MILES DAVISS career began in July 1944, when the legendary Billy Eckstine band visited St. Louis. Booked into a white club aptly named the Plantation, Eckstine was fired for using the front door instead of the colored rear entrance. So he took his amazing band, which included Charlie (Bird) Parker, John Birks (Dizzy) Gillespie and Art Blakey, to a Negro establishment, the Riviera Club, where they played with fiery beauty before a large, enthusiastic black audience -- and hurled a lightning bolt of inspiration at an 18-year-old trumpeter named Miles Davis. Years later Davis would confess, Ive come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but Ive never quite got there. A strange statement, coming from a figure so full of musical refulgence. What kind of lightning struck Davis that night? And why did it strike only once? The answer lies in Daviss lifelong struggle to achieve three goals: high musical art, commercial success and a deep connection with his fellow African-Americans. Are these goals compatible? Not today, perhaps. But they were compatible during Daviss boyhood, when immortals like Armstrong, Ellington and Basie played dance halls and night clubs and, as the saying goes, good music was popular and popular music was good. And they were compatible on that memorable night in 1944. The three goals began to conflict during the last 50 years, a time fraught with musical dead ends, distractions and dangers. In the 1950s, jazz ceased to be entertainment and became esoteric art. In the 1960s, rock and soul won a huge racially mixed audience and cultural cachet, only to succumb a few years later to racial polarization and the decadence of heavy metal and disco. Also in the 1960s, the art music known as minimalism inspired a rejection of song and dance that over the next three decades would help (inadvertently) subordinate the aural to the visual, the ear to the eye. In the 1970s punk restored the cachet of rock but also turned it into avant-garde theater. And in the 1980s, hip-hop revived rhythm but also fostered the myth that truly black music does not utilize melody or harmony. nytimes/2001/05/13/arts/miles-davis-the-chameleon-of-cool-an-innovator-with-dueling-ambitions.html
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 12:58:22 +0000
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