Miles

As Miles Davis' international popularity grows, so does his reputation as a coldly arrogant loner, contemptuous of his audiences and stubbornly insistent on having his own way in every way. He wins polls with the ease with which Thomas Costain diagrams a best seller, despite the moat he keeps between himself and his listeners. After gathering a Playboy award this year, Davis topped the largest of the European jazz popularity contests – that of the British Melody Maker. "Miles Davis has done the impossible," said the front-page story. "For the first time in the history of the Melody Maker Readers' Poll, Louis Armstrong has lost his title as the World's Top Trumpeter. That honor now belongs to the diminutive, thirty-three-year-old Miles."

Letters to the American trade press meanwhile complain of Miles' consistent refusal to acknowledge applause, his disconcerting habit of leaving the stand during his sidemen's solos, and his absolute refusal to announce the names of the tunes he plays. Reporters for newspapers and magazines – with few exceptions – find him impossible to interview and abruptly profane when pressed for a more cooperative attitude. Club owners despair of getting him to make radio or television appearances to help promote his engagements; and fans who ask for autographs are often likely to be refused with raspingly blunt impatience.

Even inside the profession, although nearly all jazz musicians of his generation respect him musically, many find him aloof and enigmatic. One jazz booker, who is on unusually cordial personal terms with even those musicians he does not handle, says categorically of Davis: "He's basically not a nice guy. His conversation, when he bothers to talk to you at all, is made up mainly of insults." When Davis was beaten bloody last August outside Birdland by a policeman who had asked him to move on, everyone in jazz was indignant at the police brutality, but a surprising number of musicians and hangers-on were also saying, "It figures Miles would be the guy that would happen to. Can you imagine what he said when that cop started telling him what to do?"

The irony of this harsh picture of Davis as an intensely sensitive musician who is in a constant state of prickly hyperacidity on and off the stand is that the latter half of the portrait is basically not true. Miles does present a cactus-like, unapproachable front (or back, as is often the case) to the jazz public; but (continued on page 78) Miles (continued from page 39) he is an unusually warm, spontaneously generous and witty friend to those few he allows to know him after hours. "I've never been able to understand," says a long-term acquaintance, jazz critic and writer Nat Hentoff, "the pervasive image of Miles as a sour misanthrope. I know few people who get as much pleasure out of life as he does and fewer who are as stimulating to be with."

"It may seem too pat an explanation," adds a combo leader who has been a close friend of Miles' for almost fifteen years, "but Miles is extremely shy. Like all of us, he only has a certain amount of energy, and he finds it difficult to meet new people. Rather than subject himself to what is for him a tiring discomfort, he tries to create so forbidding an image of himself that he won't even be bothered."

Davis, however, is not only shy but he nurtures past wounds and takes elaborate care to protect himself emotionally. What particularly prolongs his tenacity in keeping to himself are his memories of several bitter years in the not too remote past. "Sure," says jazz singer-song-writer-satirist Babs Gonzales, who is a sharply intelligent observer of the jazz scene underneath his sharp harlequining, "Miles came from a prosperous, upper-middle-class home and was even spoiled a little as a boy so that there doesn't seem to be any reason for the suspicion he has toward people. But he knew some grim times before all this success. For one thing, when he was strung out on the habit – and he's one of the very few who broke it completely without treatment – he was desperate enough to fall in with some pitiless people. Some exploited him musically and the hoods who ran one club in New York used to beat up on him and Bud Powell and others. Miles has always been a proud man, and while they didn't break him, they hurt him for a long time."

"Hell," says a normally sympathetic club owner, "I don't care what his personality problems are. You can talk about art, but jazz is still show business. You don't have to wave a handkerchief or show your teeth like Louis Armstrong to let the audience know you care what they think."

Yet the same owner,. and others, admit that despite Miles' seeming disregard for his audiences, few jazzmen attract such tenacious loyalty from their listeners.

"The more he ignores them," says one musician enviously, "the more often they come back." The explanation isn't especially difficult. For one thing, Miles' music is so uniquely personal and seductive that most listeners, once accustomed to the distance Miles sets up between himself and them, are content to come for the music alone. It's not as if they could say, "Let Miles be by himself; we'll go hear another combo in the same groove." There is only one Miles, and his groups inevitably take on a distinctive musical personality that is molded by him.

