by Brian Karsten

A Chemistry and Biochemistry major, Brian Karsten wrote this essay for Tim Bradford’s “Spirituals to Hip-Hop” class.

On July 30, 1969, the album In a Silent Way by Miles Davis was released by Columbia Records, marking the official beginning of Davis’s electric period. Its release came ten days after the first human stepped foot on the surface of the moon, ten years since the release of Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, twenty-four years since the first successful detonation of the atomic bomb, and just shy of forty years since the invention of the electric guitar. By 1969 Miles Davis had done it all, and his place in the history of Jazz as an indispensable pioneer of hard bop, cool jazz, third stream, modal jazz, and post-bop was all but assured. As Jazz’s presiding Prince of Darkness, he held an awed sway over the younger generation of Jazz musicians akin to fear. One day history would speak of him in the same breath as Parker, Armstrong, Chaplin, and Picasso.

But the times were changing fast and Davis felt it acutely and excruciatingly. Even back in 1965, in the course of a series of dates at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago, the members of Davis’s band felt stultified by the rote calisthenics of the hard-bop repertoire they’d sprinted through on so many nights before, so they conspired one night to play “anti-music” for their performance to shake out their cobwebs. They didn’t tell Davis about their decision, but as Wayne Shorter tells it, when they started up, straining to play contrary to all expectations, he didn’t even flinch (MilesDavis.com). Even then, a hunger was beginning to grow in him. And it would soon fester to an unbearable level a few years later in response to the galvanic funk and psychedelic rock his second wife, the iconic Betty Mabrey Davis would introduce him to and which he wouldn’t have been able to escape on the radio wherever he went.

By the late 1960s Jazz was no longer the folk music it had been at the time of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions nor was it any longer the pop force of Duke Ellington’s hit-making or the hipster shibboleth epitomized by the work of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. It had now begun its rapid ascent into the annals of high culture, to be included in such worthy company as the contested script of Pericles and the waltzes of Johann Strauss junior and senior. Bird and the blues were fading to a distant memory, and Rodrigo and Webern were becoming its fast friends.

The album In a Silent Way was Davis’s most radical statement up to that point, stretching, blurring and grafting form to his arcane will via the studious splicing of Teo Macero. But despite its willful flaunting of the traditional small-group Jazz form of intro-head-solo-head, the music itself is undeniably accessible in its own meditative, dreamlike way; not nearly as noisy or bracing as its immediate successors Bitches Brew and A Tribute to Jack Johnson. It is with In a Silent Way’s liberated group dynamic that Davis would set the stage for all the mad, esoteric directions in his music that were to follow.

Artists such as Miles Davis who emerged in the post-war years of the twentieth century were faced with a choice regarding the cultural chaos their epoch represented: they could embrace it, pretend it wasn’t there, or, as Miles would have it, they could yoke it to their will. The difference between the nature of freedom in the music of Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis stems from the difference in their attitude toward chaos in art. Coleman’s work found its apotheosis in embodying a kind of Taoist flow with chaos, whereas Davis desired a way of conquering it, a way of deliberately shrinking its borders and incorporating the acquired land into the greater kingdom of his art. Coleman strived for freedom over control, where Davis sought control over freedom.

It can be surprisingly difficult on a first listen of In a Silent Way to know where exactly to rest your ear. The “melody” of this music, if such a milquetoast term could encapsulate it, doesn’t sit still for you to easily discern and digest it. Instead, it flits elusively around the sound field of the recording from player to player, as transient and uncertain as an electron bouncing about its orbital. Joe Zawinul, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea blow dissolving smoke rings into the air from their electric keys while Davis, Wayne Shorter, and John Mclaughlin take turns tracing shapes in the brooding blue with trumpet, soprano saxophone, and electric guitar. It is only Tony Williams and Dave Holland who don’t seem to compete for your attention, who content themselves chugging away at a minimal, purely propulsive groove that may be the key to the album’s intoxicating hypnagogia.

