MILES DAVIS AND THE DOUBLE AUDIENCE

by Martha Bayles

Paper Submitted to the Missouri Historical Society

September 2000

"The moment a Negro writer takes up his pen or sits down to his typewriter he is immediately called upon to solve, consciously or unconsciously, this problem of the double audience. To whom shall he address himself, to his own black group or to white America? Many a Negro writer has fallen down, as it were, between these two stools."

- James Weldon Johnson (1928)

Miles Davis was only two years old when James Weldon Johnson published his essay, "The Dilemma of the Negro Author." Yet the problem named by Johnson did not disappear during Davis's lifetime. Indeed, Davis spent most of his career impaled on the horns of a similar if not identical dilemma: that of the black musician who commands the loyalty of both black and white audiences, but who harbors very different feelings toward each.

That Davis distrusted whites is clear from the countless cuts and slashes left by his razor tongue - injuries sufficiently numerous and at times unfair to make it fashionable in some circles to call him a racist. Davis was not a "racist" (unless by over-use the word is stripped of all meaning); he was a proud, prickly character, or if you prefer an arrogant cuss. He was self-consciously the son of a "race man" who (to quote one of his favorite expressions) "didn't take no shit off nobody" (23). And he was a consummate artist who strove to overcome his own biases and fathom why whites as well as blacks loved his music. To say that he communicated with two audiences is not to disparage him. As Amiri Baraku writes, "Miles's special capacity and ability is to hold up and balance two musical (social) conceptions and express them as (two parts of) a single aesthetic" (qtd. in Tomlinson 240). For the vitality of any art, it may well be that two audiences are better than one.

A previous draft of this essay focused exclusively on Davis's later career, his attention-getting forays into various genres of popular music from rock, soul, and funk in the late 1960s to contemporary rhythm and blues and hip-hop in the 1980s. In its present form it takes a longer view, roughly chronological, because I have come to believe that Davis's fusion and post-fusion music is best understood in the context of his lifelong struggle with the unforgiving conditions faced by the great black jazz musicians of the 1940s and 1950s. In Gerald Early's formulation, these gifted men and women were "neglected by the white Western world because they were black" and "ignored by an essentially grasping, wealth-obsessed society because they were artists" (315). Now that their names are world famous, it's easy to forget the bitter adversity under which they first cultivated their gifts. That adversity is also easy to sentimentalize. I hope to do neither.

Johnson's "problem of the double audience" dovetails with the current academic interest in the contextual dimension of art. At the boundary between musicology and ethnomusicology many scholars now aspire to take music out of the deep freeze of purely formal analysis and hold it up as a warm-blooded process whose full meaning derives from the specific circumstances of its production and reception. This contextual approach seems especially fruitful with jazz, which despite its enshrinement as "America's classical music" is still vitally connected with roots that reach into every nook and cranny of American life.

Yet the contextual approach is controversial. The defenders of traditional formal analysis protest that it neglects the art object. To study context, they argue, is to place every musical work on the same level and to say nothing about the unique qualities that elevate some works above others. Not long ago it was acceptable in academia to dismiss such concerns as reactionary, on the grounds that aesthetic value is but a smokescreen covering the injustices of the political and social status quo. But how does that apply to jazz? To elevate Duke Ellington above Guy Lombardo is not to reinforce the racial caste system under which both lived but to cut against it. By the same token, Ellington's superiority is based on artistry, not color.

My gripe with the contextual approach is that along with neglecting the object it often neglects the context. I agree with Robert Walser that it is worthwhile to analyze musical performances not as isolated objects but as activities "grounded in a web of social practices, histories, and desires" (360). But it is also hard. Ideally the scholar would be a participant-observer at the performance, ears and eyes open to every nuance. Most of us, however, must work with remnants: what is known about a performance space; recollections of those who were present; the odd photograph or film; perhaps a recording's ambient sound. Unable to transport ourselves back to the Fillmore East in 1970, much less to Minton's Playhouse in 1949, we gather what evidence we can and venture our best guess. Yet this, too, is hard. We must scrutinize the time and place, the setting and the characters, as painstakingly as an archivist scrutinizes a score, and use what imagination we possess to decipher the meaning. Among contextualists there is also the danger of basing one's interpretations on simplistic notions of "dialogue" and "contestation" that pre-empt genuine insight.

In the case of Davis, whose career crossed many genres and market niches, to analyze context is a tall order.* Like the cat with nine lives, Davis had a flair for landing on his feet after brushes with oblivion. Some of these brushes were with literal death: a police beating, sickle cell anemia, a sniper bullet, heroin, cocaine, a totaled Lamborghini. Others were with the figurative death of being out of step, a moldy fig, passe. The last thing Davis wanted to do was "sit down in some rocking chair and stop thinking" (Davis and Troupe 329). But that is why we find him so beguiling: we ponder his self-transformations as we would a Rorschach, hoping to discern in their cloudy depths, lyric lines, and spectacular disruptions some revelation about life and art in the twentieth century.

About Davis's later music in particular, opinion remains sharply divided. So protean was he, even when frail and ill, that the world was stunned in 1991 when he finally ran out of lives. Friends and foes came together to pay tribute, but then the battle resumed between the Miles worshipers who genuflect before every clam and wah-wah, and the jazz curators who dismiss every note after 1969 as rank opportunism. Skeptics call this battle silly. Music is music, they say. Either listen to it or don't, but what's the point of labeling and judging it? Davis himself said this, especially when he was within earshot of critics he scorned. But it would be a mistake to say that he had no use for criticism. Read his "Blindfold Tests" with Leonard Feather, and you will see that Davis bristled with critical opinions (123-139). And so did the musicians he respected; his musical colleagues were never yes men. Davis's problem with critics was not that they had opinions but rather that their opinions were sometimes self-indulgent and ill-informed.

Still, the skeptics have a point. What are musical judgments based on? The question has driven European and American modernism for the past century and applies with special force to jazz, a music grossly misjudged by the "serious" musical establishment. And it was perpetually on Davis's mind. This essay will also seek to identify some of the yardsticks by which Davis's later music is judged and, by sketching where those yardsticks came from, weigh their appropriateness. My perspective is not that of a musicologist but that of a critic who has wrestled with the good, the bad, and the ugly in popular music and does not apologize for using such terms.

To begin with a remnant: It is widely reported that in July 1944 Billy Eckstine's band used the front door (as opposed to the rear "colored entrance") of the aptly named Plantation Club in St. Louis, and for this effrontery were promptly fired. Never one to miss a beat, Eckstine went across town to the Riviera Club, a Negro establishment described by Clark Terry as "a big, plush sort of place" (qtd. in Chambers 20). There that amazing band, which included Charlie Parker, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, and Art Blakey, performed with fiery beauty before an enthusiastic black audience - and hurled a lightning bolt of inspiration at an eighteen-year-old trumpeter named Miles Dewey Davis III, who many years later would confess that he had tried in vain all his life to recapture that moment: "I've come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I've never quite got there. I've gotten close, but not all the way there. I'm always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day" (10).

Why in vain? In a career full of musical refulgence, why does Davis insist that this particular lightning struck only once? What made that night unique?

The usual answer is that Davis was witnessing a moment of "pure" artistic genius. The purity of art versus the corruption of commerce was a major theme with the critics who first championed bebop. They saw bebop as art for art's sake, a principled protest against the money-grubbing priorities of the swing era. To Ross Russell, the new music was a "revolt against big bands, arrangers, vertical harmonies, soggy rhythms, non-playing orchestra leaders, Tin Pan Alley - against commercialized music in general" (qtd. in DeVeaux 14). Because of its highbrow origins this way of praising bebop was quickly espoused as the conventional wisdom. But in 1964 Ralph Ellison dissented, writing that "the creators of the [bebop] style were seeking...a fresh form of entertainment which would allow them their fair share of the entertainment market, which had been dominated by whites during the swing era" (283).

The point is developed by Scott DeVeaux: "The insistence that bebop is anticommercial may well continue to suit the needs of contemporary jazz discourse. [...] But it is a singularly poor basis for historical research"(16). DeVeaux argues further that the "progressive" musicians of the swing era, notably Coleman Hawkins, understood "progress" in terms of "the rhetoric of black self-help [...] internalized by hundreds of thousands of African American households eager to escape the cycle of poverty and despair." The swing musician, with his polished appearance and aura of worldly success, was less a bohemian artiste in the European mold than a figure very much in the American mold - a professional (45).

It's easy to see how this image resonated with Davis, the son of a dentist who was "one of the pillars of the black community in East St. Louis" (24). But like so much else in jazz, the professional aspirations of Davis and his peers were complicated by color. As Ellison says, "the entertainment market [...] had been dominated by whites." (emphasis added) So, to return to that magical night at the Riviera Club, it also mattered to young Davis that the audience cheering for Bird and Diz were black. In the prologue of his autobiography he stresses that "black people in St. Louis love their music, but they want their music right. So you know what they were doing at the Riviera" (9).

These same themes, polished professionalism and the discriminating taste of the black audience, are intertwined in Davis's account of the famous cutting sessions at Minton's Playhouse on 118th Street in Harlem:

People who came to Minton's wore suits and ties because they were copying the way people like Duke Ellington or Jimmie Lunceford dressed. Man, they was cleaner than a motherfucker. But to get into Minton's didn't cost anything. It cost something like two dollars if you sat at one of the tables, which had white linen tablecloths on them and flowers in little glass vases. It was a nice place - much nicer than the clubs on 52nd Street. (53)

Davis adds that Minton's did not just cater to "society black people" but also to ordinary folk. Indeed, he makes a point of describing how "a regular street guy who just loved to listen" once enforced Minton's high musical standards by dragging a "no-playing cat" off the bandstand and outside for a good ass-kicking (54).

In sharp contrast to his warm memory of Minton's is Davis's chilly recollection of the jazz clubs on 52nd Street. "There were some good white people who were brave enough to come up to Minton's," he concedes, but "you went to 52nd Street to make money and be seen by white music critics and white people." Not only that, but "no matter how good the music sounded down on 52nd Street, it wasn't as hot or as innovative as it was uptown at Minton's." As for the white critics who "tried to act like they discovered" bebop on 52nd Street, "that kind of dishonest shit makes me sick to my stomach. [...] The musicians and the people who really loved and respected bebop and the truth know that the real thing happened up in Harlem" (55).

Davis also paints 52nd Street as a magnet for white adventurers for whom bebop meant not the high life but the low. These were the people Ellison had in mind when he compared Louis Armstrong's "make-believe role of clown" with Parker's public persona as "a sacrificial figure whose struggles against personal chaos, onstage and off, served as entertainment for a ravenous, sensation-starved, culturally disoriented public" (261). Ellison clarifies which public he means: "Race is an active factor here, though not in the usual sense. When the jazz drummer Art Blakey was asked about Parker's meaning for Negroes, he replied, 'They never heard of him.' Parker's artistic success and highly publicized death have changed all that today, but interestingly enough, Bird was indeed a 'white' hero" (262). Whites loved Parker's music, but some of them were also the voyeurs of his self-immolation.

During the Harlem Renaissance, when Johnson wrote about the "double audience problem," the whites he had in mind were genteel, puritanical - and inclined to "stencil" the Negro as either "a simple, indolent, docile, improvident peasant" or "an impulsive, irrational, passionate savage" (478). Two decades later, the white cult of Bird was anti-genteel, anti-puritanical - and inclined to stencil the Negro as a role model for would-be hipsters, as described most candidly by Norman Mailer: "The Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, [...] relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, [...] For jazz is orgasm" ( 4). Plus ca change...

Having suggested that two audiences are better than one, I now offer in evidence those European and American modernists who, during jazz's lifetime, came to believe that one audience was too many. This introverted tendency first appeared in 1918, when Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna, which sponsored concerts by invitation only and no press allowed. By 1958 it reached the point where Milton Babbitt could title a famous essay, "Who Cares If You Listen?" For Babbitt the progress of music was similar to that of science, "the result of a half-century of revolution in musical thought...whose nature and consequences can be compared only with, and in many respects are closely analogous to, those of the mid-nineteenth-century revolution in mathematics and the twentieth-century revolution in theoretical physics" (154).

Jazz musicians, too, believed in progress. Remarked Hawkins in 1946: "Look at what medicine and science have accomplished in the last twenty or thirty years. That's the way it should be in music"(qtd. in DeVeaux 42). But consider the difference: Babbitt, who worked in the academy, compares music with theoretical physics, an abstract realm remote from most people's lives; Hawkins, who worked in show business, compares it with medicine.

The idea of a "pure" art uncontaminated by contact with the popular audience - or the profit motive - is a modernist shibboleth. Just as it does not describe bebop, it does not describe the greatest composers. Observes Henry Pleasants: "Both Bach and Beethoven knew perfectly well how to address themselves to a large lay public, and both of them did it, repeatedly and successfully" (143). Nor is this of merely pragmatic concern. High art arises from popular art and must sustain a connection to it or else lose all vitality. This is what happened to total serialism, the method of composition practiced by Babbitt, as well as to the other branches of modernism that pursued noise, aleatory (random) experiments, and the holy grail of total freedom. These composers didn't care if the audience listened, and the audience returned the compliment.

I am not forgetting that Davis (following Parker) turned his back on the audience - isn't that a bandstand version of Babbitt? But here again, jazz is different, and part of the difference has to do with the double audience. By all accounts Davis's coldest contempt was saved for ignorant white fans (and for "no-playing" black pretenders). Further, Davis's contempt, unlike Babbitt's, was directed at an audience who did listen. The problem, for black jazz musicians, was that listening often led to larceny. Amiri Baraka calls it "the Great Music Robbery": the seemingly inexorable process by which successive styles of African-American music have been most profitably exploited not by the artists who created them but by white imitators working in a white-controlled industry (qtd. in DeVeaux 19). To Baraka this dynamic suggests that the capitalist system is inherently racist. Some beboppers gave lip service to this idea (as did many jazz musicians in the 1960s). But as Ellison saw, the beboppers were not anti-commercial. Their struggle was not for socialist revolution but for their rightful piece of the capitalist pie.

This casts fresh light on Davis's back turning. Like the posturing of many of today's "political" entertainers, it was both an outlet for resentment and a clever marketing device. As Davis reportedly quipped after rebuffing a white female fan: "When you have stock in Con Edison and make all the money I make, you have to act the way people expect you to act - they want me to be their evil nigger, and that's what I'm ready to be" (qtd. in Crouch 33).

But posturing is not art. Beyond commercial success, a musician of Davis's caliber aspires to the social esteem due any serious artist. DeVeaux notes that during the swing era a version of this esteem existed "within the black community" toward the bandleaders and musicians who "had proved their worth in open competition with their white counterparts" (27). These people had cultural authority - something taken for granted by the composer-theoreticians of European modernism but trickier to come by on an American bandstand. With acuity DeVeaux describes bebop as the offspring of this cultural authority, born in the narrow but fertile space between the familiar material the public wants and the innovative material it is willing to handle. When the black popular audience called for the blues, the Eckstine band "reacted by adding an ironic layer of complexity that (not incidentally) flaunted their special skills. [...] Yet it worked. Instead of parody, black audiences around the country heard a sophisticated updating of the old blues sound, and they clamored for more" (340-341).

A glorious moment, but short lived. "People still talk about that legendary Billy Eckstine band," Eckstine said later. "Man! The legendary Billy Eckstine was about to starve with that motherfucker" (qtd. in DeVeaux 339). As bebop grew more dense and virtuosic, the black popular audience turned toward the more accessible pleasures of rhythm and blues, leaving a core of loyal fans but no reliable market niche. The ravages of heroin, Parker's death, and the condescension of the mainstream media only made matters worse. For Davis as for many others, the sweet taste of success in Europe was made bitter by the fact that "whatever we played over there, right or wrong, was cheered, [...] and when we came back over here [...] [we] couldn't even get no work" (129). In the early 1950s he succumbed to heroin, and his talented debut came close to being a mere footnote in the history of jazz.

