Quote of the Day (Miles Davis, on How He Was ‘Always Thinking About Creating’)

“Nothing is out of the question the way I live my life. I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning. That’s when it starts – when I wake up and see the first light. Then, I’m grateful, and I can’t wait to wake up, because there’s something to do and try everyday. Everyday I find something creative to do with my life.” — American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer Miles Davis (1926-1991) with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (1990)

This Day in Jazz History (‘Bird’ Parker Loses Velocity)

March 12, 1955—The drug-related death of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker at age 34 did more than just highlight how many in the postwar jazz community were victimized by substance abuse. It also cut short the life of an extraordinary figure who, by rights, should have gone on influencing musicians of all kinds for at least another generation.

Parker’s friend and patron, Nica de Koenigswarter, discovered his body slumped over in an easy chair in front of the TV set in her New York City home. What stunned me when I first heard about it—and, I bet, anyone else with no firsthand knowledge of drugs—was that the coroner had originally believed the deceased to be at least two decades older than his real age.

One not surprised was biographer Stanley Crouch, who, in profiling Parker decades after his death in Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (2006), noted that his musical gifts were “laid low by his inability to stop fatally polluting and tampering with the flesh and blood source of his energy, with his own body.”

It was an all-too-common phenomenon in the jazz world of the Forties and Fifties. In a blog post for the British Psychological Society, Christian Jarrett cites a 1957 survey by critic Nat Hentoff which found that, among more than 400 New York City jazz musicians, more than half had tried heroin, with 16 percent admitting to regular use. The list here of those whose lives would be terribly disrupted by drugs, such as Parker, is long and, I would have to say, incomplete: not just Parker but also his protégé, Miles Davis (whom I wrote about in a prior post), Billie Holliday, Stan Getz, Lester Young, John Coltrane, Chet Baker, and Anita O’Day.

Crouch used another word, “velocity,” to describe the life-altering events crammed into Parker’s life between ages 16 and 20. But that term applies equally well to the creativity of the musician. “Bird” was a most appropriate nickname for him, because of the manner in which his imagination took flight.

I just spoke of my surprise over how rapidly his body aged, but I am perhaps even more astounded by how quickly he matured in mastering his instrument—from a teenager who was often laughed at or pitied as he first fumbled around, to a musician who, a mere decade later, set the standard in helping to pioneer the bebop movement. Cootie Williams of Duke Ellington's band once said, "Every instrument in the band tried to copy Charlie Parker, and in the history of jazz there had never been one man who influenced all the instruments."

Critic Gary Giddins may have summed up the towering achievement of Parker’s life better than anyone in his anthology, Visions of Jazz: The First Century (1998): “Parker altered the rhythmic and harmonic currents of music, and he produced a body of melodies—or more to the point, a way of melodic thinking—that became closely identified with the idea of jazz as a per­sonal and intellectual modern music.”

This Day in Jazz History (Bird-Backed Miles Leads First Recording Session)

August 14, 1947—Miles Davis, a 21-year-old Julliard School dropout who had achieved a steady reputation as a trumpeter in the trendy bebop scene, gave signs of his future greatness as bandleader by helming his first recording session, with mentor Charlie Parker taking a subordinate role on tenor sax.

On that groundbreaking session, Davis played with, besides Parker, John Lewis on piano and Max Roach on drums. Two Davis compositions were recorded: “Half Nelson” and “Milestones.”  

(The latter, according to critic Gary Giddens’ account in Visions of Jazz: The First Century, contained “so many harmonic bottlenecks that Parker insisted he’d play just the bridge because the tune was too hard for a country boy like him.”)

In the clubs dotting New York’s 52^nd Street the last couple of years, shifts in jazz were occurring with unusual rapidity, overwhelmingly centered around Parker. Musicians were in awe of “Bird,” but his drug addiction was also causing fissures in the community. 

Friend Dizzy Gillespie, despairing over Bird’s substance abuse, left the band.  Gillespie’s replacement, Davis, learned what he could from Diz while the latter was still around, but, realizing he could never match the older musician’s power, strove for his own, more personal, more lyrical tone.  

In all of this, Davis was encouraged by Parker, who, when the shy young man from St. Louis first came to New York, urged him to get up and play: “Go ahead. Don’t be afraid.”

Davis had tried imitating Parker’s sound at first, but, finding it impossible, determined to “play under him, and let him lead the note, swing the note.” 

A series of gigs followed, including an especially crucial one with the group Parker formed in April 1947, featuring Davis; Duke Jordan, piano; Tommy Porter, bass; and Max Roach, drums.

Just how much influence Parker exerted on Davis’ life is a matter of some debate still. There is no doubt that, as Davis’ idol when he came to New York—and first significant boss—he played a big part. 

But critic Dan Morgenstern, in a 1980 retrospective on Davis included in his anthology, Living With Jazz, suggested that Parker might have paid the rent for his young musician and roommate.