Rather than simple collections of interpreted compositions, the works of this period are all encyclopedic documents in their own right, each chronicling the range and depth of the collective voice of a distinct band of players. This is a far cry from what was the Rock genre’s own highest realization of collective improvisation, the Grateful Dead, which honed over its long career a single and singular sound which would have been irretrievably lost without every one of its members’ personalized contributions. Davis’s bands each blazed their own trail through separate, distinct locales within his wider vision, with every new group forging on beyond the last to undiscovered dialects and vistas, leaving the old haunts behind, forgotten.

Davis would move on from the nightlands of In a Silent Way to record what is perhaps the most enduringly popular record of this period, Bitches Brew, with a band that on many of its tracks was in excess of ten players. Unlike with In a Silent Way, the sound of the rhythm section on Bitches Brew is dynamic, shambolic, and wildly funky; like the bristling cloud of drums in “Spanish Key” that menaces the troupe of soloists like an advancing army. From its grotesque, fantastical sense of dance and raw, cryptic emotional intensity emerges a palpable undercurrent of mysticism, only reinforced by its iconic cover art and obscure track titles. A mysticism which imbues the music with a cerebral, primordial mood that is unlike anything in the canon of popular music. In this same vein, Bitches Brew is also significant for a timbral, textural richness which hadn’t been present to nearly the same degree in his prior catalog, even in his mid-’60s large ensemble collaborations with composer/arranger Gil Evans. It is on Bitches Brew where the sharp blat of trumpet commingles with the crystalline ring of electric piano, the dark mumble of bass clarinet, and the sizzling twang of electric guitar.

Via these rhythmic, harmonic, and timbral innovations, Davis massively expanded the lexicon of the inchoate Jazz Fusion genre in a way altogether unequaled since, either by the subsequent efforts of the members of his bands or the leagues of disciples that would follow in his footsteps in later decades. In this way he was much like one of his prime inspirations during this time, Jimi Hendrix, who in his own short career uncovered the full sonic capacity of the electric guitar, leaving behind a legacy of extraordinarily varied sounds and effects, and whose influence would come to be deeply felt in Davis’s next album, A Tribute to Jack Johnson.

The guitarist John McLaughlin would turn out to be Miles Davis’s not-so-secret weapon during this time. By the end of his tenure in Davis’s band, McLaughlin was just as good at melting faces and winding through contortionist chromatic passages as he was at pummeling a riff into your long-term memory. For Jack Johnson in particular, McLaughlin runs the gamut of Rock guitar stylings, proving entirely comfortable drawing from hard-nosed blues just as well as spaced-out psychedelia. Due in no small part to John Mclaughlin’s protean virtuosity, Jack Johnson would be the most Rock adjacent album of this period, fusing its pyrotechnics seamlessly with the cool intellectualism of Jazz. For much of its runtime, Davis’s backing band is built of a plausibly Woodstock-ready lineup of flashy guitar, lilting bass, ham-handed drums, and added keys for color. The accompaniment is purposely kept simple and driving to showcase without intrusion the interplay between Davis and Mclaughlin (and later Shorter and Hancock). The first track, “Right Off”, culminates in McLaughlin working out the heavy lick of the Theme from Jack Johnson in an appropriately clipped and nervy manner, as if imitating some long-haired pseudo-virtuoso fresh from cutting his teeth in Haight-Ashbury. And the second, final cut “Yesternow” follows a similar scheme, slowly accelerating over its twenty-five-minute runtime from its atmospheric beginning to end with a funky, catchy jam titled after country star Willie Nelson, leading out the record on a decidedly poptimistic note.

If Jack Johnson was Davis’s most immediately compelling record of this period, then On the Corner was perhaps its single most immediately confronting and perplexing. Opening with a gritty, zigzagging racket reminiscent of the hectic bustle of crosstown traffic, the album continues on to include some of the boldest examples of Teo Macero’s innovative production. This can be heard in the panning drums and teleporting soloists of “Black Satin” as well as the simmering, claustrophobic mix of “Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X” that’s like ducking through Times Square with each overbearing instrument playing some character in the crowd gesticulating to grab your attention. Another peculiarity of this record is that Davis plays more electric organ on it than trumpet, seeming to be fascinated at this point in his career with the stark juxtaposition of pure, static blocks of chordal color with the massive, grinding funk his band was playing, like the aural equivalent of a Rothko canvas leaning against a scrap heap.

