"Man," says Miles Davis, "I haven't been sketching in so long. Maybe two, three weeks. Usually when I get to sketching – I get so involved I stop practising my horn. So when I get a job, I can't touch it. Hey David!" Miles calls over to his genial manager. "Gimme that horn case out of the other room! If I don't have my horn next to me I feel like I'm not …"
He has his sketchpad resting on one leather-clad knee. Gently, he draws arcs and dark lines on to the paper: long-limbed figures with distended stomachs and wide thighs and bird lips. Their heads look like blackberries. Once one is finished – and it might be a few lines or a complicated picture – he turns the page and starts another.
Between pen strokes, he talks. His voice is a legendary rasp: words come out in a long guttural cough. When he laughs, it's like a gargle in the throat. When he smiles, which is rarely, he frowns, too. His eyes are mild but unbearably penetrating: he will look up from the pad, slowly, and freeze a question in its tracks. So I mostly just let him talk. He grants me an hour or so in his Montreal hotel room.
Miles is smiling, though, in the crescent of a particularly bright period. He is the last, grandest and most imperious figure from a jazz tradition that has broken up in disarray. The Prince of Darkness, the little organiser, the cat everybody knows by one name – Miles.
Forty years have seen a thousand changes in his music, yet it all retains the spearing imprint of an extraordinarily particular trumpet sound. A modern sound, terse, fresh-minted, newly-spoken – it always sounds like it was made just now. Charlie Parker's hesitant partner in Bird's Savoy masterpieces from 1945; touchstone in the genesis of the Cool, four years later. Scuffler in and out of junk, then presiding maestro of the Great Quintet with Coltrane. Sketcher in Spain, and purveyor of various kinds of blue.
Through it all was the silvery swathe of the trumpet. It remains a voice as personal as Billie Holiday's, Louis Armstrong's, James Brown's, Michael Jackson's: a small, funky, hip, spare, wisely sinful sound. Miles worked past his acoustic 60s quintet, a group that played as if it were suspended in vast, airless darkness, and soaked in the electric bath of Bitches Brew. His group got freakier, blacker, bloated with intensity, finally going supernova in the Japanese concerts of Agharta and Pangaea. Yet the trumpet was still a parched little voice in the storm.
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Illness and fatigue kept Miles out until the slow, painful comeback opened by The Man With the Horn. Through that record, and the subsequent Star People and We Want Miles, besides a series of dishearteningly variable gigs, Miles felt his way back via a mix of his splayed electric brew and a firmer, funkier sound. The corner was turned with last year's Decoy: concise, stinging ferocity. With his latest tour band, the music was warm and outgoing by contrast: horns and guitar improvised over taut, brittle rhythms, and in a centrepiece of Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time the trumpet sang as bittersweet as ever.
You're Under Arrest is the brightest, airiest Miles LP for 20 years, a set tailored to radio possibilities – hence Time After Time and a pretty hum through Michael Jackson's Human Nature – without surrendering to faceless dance music. Nobody could jive to the twisting Katia or the title track. It sounds, still, like Miles; no one else.
Live, Davis's band whip the material into a long, intricate, abstract fresco of badass flourishes, backbeat stomping and brief, violent solos. Davis doctors them through the switchbacks of the sound: it's a dazzling concentration that must exhaust him.
"When I hear myself back," he says, "things seem to be shorter than what you think they are. I keep playing and editing and playing and editing myself out … and I try and stop on a high point to leave someone else something to do. But when I hear it through, things that sounded bad for a long time sound bad only a few seconds.
"In my head, I'm saying – don't do that, do this. But it happens so fast that when you listen to it again, you tell where you check yourself. If you jump on a horse and see he's on the wrong foot, you keep checking him until he gets to the fence – that's what I do when I'm playing.
"When I'm playing, I'm never through. It's unfinished. I like to find a place to leave for someone else to finish it. That's where the high comes in. If I know I left a perfectly good spot for someone else to come in – like, there it is! – then sometimes they don't come in. Sell out your plans! Specially when you put all that time in.
"When you sing you can go dah-dah-da-daaaa and guys go doom-doom-doom in between that. But I don't sing. I have to play. When you do it, it seems like forever if you're not doing it well. When I hear it again I think – damn, I thought that was too long.