There is no other modern trumpet player with so penetrating a lyrical sense. Art Farmer comes close, but Farmer's lyricism is not nearly so intense nor so intractably lonely. There is also the rest of Davis' "conception," a term musicians use to cover all the aspects that differentiate one player's interpretation of a song from another's. Davis has attained such wide popularity in part because there is no mistaking his sound and style. Among the elements that separate him so clearly from his contemporaries are the spareness of his work – a factor that also involves an imaginative use of space – and the incisive strength of his rhythmic approach. Many other trumpet players swing "hard" but practically no one else is able to combine, as Davis does, exceptional subtlety with a decisiveness of beat that fuses rhythm sections into unparalleled unity.

Davis' time, moreover, is far from metronomic. It's unusually fluid while always implying a steady pulsation. Miles, in short, reaches not only the in-group "hipster" audience but a wide range of people who often become intimidated by what they feel to be the insistently aggressive, high-speed stunt flying of many other modern trumpeters. Miles is modern without being either self-consciously "funky" or forbiddingly "technical."

There are also listeners who derive a degree of vicarious satisfaction in watching the consistency of Miles' nonconformity. "Man," I've heard a number of apprentice anti-squares say admiringly of Davis, "isn't he cool?" These are people who come to see him in expectation of his walking off the stand when others solo, ignoring requests, and otherwise making clear his total disinclination to "Project" in any other way than musically. In addition, a sizable percentage of the women in a Davis audience find his apparent unapproach-ability challengingly attractive, and I expect some vivid daydreaming goes on among many female listeners when Miles appears on stand. In general, the fact that Davis is as singular in his on-stand behavior as he is in his music may well be a growing element in his drawing power. "They may get dragged with him," says a former sideman, "but they're always waiting to see what he does – and what he doesn't do. They might even get more bugged if he suddenly smiled at them and bowed to their applause. Then, it just wouldn't be Miles."

In any case, to those with whom he'll actually communicate, many of Davis' seemingly disdainful public attitudes turn out to be not entirely what they seem. "I get off the stand during a set," he said recently, "because when I'm not playing, there's nothing for me to do. It's ridiculous for me to just stand there and make the other guys nervous looking at them while they solo. And if I don't look at them, what's the point of my standing up there and looking at the audience? They're not interested in me when somebody else is taking a solo. I don't announce the numbers because I figure the people who come to hear us know everything we play. We have a new record about every three months, and they sell, so the audiences must know what's on them. A lot of musicians think the public is stupid, but the audiences know what's happening. It's like the public is blamed because TV shows are so bad, but hell, what choice do they have in what to watch?"

Davis finds it difficult to understand the controversy over his nonacknowledgment of applause. "Look, if I go to a club and hear a good friend take a solo that I like, I don't applaud him. It's silly. I had a girlfriend once who always used to look at me as if I should applaud her. Hell, if she didn't know I liked her, that was her problem. I don't mind if the guys in the band bow and all that, but I figure I'm doing the best I can with my horn, and anybody out front who has ears knows that. What am I there for if not to try to make people like what I'm doing? I have to bow, too? I pay attention to what counts – the music. People should give me credit for that. I try to make sure they'll have something to applaud. After all, I don't have the reputation of bringing a sad band into clubs, do I?"

"Miles is sensitive all right to whether an audience appreciates him and the band," says a former sideman. "On nights when nothing was happening, he'd whisper, 'They're dead out there,' and he'd be bothered."

Davis is also puzzled at being expected to do promotion for the clubs at which he appears. "A woman called me up in Detroit to do a TV show." He shakes his head in wonder at her arrogance. "She said everybody who'd played that club did the show for scale. I told her I got several thousand dollars for doing a TV show for CBS, and I'm supposed to do this one for thirty dollars? Besides, I don't believe that you have to push. People either like what you're doing or they don't. If they don't, I'll know it, and no amount of publicity is going to help.

