tommy LiPuma, late last year, little was forthcoming with regard to how much cash the the label had spent on procuring Miles. "It's standard practice not to divulge such matter," said LiPuma, another good-natured pragmatist. It was, of course, "a great honor to have Miles Davis on the roster. He seemed to like our way of thinking. He felt that his association with Columbia had gone as far as it could. He as looking for a change." Not that LiPuma and Warners had any grand schemes for Miles. "Let's just say that, when you come to work with a musician of Miles's pedigree, it's not fitting to try and tell him what to do."
This of course, was early in the relationship, before LiPuma would become executive producer of the first WB release, at that point tentatively penciled in for a late spring 1986 release. LiPuma had definite ideas about suiable collaborators. Thomas Dolby, for one, was high on the agenda; and Lyle Mays, the young keyboard player best known for his collaborations with guitarist Pat Metheny. It was then that Prince's name camp up. LiPuma reacted immediately. "I felt that Prince might not be too conversant with certain idioms pertaining to Mile's dynamics inherent in be-bop so, yes, indeed, Prince was ideal." Miles refers to Prince excitedly as "that funky little dude." By the time of the release of Around the World in a DAy in 1985, the aging trumpet legend had become totally smitten with pop music's most audaciously resourceful stylist.
"Prince wrote me a letter and along with the letter he enclosed a tape of instrumental tracks he'd recorded by himself in his studio. And in this letter he wrote, 'Miles, even though we have never met, I can tell just from listening to you music that you and I are so exactly alike that I know whatever you play would be what I'd do. So if this tape is of any use to you, please go ahead and play whatever you feel over it. Because I trust what you hear and play.' I mean. now here's a dude...Hell, he's go it all! Multi-musician with a damned vengeance! As a drummer he can hold it down, you know what I'm sayin'? There's not many cats can nail it tight what with current technology makin' most drummers damn near obsolete. As a guitar player...he puts out! Plus, he's a god-damn great piano player. Matter of fact, he's about a s good as they get, and I've worked with the best, I should know!"
Did anyone say Wynton Marsalis? Prince is who Miles Davis checks out now. The way he works in the studio--"sheer genius," reckonsMiles. Hell, it didn't even drag Miles's bag one bit when the boy genius suddenly called through for some typically enigmatic reason requesting Miles not to release the tracks he's sent him. "I don't know exactly why he decided not to let'em come out but I respect that boy.
"Do you know Prince kinda reminds me of, particularly as a piano player? Duke! Yeah, he's the Duke Ellington of the eighties to my way of thinking. Only back in them old days you couldn't get a man like Duke on prime-time. No, white audiences didn't want to see that elegance, that attitude, 'cos it was too intimidatin'."
This leads Miles staright into another of his harangues"
"See, this is that thing you got to take into consideration here. Time and again, the black man has fucked up. He starts out with hisshit together, then he gets damn side-tracked by white folks, y'know, whisperin' in his ear, 'Hey son, you should od this. Clean it up. Tone it down. Get smart. Get jive. Get youself a goddamn monkey-suit or somethin'.' The white man, see, he's always out to mess with our thing, packaging it, strapping some jive label on it. And the black man, he's fallen for it mostly ever damn time. Why" Cos he's greedy, that's why! Hell, it's shameful what I'm sayinn' here but it's the truth. White man starts talkin', the black man, he listens up, starts seeing dollar signs flashin' and the next thing you know he's sellin' himself out everywhere. See, attitude--that's what the black man's go. Attitude! The white man wants it so bad, he can't help but be jealous. So, over and over, the black man's music gets fucked with. But he don't see it happening 'cos greed is motivatin' him more than his better instincts."
That deadly voice, shorn of any pitch beyond a gravel-toned whisper, rarely registers an emotional counterpoint to these tenacious accusations. He does sound particularly melancholy, however when I query him about the absence of Darryl Jones, the young bass-player featured in last year's ensemble. DAvis, during 1985's European gig, had tended to behave somewhat mischievously toward his fellow musicians. At London's Festival Hall he kept resetting keyboard player Robert Irving III's synth patterns to no appreciable avial, while in Paris he broudht on John McLaughlin in what could only be interpreted as a bid to upstage guitarist John Scofield. Only Jones was left unscathed by such questionable antics. At Montreux, Miles had even sidled up to the bassist and his arm around his shoulder, gently coaxing him to the lip of the stage for an ovation. This occurred, mark you, just before young Darryl passed an audition to workd with Sting on his Dream of Blue Turtles record and tour.
"Darryl? I had to let him go. Same shit as I've been relatin' to you. That boy...I liked him too. He could play so good and, hell, I felt kind of paternalistic toward him in a way. But then Sting comes along, offers him more money, high-class accommodation and all that stuff. And Darryl, he got so damn confused, I just said to him, real diplomatic and cordial like, 'Man, what do you really want?' You know what he said to me? Darryl said,'Miles I wanna do cross-over,' God, I almost threw up! Here's a boy with real potential and yet there he is falling for the white man's corporate bullshit. Cross-over my black ass! Don't mean nothing!...Anyway, the boy had made his choice."
"See, I like Sting! Yes, indeed! He's good and I like his songs--some of 'em--and his voice. He ain't like Mick Jagger rippin' off Wynonie Harris, shakin' his goddamn skinny white ass and pretendin' to sing the blues. You can take that shit, toss it in the river, watch it sink. Fuck that shit!
"Sade--her too, y'know. I think she's interestin' right now 'cos see, if she works on her attitude she could shape up to be something good. Like, when she comes on the radio, I keep hearing intimations of Lena Horne comin' through. Now, she ain't that good--yet, But like Lena singin' 'Stormy Weather'--hell, it's something and God knows I love her but, damn, that 'my man is gone' shit...Women ain't like that now! Like Billie [Holiday] singin' about 'her man and how she ain't worth shit without him. That was real but that was then. It would be a lie to do that shit now though, 'cos women have changed. They don't need no pimp! They don't stand for that shit and that's how it should be. I know 'cos I used to be one myself! Had me seven women when I was strung out back in them old days [mordant chuckle]. And I'll be damned if I can remember their names...
"I don't like to think back to that. Women nowadays are into control. Like that song by Michael's sister Janet [Jackson]. That's what's happenin'! Anyone who wants to go back to the past, they're too scared to live in the present."
No comments:
Post a Comment