"I was talkin' to Bob Berg [sax in the current band]. I said, Bob, don't fish around for a tone centre. There's certain numbers where he just stands up and goes doo-dur-dum- trying to find the key. The key is already there! I say, Bob, when you start playing just try and finish what somebody's left. Don't just play till it dies. If he tries to find a tone centre, he'll just fuck around. Play flatted fifths. I hate flatted fifths.
"Soon as we get to the airport he say, Hello Miles, I say, C'mere Bob. How you feelin'?"
The eyes drill me. Miles the disciplinarian.
"When you do anything too long, you either wear it out or lose interest. I say, listen man, when you play you gotta help the rhythm section. Don't just lean on them. Tony [Williams] used to have that trouble with Wayne [Shorter]. You followin' me? Wayne'd get drunk and try and play himself sober. They'd play like this" – Miles bangs a Perrier bottle on the table – "and Wayne'd just go durrr-durr-durr, for maybe 30 minutes. And Tony'd get tired of it. Wayne was just leaning on him.
"A vocal is rhythm that way. They know when the highs come up, what to push – but when a guy's just playing, you have to help the rhythm section. A lot of tenor players get into this kind of shit –"
He gets up suddenly and hunches up in front of me, a mime of a convoluted tenor solo twisting his arms. I notice his hands, the fingers manicured but as starved and stick-like as a crone's. He sits again and takes back the pad. And the rhythm players?
"Rhythm has changed so much now. I have Steve [Thornton, percussion] up there now, I tell him to play single strokes. And I got Vince [Wilburn] up there, he's got a nice touch, he doesn't lose time. Vince's clichés don't go any further back than the 70s. The first record I ever gave him was James Brown, Rapp Payback. You remember that, don't you? His idol is Freddie White.
"Naturally, they'll lay down a funky thing. Daryl [Jones, bass] and Vince played together in school in Chicago. You know they got young kids there all into the Earth Wind & Fire thing?"
Seems to me that guys like that only ever come up playing these tight, funky rhythms. The percussive looseness discovered by Elvin Jones and Tony Williams has stiffened up again because young players don't even want to try and play that way.
"You'd be surprised," he cautions. "Drummers ape each other. The way every rock'n'roll record sounds like something else but not all together. Everything other drummers play, if you're playing drums, they all hear. They know how to play everything now. It's the flood of records. Drums and trumpet and bass … it's like a big tree of goodies. You can just buy this record and pick this off and get this bass and flap it up! The good drummers don't play all that in-between stuff, only the bad drummers do to break up the time. Because they can't lay in the pocket. He has to learn that basic stuff first.
"My drummer's my nephew. He's in his 20s. He'll go buy a jacket like you got – no, a grey one. Grey, black, white – but he won't do this."
Davis gestures to his own clothes. Sumptuous black leather trousers, a beautiful red and black wrapover.
"He won't buy nothing red or yellow – nothing that shines. Me, I like to wear shit that shines. A l'il chain here.
"I look into the mirror, I start bleeding into the woodwork. 'Cause I'm brown. See this shit here?"
He waves at the soupy brown decor.
"All this shit is jumping out of my colour! I put on all brown last night. I was going to take my wife out to dinner. Shit, I took that shit off, man. It was raining and shit. I said, wait a minute! Let me get this shit off! So I wore a l'il short blazer bolero jacket, put this belt on … I was alright then. I had all that brown on and I said Goddamn!
"That's the second time I done that in my life. I did it once and walked down 8th Avenue. A brown suit I had made, big shoulders … maybe 35 years ago. I looked in the mirror and didn't see myself.
"So I stopped and bought me a yellow tie.
"I got shit to cheer me up. Shit I wear after six. Shit I wear after 12. Shit I wear in the day time. Shit I wear while I'm riding my horse."
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Sartorials aside, what strikes me about the contemporary Davis is his return to melody. What hurt about the jungle-funk sweat music of his early 70s outfits was its terrible murk: there's nothing songful in that iron-ore sound. And Miles loves the tang of melody, the cut of a good song: which justifies the caresses bestowed on Time After Time. In concert, he patiently untangles long chains of carefully tuned phrases, and whole songs are written. The comparison is stylistically farfetched, but I was reminded of the great Ellingtonian tenorman Ben Webster, who spent his autumnal years playing tunes so tenderly that he didn't bother to improvise around them.
"Ben? Well, you know, the way Ben's tone was … I can hear him playing now in my head. That's a style that's almost gone now. Who plays like that? Lucky Thompson? What's Lucky doing now?"
Lucky Thompson, the brilliant tenorman, reportedly a casualty – sick and neglected, somewhere in the south.