"Then they tell me," Davis' exasperation mounts as he lists the demands made of him, "that I should meet all the local celebrities and be nice to them. (continued on page 104) Miles (continued from page 78) That's like if someone said to me. 'I want you to meet the President of Argentina.' Is he a good president? OK. I'm a good musician. Does he do his job as well as I do mine? Fine. So why do I have to meet him? In Cincinnati, they said, 'I want you to meet this disc jockey; he's the only one in town who's playing jazz.' I said I didn't want to be bothered. 'But he's one of the best guys around here.' 'Look,' I told them. If he's doing a good job, great. I am, too – or I'm trying to. Besides, he might not want to meet me. And there are days besides when I just don't feel like meeting people. Why should I have to if I do what I'm supposed to on the job?'"

Nonetheless, the owner of the Key Club in Minneapolis will not have Miles back because he refused to help in local publicity. Miles is consistent, though. His own booker has only one publicity picture of him – an old, stiff one – and Miles will not be bothered to have new ones taken. (The same office handles the public-relations-conscious Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet, and within the first two months of its existence, Farmer and Golson had eagerly posed for at least ten different shots.)

Except for his unyielding refusal to do local radio and TV shows, Miles generally gets along well with most club owners. "When I get booked some-where for the first time," Miles chuckles, "I tell Jack Whittemore of the Shaw office to tell the owner that I'm crazy and not to fool around with me. Then, when he finds out I'm not unreasonable and that I make time, we wind up getting tight. Most of those owners are good friends of mine, and I don't make the mistake some musicians do of thinking of all club owners as one breed. They're people; they're all different. But if you do what you're paid to do, they'll treat you right."

Some promoters regard Davis as predatory, but from his point of view, he's simply making certain he gets his rightful share of what profits there are. A couple of years ago, Miles was getting $1000 a night for one-show concerts. He was offered a Town Hall, New York, date that included two shows. His booker told him he might be able to get him $1500 since there were two performances. Miles said, "I'll tell you what. I'll take $1000 for the first show and $500 for the second, but you tell the promoter to rope off half the house for the second show and sell tickets for just the half that's left." Miles got $2000 for the night.

On the other hand, Davis will occasionally play in a club he likes for less than his normal fee, and he will not ask his top fee if he feels the room can't afford it. He gets less than his maximum price at New York's Village Vanguard partly because he likes the owner, Max Gordon, and partly because he knows how much Gordon can net in the room. He sees no point in charging Gordon so much that a profit would be impossible. If a club owner has offended him, however, Miles may never return for any fee. The manager of the Town Tavern in Toronto suggested a few years ago that Miles fire drummer Philly Joe Jones because Jones was "too loud." "Now," says Miles with relish, "he wants me back, but I won't go. He thinks he's going to influence musicians, huh?" Miles also refused to play the Crescendo in Hollywood for $3500 and instead worked what could be termed a strip joint for $1000 less. He had not forgiven Gene Norman of the Crescendo for having offered him $1500 the year before.

"Maybe that's all you were worth then," said one of his cronies when the new offer came up.

"Besides," Miles rejected the question, "Dizzy told me the audiences are noisy there."

Miles' prices have risen steadily in the past three years. His lowest point was in the early Fifties. After the nine-piece band that made the influential set of Capitol recordings in 1949 and 1950 (Birth of the Cool, Capitol T-762), Davis went from job to job, and finally the number of weeks between engagements began to stretch. He had become hooked on drugs by 1949, and the four years of his addiction were painful – economically as well as personally. For a time record dates were his prime source of support; and later, he exiled himself to Detroit for several months in an attempt to get himself together. His essential independence made the fact that he was so sorely dependent on narcotics increasingly distasteful to him, and he finally broke the habit because, as he once explained, "it was too damn much trouble." He had also become clearer as to what kind of musical group he wanted; and as he began to be able to organize and keep a combo together, his popularity and income grew, starting around 1955. Miles, however, has never been money-hungry and has always been known for his insistence on taking time off to rest and for his capacity to turn down jobs he doesn't like, no matter what the price.

There are times when Miles' refusal to accept an engagement verges on the whimsically irrational. As part of a European tour he undertook in the early part of 1960, he was offered an unprecedentedly large fee to play Britain, where he has never appeared. He turned it down. The reason came out during a conversation with British writer Kenneth Tynan. Tynan, in America as guest drama critic for The New Yorker, asked Miles at a New York party why he didn't go to London.

"You're very popular there," said Tynan.

"I can't stand the language," answered Miles. "I don't like to hear English spoken that way; it would drive me crazy if I had to hear it every day."