Then the cat landed on his feet, with a vengeance. Critics still debate the merits of Davis's Birth of the Cool recordings. To Andre Hodeir they represented "a new classicism," taking the necessary next step beyond the "spectacular effects" of bebop ("Miles Davis" 36-37). To Max Harrison their "muted colors" and "lucid proportions" were nothing new, these "'cool' possibilities" having always been present in jazz (48-49). To Stanley Crouch the Birth of the Cool was merely "another failed attempt to marry jazz to European devices," and Davis's subsequent collaborations with Gil Evans (Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain) mere "pastel versions of European colors" (39). Nevertheless, all parties agree that the new style was popular with whites - as was Kind of Blue, described by Gary Giddins as "so accessible few people recognized the album for the insurrection it was" (Visions 349). This "insurrection" remains the only jazz album that many whites own.

When Gerry Mulligan moved to California in the early 1950s, the cool sound became the immensely popular West Coast sound as developed by Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Jimmy Guiffre, Chet Baker, and others. Because its leading figures were white, the media and recording industry played up the West Coast style, and in those racially tense times a reaction was bound to set in: it was called hard bop. By 1970 Ron Wellburn, an ardent proponent of the "black aesthetic," would describe hard bop in these terms:

Percussionist Art Blakey has made several trips to Africa since the mid-forties. When he returned in 1955, he literally brought in a drum fever, which served as the primary impetus to the black musician's reaction to the West Coast "cool," a predominantly white jazz musicians' thing that had sucked its blood from Lester Young and Miles Davis back in 1949. (130)

Why does Wellburn condemn cool but not Davis? The answer is simple: Davis also helped to create hard bop. Giddins puts it in a nutshell: "The warring subcultures, West Coast jazz (cool) and East Coast jazz (hard bop) had the same midwestern parent: one Miles Dewey Davis" (Visions 341). To the yang of hard bop Davis brought stillness, melodic beauty, and understatement; to the yin of cool he brought rich sonority, blues feeling, and an enriched rhythmic capacity that moved beyond swing to funk. By refusing to color-code either his music or his audience, Davis rose at the end of the 1950s to the summit of artistic excellence.

Then the ground shifted. During the 1960s American music underwent drastic change that would confound even Davis. Legend has it that jazz was born in a brothel. If so, then perhaps it can be compared with the brothel-born infant brought before King Solomon, and black and white America with the two harlots who claimed to be its mother. Solomon said, "Bring me a sword. Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other." Everyone knows what happened next. The first woman cried, "Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means slay it." The second woman said, "It shall be neither mine nor yours; divide it." And wise Solomon gave the infant to the first, declaring, "She is its true mother" (1 Kings 3.16-28).

Yet here the analogy breaks down, because jazz did not remain whole. Davis was well positioned to play Solomon, being intimately familiar with every part of child: rhythm, shapely melody, and sophisticated harmony. And for a while he exerted his best musical wisdom. But the case was too complicated, involving not only the racial parentage of jazz but also the following three changes: first, the transformation of jazz into a high-minded yet esoteric art music; second, the emergence of a large, enthusiastic, racially mixed audience for popular music; and third, a sea change in Western music-making that would pervasively alter the relationship between aural and visual media. Each of these three changes had an impact on Miles Davis.

Consider first the transformation of jazz. Long before the 1960s, jazz had been borrowing musical ideas from European and American modernism. Indeed, it is now widely acknowledged that jazz made better use of modernism than vice versa. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, jazz musicians exploited with stunning speed and originality such modernist ideas as chromatic harmony, modal scales, electronic instruments, and electronically altered sound. It is tricky to take a balanced view of this process, because while many in the "serious" music establishment dismiss jazz as a Johnny-come-lately rummaging in modernism's cast-offs, many in the jazz establishment belittle or deny the role of European ideas.**

This impasse intensified during the 1960s, when the leaders of the New Thing, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor, expanded the sound vocabulary of traditional instruments; eliminated cadential harmony and the modal system; explored polytonality and atonality; adopted irregular meter; and then, increasingly, abolished metric time. The goal, imperfectly achieved, was total improvisatory freedom. Viewed through a European lens, this was a case of artists undertaking the quintessentially modernist project of dissecting the fundamentals of their art. Viewed through the lens of black nationalism, however, it was a case of African American artists purging jazz of a despised European ancestry. In a typical 1968 effusion, Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) declared that "colored peoples' music demands, at least, that many many [sic] half, quarter, etc. tones be sounded, implied, hummed, slurred, that the whole sound of a life get in," while "the 'precision' that Europeans claim with their 'reasonable' scale" produces "only the sounds of an order and reason that patently deny most colored peoples the right to exist" ("Changing Same" 124-125).

The black innovators of New Thing did not embrace all of modernism. For example, they ignored the rigorously mathematical techniques of serialism - perhaps because they were less willing than academic composers to purchase intellectual rigor at the price of musical rigor mortis. They also made scant use of the random or "aleatory" experiments of John Cage. Some scholars equate the concept of "free jazz" with aleatory music, but the two are not equivalent (Budds 80). As African Americans living through the civil rights and black power movements, the New Thing musicians were preoccupied with their own capacity to utilize freedom, not with the role of chance and indeterminacy in the universe. Even when most "out there," they understood their music to be expressing human (and God-given) creative powers. Indeed, they would have agreed with Yehudi Menuhin that "improvisation is not the expression of accident but rather of the accumulated yearnings, dreams and wisdom of our very soul" (qtd. in Croften and Fraser 78).

Baraka insists, rightly, that black jazz musicians never borrow a European idea without giving it a powerful idiomatic twist. In the New Thing the borrowings from modernism are often coupled with (or duplicated by) importations from African, Indian, and other non-Western traditions. This can make tracing the influences on New Thing musicians a bit like retrieving eggs from an omelette. As Giddins writes about Cecil Taylor, "people tend to hear in his music echoes of what they already know. Some find traces of Ellington, Powell, Monk, Silver, or Brubeck; for others, it's Brahms, Stravinsky, Cowell, Messiaen, or Boulez; for still others, it's Africa, the pentatonic scale, and microtones" (Visions 457).

A less sanguine perspective on the New Thing was that of the jazz elders who, instead of savoring the rewards of maturity in the 1960s felt themselves tossed into the dustbin of history. Not surprisingly, they were quick to warn that the heady concept of free expression opens the door to fakes and charlatans. "They're playing 'Freedom' and they're playing 'Extensions,' whatever those things are," growled Hawkins in 1964. "Man, I don't know what they are. These guys are looking for a gimmick, a short cut. There is no short cut" (qtd. in DeVeaux 449).

To some extent, Davis was one of these elders, commenting to Feather that Taylor's "Lena" was "some sad shit, man. [...] Is that what the critics are digging? Them critics better stop having coffee" (Feather 132). But here again, Davis landed on his feet. He sought out four ferociously talented young men - Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Tony Williams - and set off a controlled explosion that equaled the excitement of the New Thing but through a disciplined route that tolerated no short cuts. It would have been the perfect solution, had jazz not been plunging to its nadir in the 1960s. Viewed from the twenty-first century, this Davis quintet made the kind of music, like Bach's Goldberg Variations or Beethoven's late quartets, that occupies an elite niche within a vibrant, broad-based tradition. But this niche did not seem very desirable at the time; according to the catchword, "jazz was dead" (Chambers 79).

Oddly, Davis blamed whites for promoting the New Thing. He even remarks that "pushing the free thing among a lot of the white music critics was intentional, because a lot of them thought that people like me were just getting too popular and too powerful" (271). Giddins faults this "incoherent" remark, noting that Davis "forgets LeRoi Jones" (Faces 162). But beneath the incoherence (not to mention the egotism and paranoia) lurks a valid perception: that despite the urging of Baraka and others, the New Thing never became the voice of the black masses. Coltrane was the only figure to command a large black following, and that had more to do with his earlier music (including his association with Davis) and his impressive spirituality than with his post-1965 avant-garde sound. Today, when hindsight reveals a more durable commitment to the New Thing among intellectually inclined Europeans than among everyday black Americans, Davis's odd attitude makes intuitive sense.

An introverted modernist like Babbitt - or Taylor, for that matter - tends to cultivate his art and neglect his audience. Not Davis. "I never was one of those people," he writes in his autobiography, "who thought [...] the fewer hear you, the better you are, because what you're doing is just too complex for a lot of people to understand" (205). Creatively if not psychologically, Davis was an extrovert who cultivated both his art and his audience and refused to neglect either. This is not a flaw. On the contrary, it may be a necessary qualification for greatness. Davis's audience-seeking antennae were long and sensitive, and in the mid-1960s they picked up the unwelcome but unavoidable fact that jazz was being eclipsed, in every way that mattered, by popular music (Chambers 80-81). What he did next was what came naturally: he gravitated toward where the action was.

Musically speaking, the 1960s were the best of times - and the worst. To the extent that authentic black gospel was flowing into the secular market as "soul," and the musical and lyrical talents honed in the folk movement were shaping rock'n'roll into sophisticated rock, the period was incredibly fruitful. But to the extent that musical sound was being supplanted by self-indulgent theatrics, the 1960s laid the groundwork for the deterioration of the 1970s. What attracted Davis was the seemingly miraculous spectacle of the double audience blending into one. In the mid-1960s the crossover appeal of both white and black performers (often playing together in the same bands) was so great, Billboard suspended its policy of running color-coded charts. In this spirit Davis noted Coltrane's role as "a guiding light" not only for young blacks but also "for many intellectual and revolutionary whites and Asians"(286). Also catching his eye was the Charles Lloyd Quartet, whose 1966 appearance at the Fillmore West led to sudden success with the huge racially mixed youth audience (Chambers 136-139).

The new woman in Davis's life, the singer Betty Mabry, was his bellwether. What she and countless other young people saw in performers like Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix was a power beyond the usual categories of entertainment or even art. It was erotic, to be sure (her marriage with Davis ended when she hooked up with Hendrix). But it was also spiritual. Here is a parallel between the lightning that struck Davis at the Riviera Club and the fireworks generated by Stone and especially by Hendrix at the top of their form. Both recall the history of African-American music as ritual, and the musician as priest or shaman. This is true of gospel, obviously. But also of jazz (think of Bird, or especially Monk) and of the blues: as Albert Murray reminds us, the blues is secular, but as traditionally performed it is "a ritual of purification and affirmation nonetheless" (38-42). Before the 1960s counterculture succumbed to drugs, political fanaticism, and mindless hedonism, its better instincts were buoyed up by a mode of music-making whose aim was spiritual ecstasy.

Davis was not cut out to play shaman. Unlike Sly Stone, he did not come from the Pentecostal church, and he was not about to start leaping about the stage in an effort to take his audience higher. But as the Summer of Love gave way to Woodstock, and Woodstock to Altamont, Davis found the perfect niche. Rather than ride the jubilant crest of the counterculture (which by 1968 was already past), he made music that spoke to its undertow.

To be sure, it was not Davis but the Rolling Stones who strutted their stuff in a blood-red spotlight at Altamont, belting out "Sympathy for the Devil," "Brown Sugar," and "Under My Thumb" while the Hell's Angels hacked and stomped a black fan named Meredith Hunter to death. But listen to those classic Stones numbers today, and you will feel like tapping your toe and grinning. Listen to Bitches Brew, and you will feel like burning the house down. I mean this as a compliment. With its bottomless, shifting rhythmic ostinatos, its eddying scraps of guitar and snarling bass clarinet; its dissonant chords in unmentionable keys; and the recurring pitchfork thrust of Davis's horn, Bitches Brew stretched the imaginations of both black and white listeners at a time when rock was ossifying into hard rock and soul was losing its (gospel) soul.

Part of Bitches Brew's success was its departure from the high-mindedness of jazz. Like the nationalist movements in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European music, 1960s jazz involved an extra-musical search for heroes, symbols, myths of the people. From Sonny Rollins's Freedom Suite to Coltrane's Ascension, Archie Shepp's abstract blues to Sun Ra's far-out fringe, this music expresses lofty emotions: anger, sorrow, righteousness, spirituality. By 1969, however, the black revolution was mired in violence and backlash, and the love-and-peace counterculture was running low on love and peace. Bitches Brew captured this moment both musically and extra-musically. And it did so for both audiences: in the cover painting by Mati Klarwein a pensive African-looking face, beaded with moisture, is depicted in both ebony and pink - a detail that, along with the photograph of Davis with Teo Macero, reassured whites that this music belonged to them, too.

Yet Bitches Brew is not rock. When late-1960s rock tried to conjure darkness and danger, it did so by cranking up the volume, setting off smoke bombs, applying too much eye makeup, and making the music cruder as well as louder. The general tone is suggested by the British reviewer who described the hard rock band Black Sabbath as offering "anguished screeching about war pigs, rat salads, iron men and similar gloomy topics set to an endlessly repeated two-chord riff" (qtd. in Stambler 57). This kind of hard rock was a hit with the junior testosterone crowd, and in the 1970s its monstrous offspring, heavy metal, became one of the most durable genres in the history of popular music. But none of this has anything to do with Davis's direction at the time.

In the controversy over Davis's fusion, the most puzzling factor is the third transformation mentioned above: the sea change in Western music-making that also occurred during the 1960s. Both the champions and the critics of Davis's later career tend to hold him responsible for this transformation and to assign praise or blame accordingly. But this is a mistake. Davis absorbed the sea change and adapted his remarkable talents to it in ways both creative and calculating. But he did not cause it.

The sea change is part of a massive cultural shift away from the ear and toward the eye. Literary people complain about the conquest of print by images; a profounder complaint could be made by musicians. It is beyond the scope of this essay to pin down all the forces at work in this shift. But there can be no doubt about its impact. At all levels, from the Broadway stage to the latest youth craze, listening is now distinctly subordinate to looking. In the visual feast of a culture dominated by photography, film, video, computer graphics, and high-tech stagecraft, music is rarely more than aural sauce.

Ironically, the musicians who contributed most to this change had the exact opposite intention. In 1965 Philip Glass was inspired by Indian raga to try a new compositional approach in which the Western tendency to "take time and divide it" would be replaced with the Eastern one to "take very small units and add them together." So he took brief, simple melodic-harmonic motives and repeated them over and over, along with "cycles of different beats, wheels within wheels, everything going at the same time and always changing" (qtd. in Clarke 467). Similar ideas occurred to the jazz avant-gardist La Monte Young, and to composer-engineers such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Mike Oldfield. Dubbed "minimalism," the music that emerged from these efforts was emphatically not conceived as mere background. To Reich the goal was to "facilitate closely detailed listening" (qtd. in Mackay 107). To Glass it was to supplant the narrative mode of listening associated with "story symphonies and story concertos" with a timeless immersion in which "neither memory nor anticipation" would have "a place in sustaining the texture, quality, or reality of the musical experience" (qtd. in Randel 313).

It's important to note that minimalism did not arise from musical modernism. On the contrary, Glass consciously rejected his modernist training when he espoused the Indian idea of music as "a meditational mode of perception" that "shares attributes with trance states, religious ecstasy, and drug experiences without being synonymous with them" (Rockwell 113). At the same time, the musical modernists rejected Glass. As John Rockwell explains, Glass's "refusal to come to terms with either conventional tonality or its serial extension [...] enraged the contemporary musical establishment, accustomed as it was to equating technical complexity with artistic worth" (114). Today Glass, Reich, and others are feted in concert halls around the world, and composers from John Adams in America to Henryk Gorecki in Poland have combined minimalism's clear pulse and looping repetition with romanticism's high emotion (Simms 422-423). But significantly, the first modernists to embrace minimalism were not in music but in the visual arts. "I gravitated toward artists because they were always more open than musicians," admits Glass (qtd. in Rockwell 116).

In the popular realm minimalism was an instant hit. Rock fans bought Riley's A Rainbow in the Curved Air (1968) and Oldfield's Tubular Bells (1973). Today minimalism is blamed for New Age, the easy-listening mood music disparaged by critics as "aural wallpaper" or "sonic laxative" (Clarke 850-851). Add a shot of computerized rhythm, and you have contemporary dance and techno. But here, too, minimalism keeps company with the visual. Beginning with the passages from Tubular Bells used in The Exorcist (1973) and continuing through Glass's stunning scores for Koyaanisqatsi (1983) and Hamburger Hill (1987), minimalism's slowly shifting repetitiveness - its "wallpaper" quality, if you will - has largely conquered the silver screen. Indeed, minimalist soundtracks often work better than the traditional orchestral kind. What this means, however, is that the high ambition of minimalism's creators - that pulsing trance like sound would foster a new quasi-spiritual listening - is not fulfilled. Outside the concert hall, in the casual, secular, technologically driven settings where most people now listen to music, minimalist-derived forms succeed precisely because they do not demand the concentrated attention once routinely paid to shaped melodic structures from the symphony to the sonata, the popular song to the jazz solo.

A similar pattern can be seen in rock. Ask any young fan of today's "alternative rock" which 1960s band he or she admires the most, and the answer will likely be the Velvet Underground, the obscure New York band that became famous in 1966, when Andy Warhol hired them to accompany his "happening," the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The Velvet Underground had direct ties to minimalism. Along with songwriter Lou Reed, the band's co-founder was John Cale, a violist who had worked with La Monte Young. Reed and Cale claimed to be inspired by 1950s rock'n'roll: the steady backbeat, the basic chord changes, the simple melodies. Yet as Rockwell notes, "this fascination with the basics was merely a rock extension of the whole lower-Manhattan art world's devotion to minimalism" (235). The Velvet Underground did not sound like 1950s rock'n'roll - or like 1960s rock, for that matter. Rather than embellish their simple songs with rhythmic counterpoint and blues expression, Reed and Cale added the ingredients of minimalism: the drone, the unaccented 4/4 pulse, the melody shards set against dissonant chords. Writes Charlie Gillett, this "deliberately primitive musical accompaniment seemed to have filtered all the black influences out of rock'n'roll, leaving an amateurish, clumsy, but undeniably atmospheric background" (309). This atmospheric minimalism did not top the charts at the time, but with the rise of MTV and the music video over the next twenty years, it became one of the most important influences on rock.***

Against this background, it is hard to know what "jazz-rock fusion" means. The label is highly misleading in the case of Davis's experimental 1970s albums, Dark Magus (1974), Agharta, and Pangaea (both 1975), which take very little from jazz, apart from what Davis had resisted a decade earlier: free improvisation, and very little from rock, apart from a fascination with volume and electronic instruments. The label is more accurate in the case of Hancock, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, and John McLaughlin, whose fusion combines jazz improvisation with the volume, electronic instrumentation, and strong rhythms of popular music. Yet these former Davis sidemen drew not just on rock but on soul and funk, which are not the same thing. To call Aretha Franklin a rock musician, for example, is to ignore the difference between the Chicago blues (the basis of 1960s rock) and black gospel (the basis of soul). And to lump James Brown's music with rock is to ignore the difference between rock and funk, the African-inspired "drum fever" that entered popular music by way of hard bop. Moreover, the label "jazz-rock fusion" obscures the impact of minimalism on rock and on what Davis and others were doing in fusion.

A label can also imply a judgment. Many jazz people consider anything connected with rock as "dollar-sign music" and condemn fusion accordingly (Baraka qtd. in Tomlinson 237). For such people the yardstick is anti-commercialism. But if fusion was a sell-out, it was a bit short on buyers. After the success of Bitches Brew, which (as I say) hit the 1969 Zeitgeist on the head, Davis's 1970s records did not fulfill anyone's gold or platinum hopes. Weather Report, the band led by Shorter and Zawinul, was more commercially successful. But even their best-selling Heavy Weather (1976) climbed no higher than number 30 on the album chart. Fusion was never on the fast track to the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame.

Meanwhile, the "fusion" part of the label appeals to critics steeped in postmodernism. To Gary Tomlinson, Davis deserves credit for having boldly gone where no musician had ever gone before. Here the yardstick is "unflinching confrontation" with "dialogical extremes" (239). Not only did Davis spearhead "a departure from the canonized and thereby musically segregated jazz tradition," he also created "an ever-changing melange of ingredients from his (our) fragmented and dizzying varied musical environment" (236, 242). Moreover, he ventured into "the structural indeterminacy sometimes explored by Karlheinz Stockhausen" while at the same time "coming to grips with the bitch within himself" and recognizing "his own mysterious otherness, and his desire to enter into a meaningful, nondemeaning colloquy with it" (246-7).

After reading such a compendium of virtues, it is tempting to add that fusion also sweetens the breath and keeps the trousers from bagging at the knees. But is the music any good? For answer I suggest a simpler standard than either anti-commercialism or dialogical theory: namely, the one customarily used to judge popular music. Here, too, judgment is more problematic than it once was. But one can still state in general terms the virtues of popular music, as Tomlinson does when he defends "the vitality, subtlety, and expressiveness of the pop traditions that inspired Davis" (237-238). Vitality, subtlety, expressiveness - not a bad list. These are also the musical qualities that Davis himself favored. He disliked over-intellectualized music, complaining that Coleman did not "play in rhythm" and that Shepp, Albert Ayler, and Taylor played music that had "no melodic line, wasn't lyrical, you couldn't hum it" (250, 271). With the popular audience Davis shared an appreciation for the primary capacities of music: the power of rhythm to move the body (dance) and the power of melody to move the emotions (song). Perhaps fusion should be judged by these standards?

The question "Can you dance to it?" is philistine only if danceability depends on something as mindless as a heavily accented back beat. Some people require such a beat in order to dance at all and lose their bearings when music shows too much rhythmic life. But these are not the people by whom danceability is properly measured. The true yardstick is not strict tempo but swing, funk, groove - whatever name is given to that elusive quality that moves the muscles and lifts the spirits of the true dancers among us. By the time fusion came along, jazz had parted company with this quality. It is often said in bebop's defense that people danced to it. So they did, until it grew too complex and they defected to rhythm and blues. With the New Thing, not to mention with Davis's 1960s quintet, percussion becomes a boiling cauldron that impresses the intellect but defeats the feet.

Was fusion a corrective? Yes and no. Hancock's Head Hunters (1973) proved that jazz musicians could match Sly and the Family Stone in making people "dance to the music." But therein lay the problem, because jazz is expected to do more than match popular music. It's expected to aim higher. In the context of funk fusion, this often meant thickening the "bottom" to the point where no danceable rhythm could possibly surface. In Davis's capacious fusion bands of the early 1970s, it is true (as Tomlinson notes) that each player had "an extraordinary freedom of colloquy within the ensemble." But at the same time these ensembles had enough instrumental paraphernalia to support three or four funk bands. "The Brazilian and African percussionists and the Indian musicians," writes Tomlinson, "contribute not so much full-fledged styles as raw sound materials. More flavors for the mix" (246). OK, but as any good cook knows, too many flavors can turn melange into mess.

I hate to sound square, but the trumpet is primarily a melody instrument. And while Davis was a fine bandleader, he was primarily a trumpeter who reminded a world dazzled by bebop virtuosity that (sometimes) less is more. Critics dispute his technique and how well he played in the higher registers. But no one disputes that his horn spoke to people on the lower frequencies of emotion, through melody. Because of its deceptive simplicity, melody is one of the hardest elements in music to explain or evaluate. Writes Aaron Copland: "Why a good melody should have the power to move us has thus far defied all analysis. We cannot even say, with any degree of surety, what constitutes a good melody" (49-51).

As a melodist Davis has always had a "penchant for minimalism" that (according to Baraka) goes "back to his earliest music. It is the 'fill-in' quality we remember with Bird." Obsessed with "what can be cut out," Davis always preferred sketched understatement to embellished overstatement (72). Like a drawing by Matisse in which a single line can suggest a full three-dimensional volume, a melodic sketch by Davis has the power to evoke larger forms. He was proud of this ability, as shown by his comment when Coltrane complained about not being able to stop playing: "Try taking the saxophone out of your mouth" (TK).

Davis's way with melody also involves repetition, though not in the minimalist sense. In his best music, notes Wynton Marsalis, Davis repeats a "sweet" melodic motive only as long as it takes to squeeze the sweetness out, then drops it and hunts for another (NPR). In his pre-fusion music this development of the motive is closely related to Davis's awareness of harmonic structure, even within the loose boundaries of modal improvisation. In his autobiography he alludes to this awareness with typical bluntness: "We ain't in Africa, and we don't play just chants. There's some theory under what we do" (400). Not until fusion do Davis's melodies quit suggesting larger forms and become "just chants." And only at the end of his career did he become a minimalist in the sense of recycling a single melodic fragment throughout an entire performance (Harrison 226).

The anti-melodic tendency within fusion is defended in some quarters as yet another liberation from the hegemony of European music. If liberation means converting from a music based on shapely melody and sophisticated harmony to one based on mere squiggles (or as record producers call them, "melody hooks"), then not just fusion but the great bulk of popular music has now been liberated. I will leave aside the question of whether the emotional power of melody is a tool of "order and reason" (philosophers from Plato to Rousseau thought otherwise). The more relevant point is that only in an atmosphere of mindless racial polarization could melody be rejected on the preposterous grounds that it is of interest only to whites. To the extent that Davis bought into this polarization, he sold out his rarest gift.

Like the child brought before Solomon, African-American music is a living whole in which every dance, even the liveliest, partakes of melody; and every song, even the tenderest, partakes of rhythm. Popular music still possessed this wholeness in the 1960s, but by 1975 it was clear that for lack of a Solomon the child was being dismembered. It is probably no coincidence that Davis quit music that year. The rift between black and white audiences that had opened after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. was reaching the breaking point. Billboard had restored its color-coded charts, and while the disco craze was still integrated, the white fans of heavy metal were beginning to wage their anti-black (and anti-gay) "disco sucks" campaign (Perry 53). Other whites, including many Southern musicians who had performed on soul records, were retreating to country rock. Soul was losing touch with its gospel roots, as Isaac Hayes led Barry White into the swamp of self-indulgent "fuck music." And the New York audience was splitting between the white downtown clubs that spawned punk and the black uptown clubs that nurtured hip-hop. Popular music was being cut into pieces, with rhythm claimed by the black folks, melody left to the whites, and harmony abandoned to foster care.****

Amid this deterioration Davis's final gambit was to market himself as a black youth idol. This is no surprise, since he had always favored the young, stylish, and black audience. But the more he tried to update his image, dressing in Hendrixian glad rags and adorning the cover of On the Corner (1972) with blaxploitation cartoons, the more his targets recoiled. Unlike the white audience, the black audience was not divided by age in the 1970s. Black youth did not flock to Davis's music, but neither did they scorn it the way white youth scorned the music beloved of their parents. Black youth respected Davis, so when he started posing as a superannuated super-fly, it was a bit like seeing Ella Fitzgerald in a go-go dancer cage. In the wry observation of the writer David Nicholson, "Fusion Miles always seemed like one of my uncles in bell bottoms."

The irony is that by quitting music and attempting to lead a totally hedonistic lifestyle, Davis did stay in touch with the times. What is left to say about the late 1970s? To make one tiny detail stand for the whole, I offer the following passage from a 1980 handbook for would-be disco proprietors. After touting mainstream discos as places where people "can abandon themselves to the tidal wave of raw animal emotions that engulfs them," the chapter entitled "Club Safety" notes "the growing problem of damage to noses caused by excessive use of cocaine" (Joe 185). Noses were the least of it, as countless addicts can attest. It was during those years of seclusion that Davis came closest to destroying himself.

But then the cat pulled off another landing. Paradoxically, many people who had stopped listening to popular music in the 1970s started again in the 1980s. The 1980s saw the emergence of MTV, clearly the triumph of sight over sound. But it was also a time of renewal. On the white side of the fence, the so-called New Wave rejected the anti-commercial, anti-musical philosophy of punk and (in Bill Flanagan's words) "decided they were not going to limit themselves or pretend that playing every night does not make you a better musician" (32). Whatever else might be said about videogenic acts such as Elvis Costello, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Blondie, the Pretenders, Dire Straits, the Eurythmics, the Police, or the Talking Heads, their music refreshed some weary ears. The same could be said of the black performers who appealed to Rip Van Davis when he awoke from his six-year sleep: Michael Jackson and (especially) Prince.

For his comeback Davis needed the right musical vehicle, and jazz was not it. Some blame physical frailty. But his chops improved over time, and besides, chops matter less than musicianship. More important was his dread of becoming a legend. In the early 1980s the cultural position of jazz was ambiguous: neither moribund nor cutting edge, it was becoming classicized, which is sort of like becoming canonized, only the requirements are different (you don't have to be a saint). Toward this process Davis was of two minds - but only one gut. In his autobiography he says (of the great jazz figures) "shit, their music is classical." But in the same breath he knocks Wynton Marsalis for playing "old dead European music" and compares the "tired-ass shit" played by many whites with the dynamism of black music, which he extols for not being "the same on Friday and Saturday night" (360-361).

This need for reinvention ran deep in Davis - both mind and gut are talking here. But can it run too deep? Early suggests that the "keen and bitter" demands made by black audiences on black artists would be "more bearable if blacks were not so quick to condemn their artists for being out of style, so easily able to disengage themselves from engagements of awesome worth" (270-271). Davis's pet insults - "stale," "tired," "old," "dead" - must have cut close to the bone in the 1980s. Desperate to avoid the taint of age and weakness, he scorned as reactionary the efforts of Marsalis and others to transmit jazz as a living tradition. If Early is right, and such efforts, common to most cultures, meet uncommon resistance among African-Americans, the explanation is as simple as black and white. In Davis's mind, the "sorry-assed imitation" who wins a Grammy for "copying black people's shit" is invariably white (325). And so is the moldy fig who turns jazz into "something dead that you put under a glass in the museum" (272). If being a legend meant being the object of white nostalgia or a specimen for white collectors, Davis wanted no part of it.

There was, of course, a sizable black audience that stayed loyal to Davis throughout his retirement, and this audience mattered to him as much (or more) than ever, to judge by this uncharacteristically heart-tugging account of his first live performance after six years:

One night, there was this little crippled black guy who had cerebral palsy sitting down front in a wheelchair. [...] I was playing this blues, and he was sitting right in front of the stage. I played it to him because I knew that he knew what the blues were. Halfway through my solo, I looked into this guy's eyes, and he was crying. He reached up his withered arm, which was trembling, and with his shaking hand he touched my trumpet as though he were blessing it - and me. Man, I almost lost it right then and there. (347)

Such a moment of quasi-religious communion would feel distinctly out of place in a Wynton Marsalis concert. It depends on the venue, of course, but (like Billy Taylor) Marsalis is a natural educator who rarely performs without also endeavoring to correct in some small way the public's incomprehension of jazz. This is not something Davis cared to do. Consider, for example, the evening he spent watching Ray Charles accept a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Kennedy Center. The year was 1987, and Davis also attended a dinner at the Reagan White House, where he was seated next to the (white) wife of a politician. Whether the questions she asked about jazz was as silly as he recalls ("Are we supporting this art form just because it's from here in this country, and it is art in its truest form[?]"), they were doubtless silly enough to irk the average fan, never mind Davis (380). Such questions would have irked Marsalis, too. But being a politician himself (I do not mean this as an insult), Marsalis would have sucked it up and delivered a charming and informative reply.

After forty years of celebrity Davis had a celebrity's ego. So his saltiness that evening may also be explained by the fact that he wasn't getting the award. Which brings us to the main reason for his dread of becoming a legend: his need to command the whole landscape, not just a corner of it. While he hated being stifled by fools, celebrity was his oxygen. "That's one of the reasons I have to make money," he explains, "so I can keep my life private. You have to pay for fame - mentally, spiritually, and in real money"(409). The burden of the celebrity artist is the need to feel both pursued by one's admirers and protected from them. Like all true celebrity artists, Davis took mischievous pleasure in the game, as when he quipped, while showing an interviewer one of his amateur paintings, "Maybe it's not so good, but it's got my name on it, hee-hee" (APR tape).

Thus did Davis make his comeback with the double audience firmly in mind. Playing to the mass audience, he traded on his celebrity, granting puff-piece interviews, making a music video in which his art work was prominently featured*****, and (eventually) allowing himself to be feted as a lifetime achiever still busy achieving. Playing to black youth, he mixed it up with the chart-topping genres of "contemporary rhythm and blues" and hip-hop. Again, the most appropriate yardsticks by which to evaluate this last phase of his music are the perennial ones of dance and song.

Dance was alive in the 1980s but not well. Many of the lesser talents who cashed in on the disco craze had done so by exploiting various short cuts. Their efforts are best summed up by James Brown's deathless remark about disco: "I taught 'em everything they know but not everything I know" (242-243). The most maligned short cut was the "drum machine," or computer-generated rhythm track. One of the first hit singles to use this device was "Family Affair" by Sly and the Family Stone, a record that has never been accused of sounding mechanical. Yet mechanical rhythm soon followed, as the least creative forces in the industry began to grind out disco literally by the pre-measured unit, introducing a new labeling system, "bpm" (for beats per minute), to help rhythmically challenged disc jockeys segue from one record to the next. Nelson George blames this mechanization on "Eurodisco," the imported high-tech dance music whose "metronomelike beat" was "perfect for folks with no sense of rhythm" (154). But in fact many young blacks gravitated toward Eurodisco - and toward Kraftwerk, the West German band whose popularization of Stockhausen had heavily influenced it (Stambler 397).

Because computers are easier to control, and to record, than live musicians, many producers, black and white, came to swear by them and to deny that anything was lost in the translation.****** Sometimes a producer would concede that technology stifled spontaneity, as when Nile Rodgers admitted missing those times when "somebody in the back makes a mistake and you go, 'Wait a minute, what was that again?'" (qtd. in Fox 334). But as suggested by Rodgers's choice of the word "mistake," it was widely assumed that the only thing live musicians added to the mix was error. This assumption comes not from African-American music, where the performer's role is vital, but from electronic modernism, where the composer-engineer is king. As randomness or accident, error can be programmed into a computer - indeed, such devices are called "humanizers." But no amount of randomness could humanize the "dance music" genres of the 1980s. The chart headings - "urban contemporary," "rhythm and blues" - left the disco era behind. But the music did not.

This is not a Luddite tirade. Popular music has long been at home in the electronic media, and it was inevitable that people would explore the new technology. But in terms of what matters (and has always mattered) in music, new toys do not always mean progress. Listening to the best singers of the time, people like Anita Baker and Luther Vandross, perform against the snap-crackle-pop of precision-tooled rhythm tracks is like watching a tennis pro take the court against a ball-serving machine. No matter how skillfully the pro returns the serve, the interaction never develops into a volley. The reason is simple: one of the players is not a player. The essence of swing (or funk or groove) is intuitive, interactive, elastic - like human creativity. The cliche of the 1980s was that computers are better than bad musicians. Maybe so. But what about good musicians?

Musicians can be self-indulgent, of course. But so can producers, especially when they have at their disposal all the goodies in the studio. What changes is the nature of the goodies. In the 1950s the most dreadful mainstream pop was dominated by producers who behaved like little boys in a candy store, dripping syrupy strings and gooey choral voices over material that was already sugary. In the 1980s the most dreadful black pop was dominated by producers who acted like little girls in a boutique, dressing up immature material with every kind of synthesizer frippery. Against these sterile and unresponsive backdrops, even the best voices embark on a quest for feeling that quickly dead-ends in empty virtuosity. The results may saturate the ear, but they do not satisfy the soul.

This is the problem faced by Davis on his first two Warner Brothers albums, Tutu (1986) and Amandla (1989). Never one for virtuosity, empty or otherwise, he picks his cautious way through the state-of-the-art sonic landscapes prepared for him by Tommy LiPuma and Marcus Miller. But he was clearly ambivalent: "Some people say they miss that spontaneity and spark that comes out of recording with a band right there in the studio. Maybe that's true; I don't know." Then he lets down his guard: "I like raw shit, live, raunchy, get down, get back in the alley shit." Davis respected the people who worked on these albums, especially Miller. But to him the process was a compromise: "Rather than get myself, the working band, and Tommy into all kinds of hassles by trying to bring my working band into the studio to record music that I might like, but Tommy doesn't, we do it this way, laying down tracks on tape" (371). Of all the musicians on earth, surely Davis is the last who should be "phoning in" his part.*******

The 1980s were not just a sojourn in the studio, however. By mid-decade Davis's antennae were fully extended and telling him where the good music was. With a new band including alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett, bass guitarist Foley, keyboardist Adam Holzman, and drummer Ricky Wellman, he began to tour, playing tight, powerful pieces that knit together the unraveled strands of fusion (384). The full impact of this band was not felt until 1996, when Holzman and Gordon Meltzer assembled eleven of the best (unedited) tracks for Live Around the World, an impressive album that has caused many nay-sayers to look again at Davis's later career.******** People who hate the sound of fusion will not be won over. But those who like fusion's sound but dislike its radical unmooring from dance or song will be intrigued. Not only do many of these tracks meet the test of variety, subtlety, and expressiveness, they also meet Davis's own test, which is whether anyone else could have made music that sounded this way at any other time. (The answer is no.)

From the standpoint of dance, Davis was wise to hire Wellman, previously the drummer for the go-go band Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers. It is regrettable that the best go-go bands never found a significant audience outside the music's home base of Washington, D.C., because unlike disco, go-go did know everything the Godfather of Soul knew.********* Another James Brown apprentice singled out by Davis was Prince Rogers Nelson, a figure both more famous and (to Davis's critics) more controversial than any of his other 1980s collaborators. For Crouch the sight of Davis praising this "Minneapolis vulgarian and borderline drag queen" proves that he had "become the most remarkable licker of moneyed boots in the music business" (30). Crouch is right about the lightweight raunchiness of his extra-musical persona. But Prince the musician had a traditionalist ear, even when brandishing the latest technology. Perhaps not slated to become "the next Duke Ellington" (the comment by Davis that most rankled Crouch), Prince did make some extraordinary music in the 1980s, which Davis can hardly be faulted for noticing. It is too bad for Prince that he did not collaborate with Davis, because the experience might have helped to mitigate his two most glaring faults. The first fault, a sexual narcissism more forgivable in a twelve-year-old than in a mature artist, is not something that Davis could (or would) have wasted his time correcting. But Prince's second fault, a vocal style like the bleating of a priapic baby goat, is something that Davis could have corrected - if only by filling the void with his own incomparable sound.

Ultimately, Davis's 1980s comeback was hindered by the dismembered state of music, especially song. Again, it was not his fault that the ability to write, play, or listen to melodies longer than two bars seemed as forgotten as the art of the fugue. The sea change had come, and all he could do was recognize it. "A lot of people ask me where music is going today," he says at the conclusion of his autobiography. "I think it's going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that" (393).

So it that all? Did Davis simply go with the flow, chasing those short phrases down the musical drain? Or can we distinguish between short phrases that work and those that do not? I say we can, but hasten to add that this distinction is as elusive as the one between good and bad melody on a larger scale. Both depend on what Copland calls "the power to move us." Even the briefest motif can have this power, as Davis knows better than most. Who can explain the appeal of the short phrases that open and close "Miles" (Milestones 1958)? They are, to borrow the lowbrow term, catchy - meaning we cannot get enough of them, even while listening to them. Davis understood catchiness, which is why he covered hit songs such as Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" and Michael Jackson's "Human Nature." Both are included on Live Around the World, and when Davis says (amid wild applause following an electrifying performance of "Human Nature") "That ain't nothing, I do that every night," the pride in his scratchy voice is real.

So is the joy, which raises a question. Did Davis finally retrieve the lightning, that original thunderbolt that struck him back in 1944? If so, here's another question. Live Around the World traces a global itinerary: New York, Los Angeles, Graz, Montpelier (France), Rome, Montreux, Osaka, Chicago. Most of these places are long way from the Riviera Club in East St. Louis. During his final years, while reveling in the applause of a global audience, did Davis forget about the (black) folks back home?

I don't think so, though his final attempt to connect with the African-American audience was less than well received. In 1989 Quincy Jones made Back on the Block, an eclectic album that enlisted hip-hop and contemporary rhythm and blues in the cause of introducing young listeners to jazz. At the time he was quoted in Parade saying, "Black people, we have no sense of our musical history. And that's a shame, man. I just hope, before I get out of this world, that I can do something about it" (26) This effort may have spurred Davis toward Doo-Bop, the collaboration with rapper Easy Mo Bee that he was working on when he died.

About Doo-Bop the obvious comment is one that I have already made: when the melody shrinks, so does Davis's room to maneuver. The lack of melody in hip-hop is not a crime against music, as some would have it. It is simply a reflection of hip-hop's origins in an oral tradition stretching back through Jamaican "toasting" and Trinidadian calypso to the griots or bards of West Africa. Hip-hop came from immigrants, specifically West Indian immigrants to New York, such as Joseph "Grandmaster Flash" Saddler, the second-generation Barbadian whose celebrated club act, featuring improvised patter and the skilled manipulation of two turntables ("wheels of steel"), was a Bronx update on the traveling "sound system" shows that dominate popular music in the islands. From these low-tech roots hip-hop quickly evolved into a high-tech operation. The basic formula is a sound collage in which programmed, sampled, or performed rhythms are combined with rhymed wordplay. But hip-hop soon came to include a universe of other sounds (anything a producer-creator cares to add), as well as the visual components of dance, fashion, graffiti, and (eventually) video and film. Given this rich mixture, hip-hop has tremendous potential as an art form. So it would be foolish to wish it away or to condemn it, just because certain popular strains of it have worked hard at being offensive.**********

Nor is hip-hop hostile to melody. The so-called East Coast school has long sampled melodic lines from soul records, and it is now customary for rappers, even gangsta rappers, to sing or to be backed up by singers. The melodies involved being extremely simple, this does not exactly make hip-hop a natural showcase for the talents of a Miles Davis.

Nevertheless, it is hard to fault Davis for taking an interest in hip-hop. And to his credit, he did not repeat the mistake (made with On the Corner) of playing to the mainstream's cartoon images of black people. Today, when the rivalry between East and West Coast hip-hop makes the exploitative gangsta style a topic of debate, it is a cliche to say that ghetto youth have enough problems without being made to represent "the collective unconscious garbage heap of neuroses for whites" (Early 296) But it was not a cliche in 1990, when Davis decided to make Doo-Bop. Back then gangsta rap was the cutting edge hip-hop style grabbing all the headlines. And yet Davis the alleged trend-chaser refused to touch it. His critics may call him a "licker of moneyed boots," but he did not lick those of Dr. Dre.

Judged as a tribute to Davis, Doo-Bop wins points for sincerity, if not eloquence. Judged as a hip-hop album, it is middling. Judged as an album worthy of Davis's talents, it cannot be said to light the way to future collaborations between jazz masters and their hip-hop admirers. But by attempting to get across to young listeners a little memory, a little taste of what music once meant to someone like Miles Davis, it is (in the context of cultural politics writ large) a worthy finale.

Most jazz people will prefer to remember a different Davis finale: the concert of classic Gil Evans arrangements that he played with Quincy Jones at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Montreux Jazz Festival. Jack Chambers offers this moving account of the occasion, as captured on video:

Visually, Miles Davis is the focus. The camera cannot stay off him for long. He was dying, we now know, but he is there in his plumage. He snarls once and smiles more often than you would expect. He looks and acts very tired. He takes his solo turns gamely, ponderously; his tone is as fragile as an icicle. [Wallace] Roney sits beside him, always alert, ready to go forward in his place on short notice. [...] Roney's love for the weary old trumpeter, so plainly caught by the camera, beams out the gratitude of a couple of generations of jazz musicians. It turns what might have been an anti-climax into a shining finale. (XVII Introduction)

Why not accept both finales? Combined, they reveal that Davis was up to his old tricks, having it both ways: in the spotlight as presiding jazz elder and with a hip-hop CD in the works. For this I can only admire him, as I admire the courage and agility with which he eluded most (not all) of the dangers strewing his path, the many shapes of figurative death that stalked his musical generation. His long struggle to stay on top was messy and unseemly at times, and some have argued that by his refusal to "age gracefully" he contributed to the decline of American music. But that decline would have happened anyway, and I for one lack the presumption to blame a man for not walking in a straight line across a minefield.

I also think that Davis made it across the minefield. By staying on top throughout all the vicissitudes of America's postwar musical culture, he helped to keep alive the lightning. By this I mean the living memory of his musical generation, one of the most brilliant that ever lived. He did not do this in the mode of a curator, preservationist, or classicist. But in his cranky, egotistical way he was an educator. Countless young people who hear of him through hip-hop or catch his image in an advertisement will seek out his later music, then work their way back to the rest. This happens all the time. Unlike Davis, I have no gripe against jazz repertory groups and university jazz programs; it does my heart good to see jazz at Lincoln Center and on PBS. But this is America the unpredictable, where culture and tradition get handed down in funny ways, some straightforward, some backhanded. And for many audiences, from the two discussed here to innumerable others around the globe, the backhanded way may be the best.

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* The point is illustrated by Walser's essay on Davis's 1964 performance of "My Funny Valentine," which begins with a spirited defense of the contextual approach but then fails to practice what it preaches. Not discussed in Walser's text are the following facts: Davis was playing not in a club but in New York's Philharmonic Hall (mentioned in an endnote); playing with him were George Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams (the full roster recited by every jazz radio announcer); the band had never played Philharmonic Hall before; the concert was a benefit for the voter registration efforts of the NAACP, CORE, and SNCC; some band members were disgruntled at not getting paid; and Hancock thought afterward that the rhythm section had sounded bad but changed his mind when he heard the tapes. For this "thick description" I resort not to some obscure monograph but to Davis's autobiography and to a conversation with Bill Kirchner (Davis and Troupe 265-166).

** Modernism came later to music than to the other European arts. Literature and painting, for example, became modernist during the late nineteenth century. Music held out until World War I (perhaps because it was more deeply imbued with romanticism). Because modernism came of age with jazz, modernists from Milhaud to Copland understandably tried to include "jazz effects" in their work. The ungainliness of these efforts, typically executed (in both senses) by non-jazz musicians, convinced a generation of critics that jazz could not rise to the level of "serious" music - while ironically, the more vital borrowing was on the jazz side.

*** Just to cite one example, the Irish band U2 rose to prominence in the 1980s on a rich enveloping sound developed not from the blues but from the basic formula used by the Velvet Underground. To quote Bono, the band's lead vocalist, "U2 grew up saying 'Fuck off' to the blues" (qtd. in Flanagan 450). Other influences on today's "alternative rock," such as feedback noise and the frantic beat known as "thrash," come from punk, which also began in the lower-Manhattan art world then exploded across Britain in the late 1970s. But punk, too, filters out all the "black influences." To hear the extent of this change, compare punk's taste for feedback as chaotic noise with Hendrix's masterful blues-based control of it.

**** To be sure, Davis bought into the dismemberment of music less by rejecting melody than by embracing rhythm as his racial birthright. See, for example, his comment that during the 1960s "white people were trying to suppress rhythm because of where it comes from - Africa" (Davis and Troupe 277).

***** According to Georgia Bergman, who produced Davis's first video for Warner Brothers, Davis was won over by the suggestion that the video might serve as a showcase for his paintings.

****** I leave aside for the moment the practice of sampling, which in the hip-hop era has transformed the way rhythm tracks are programmed.

******* To illustrate the point: compare the studio-assembled version of "Full Nelson"on Tutu and the live performance taped at Montreux in 1990 (on Live Around the World 1996).

******** I am indebted to Bill Kirchner for bringing Live Around the World to my attention.

********* By a cruel irony of timing, go-go failed to make it big because of a film, Good to Go, which connected the music with D.C.'c burgeoning crack wars. That was in 1986, just three years before Ice-T, NWA, and countless other gangsta rappers would get rich exploiting the same connection.

********** I am on record as a critic of gangsta rap, the commercially successful brand of hip-hop that since 1987 has made the image of the promiscuous bloodthirsty black a staple of youth entertainment worldwide. But this latter-day minstrelsy is by no means the whole picture.

*

Published on Jerry Jazz Musician with the permission of the author.

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