"South of where? France? Well, that style's almost gone. On a song like Human Nature you have to play the right thing. And the right thing is around the melody. I learned that stuff from Coleman Hawkins. Coleman could play a melody, get ad-libs, run the chords – and you still heard the melody. I play Human Nature, varies every night. After I play the melody, that tag on the end is mine to have fun with. It's in another key … uh, D natural. Move up a step or so to F natural. Then you can play it any way you want to."
It's a show of strength when a musician like Davis chooses to treat such tunes as standards. Melody might be dying in pop music: if, in Frank Zappa's words, it's all just hamburgers, made for people to dance to, whither a good tune?
"What d'you mean? How's it gonna die, man? With all those singers?"
Aren't they singing hooks, not melodies?
"Just hooks? Well, you see," says Miles, putting down his pen, "the way you're talkin', Richard, it's from listening to too many tapes. And all that shit starts running together. Of course there's hooks in songs. But there's still melodies to be played. I got one of them on that tape over there … what's that thing by Toto, something about Africa? That's a nice melody! I can play that melody!
"You don't have to do like Wynton Marsalis and play Stardust and that shit. That's way back then. Those operas are all old. Tosca and all that shit. Why keep repeating that shit? Why can't Human Nature be a standard? It fits. A standard fits like a thoroughbred. The melody and everything is just right, and every time you hear it you want to hear it some more. And you leave enough of it to know what you want to hear again. When you hear it again, the same feeling comes over you. Time After Time will be a standard, partly because I played it, partly because Cyndi sang it, but it's also a good melody. On oboe, accordion, everything.
"I sat down at the piano last night and the first thing that came into my head was dah-dah-dah … All the Things You Are. That little part in there came right out of my fingers, man. That's the reason the song's a standard. 'You are the things I love …' "Who wrote that?"
Jerome Kern.
"Yeah? That's a great song. But look at the stuff Paul and the Beatles wrote. A lot of the stuff you'll hear this year will be standards. Muzak has that shit covered. You go up in the elevator and you hear all that stuff.
"I mean, I can't play Honeysuckle Rose. Fuck that. I was playing that shit when I was 12. It's a nice song for a show … there's gotta be some different stuff, man. You can't keep playing The Barber of Seville and stuff."
Even though Miles has frequently found time for classically based music: most notably, in Gil Evans' arrangements for Sketches Of Spain. There was actually talk of a record of Miles playing tunes from Tosca; he grudgingly admits that he likes one song from the show. It seems that the Davis years have been full of projects spoken of and never fulfilled: like, for instance, something new with Gil Evans and George Russell, arguably the two greatest modern jazz composer/arrangers, together. Miles puts some of it down to corporate crap.
"That's George Butler's doing [Butler is "executive producer" on recent Miles]. He's always coming up with some bourgeois idea – like playing with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. To me that doesn't mean anything. It's what we're gonna play.
"In January I went to receive an award in Denmark. A piece was written for me, like my musical life story from the time I started, all that shit is on there … and I did a certain part for it and we recorded the whole piece. We stretched it to about 60 minutes and it'll be a two-record set on Columbia. This music will be like nothing you ever heard before. We may up the scale, a 10-note scale on M-I-L-E-S-D-A-V-I-S. With the texture of the synthesisers and the horns, it's entirely different. George Butler, he ain't even heard it yet, he didn't show any …
"People have me doing all this stuff because he said so. I got all these guys lined up – George Russell, I got Gil writing a piece, Joe Zawinul, I asked Wayne and he said OK … these composers never get a chance to play with an orchestra. But the whole thing never materialised.
"You know I don't like the word jazz, right?" he says, speaking in what might be a conspiratorial whisper. "You've heard that? I hope that's one of the things you've heard. George said about the Copenhagen set – we're gonna call it contemporary jazz. I said, George – no. We're not gonna do that to that music. I told him to put 'new music' down. I had him swear on some bibles and shit so he won't change it with his dumb self. That kinda bourgeois shit of his. I'm not gonna jump up and down so I can play with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. So what?
"This is my last date for Columbia. I signed a contract for Warner Brothers. And you're the first to know."
And so ends the most distinguished of catalogues, dating back nearly 30 years. Davis dislikes the past, but he can't evade the weight of his old work. How does he feel about every "previously unissued" set, music that continues to appear – like the recent 1953 date with the Lighthouse All Stars?
