Jancis Bautista Professor Aurelea
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Bautista 1 Jancis Bautista Professor Aurelea Mahood English 100 24 November 2016 Miles Davis: An Innovator to Modern Music Miles Davis is regarded as an important figure and visionary in jazz history, directing new pathways from a variety of innovative sounds and forms that rejuvenates music into its highest artistry. A fearless man, Miles pushed boundaries, delivering the unexpected, which transformed music history, creating new territories in artistic and popular styles that impacted many musicians of today. Even more so, he has garnered many fans and critics of different backgrounds and knowledge of music bringing each individual their own opinion, thoughts, ideas and revelations of what music meant to them. I know myself that I have my own experience of Miles Davis; in my senior year of high school in 2016, I played my first Miles Davis tune, Blue in Green, in our Jazz combos. It was our first reading of the tune and I played tenor saxophone with the rhythm section of our band. I felt every chord with sensitivity- flooding with emotions that I could not describe the divine of music. On that day, right after school I bolted home and eager to listen to Miles Davis’ recording of the tune. It was even more beautiful than I imagined. His lyrical and open sound touched my heart as his Harmon muted trumpet buzzed through my ears, along with Bill Evans’ soft touch on Bautista 2 the piano and Paul Chamber’s warm bass lines complimenting every note Miles plays. It was an unforgettable moment. It has been almost 25 years since Miles Davis passed away from pneumonia and respiratory failure, yet even to this day, I am so amazed of his music being the fact that I am far away from such generation of musicians. Through this anthology, I hope to illustrate through different sources of recordings, and articles why Miles Davis was an innovator of music. These various sources are ordered as accurately by date (though articles are rather spread out at times) from his unexpected start of popularity in the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival to his grounded confidence and arrogance in Bitches Brew (1970). I hope that going through these sources in order can bring an experience to the reader of who Miles Davis really is. Davis’ career encompassed four decades as a jazz musician while introducing new heights of artistry in music for each decade. It is also significant to discuss Miles Davis’ personal life along with his relationships with fellow musicians he has worked with. Davis truly embodied the importance of collaboration, inspiring and cultivating his fellow jazz people about personal creativity, leading people to find their own passion for music. He was able to initiate new sounds and revolutionize music because of his genius and bold personality but he also believed in others who can explore, experiment and rebel against the standards of music. Miles always told his bandmates to not play what’s “there” but to play what’s not “there”. Most of his contemporaries have indicated that wherever Miles goes, the music goes as well. It is with great significance to view Miles as a gatekeeper, opening many gateways that allowed many artist to explore and Bautista 3 expand beyond their own measures, eager to take music in another place. He was a pioneer to a variety of music, delivering his mission to the world to not stop being creative humans. The humble beginnings of Miles Davis then became a star is illustrated in Kofi Natambu’s, Miles Davis: A New Revolution in Sound. While he daringly played difficult compositions of Thelonious Monk, during the second annual Newport Jazz Festival in 1955, it was more significant that “Davis captivated the festival throng with haunting, dynamic solos and brilliant ensemble playing.” (37). It was then in the fifties when he finally “arrived”, clean from drugs- no longer addicted that he was able to straighten his “creative clarity” receiving deals from Prestige Records and soon to be his long lasting and paramount career with Columbia Records (37); through these opportunities, commenced Miles to bring new ideas and innovations that would transform Jazz history. The birth of developing ideas came forth first on his trumpet, changing his tone that “brought a burnished lyricism that was both deeply introspective and fiercely driving all at once.” and his “phrasing emphasizes and focuses on the relationship of space to tempo and melody”, establishing his own aesthetic style (38). Moreover, Miles Davis was able to broaden “expressive possibilities” regarding “musical improvisation and composition” portraying “[a] personal quest” to explore many “complexities and ambiguities” in “emotional and psychological” ways of playing (38). In addition to this, Natambu characterizes Davis as a “social and cultural avatar” to African Americans through his music with an ambition of personal creativity, intellectual independence, and freedom of social and cultural endeavours that defied racial and repressive