parents died, his wife left him. the others would instantly react Jeremy Yudkin It took him a long time to fi nd a to it. They were such incredible new group, but when he did, in musicians. 1965, he got very excited about “I’ve been looking at videos making music again.” from the time, and they play Unlike other fi gures who with their eyes closed. When made important contributions they fi nish soloing — and this is in one jazz style and stayed with particularly true for Miles and it, like Louis Armstrong, “Miles his saxophonist, Wayne Shorter was constantly responding to — you can see them opening what was new, and was himself their eyes and thinking, just for often personally responsible a nanosecond, where am I?” for making the change,” Yudkin Miles Smiles is the second says. Davis is credited with record from this group, which several signifi cant innovations: also included Herbie Hancock, the shift from be-bop to cool in Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. the late 1940s and early 1950s, “It captures a very special mo- the pioneering of a new style in ment in their careers, in their 1959 with the classic recording togetherness,” says Yudkin. Kind of Blue, and the fusion of The tunes “rearrange many of rock and jazz in the late 1960s. the generally received ways of Yudkin gives him credit for two making jazz. Instead of either a other shifts: the introduction twelve-bar blues or a thirty-two- PHOTO BY KALMAN ZABARSKY BY PHOTO in the mid 1950s of hard bop, bar song form, for example, they a “down home, earthy, bluesy, have odd numbers of measures, A Musicologist gritty kind of music,” and the de- odd sectionalization.” The har- velopment of the style that char- monies, the relationship between acterized his work from 1965 to the instrument, the soloing — Smiles with Miles 1967, later called post bop. all are reimagined, he says. The music is “very serious, Post bop was radically new, CFA PROF TRACES EVOLUTION fairly diffi cult, and incorporates and fl eeting. “By the end of the OF A NEW JAZZ STYLE elements of free improvisation 1960s,” Yudkin says, “Miles was and a very close interaction already starting to move in a MILES DAVIS, simultaneously mon- among the players,” Yudkin different direction, adding elec- umental and enigmatic, has says. “Someone would start to tric instruments and moving been a gristmill for jazz schol- do something in their solo, and into fusion.” BARI WALSH ars. One of those he has now drawn into his orbit is Jeremy Yudkin, a widely curious musi- cologist whose past research has run from medieval polyph- ony to the Beatles, Beethoven, and Bartók. In his new book, Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, and the Invention “It’s intense of Post Bop (Indiana University and intimate, Press, 2007), Yudkin tackles and you feel one of Davis’s most inscrutable there’s a new periods, the mid 1960s, when world there.” “the music is very intense and —Jeremy Yudkin, abstract,” Yudkin says. Jazz on Miles Smiles scholarship has largely ignored the period, he adds. Miles Smiles, released in 1967, was the artistic high point in that stretch of Davis’s career, according to Yudkin. He had

In May, International Development and Alumni Relations held a farewell PHOTO BY KELLEY TRAVERS formed a second group, after reception for all of BU’s graduating or departing international students, his quintet of the 1950s had including those from BU Global and the Center for English Language broken up. “The early sixties and Orientation Programs. Among the many gathering in the School were very problematic for him,” of Management atrium are (from left) Antonio Cepeda Barragán says Yudkin, a College of Fine (BU Global’08), Marcela Elizondo (BU Global’08), Nobuhiko Ichimiya (CELOP’08), Cecilia Kane (MET’08), and Livia Fabre (MET’08). Arts associate professor of mu- sicology. “He was ill, both his

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