The usually voluble Tynan was for once reduced to incredulous silence.

Davis will stick to his principles, however fanciful they occasionally seem to be; but once he has agreed to negotiate, he expects to be well paid. Last year, Nat Hentoff sketched a format for a half-hour CBS-TV jazz program for producer Robert Herridge. He and Herridge agreed on Miles. Charlie Mingus and the late Billie Holiday as participants.

"Sounds like a good show," said Miles to Herridge, "but not for me. It sometimes takes my group thirty minutes just to warm up. I'm not going on for ten, no matter what you pay me."

As it turned out, the program – which had been taped for The Robert Herridge Theatre series – became The Sound of Miles Davis. It was all Miles, half with his small combo and half with Gil Evans directing a large band in selections from Miles Ahead. Total commentary for the half hour was less than sixty seconds. The show, because Miles held out for his standards, is quite likely the most intense and unalloyed jazz program in television history.

The sidemen for the big band were paid separately, as was Gil Evans. Miles' own unit received $4000 from which Miles took his not inconsiderable cut. "Don't I get extra," he asked half-play-fully after the price was set, "for conducting my own combo in the first half?"

Davis has been accused of one clear inconsistency. He has bitterly criticized the jazz festivals, has sworn with boiling vehemence never to play them again, but always reappears. "How come?" a friend asked him a few weeks ago. "The money," said Miles. "If I do something I don't like to do, I expect to get very well paid for it, and those festivals certainly do pay." At one festival last summer, Miles received $3500 for one set. He was told before he went on that there was only time for two numbers. Most leaders would have been indignant, feeling they wouldn't have time for their group to build to a properly effective climax. "It's all right with me," said Miles. "You're paying for it."

Davis' concentration on getting what he considers just financial reward for his work carries over to his off-the-stand attitude toward money. Unlike most musicians who have been graduated to the higher income brackets, Miles has invested his profits. He now gets no less than $2500 for a one-nighter and will demand – and usually receive – $3500 a night if two concerts are expected of him. An index of how much he keeps is that his best-paid sideman was John Coltrane (now proprietor of his own quartet) at somewhat over $400 a week. Cannonball Adderley never made more than $350 a week with Miles, although when he decided to leave to from his own band last year, Miles vainly offered him a guaranteed annual wage of $20,000. For club dates. Miles usually gets $3500 to $4000 a week, sometimes more.

Except for his four years in the pythonlike grip of narcotics, Miles has rarely had major economic problems, although he's never before been as comfortable as he is now. The Davis family is substantial financially. A grandfather had owned a thousand acres in Arkansas; and Miles' father, a dentist, for some years has also been breeding hogs and cows on two hundred acres in Milstadt, Illinois, near East St. Louis. Miles was born in Alton, Illinois, May 25, 1926, but two years later, the family moved to East St. Louis. Miles' mother, who has since been divorced from Dr. Davis, was a power in local society. She was never visibly enthusiastic about Miles' early and intense interest in music. His father, however, gave Miles a trumpet for his thirteenth birthday.

Miles played in a high school band, and by the time he was sixteen was working with a St. Louis combo, Eddie Randolph's Blue Devils. He was competent enough to receive an offer from the visiting Tiny Bradshaw band to leave school and go on the road, but his mother, appalled, insisted he finish his final year of high school. The experience that finally led Miles to resist his mother's determination to send him to Fisk University was three weeks with the Billy Eckstine band in and around St. Louis. The band, which then included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, had arrived in town with a sick third-trumpet player. Dizzy, seeing Miles at the rehearsal with a trumpet case, drafted him into the band.

Miles persuaded his father to send him to Juilliard. As soon as he arrived in New York in 1945, Miles searched for Charlie Parker, found him, and roomed with him for a while. With Parker as his guide, Miles met many of the young modernists, and they taught him and encouraged him. Miles finally went to work with Parker. He left school and began to establish a reputation from his recordings with Parker and later from his work with Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter and Billy Eckstine. By the late Forties, Miles was a bop luminary and was already influencing others.

