Miles Davis

The Definitive Biography

Ian Carr

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780007481941

The acclaimed classic biography, now available as an ebook.

Please note that this edition does not include illustrations.

ONE

Miles Dewey Davis III

‘I just got on to the trumpet and studied and played.’¹

Miles Davis

Miles Davis was born in Alton, Illinois, on 26 May 1926, and a year later his family moved south to East St Louis, a small town on the east side of the Mississippi River. There was an older sister, Dorothy, born in 1924, and in 1929 his brother Vernon was born. The family was middle-class and prosperous, having established itself in just two generations since Lincoln and Congress abolished slavery in America. The men of the family were proud, intelligent and self-willed, and the name ‘Miles’ was passed on to the firstborn son of successive generations.

In the days of slavery the Davis family had been musicians and had performed classical string music for the plantation owners. But after Emancipation this musical tradition was broken. For several decades there were only two courses open to Negro musicians: either to be an entertainer for white folks, or to play in clip-joints, brothels or bars. Neither alternative was acceptable to the aristocratic Davis men. Miles’s father (Miles II) wanted to be a musician himself but was emphatically dissuaded:

My father, Miles I, was born six years after the Emancipation (i.e., in 1869) and forbade me to play music because the only place a Negro could play then was in barrel-houses. My father was the most efficient double entry column book-keeper in Arkansas before the coming of the adding machine and white men came to his home under cover of night for him to fix their books.²

It was no illegal ‘fixing’, but at that time no white man wanted it known that his accounts were being done by a black book-keeper. Miles I was eventually able to buy a thousand acres of land in Arkansas and send his son, Miles II (born 1902), to Northwestern College to study dentistry. Miles II worked hard and when the family moved to East St Louis he had a thriving practice and became a substantial landowner, buying a 200-acre ranch on which he raised pedigree hogs and kept horses. This enabled his son, Miles III, to grow up in the open country and to enjoy the pursuits of riding, hunting and fishing. According to his father, he liked long country walks and was an excellent horseman – ‘if he was ever thrown he’d remount immediately and master his mount’.³

The young Miles had the ingredients for a secure and happy boyhood: caring parents, a father with professional status, wealth and property, and a mother, Cleota Henry Davis (born 1900, also in Arkansas) who was dignified and beautiful. However, this meant little if you were black and lived in a city as racist as East St Louis. The Davis family moved into an all-white neighbourhood – a bold and provocative gesture typical of them. But although East St Louis was in the officially Midwest state of Illinois, it was in southern Illinois and racism was still prevalent (many blacks had been murdered there in the infamous and bloody riots of 1917). One of Miles’s earliest memories is of being chased down a street by a white man shouting, ‘Nigger! Nigger!’ Miles, a sensitive boy, never forgot it. However, it was instilled into him that the Davises were special people, and he also found particular inspiration in his paternal uncle Ferdinand, who had attended Harvard University and was well-travelled, stylish, intellectual, a ladies’ man, editor of a magazine called Color, and an authority on black history.

In physique, Miles Davis took after his father, having the same slight, though wiry, frame. He inherited his mother’s good looks – the large, luminous eyes, the straight, finely chiselled nose, and the delicate jawline – and he also felt that his artistic talent, sense of style and love of clothes came from her. His early relationship with her was deeply affected by the racial and social situation. As the wife of a dental surgeon, Miles’s mother was aware that her family had an important place in local society, and she strove to uphold that position. After Emancipation, it was the professional men and ministers of the church who were the heads of the new black society, and they were at pains to get rid of any customs, habits or mannerisms that were too ‘negroid’ or which harked back to slavery. It often happened that leading black citizens became the most fanatical imitators of white society.