This seems unlikely. Davis’ autobiography, Miles, is filled with admiration for Parker as a creative force, but an almost scatological disgust for his antics when in the grip of drugs:

“He wanted everything. And when he was desperate for a fix of heroin, man, Bird would do anything to get it. He would con me and as soon as he left me, he would run around the corner to somebody else with the same sad story about how he needed money to get his horn out of the pawnshop, and hit them up for some more. He never paid anyone back, so in that way Bird was a [expletive] drag to be around.” 

That account would seem to lay to rest any notion that Parker could help others monetarily at a point when he could hardly help himself. 

In another sense, though, Davis didn’t recognize the exquisite irony that he could be just as much high-maintenance—perhaps even more so—than Parker. His interactions with his sidemen were more than a little similar to Bird’s.

His band members, like Parker’s, depended more than a little on his health. He had a heroin addiction of his own so harrowing that he needed to leave New York for his father’s farm in Illinois to break it cold turkey. 

In the 1960s, he discovered he suffered from sickle-cell anemia; in the mid-1970s, continuing health problems (including an addiction to cocaine this time) led him to withdraw from music.

If Parker’s personality could be bizarre at times, Davis’ was extraordinarily complex. His irascibility and general willingness to irk people at times just for the hell of it inspired the nickname “Prince of Darkness.”

Yet, like Bird again, his skill as a musician was such that band members were willing to tolerate the sullenness—if they could get past points of enforced inactivity because of his health. (Not everyone could do this.) 

Those who did stay the course with Miles testified to his willingness to give them creative freedom—and, surprisingly, for those who only knew that low voice growling expletives at every turn, he could be sensitive and kind, inviting them to his house, where he would cook dinner and discuss music.

Those sidemen included many, if not most, of the nonpareil jazzmen of the last half century, including Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Herbie Hancock, and Ron Carter, to name just a few.

This Day in Jazz History (Miles Davis’ Arrest Sparks Near-Riot)

August 25, 1959—Last month, Henry Louis Gates asked the policeman responding to reports of a break-in at his Cambridge, Mass. home if he was being questioned “because I’m a black man in America.” For all his outrage, whatever indignities the Harvard professor experienced on that now-famous night pale next to what happened to Miles Davis outside Birdland 50 years ago.

Here was another case in which a white cop in a metropolitan area failed to recognize one of the most famous African-Americans of his day—only this time, the civilian, Davis, ended up on the ground bleeding before being arrested, brought to police headquarters, then forced to run a months-long legal gauntlet.

The Gates case provoked weeks of cable TV rants, blogger battles, and a beer summit at the White House; the Davis incident nearly started a race riot, at a time when U.S. credibility as a beacon of liberty was being questioned abroad because of the continuing American apartheid.

It happened only months after what might have been the professional highlight of the trumpeter’s life: Kind of Blue, his bestselling album and, as The Wall Street Journal noted earlier this year, still considered “for many, the quintessential jazz album.”

Three decades later, in the autobiography he co-wrote with Quincy Troupe, Davis still couldn’t get over the outrage that “changed my whole life and my whole attitude again, made me bitter and cynical again when I was really starting to feel good about the things that had changed in this country.”

Just before midnight, near the end of a triumphant two-week run at the jazz club promoting the release of Kind of Blue, Davis, between sets, had just escorted “a pretty young white girl named Judy” to her cab. Tired on this steamy summer night, he paused outside Birdland to take a drag on a cigarette when a white cop told him to move along on the crowded sidewalk.

“Move on, what for?” Davis asked. “I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis.”

The officer repeated his command, then decided to make an arrest when Davis gave him a hard stare. The cop claimed that Davis pulled away, then tried to grab his nightstick; Davis, who’d taken boxing lessons, said he was moving forward to cushion the force of any blow that might come.

One of three detectives passing by saw the cop falling forward, then rushed toward the musician, pounding him repeatedly on the head with his nightstick.

The beating occurred in a terrible moment in New York, when a deeply racist police force was bringing to the surface long-simmering anger among African-Americans. Not long before, the arrest of a drunken woman in Harlem had led to a riot that required the intervention of boxer Sugar Ray Robinson to quell.

This time, with more than 200 people yelling for the cops to stop beating Davis, the potential for trouble seemed just as great. Hauled down to the 54th Street precinct headquarters, the musician was, he said later, constantly provoked by cops, then booked for disorderly conduct and assaulting an officer. A doctor from St. Clare’s Hospital put five stitches in his scalp.

The next day, columnist and TV personality Dorothy Kilgallen, a friend of Davis, had a front-page story in the New York Journal-American about the beating, and pictures of the musician bleeding while in police custody flashed all across the country.

After two separate court appearances, Davis was acquitted on both charges. He had threatened to sue the police department for half a million dollars, but the suit fizzled out. (According to the musician, his lawyer had failed to file in time to beat the statute of limitations requirements; biographer John Szwed repeats rumors that Davis was amenable to dropping the case, lest the incensed police “make even more trouble for him.”)