Through the years, Miles has become a gourmet of sorts and one of the most carefully tailored musicians in jazz. Although he appreciates material pleasures and owns a $12,600 Ferrari, Miles hardly squanders his money. "I'm cool," he said recently to another musician, "so long as the lights don't go out in Jersey. I've got public utilities stock there," Miles announced with the aplomb of Bernard Baruch after a telephone talk with his broker. "Any time I'm worried, I look over there, see the lights and feel secure. If I'm very worried, I'll call up J. J. Johnson who lives in Jersey, and ask him if his lights are still on. He'll say they still are; I'll say, 'Cool,' and hang up."

Davis as of last accounts owns some $45,000 worth of stock. He reads the market reports and usually makes up his own mind as to what to buy. "I travel a lot," he explains, "and so I see what's happening a lot more clearly than most people. If a lot of buildings are going up, it figures they're going to need light, so I buy public utilities. I went to a fight in Madison Square Garden, tasted that Canada Dry soda pop, liked it, bought some more, still liked it, found out they had the sense to put it in cans for picnics, and bought some stock in it."

Miles occasionally takes advice on investments. One friend told him that steel prices were bound to go up after the strike was settled. Miles bought stock in steel, and made a substantial profit. He is characteristically contemptuous of mutual funds. "They're for old men. All they do is pick safe things you can buy yourself by using your head and the phone."

Miles is proud of his economic self-sufficiency. "If somebody says," he gloried in his long-range affluence, " 'Miles, you can't get a job any more,' I'll say, 'Solid,' and go to Europe and drive my Ferrari."

Davis delights in the challenging, instantaneous power of his automobile and laments inhibiting American speed rules. "In Europe," he lectured a friend, "you can drive as fast as you want. They don't think that everybody's a fool. Nobody wants to get killed. Nobody's going to go a hundred miles an hour in traffic. Now, Europe is really civilized. If a cop there sees a Ferrari coming, he stops traffic and lets it go by. But in this country, you can't get pleasure any more out of driving a car. It's a funny thing. When you're a kid, your pride and joy is getting a toy car to play with. You know, you never get the boy out of a man; but when you're grown up, they shut off that boy and make you drive at forty-five miles an hour."

Aside from his automobile, which Davis drives with casually expert zest, another avocation is shooting. When he visits his father's farm in St. Louis, Davis goes out target practicing with a .22 rifle. He does not, however, believe in hunting with a gun. "Even if you hunt a tiger, a man with a gun has a ridiculously unfair advantage over an animal. Hunting makes sense only in the way the natives go after a tiger. They don't have guns and have to use their wits to trap him. Another even match is hunting wild boars with spears, because if a wild boar catches you, he'll eat your ass off. Those African safaris make me laugh. A white man goes on one with natives doing all the work. I'd like to see some African Negroes go on a safari all by themselves. I wonder how they'd do."

The reference to the hunter's exploitation of the natives led a hardy friend to ask Davis about the occasional charge that Miles is somewhat of a racist in jazz, that he doesn't believe most whites are equal to Negroes in their capacity to play original, creative jazz. One story in the business is of Miles, during the nadir of his career several years ago, saying to a sideman in public on a Detroit bandstand, "You're playing too goddamn white tonight."

Davis laughs at the charge. "I haven't time to learn to Jim Crow. I've been busy since I was thirteen years old, and I've known enough Crow myself. I wouldn't want to take the next thirty-three years to learn to be prejudiced. When I first hired Lee Konitz years ago, some guys said, 'Why do you want an ofay in your band?' I asked them if they knew anybody who could play with a tone like Lee's. If I had to worry about nonsense like that, I wouldn't have a band. I wouldn't care if a cat was green and had red breath – if he could play."

If Davis is not anti-white, he is largely anti-jazz critics. "They just don't know what to say.What is love? Who the hell will tell you what love is? You have to find out for yourself. And besides, the critics are always behind times. They used to ask me how could I stand Red Garland, Coltrane and Philly Joe. Now they're praising them."

The criticism Miles does take seriously is that of the musicians he admires. "If I told him after a set," says a former sideman, " 'You didn't play anything,' that would really bother him." There have been nights when Miles was aware the other sidemen were not interested in his playing, and he'd get off the stand after a set, muttering, "I'm losing it." "If somebody like J.J. or Gil Evans or John Lewis is obviously not impressed by what he's doing," says a friend, "Miles feels a draft."