injustices of the world (38-39). Miles Davis’ rebellious passion Bautista 4 to innovate music turned into a creative and powerful action for social change that synthesized for a progressive future. It is with no doubt that the 1959 Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album was an important landmark for Columbia Records and in Jazz history itself. Featuring his sextet: Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone (except on “Blue in Green”); John Coltrane on tenor saxophone; Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly (on “Freddie Freeloader”) on piano; Paul Chambers on bass; and Jimmy Cobb on drums, Davis experimented with his music basing the album on modality. At that time, it was a revolutionary record contrasting Davis’ and his mentor’s earlier work with bee bop and hard bop. This album established two important aspects of music: harmony and style. In his early days, Davis associated and influenced himself with people such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who were considered “kings” of bee bop; a series of chord changes, harmonic substitutions, modulations and technical melodies were present in bee bop tunes. In addition, improvising on these tunes required an immense amount of virtuosity and technique. An example in contrast to bee bop is Davis’ composition, “So What”, which is a 32 bar piece of only 2 chords: 16 bars of D minor seven, following 8 bars of E flat minor seven and closing with another 8 bars of D minor seven. Davis, on the other hand tossed aside bee bop elements, focusing on scales in terms of structure and melodic inventions through the use of modal chords. It is also crucial to observe Miles’ musical language in improvisation as he flourishes his warm and non-vibrato tone, along with his control of long tones and spaces in the music; it was to the extreme opposite of bee bop’s fast, rapid, and intense style of playing. It is with a total surprise Bautista 5 in the jazz world of 1959 that Miles Davis achieved the level of innovation through simplicity as today it is known to be one of the bestselling jazz records in history. Subsequently, Miles had switched around band members from 1960-1964 after the departure of the Kind of Blue line-up to their own desired paths and it was not until 1965 when he was set with his legendary Second Great Quintet. In an article by Mark C. Gridley focuses on Keith Waters’ The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-68, providing an outline of Waters’ research on Davis’ Quintet through recordings, compositions and stories from the band. Furthermore, simple and scholarly summarization is provided by Gridley, paraphrasing Waters about the groups’ harmonic, rhythmic, and improvisational ambiguities (768). As observed through their studio and live recordings, it is evident that each member had extremely good ‘chops’ (the ability to play their instrument) “effortlessly negotiating between hard bop and free jazz” This established a new period of Miles Davis that “[introduces] the rule-breaking achievements [and innovation] of these extraordinary musicians who collectively improvised with almost magical rapport and achieved the highest level of artistry in jazz” (728). A prime example of that artistry is delineated on the 1967 release of the Second Great Quintet’s Miles Smiles. Miles Davis himself handpicked Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums), bringing innovative and astonishing ideas in improvisation and original works. The extension of modal melodies, tempo, form and meter is further explored abstractly. For example, Saxophonist, Wayne Shorter’s composition “Footprints” starts with a bass line in twelve-eight (12/8) played by Ron Carter throughout the whole piece while drummer, Tony Williams freely incorporates three-over-two Bautista 6 cross rhythms and its four-four (4/4) relation of afro-Cuban and swing rhythms providing different colours for the soloist to improvise over. The improvisational qualities of this recording were not as traditional as they focused more on developing structures on scales taking most of the piano out for comping chord changes, taking the possibility of the soloist to switch chords over the bass notes, however they want. The band members themselves had the ability to also veer off from the tune, moving harmonies and rhythm into another dimension and plainly going back like it was planned. Much of the album simply derives into the mixture of hard bop and free jazz making this album an innovative venture of Miles Davis. Through their magnificent chemistry and flexible communication that transcended jazz beyond its limitations. It is important to include Miles Davis’ contribution to the development of improvisation and his aspirations of artistic freedom through collaboration as analyzed on Christopher Smith’s article, A sense of the Possible, Miles Davis and the Semiotics of Improvised Performance, in which Smith uses the “Second Great Quintet” (1964-1968) and the “Post-Retirement Bands” (1981-1990) exhibiting the improvisational genius of Miles.