"I never played the Lighthouse." Perhaps this is creative historical editing. "I'm just saying I don't know anything about it. People do that, man. I was playing Time After Time for months and George finally heard it at Montreux – said, We gotta release this record. But he never did. And now CBS tell me, Miles, if we'd had that 45, we'd've sold thousands of those records. But George was too busy with Wynton Marsalis. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I just left."
Seems like I heard a familiar name back there. Marsalis, the brilliant young Turk, seems to have little but contempt for what he sees as the fraudulence of Miles's current work. Yet his own work, as dazzling as it is, seems laden with ironic references to Davis' music of the 60s.
"Sure he's a good player. I talked to Wynton and, uh … George is gonna fuck him up, man, 'cause he's too young to think like an old man. He keeps playing all those things we did in the 60s, and he's a young man. He should take a step and stretch out a little bit. That stuff we played when Coltrane was with us, that kind of modal thing … he's too young to stick to that. And George Wein's VSOP – he made that up because he thought I was coming back and playing with them. If I'd gone with that, look where I'd've ended up – like him, playing that same shit. Nobody wants to hear that. I know, I went through it."
Even so, going through the Davis canon reveals several directions left tantalisingly unfulfilled. Most notably, the unfathomable ESP LP from 1965: severe, abstruse, full of weird chimes at midnight. But Miles disdains the impulse. He touches his lower lip, which looks bruised and wounded from the decades of hard metal pressed on to it.
"These things make critics comfortable because they know exactly what that is. They can wake up drunk and review it and they know exactly what it is –well, it sounds like Miles and Coltrane in the 60s and that guy plays like Herbie Hancock – it's the same fucking thing. I don't wanna hear that with my own ears.
"There's a lot of beautiful ballads besides all those. My Funny Valentine, it's beautiful, but it's been done to death. I'd rather play something that you can learn and like that you don't know. I don't want people to know what I am."
He drops his voice, if that's possible, to an even lower pitch.
"I just don't like to think back to those days. Reminds me of some old bitches I used to know."
I still think that the popular song is in decline as a player's vehicle. Miles could prise the most melancholy emotions from Sinatra tunes like It Never Entered My Mind – and that was mainstream stuff. Maybe today isn't on that level. Will Prince still be played when his time's up?
"You can play Purple Rain. That'll be played. If I say, Prince, write something for me, he'll write for me. When he writes for himself, he'll write for himself. When things are written for people, like dancers, they say I'll go and jump in that corner with a red suit on and feathers. Composer'll say, OK. A reason for writing music makes another style, sometimes. Firebird Suite. Red Shoes. That's a great movie, remember that movie? Dancers make styles, they wear shit that they really need. Aerobics. New music is coming out of that because they like that tempo.
"Space music'd be really something … but they don't have no gravity up there. You couldn't have no downbeat!
"Gil told me once, the only reason a chord will sound wrong is with the next chord. No such thing as a clinker."
But one requires a selective genius to make sense of that choice.
"It's just sound. One sound leads to another."
The sound of You're Under Arrest is like silver ("You mean platinum. That's what you hear"). It's like Miles stepping out of the darkness. But he clearly arranged the set with little but hard musical ends on his mind.
"When we went in, we recorded Tina Turner's What's Love Got To Do With It. But I scratched that. I thought this You're Under Arrest song was gonna be a strong thing. I put that James Brown thing in it, had to separate it, subdivide some of the phrases. I thought it would be strong, but it wasn't. I still have to fix it up a little bit. Then we went into a little political thing …"
The record ends with And Then There Were None – the end of the world. Is he concerned about the imminent closedown?
"No! Hmm! But I'm saying, it could happen. I just want to be in the right place when it happens. It might be in a place you don't like, and you'll say God-DAMN! Why'd it happen while I was here? Why didn't it happen in the summer when I was swimming?"
I think back to a meeting with Sonny Rollins a few weeks before. Rollins, perhaps the only remaining figure of Davis's stature, seemed like a man made lonely by his position of the great soloist. In this kind of music, a man's creative life is fast and short. If you go on longer than a little while, everyone tries to run you down. Does Davis feel he's gone on longer than he was meant to?
"Shit, no," growls the old man, a little amused. "What d'ya mean? You sayin' that shit when it's raining and stuff outside? 'Course, you're used to that stuff in London. You just dye your hair when it rains. Liven things up a little bit."
Don't you find yourself alone up here?