Among the critics, Miles has only a few personal friends, among them Ralph Gleason, the nationally syndicated San Francisco Chronicle columnist and Nat Hentoff. To writers he doesn't know, Miles can be traumatically caustic or bewilderingly outrageous. During a Pittsburgh date, a team of psychologists from the University of Pittsburgh asked him to help in their survey of the psycho-sociological backgrounds of musicians.

"Well," Miles croaked, "I'll tell what I do." And straight-faced, he detailed a wholly mythical pre-breakfast sexual ritual that would have appalled Humbert Humbert, Tennessee Williams and the Marquis de Sade. The psychologists, diligently taking notes, were half inclined to take him seriously, but were also dawningly suspicious as he added more graphically athletic details.

"Hey," the cautious Cannonball Adderley whispered to Miles, "this stuff may get in print."

"So what?" said Miles, enjoying himself hugely.

A few years before, a wealthy, rather arrogant young lady was writing an article on Charlie Parker for a national magazine, presumably in lieu of social work among the underpriviledged. She accosted Miles at Birdland.

"Why," she began, "did they call him Bird?"

Miles looked at her for a long time, and for some reason, decided to give her a relatively straight answer. "Because he squeaked on his horn."

"That's not true," said the angular young lady. "I have found out why. But I won't tell you."

Miles grimaced. "So you got a secret now. I'll tell you another. Bird was a friend of mine. I used to put him to bed sometimes with the needle still in his arm and him bleeding all over the place. He used to pawn my suitcase and take all my money. You going to put that in your article?"

The young lady, indignant but not sure why, walked away.

Davis himself, however, is sometimes hurt at the way he's occasionally treated in the press. In Minneapolis once, as is his custom, he refused a local reporter's invitation to come to the newspaper office for an interview. The reporter, his ego pinched, wrote a merciless personal attack on Davis for the next day's paper. "Why do people do this?" Miles asked in his hotel room. "Why does this guy go out of his way to harm me?"

Miles was made even more furious a few nights later. A Minneapolis columnist whom Davis did not know saw Miles at a club he was playing, sitting between sets with an attractive young lady. The columnist feigned drunkenness, leaned heavily on Miles, and slurred out a request for Melancholy Baby. At first, Davis answered him with surprising politeness, considering the provocation, but as the columnist persisted in his act, Miles told him with sulphurous finality to leave. The next day, the columnist "exposed" Davis, criticizing the way Miles talked to innocent customers who paid their good money to hear him. Somehow, the columnist omitted all mention of the boorish drunk act he had put on.

Next to people who invade his privacy, Davis' most active professional dislikes are theatre dates and concerts. "If there are no more nightclubs," says Davis positively, "there'll be no more jazz. How are you going to feel, free at a jazz concert? And feeling free, after all, is the whole act of jazz. There ain't but two things you can do at a concert – go there and play or go there and sit down. You can't drink: you can't move around." When a hanger-on backstage at the Apollo Theatre in New York persisted in expressing his belief that the future of jazz was on the concert circuit, Miles snorted. "All right. You listen to what the musicians say after a concert. Every time, backstage, someone will say, 'Now, where are you gonna blow?' You can't stretch out and really play at a concert and you can't make everybody sit still and feel the same way. The Germans tried it, and they couldn't make it work."

As for theatres, Miles is apprehensive as well as unenthusiastic. "We play a theatre, and they announce 'Miles Davis and his orchestra!' They pull back the curtain, and there's just me and Coltrane. It frightens me. I figure someday somebody's going to yell out 'Hell! Where's the show?'"

During one recent theatre engagement in Chicago, as Miles was about to start the group's theme, Coltrane whispered, "Sentenced for another seven days."

"Shee-it," said Davis in resigned agreement, "play the ensemble."

Unlike most musicians on theatre dates, Davis does not succumb to between-shows boredom and bars. He usually works out at a local gym. Feeling flabbiness and atrophy of any kind to be actually distasteful, Davis keeps himself in physical condition with religious fervor. "It's when you don't do anything that you get sick," he has hectored friends. He has even given gym equipment to friends he feels in urgent need of rehabilitation. In the brown-stone Davis recently bought in New York's West Seventies near the Hudson, there'll be a fully equipped gym on the third floor. That floor will also contain a ballet bar and classroom for his present wife, the lissome dancer-teacher, Frances Taylor.

Women are strongly attracted to Miles. A few, who affect to scorn him, are almost invariably women who feel he has ignored them. In Frances, however, warm, intelligent and remarkably unaggressive, Davis has found the woman closest to his own ideal. "She loves her man, and she's all woman. If she hasn't seen me all day, she's all over me when I come home." And if Miles doesn't come home some nights, Frances, he believes, "understands a man has to get out every once in a while." Miles is also very much involved with his children by a marriage that took place when Miles was very young, and gradually dissolved. The children live in St. Louis with Miles' parents. His seventeen-year-old daughter has organized a rock-'n'-roll group and sings like Betty Carter, who has coached her. "I know some girls have an infatuation for their father," the girl told Miles a few months ago, "but I tell you that if Frances hadn't married you, I would have." Miles' two boys are ten and fourteen. The ten-year-old is a fledgling trumpeter, and the older boy plays drums. Both are athletes. "They don't get into fights," says Miles proudly, "because they know how to fight." Davis is spare with fatherly advice. He's convinced that "kids have to find out the important things for themselves. But one thing I never do is talk down to them."

Davis' affection and encouragement are hardly limited to his family. He has advised and befriended several young musicians. Sonny Rollins and Jackie McLean were among his proteges, and when Cannonball Adderley first went to New York from Florida, Miles tried to teach him how best to use chords and also clued him as to the honest managers and record companies. When Cannonball later joined Miles and finally decided to be a bandleader again, Davis encouraged Adderley's ambitions once he was convinced Cannonball was determined to leave.

Several weeks ago, Miles ran into Joe Glaser, the most powerful of the jazz booking agents and a man renowned and feared for his turbulent temper. A few days before, Glaser had discovered that two of his veteran assistants had been planning to set up an office on their own in five months. He summoned them to his office, and roared that they could consider themselves independent entrepreneurs as of that second. One of the two is well liked by Miles, and Davis asked Glaser why he had guillotined the agent so hastily.

"Hell," exploded Glaser, "if some bastard had been playing with you for fifteen years and then you found out he was plotting to go out on his own, wouldn't you fire him?"

"No," said Miles, grinning. "I'd let him go. I'd figure I could borrow some money from him if he made it someday."

Glaser laughed.

"You're laughing," Miles continued, "because you don't need money any more. I never know when I'll need some."

By temperament and experience, Davis is rarely likely to brood about changes in personnel or possible competition. He is, in current sociological jargon, thoroughly inner-directed. He was playing Philadelphia a few months ago, and a member of his retinue, worried, said: "Dinah Washington's going to be around the corner from you. It might hurt business."

"Hell," said Miles. "If she packs that many people in, there'll be an overflow, and they'll come over and see us." Miles laughed when he told a friend about the incident. "People always want to see an argument get started about something. There's no reason to start an argument. There's room for everybody."

Even when a sideman makes a mistake, Miles does not believe in blistering denunciations. "I never have any trouble with musical discipline, to begin with," he explains. "I only hire musicians I know I like." Davis corrects his sidemen on the job, but rarely loudly enough for the audience to hear. His criticisms are usually along the line of, "You don't have to play all those notes." Or "This is not the kind of tune for all those substitute chords. It sounds funny that way."

What happens on the stand and in Miles' own playing through the months and years inevitably has an effect on other jazzmen, and not only trumpet players. Miles has influenced several trumpet players directly – Art Farmer, Chet Baker, the later Kenny Dorham, Donald Byrd to some extent, Wilbur Harden, and even his own earliest major influence, Clark Terry, formerly with Duke Ellington's band. Miles used to follow Terry around St. Louis, and it's likely that Miles first began to appreciate the virtues of leaving judicious spaces in a solo from Terry.

From records, Davis in his teens absorbed what he could from Roy Eldridge, Harry James, Bobby Hackett and Buck Clayton. Later Dizzy Gillespie became a strong stimulus, but in trying to deal with Gillespie's style (as had been his experience earlier with Eldridge and James), Miles found he simply couldn't play as fast and as high as he did. When he went to New York, Davis became increasingly interested in tone. Billy Butterfield's impressed him except for its vibrato, but Miles was much more drawn to the late Freddie Webster. Webster, who didn't record much and almost never in a context that provided him with extensive solo space, was noted among musicians for the deeply expressive clarity and warmth of his tone. He was also extremely economical in his choice of notes. While at Juilliard, Davis traded information with Webster. He'd teach Freddie the theory he had learned in school, and Webster would try to show him how to make his tone more mellow.

