And naturally there have been compensations: the back-catalogue and the mythology
Posted in General on 26. Aug, 2010
And, naturally, there have been compensations: the back-catalogue and the mythology.Ah, the mythology. There’s always been a sense that you can’t have Miles Davis without mythology, and it’s true You can’t. You might just as well try to have injuns without bows and arrers.Still, you do get the feeling that the Miles Davis image and narrative bank has closed its vault and nailed up the front door, having satisfied itself that its contents are sufficient to the needs of history. Davis has hardened into the kind of icon the Byzantine church would have treasured for its formality, immutability and clarity of gesture These are irreducible images.
We have Miles the Jazz Pantocrator, Miles the Badass Mother of Jazz-Rock, Miles the Half-opened Eighties Christmas Present, and so on; images as unyielding in the mind as a rank of Easter Island statues Actually, they do yield something. They are usually taken to mean one thing: this is what “cool” looks like. Davis was not a man you could get inside.As for the music, it has been allowed to settle since his death, without constantly being subjected to the torsional pressure the trumpeter brought to bear on it by continually reinventing himself It’s as if the music is now free to be itself. Appropriately, Columbia (aka Sony Jazz), which recorded the vast majority of his best and most important work between 1955 and 1985, has since been reprocessing it with a deal of commitment and fidelity (perhaps, dare one suggest it, as a penance for years of neglect and shoddy exploitation).The 10 years since Davis’s death have fled by, musically speaking. The sense is hard to escape of a culture, if not in retreat, then struggling for oxygen on the surface of a financial and creative sinkhole of its own making. Davis was a creature of his times and there is nothing of equivalent weight and buoyancy out there now; nothing so good that it defies, even as it exploits, the gravitational drag of its cultural background. (Wynton Marsalis? Radiohead? Don’t make me laugh.) And the irony of it all is that a fit Davis would have relished the situation.Think what can be done with 10 years.
Between 1959 and 1969, for example, Davis cranked out more great works of art than the average dancing bear manages in three lifetimes. Start with Kind of Blue and trace the curve to In a Silent Way, from modes to Fender Rhodes in an whirl of brilliant things: it goes Sketches of Spain, Someday My Prince Will Come, Seven Steps to Heaven, ESP, Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Filles de Killimanjaro. Then there’s the live recordings, from New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Stockholm, Antibes, Berlin, most of which stand as work-in-process X-rays fit to rank with anything of artistic value produced in the Modernist century.It’s an amazing body of work: hard, transparent, crackling with energy, shining with the dews of creativity, yet also elegant, restrained, dark and witheringly chic. Every record Davis made was a fashion statement at the same time that it was high art at the same time that it was popular art at the same time that it was a tool for making the world feel blacker.