"Uh-uh. Not with the musicians I work with. They end up being your best friends. If I ever leave a will it's not gonna be to my relatives, it's to the people I function around best. You're around musicians all the time. You're not alone.
"I don't know about Sonny, I don't know what kind of rapport he has with his musicians. I started him off. We loved each other, still do. We played different styles which he doesn't play any more. We used to play a style called peckin', broken phrases … nobody does that any more."
When he gets into reminiscing, Miles leafs through years as if it were all some vast scrapbook he can turn to at a moment's notice. Follow some of this.
"That was one of Charlie Parker's styles, because his father was a tap dancer. Ba-ba-bip da-dah-d'n-da dee-da-dee-deh – like tap dancers dance! That rhythm, you hadn't heard no shit like that! Hey, you got it on that tape! Give it to me so I can put something to that rhythm!
"And Bird played like that. Nobody wrote like that before. The first time they saw the music to Moose the Mooche – before that Stravinsky and Alban Berg was the hardest thing. Lucky Thompson was saying – what? What is – ? The notation! Everybody had to learn that.
"That was one style. Sonny and I used to play that style. Now Sonny's the only one playing it, only one who could. And me.
"Coltrane could do it. He started with a style imitating Eddie Lockjaw Davis. But he was something else. People don't know it but it took him a long time. I was going with a girl who was an antique dealer in France. She gave this soprano sax to me and I gave it to Coltrane. I gave that thing to Trane, man, and it's probably still in his hand. He probably died with it in his mouth! He never did take that thing out of his mouth.
"Then I gave him some progressions. I said, Sonny – I mean, Trane. I had them both in the band but I have no tapes of that band, shit. We had this thing by Khatchaturian – you know Rachmaninoff's modulations and stuff like that, three or four keys? I gave him a tone centre of E natural and said, you can play F, G minor, E minor triad, C triad, all these chords … and he'd play all of them. In two bars. In that order, and then in a different order.
"I gave him all these little things, like – play this for me, Trane. And it'd sound like – blablablablublurp.... that's the way it sounds, if you play without stopping you sound like Coltrane. But you have to be doing something. It has to fit the chord, the day, the weather and everything."
Wasn't there a time when Coltrane thought he must have played everything?
"You would say that, you're not Coltrane! He was a very greedy man. Bird was, too. When I was 17,18, my allowance was like $40 a week. My wife would cook something, a little cornbread, and I'd say to Bird, Come on downstairs and eat. And he would eat all of the cornbread! He would sit down and leave a little piece like that and then leave! Did that a couple of times and I said, Fuck Bird! After a couple of times I didn't leave him anything to gobble up.
"Like when Bird died. They asked me to say something about Bird. I said, Man, if I said something about Bird, you wouldn't believe it. Don't ask me that! He was a big hog. A pig. No such thing as no with him. And Trane. And Sonny. Only three people I knew like that. And Dizzy, when he was young. I suppose geniuses are like that.
"Trane would find a note he liked and run all kinds of chords on it. But he was a big hog. I seen him with a whole ounce of dope once, the dope was spilling over and he wouldn't give it to nobody. So much that it was running all over everything! Guys would ask him for some, he'd say no."
Stories, stories – maybe he embellishes, but who knows? Will we ever see his memoirs?
"My wife keeps asking me to do that," he says, almost smiling. "I say, Cicely, I can't tell them things. I can tell you about Coltrane, but I can't tell you about the women.
"Bird – that's why we called him that, he used to squeak on reed a lot – and Trane had the same trouble. When I first recorded Trane, the guy from the record company, said, Miles, who is that out there playing saxophone? I said, man, just record the shit. You want us to play, we'll play, if not we'll go home. I mean, Trane was a big thing to be dropping on people! That was hard shit to just think of!
"We were in California once and he said, I can't make rehearsal. I have to get my teeth fixed. I said, Don't do that. Because he had one tooth out, and that's how he got that sound. Next thing I know, man, he was smiling and he looked like a piano. And I said – Oh shit! There goes the sound!"
There goes the sound. A high trumpet, singing very sweet, played by a funny, shrewd, grouchy, fatherly, fragile man, who has to keep playing. Miles closes his sketchbook. A couple of hours later, he leads his group through nearly two and a half hours of hard music.
A few hours after that, at a breakfast table, I am coughing with fatigue into my coffee. This dark, ancient voice addresses me. "Hey, man. Don't you wave?" I look up. Shit. He's waving to me. The Prince of Darkness is waving to me. I wave back.
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