The music in the Davis household was limited to the genteel Western variety. Miles’s older sister, Dorothy, played the piano, and he used to peep through the door and watch when she had her piano lessons. His mother played the violin and wanted Miles to take it up. But another side of her musical ability, which she did not reveal to Miles for many years, was always suppressed: she could play the piano and knew the blues. In 1958 he said, ‘I didn’t know until after I’d gone back there for a visit a few years ago, that my mother ever knew one note of the piano. But she sat down one day and played some funky blues. Turned out that my grandmother used to teach organ.’⁴ So complete was the censorship that even the knowledge of his grandmother’s musical proclivities had been kept secret. But his mother did at least buy him two records by Art Tatum and Duke Ellington, and also unwittingly assisted his musical development by frequently putting Miles, Vernon and Dorothy on the train to stay with their grandparents in Arkansas, which had been one of the slave states and was saturated with black music: blues, gospel and worksong, sung by men or women, accompanied by funky guitars. Miles experienced this from the age of six or seven, walking at night on country roads with his uncles and cousins, and also at Saturday-night church services, and the potent music left an indelible impression on him.

In East St Louis, as befitted their social position, the Davis family went to church, but Miles was already showing signs of that sharp intelligence and individualism which were to illuminate and shape his adult life. He had already begun asking awkward questions and expecting honest answers: ‘I went to church when I was very young, but when I was about six, I asked my mother why the church kept calling me a sinner when I hadn’t done anything wrong. When I didn’t get a good answer, I stopped going to church.’⁵ Miles’s mother was also active in community life. Later on, she was to work with such organizations as the Urban League, the aims of which were: ‘To eliminate racial segregation and discrimination in the US, and to help black citizens and other economically and socially disadvantaged groups to share equally in every aspect of American life.’

Although intensely conscious of his social position, Miles’s father did not attempt to blot out the past with the same fanaticism as his wife, nor did he try to ape all the customs of white society; he was proud of his own father and reminisced about his forebears. He also instilled into Miles junior the necessity for self-sufficiency, insisting there was no excuse for being poor. As a result, Miles was, from an early age, money-conscious and frugal. By the time he was ten he was doing a paper round. ‘I got a paper route and it got bigger than I could handle because my customers liked me so much. I just delivered papers the best I could, and minded my business … I saved most of what I made except for buying records.’⁶

From the age of seven or eight, Miles had also been listening regularly to a radio show called ‘Harlem Rhythms’ which featured great black musicians including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington, but also included a few leading white musicians like Bobby Hackett and Harry James. Then when he was nine or ten, his father’s best friend, a medical doctor called Eubank, gave Miles his first trumpet and he had some private music lessons. But by the time he’d reached his teens, Miles had become aware that his mother and father were not getting along well. (They would eventually divorce.) One confrontation occurred on Miles’s thirteenth birthday. His mother wanted to give him a violin as a birthday present but, Miles recalled with irony: ‘My father gave me a (new) trumpet – because he loved my mother so much!’⁷ The choice represented two cultural polarities: the violin was representative of Western ‘serious’ music, and the trumpet (after Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge) had come to symbolize the essence of jazz – a music with non-Western roots. Miles’s mother deeply resented this choice. Furthermore, his father had not only chosen the new instrument, he’d also already chosen the teacher. Elwood Buchanan, a patient of Miles senior, worked for the local education authority as a peripatetic teacher and was an excellent trumpeter. Miles had started playing the trumpet at grade school, and from Buchanan, as well as technical lessons, he learned something of the romantic myths and folklore of jazz: ‘He used to tell us all about jam sessions on the Showboat, about trumpet players like Bobby Hackett and Hal Baker.’⁸

From the start, Miles began to find out things for himself. To achieve breath control, good intonation and a clear sound, it is essential for trumpet players to practise holding long notes, and when Miles first began lessons at school, once a week the class would hold long notes. There was a certain spirit of competition in this activity:

Everybody would fight to play best. Lucky for me, I learned to play the chromatic scale right away. A friend of my father’s brought me a book one night and showed me how to do it so I wouldn’t have to sit there and hold that note all the time … The next day in school I was the belle of the ball!⁹

When Miles went to high school, he received daily lessons from Buchanan, and also joined the school band. The teacher gave him some advice which profoundly influenced Miles’s whole approach to the trumpet. He was told not to play with vibrato: ‘Buchanan didn’t believe in it. He said that all the white guys used it, and the best guys were the black guys who played straight sounds.’¹⁰ He also warned Miles: ‘You’re gonna get old anyway and start shaking.’ From that time on, the young Miles tried to play ‘fast and light and no vibrato’.¹¹

The high school was racially mixed, but Miles had no real friends among the white pupils. He made rapid progress on the trumpet, but came up against racial prejudice. According to his father:

In school competitions he was always the best, but the blue-eyed boys always won first and second prizes. Miles had always to settle for third. The officials, Miles and everybody else knew he should have had first prize. You can’t treat a kid like that and tell him to come out and say the water wasn’t dirty.¹²

The injustice made a deep impression on Miles. Years later, he recalled: ‘It made me so mad I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn. If I hadn’t met that prejudice, I probably wouldn’t have had as much drive in my work.’¹³

The high school band rehearsed twice a week and tried to sound like Count Basie, and soon Miles was also playing at weekends with drums, piano and an alto saxophonist who ‘sounded like Guy Lombardo’s first alto’. He was rising steeply in the estimation of his teacher, Buchanan, who talked of him in glowing terms. The teacher was a drinking companion of trumpeter Clark Terry, who was six years older than Miles and who lived across the river in St Louis. According to Terry, Buchanan was tremendously proud of Miles and used to say: ‘Man, I gotta little cat over there! You gotta come and hear him! He’s playing his ass off!’ He enthused so much that eventually Terry went over to hear Miles play and was deeply impressed. If Clark Terry appreciated Miles’s playing, Miles had an even greater respect for the older man, and said of Terry: ‘I started to play like him. I idolized him’.¹⁴

Shortly after this, Miles met up with his hero again, but was rebuffed. Terry was playing with a band which was hired by the Parks Commission to play at an outdoor athletic and band competition between various Illinois high schools. Miles was competing with the East St Louis high school band and tried to chat to Clark Terry, who was busy eyeing up the numerous pretty girls. Terry recalls: ‘So this kid comes up to me … and I said, “Why don’t you get lost – stop bugging me! I want to look at these girls.” So it turns out it was Miles and I’d forgotten.’

Some time later, when Miles was only sixteen and still at high school, he joined the musicians’ union. This enabled him to work professionally, playing little engagements at social clubs, church halls and other occasional functions in the St Louis area. It was while he was working at the Elks Club, a place where all musicians used to go for after-hours jam sessions, that Miles finally became friends with Clark Terry. The latter dropped by to do some after-hours blowing, and on his way upstairs heard a trumpet player he couldn’t identify, though he ‘knew every horn in town’. The club was on the third floor, and Terry ran all the way upstairs:

And I see this little cat sitting there with his legs crossed and he’s smoking his ass off. So I walk up to him and I say, ‘Hey man, aren’t you the guy …?’ and he says, ‘Yeah, I’m the kid you fluffed off down in Carbondale!’ We always had a big laugh about it afterwards.

After this, the two became firm friends, and Terry became a kind of father figure for the young Miles. Talking of his influences, Miles says:

The main one must have been Terry. My teacher [Buchanan] played like him … he [Terry] and I used to go out to jam and the place would be crowded in ten minutes. He’d come over to my house and ask my father could I go, you know, and he’d take me to a session. Man! We’d play from six o’clock to six the next morning.¹⁵

With Clark Terry as his chaperon and mentor, Miles could rapidly broaden and deepen his experience of the musical activity in the St Louis area. St Louis is the chief city and river port of the state of Missouri and acts as a gateway between South and North. Earlier in the century, it had been a centre for ragtime, and the city was a natural stopping-off point for musicians travelling downstream from Kansas City or Chicago, or upriver from New Orleans. Jam sessions by visiting and local musicians were a prominent feature of musical life around St Louis during the 1930s and 1940s. Miles recalls:

We always played the blues in St Louis. Bands came up on the boats from New Orleans, guys came from Kansas City and O...