Miles & Me by Quincy Troupe

Author:Quincy Troupe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: african american friendship, black friendship, poetry memoir, poet memoir, musician memoir, book about music, inspirational book, memoir about relationships, memoir about colleagues, memoir about comrades, black memoir, african american memoir, african american author, black author, harlem, new york, greenwich village, east village, jazz trumpet, miles davis memoir, jazz biography, miles davis biography, memoir about friendship, miles davis, jazz memoir, jazz, music, biography, autobiography, biographies
ISBN: 9781609808358
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2018-09-21T18:00:00+00:00

sending our regrets

The Tutu video party reminds me of the annual birthday parties that Miles would throw for himself and a few friends at some great restaurant in Los Angeles or New York, depending on where he was on May 26. A lot of stars came to these parties, like Bill Cosby and his wife, Quincy Jones, Prince, Jasmine Guy, and Lionel Ritchie. Everybody would sit around the birthday table trying to appear cooler than the next person, too hip to even talk to each other. These stars seemed so empty and superficial to Margaret and me. Their lives seemed devoid of passion. So rich and famous and talented, they appeared to be enchanted by themselves, their notoriety, their privilege. So isolated. So detached. So unreal. Partying with the stars was definitely weird.

So in 1990, when we were living in New York, we decided not to attend the next-to-last birthday party that was held out in Los Angeles. Instead, we sent a friend, Teresa Sanchez-Gordon (now Judge Sanchez-Gordon), and her daughter, Maya-Luz, with a huge bouquet of flowers. After the maitre d’ told him who the flowers were from, our friends were able to carry them in to give to Miles personally. Now, both these women are extremely beautiful, as fine as they come. So when they brought the flowers in to Miles with big grins on their faces, he kept looking at them so hard they got a little nervous. They told me Miles’ eyeballs almost fell on the table, he was so amazed. He liked them so much that he invited them to his party, and when they declined, he got up and walked them to the door.

The next day he called me and asked where I was, and how come I hadn’t come. I told him I didn’t like those kind of affairs because I found them boring. After agreeing, he asked me, laughing all the while, about my beautiful friend and her gorgeous daughter, saying with a deep chuckle of appreciation, “Man, they were finer than a motherfucka.” With that I agreed. The following year, in New York (the last year of his life), when he chartered a boat for his birthday party, he didn’t even bother asking us to come because he knew we would turn him down, but we did send birthday greetings.

Around this time Miles got real tight with the pop star Prince and started going out to Minneapolis to play and hang out with him. He loved Prince’s music and his attitude, and the young star idolized Miles. They had been talking about doing a record together ever since I began writing Miles’ book. Somehow it never happened, even though Prince submitted some songs for one of Miles’ albums that didn’t work out.

Something else that never worked out was that I was never able to arrange for Miles to meet our homeboy Chuck Berry. I wanted to see that happen real bad. They were born in the same year and had never met.

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