Which is why I have been studying Miles’ work for the past year or so, trying to figure out where (if?) he went wrong. Think about the fact that this guy has been making “jazz” records since the late Forties, and that many of them, way more than any single musician’s share, have become (to borrow the title of one) milestones. The man has defined at least three eras in American music – can Dylan say the same? Never mind that when In a Silent Way came out it had the same effect as Charlie Parker’s renaissance and influence on his followers – i.e., it ruined a whole generation of musicians who were so swept by its brilliant departure that they could do nothing but slavishly imitate so every goddamn album you heard dribbled the same watered-down-kitsch-copy of Miles’ electric cathedral – it remains that now, seven years later. In a Silent Way not only has not dated but stands with Sketches of Spain and a few other Miles albums as one of the sonic monuments of our time. And that’s neither hype nor hyperbole.
But since then, the years, private problems, celebrityhood, hipper-than-thous – something, whatever, has taken its toll. On the Corner was garbage. So was, with the possible exception of one bit I have been told about but am unable to find in its four unbounded 30-minute sides, Miles Davis in Concert, Big Fun and Get Up with It were largely left-overs, with predictably erratic results. The former’s “Go Ahead John” was a cooker, but too much of the rest was something never previously expected of Miles, simple ideas repeated for whole sides, up to a half hour each, in an electronicized receptiveness and distortion-for-its-own-sake that may have been intended as hypnotic but ended up merely static. What was perhaps even more disturbing was that once you got past the predictability and disappointment and analyzed the actual content of the music, it took Miles past his traditional (and traditionally heart-wrenching) penchant for sustained moods of deep sadness into a new area redolent more of a by turns muzzy and metallic unhappiness. He should have called one of these albums Kind of Grim. And mere unhappiness, elaborated at whatever electro-technocratic prolixity, is not nearly the same as anguish.
Much of Miles’ finest music, from Blue Moods to “Prayer” on
Porgy and Bess to Sketches to My Funny Valentine, has been about inner pain
translated into a deep mourning poetry so intense and distilled that there have
been times when I (and others have reported similar reactions) have been almost
literally unable to take it. I have always been offended when people ask me to
take off any jazz record because they find it “depressing,” but secretly I
always knew what they meant. Because there were times when I found Miles’
anguish not purgative but depressing, when I had to yank Jack Johnson out of
the 8-track deck because I could not drive to the laundromat with such a weight
on my heart; but I also knew the reason why I (and, if I may be presumptuous,
the nebulous anti-jazz people I just mentioned) was depressed: because at that
moment there was something wrong with me, of a severity that could reach by
degrees from my consciousness to my heart to my soul; because I was sweeping
some deep latent anguish under the emotional carpet, or not confronting myself
on some primal level – and Miles cut through to that level. His music was that
powerful: it exposed me to myself, to my own falsity, to my own cowardice in
the face of dread of staved-off pain. Because make no mistake, Miles
understands pain – and he will pry it out of your soul’s very core when he hits
his supreme note and you happen, coincidentally, to be a bit of an open
emotional wound at that moment yourself. It is this gift for open-heart surgery
that makes him the supreme artist that he is. So, obviously, I am damned if I
am going to shrug him off at this point. I am going to tear these fucking
records apart and find out what the source of the cancer running through them
is, praying for cure....."
