So What by John Szwed

Author:John Szwed
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448106462
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER SEVEN

The power of a Miles Davis1 was that he always seemed to be waving back from the other side of Black culture’s transcendable horizon, from the post-liberated side of Black potentiality. That other shore was not emblematic of emancipation. What was over there was freedom from fear of a Black romantic imagination.

GREG TATE

“YOU CAN ALWAYS get another woman.” Or another saxophonist. When Miles heard that Wayne Shorter might be willing to leave the Art Blakey group, he called him in the middle of a rehearsal and offered him the job. But leaving Blakey was no small matter. Art was one of the great post-bop drummers, and the bands he led all developed deep ties to the history of jazz. Still, Shorter was growing restless in that group. Playing with Blakey was something like being in a show, he said. There was a fixed structure to every piece, with no room for variation except in the solos, and even they were determined by the structure.

I had a chance [to hear the Miles Davis Quintet] one night at the Regal Theater in Chicago and we had played before Miles…. Then I went into the audience2 and sat and waited until Miles’ band came on…. I was listening to the power of individualism and subjectivity that was going on with all the players. Cannonball, Coltrane, and whoever was playing piano at the time, probably Wynton Kelly, and Paul Chambers on bass. They opened with a song called “All Blues” and what I heard and felt was this penetrating … it was not a sudden blast with a showlike … bang! … you know. Instead they opened with a tremolo on the piano. The tremolo sounded like a Ravel thing. This tremolo threw a hush over the audience that was different from the Messengers’ kind of opening impact sound of “bang!” … The music seemed to transport the audience to some place they don’t usually go in their everyday life.

“Miles was the man,”3 Ron Carter said. “Guys were killing to get that gig…. They would flatten your tires, put sugar in your gas tank … ’cause that was the gig!” And once Shorter was in it, this was a band that could even rival Miles’ quintet with Coltrane, maybe even surpass it. It was what Amiri Baraka called the “all-time classical hydrogen bomb and switchblade band.”

The new quintet’s first studio recording was E.S.P., completed in Los Angeles in January 1965. It announced its uniqueness in the Davis catalogue by not including any pop songs or ballads. Every piece was written by someone in the band, and most of them were either collectively reworked at the session or changed by Davis. Herbie Hancock recalled Miles’ minimalist techniques as he revised Ron Carter’s composition “Eight-One”:

Miles took the first4 two bars of melody notes and squished them together, and he took out other areas to leave a big space that only the rhythm section would play. To me, it sounded like getting to the essence of the composition.

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