In all its funky eccentricity, On the Corner represents a transition from the world-beating semi-accessibility of In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and Jack Johnson into the abstract sprawl of future efforts like Get Up With It, Agharta, and the sinister event horizon of Dark Magus. By the time Magus was recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 1974, Miles Davis had ceased to rehearse his bands to any substantial capacity, instead largely allowing them to run free with their own private illusions of who he was and what he was about. The whole affair is a confused jumble of egos that still somehow manages to coalesce in the common goal of pleasing their leader. As a result, the sound of Magus is rough, crowded, pungent, decadent. It is also incredibly heavy, so much so that it threatens to collapse under its own weight, and over its hour and forty minutes it does, crumbling like a sinkhole in slow motion, the pieces of its volcanic terrain gradually swallowed up by the growing darkness between its cracks. Miles’s trumpet is utterly drenched in effects, played almost exclusively in tuneless, high-pitched staccato stabs. Any semblance of song-form is dispensed with, and the music finds a total, twisted freedom all the equal of Ornette Coleman’s insolent Free Jazz. Except that while Coleman’s freedom represented a new beginning, Dark Magus represented something like a death spiral, having come on the eve of Davis’s five-year retirement from music and notorious descent into depression, drugs, and sex addiction.

Listening in to the murk of Dark Magus, you can hear the smoldering phantom of Miles as he glides across the stage, lingering in turn beside each green-faced player struggling to keep up, to prove himself; the hunched, vulture-like manifestation of all their creative hunger and insecurity.

He knows they are terrified of him, and he turns his back to the crowd so they can look him right in his face, glaring behind the blackened mirrors of his sunglasses and licking his scarred lips like a feral beast, hideously resplendent in technicolor spots and stripes. Like any good conductor, he lets them believe any wrong note (how could there be any wrong notes?) is their death.

He raises the frigid steel to his mouth and turns back around. Every eye is on him as they had been since the instant he first walked out on stage, but he doesn’t need to look back. He knows their ears are all full of the hardest, wildest funk any of them have ever heard.

There was the familiar sour buzz and all the gnawing pain from his anemia, his arthritis, his bursitis, left his mind. The stage lights were hotter than the sun and all the young cats were sweating bullets, but he was dry as a bone. They called him a sellout; he’ll show them a sellout.

Distantly, his horn cut through the gale with a sound that was unmistakably his, like the smoky whisper of his speaking voice, lost while recovering from an operation years ago all because he couldn’t control his temper, couldn’t keep from raising his voice to chew out some clueless cat in his band. But now it came out strange, mutated.

Slowly, carefully he looked for himself inside it, playing one note at a time, listening for the sound he’d been listening for his whole life. He was reaching, as he had done so many times in his career before, but this time, for the first time, he wasn’t sure what he was reaching for.

When he was playing with Charlie Parker in the ‘40s he couldn’t play as fast as Bird could, but with one note the world fell silent. Bird couldn’t do that. No one could do that.  His voice, his real voice, was an American treasure all its own, all the equal of the room-filling guffaw of Armstrong’s trumpet, of Sinatra’s smooth-talking songbird, of the sepia rainbow of Ellington’s band, of the acerbic sigh of Billie Holiday. When he played, even the chairs and cash register listened, knowing that any impossibly terse, crystalline phrase that came out of his horn would never be heard again.

He was Jack Johnson: any second the knockout punch would come and you better pray you don’t blink when it does. And just like a bullfighter he made you hold your breath, made you aware that every living second was a miraculous triumph over the rippling oblivion beside him, yet he made it look so easy. Like Picasso.

Once in Barcelona he saw the artist’s paintings of bullfights, each looking as if made by a completely different painter. Through them, he thought he could see the world through Picasso’s eyes. He met the Spaniard in Paris back in 1949 , spoke for a long time with him in fragments of French and English (Troupe 126). He liked him–he always admired a man who knew how to keep his women in line. And he liked the way Picasso looked at him too, with his mad, unspeakable eyes; a god’s eyes. He liked to think the artist was painting him had been painting him in his head the whole time.

Picasso was reaching too. Like Miles, mere mastery was never enough for him. He painted to possess, to ensure that what he saw could never be seen again except in the way he saw it, so that even the first tentative scribblings of the unschooled hand would inevitably resemble him.

So it would be with Davis. His music would subsume the unrefined noise of the rock and rollers, the funk and soul musicians, and blare it back, transfigured by his genius into a world of primeval sound none of them could have ever imagined.

But it didn’t satisfy him.

Miles Davis was a deeply restless man, dogged by revolving addictions and his own inexorable rage. He was frigid with everyone he knew, and love never lasted long for him. His first wife, Frances Taylor, left him because he was constantly violent towards her, and he left his second wife, Betty Davis, out of paranoid jealousy. She was one of the reasons he went electric in the first place, the one who introduced him to all this racket, to Jimi Hendrix.

Hendrix represented invigorating possibilities for him, a Black man who could mesmerize oceans of stoned white faces while still retaining considerable admiration from his fellow Black musicians. Davis would attend Hendrix’s revered 1970 New-year concert at the Fillmore East, and it was there that he experienced his sound in person, particularly snowed by his performance of “Machine Gun” (Jones).

Listening back to the song’s historic recording immortalized on the 1970 record Band of Gypsys is to marvel from Hendrix’s first notes, strong and full yet shimmering with groovy psychedelic energy, like sunken treasure gleaming up beneath sloshing ocean waves. But it’s at the four-minute mark when he steals the air right out of your lungs. He begins his solo with an atom-splitting wail that seems to go on forever. You don’t hear the note itself, but rather the sound of the air shaking and screaming itself to life around it. Hendrix goes on, and does he go on, playing with a heart-pounding spontaneity that could never be taught but which easily stomps the banality of mere technical skill any day of the week. He truly sounds as if he hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s going to play next, and it doesn’t even matter. Everything he tries he soon finds he can play better than anyone else, and everyone there knows it too (Slowhand indeed). Miles knows it.

Over the next five years Davis would try repeatedly to find some version of that sound for himself (most overtly on “Sivad” off Live/Evil). He would temper his high end to a fierce, piercing vitality, he would run the gauntlet of pedals and effects, and he would restrict his phrasing to short aggressive strikes that would explode suddenly into wild, chromatic paint-flinging freakouts. Previously, there had been a clean, rhetorical order to his playing, in its place was now a turbulently rockist sense of storm and stress. But that ease, that Edenic fervor wasn’t there. Maybe it never was.

***

There is a legendary quotation that Picasso probably never actually said, but which nevertheless effectively crystallizes in its catchy overstatement the immemorial cultural anxiety surrounding all progressive artistic endeavor, an anxiety which the man would have found himself at the center of as the towering, indomitable Jove of the visual art world in the first half of the twentieth century.

It goes: “After Altamira, all is decadence” (Picasso and the Avant-Garde).

Altamira, a cave complex buried under Cantabria, Spain which until the bright, war-torn year of 1868 had sequestered in its cracked and lightless galleries an extensive collection of paintings by prehistoric humans away from the sight of modern eyes.

You can picture him among the many tourists, his coal-hot eyes never quite meeting theirs, though they were all anxiously compelled to stare and drink in the sight of the demigod loitering in their midst.

His face was set like a mask hung in his studio back in Montmartre, every muscle drawn boldly and starkly into its place as by his own brush, but with each starting to show on the face with an errant bristling of wrinkles, vandalized by the belligerent hand of age.

He stood coldly before an impassive sketch in clay and ochre, and they watched his hand rise weightlessly to the height of his chest, the compact fingers clenched and angled down with the wrist, as if holding the apparition of a brush.

It jerks back, suddenly roused from its somnambulism, but the painter does not turn about to regard his audience and their many eyes assimilating every minute twitch of his body. He only glares ahead, blankly.

“What is in his mind? Can a man like him even think in words?”

A bison poses serenely in profile, its horned head at the center of the painter’s vision. One of his very first, of a bullfight he went to as a child, flashes across his mind’s eye. He could still recall in undegraded detail the violent thrash of light and shadow: the barbaric gorgeousness that was the novic birth of dark blood in blazing sunlight, the monstrous discord of form between rigid, dauntless matador and rushing, fluid beast, the heavenly rose glow of dust tossed up by boots and hooves. But it was as the scene laboriously emerged on the easel, like figures from a fog, that its world at once became comprehensible, beautiful, submissive to him. It became a portrait of himself, as bull and matador both, a minotaur courted and menaced by the primal strife within him.

Where could these primitive masterworks have possibly come from? They were miraculous, perfect; they succeeded in entirely absorbing their subjects into the sphere of the human intellect for all time, forever expanding the frontiers of the dominion of man into the realm of the form and essence of nature.

We can wonder then where in the private space of his own head he would have fallen between Altamira and the “decadence” that supposedly followed it. Certainly, his own work in its many phases and fixations pursued a lifelong obsession with capturing the naive purity that was exemplified by the art at Altamira. But then what else could Altamira represent but an effortless achievement of that ideal, free of the stink of contrarianism or self-conscious erudition, rendering the artist’s own attempts as works of affectation and pastiche.

For an artist such as him, who had lived through all the nihilating cataclysms of war and cultural metamorphosis in the 20th century, who had sublimated and subsumed them into the sphere of his imagination and made of them great intellectual monuments to stand among the rubble, it would have been understandably profoundly disquieting to uncover these immortal signatures of human genius, secluded in perennial indifference to his existence. Every innovation the man had made, every prospect of innovation he had before him had been easily anticipated and outdone and God was laughing at his hubristic seriousness.

***

Jimi Hendrix’s funeral was the last that Miles Davis would ever attend. A year ago, he had filed for divorce with Betty Davis after accusing her of cheating on him with the guitarist.

There was a jam session held afterwards by several prominent musicians who had known and been inspired by the great musician. Miles refused to play, feeling that it was impossible to provide a requiem that was equal to Hendrix’s legacy.

Five years later, in 1975, when Miles Davis put down his trumpet for what seemed to be the last time, feeling the warmth slowly fill in the impressions left on his fingertips, he found there was little satisfaction to be had in looking back.

He was alone in a prison of mind and body, helplessly cloistered in his own shadowy myth. Somebody would drop by every week or so with his drugs, and that was all.

***

The matador loves and fears the toro in equal measure. It is the canvas, the instrument through which he trumpets his genius into the void, but it is also the brutal tool wielded by fate to inflict back upon him all the bloody repercussions of the boldness of his nature.

Ordinary life is unbearably boring for him, and he keeps living on solely for those first few crucial minutes of treacherous unknowing at the start of each fight, before he has fully learned the bull’s mind, where the nearness of death makes the world shine more vividly and exquisitely than ever before, and the roaring crowd comes crashing into his ears after the silence of each perilous pass.

His career will finally end when he is gored to death, or too old and broken to continue, or too fat and satisfied with fame and glory to care anymore. Until then he will be a god among men. Until then his life will be only reaching for that sight, that sound, that exalted feeling. “¡Olé!”

Works Cited

Berger, John Peter. The Success and Failure of Picasso. Pantheon Books, 1989.

Davis, Miles, with Quincy Troupe. Miles: The Autobiography. Pan Books, 1990.

Jones, Josh.  “When Miles Davis Discovered and then Channeled The Musical Spirit of Jimi Hendrix.” Open Culture.  https://www.openculture.com/2020/02/when-miles-davis-discovered-and-then-channeled-the-musical-spirit-of-jimi-hendrix.html.

MilesDavis.com. https://www.milesdavis.com/albums/the-complete-live-at-the-plugged-nickel-1965/

Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris.  Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 24-May 2, 2010.   https://philamuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/picasso-and-the-avant-garde-in-paris.