Davis had expected racist treatment in his native East St. Louis, but not in supposedly tolerant New York. “But then, again, I was surrounded by white folks and I have learned that when this happens, if you’re black, there is no justice. None.”

Just how much the incident seared the musician can be seen in You’re Under Arrest, an LP released just over a quarter century later, in which Davis mixed denunciations of police brutality and Reagan foreign policy.

Like Frank Sinatra, Davis was a man whose belligerence often camouflaged a sensitivity that came out most piercingly in love songs. It’s an open question how much of the trumpeter’s moodiness and irritability over the years derived from insecurity, how much from the effects of substance abuse, and how much from the pain of living in a country where he felt marginalized by the color of his skin.

Davis was particularly incensed at accusations that he was racist and irredeemably angry. Just how complex a personality he was can be seen on You’re Under Arrest. Side by side on the album, next to songs of volcanic pain and rage, are ones where he reached for another emotion. How well he could achieve this, even in his final years of physical decline, can be seen in one of the latter songs, Cyndy Lauper’s “Time After Time.” It was as if he had achieved a transcendence, through his instrument, that he couldn't find in life.

This Day in Pop Music History (Lauper’s “Time After Time” Hits #1)

June 9, 1984—It wasn’t the first single from Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual album, but “Time After Time” began to exert its own kind of magic before long, as it reached #1 on the Billboard pop chart, where it would stay for two weeks.

The brilliant deejay Jonathan Schwartz says you can’t copyright a song title, and as the son of composer Arthur Schwartz, whose “Dancing in the Dark” not only served as one of the longtime entries in the Great American Songbook but as the first single from Bruce Springsteen’s megaseller Born in the U.S.A., he would know better than anyone.

But a particularly interesting counterpart to “Dancing in the Dark” as an enduring title in different genres of music occurs with “Time After Time.” 

Jazz and pop musicians just loved the 1947 Sammy Cahn-Jule Styne song from the film It Happened in Brooklyn; most songwriters would believe they’d died and gone to heaven if Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Harry Connick Jr., Stephane Grappelli, the Temptations, Carly Simon, and others too numerous to mention had had a go at just one of their songs, as Cahn and Styne did in this case.

But now, get this: Nearly 40 years later, Lauper produced her own hit single using the same phrase, in her own style—and slowly but surely, it began to enter the pop pantheon, too.

Lauper’s “Time After Time” resembles Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” in another sense: they resulted from a producer pressing an artist for a song missing that could carry the album. 

Springsteen had already recorded much of Born in the U.S.A., but friend-producer Jon Landau told the exhausted Boss that their labors weren’t done—the LP still lacked a sure-fire single. (And you wonder where those lines, “I ain’t nothing but tired/Man, I’m just tired and bored with myself?” came from?)

Likewise, after Lauper already had “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “She Bop,” and “All Through the Night” in the can, her producer, Rick Chertoff, insisted that she needed “one more song.” 

Over several days, inspired by the title of the Malcolm McDowell sci-fi flick Time After Time, the singer and co-songwriter Rob Hyman thrashed out a tune that started out bouncy but, before long, became increasingly bittersweet.

The affecting video for "Time After Time," with Lauper doing a more plaintive version of the free-spirit image promoted on her CD—i.e., a runaway leaving her lover—did much to enhance its popularity. 

But countless musicians, almost from its release, took to the song because of its simple but thoughtful lyrics and moving melody.

Most people who’ve loved this song to distraction have, like myself, a favorite performer who, they believe, has rendered it exquisitely. 

From the Miles Davis live version I’ve downloaded, I can see why he played it incessantly in the last seven years of his life. I’m also much taken with a live 2005 version by Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20, which really allows you to hear and practically meditate on the words.

But for my money, nothing matches Lauper’s own duet with Sarah McLachlan. If you’ve ever heard McLachlan perform “I Will Remember You,” you’ll understand perfectly how she can tear your heart out. 

Their collaboration on this YouTube clip is, quite simply, a marvelous demonstration of a song that wends its way into your heart and stays there.

Quote of the Day (Chick Corea, on a Miles Davis Masterpiece)

"It's one thing to just play a tune, but it's another thing to practically create a new language of music, which is what Kind of Blue did."—Pianist Chick Corea, quoted in Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece.

Fifty years ago today, the final recording session was held at Columbia Record's 30th Street Studio for what might be Miles Davis’s supreme moment as a jazz icon, Kind of Blue. The great trumpeter’s lineup included musicians who matched the standard set by Davis himself: “Cannonball” Adderley (alto saxophone), Paul Chambers (bass), Jimmy Cobb (drums), John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Wynton Kelly (piano), and my favorite of the bunch, Bill Evans (piano).

For an excellent summary of why this recording became Davis’ biggest-selling LP—and one of Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums of all time—please see John Edward Hasse’s account from two weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal.