Victory Is Assured by Stanley Crouch

Author:Stanley Crouch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Liveright

* Charlie Parker: The Complete Savoy & Dial Master Takes.

MILES DAVIS, ROMANTIC HERO

Written on the occasion of Davis’s posthumous induction by Herbie Hancock into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, S.C. resists previous arguments regarding crossover jazz and the electronic Miles to provide a selective and nuanced consideration of Davis’s legacy as a cultural icon and the rituals of masculinity.

FOR THE INNOCENT LISTENER who hasn’t been convinced by the noisy claims and special pleading for the artistic significance of jazz improvisation, Miles Davis’s My Funny Valentine is one of the most persuasive arguments. With this recording, Davis was never to be captured playing again with such virtuosic command of varied emotional detail. It is hard to imagine another rhythm section improvising with more adventurous looseness and equal sensitivity to each moment of the music, and it is equally difficult to imagine another young tenor saxophonist, unaware of the tempo and rhythmic freedom that was going to rise about him, responding with more ease, formal beauty, and eloquence than what we hear from George Coleman on selection after selection. It was, as they say in the business, “One of those nights.”

What made the recording so special when it came out—and makes it even more special in our decadent and pornographic moment—is the depth of its romantic feeling. There is an intimacy and a great tenderness to the music, both wounded and reverential. In 1964, this engagement in romantic expression was still relatively new because male Negro singers had only been recording romantic songs for about twenty-five years, having been forced to leave the province to Caucasians because of the sexual limits of racism. But instrumentalists had no such limitations imposed upon them. Jazzmen had used the Tin Pan Alley love song as a common form of American expression, and the most inspired of them bent the melodies until special sounds came out. The champions in the business of instrumental romance were almost always saxophone players, and the “boudoir saxophone” was a stable force in American music. A player was expected to lean his tone against a song and make it sigh with an erotic fire.

The command of the poetic emotion made Miles Davis the greatest player of romantic songs to emerge since World War II and the innovations of Charlie Parker. By the mid-1950s, he had come into his first period of maturity and developed a style in which his lyricism was so revealing that it brought unexpected pleasure to his listeners. Davis’s improvisation testified to his willingness to share the facts of very introspective feelings. And none of what he did seemed easy. As My Funny Valentine shows, great difficulty was audible in every musical gesture: The notes had points on them; they were slurred and bent suggestively or painfully; a tone could disappear into a sigh or begin as a pitchless whisper and tellingly work its way up into a note. This delicacy could ascend through sudden moans to yelps or descend to dark growls devoid of vibrato that were nearly embarrassing in their exposure.

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