In recent years, Miles' tone – along with the rest of his playing – has become more assured. Not yet widely realized is the fact that he has developed one of the fullest and most attractive tones of any trumpeter in jazz in the lower register.

Miles has also on occasion taken to the Flugelhorn with its richer sound. All in all, the often pinched, undernourished sound that used to characterize much of his playing has filled out; and his concentration on sound has influenced scores of other players to return to a concern with more tonal body in their playing.

Miles is hardly so self-involved with his own sound or other aspects of his playing that he fails to keep aware of what other musicians are doing. If he likes a musician, however, he's rarely direct in his compliments. He'll tell another sideman that his own drummer Jimmy Cobb, for example, "sure does swing," but not Cobb himself. When he does hire a man whose musical capacity he respects, Davis is patient beyond all normal bounds. He may well be the most permissive employer in terms of his sidemen's tardiness and general undependability since Duke Ellington. Miles thought – and still does – that Philly Joe Jones is the best drummer in jazz, and he suffered for months with Jones' congenital irresponsibility. Contrary to rumor, he never did fire Philly Joe, although Jones would have tried the patience of a jazz stoic. Joe just left. Similarly, Miles had pianist Red Garland on the payroll, and Garland is almost uncanny in his consistent inability to show up on time. Miles, however, endured Garland for months, and even rehired him for a while after Garland had left the band.

Davis rarely calls rehearsals, and then only when a new member has joined the band or he's written a piece he wants to hear immediately. "I rehearse on the date, just as I do all my practicing on the job. Hell, once you've got your horn under your hands, there's no point in wasting your free hours on scales." Even at the infrequent rehearsals, Davis spends comparatively little time on details. One afternoon, after a rundown, a musician missed several notes in a number. "Well," said Miles, ending the rehearsal, "you know how it goes now. You can straighten the rest out by yourself."

Miles' own tastes in jazz are demanding. He likes few players, but his knowledge goes far back into jazz tradition. He not only remembers sidemen from the swing-era bands, but has more than a passing knowledge and appreciation of authentic blues singers such as John Lee Hooker and Big Bill Broonzy.

As for his own work, although he has become the major influence among many contemporaries on all instruments, a few musicians are beginning to accuse him of coasting. "A certain vitality isn't there any more," says a drummer. "He lives a pretty lush life and his music gets kind of lush." A trombonist, who has worked on several Davis dates, believes that Miles has deliberately restricted himself to a narrow range of notes and to safe ideas. Says another musician: "All his talk of increasing the melodic possibilities of improvisation amounts to his reducing the number of progressions to an absolute minimum, but he doesn't fill in the chordal void with lots of melodic lines. The notes are always within the same compass and he's not compensating for the meagerness of the progressions."

"I've heard Miles," adds another dissident, "play whole solos with about only three notes. Monk has sometimes done the same thing, but Monk will always surprise you. In recent months, however, I have almost always been able to predict what Miles is going to play. Yet," the musician concedes, "every once in a while, he does scare everybody."

"I was once with Miles," says a musically trained engineer, "when he was listening to alternate takes of a record session. He invariably rejected those takes that had clinkers, even though there were some that were better musically, despite the mistakes. He was too concerned with playing it safe."

Miles scoffs at the accusation that he's softening with success. "I'm too vain in what I do to play anything really bad musically that I can help not doing. If I ever feel I am getting to the point where I'm playing it safe, I'll stop. That's all I can tell you about how I plan for the future. I'll keep on working until nobody likes me. If I was Secretary of Defense, I'd give the future a lot of thought, but now I don't. When I am without an audience, I'll know it before anybody else, and I'll stop. That's all there is to life. You work at what you do best, and if the time comes when people don't like it, you do something else. As for me, if I have to stop playing, I'll just drive my Ferrari, go to the gym, and look at Frances."

Miles Davis LP Discography

(record numbers in parentheses are stereo)

Bags' Groove Prestige PR-7109

Birth of the Cool Capitol T-762

Blue Haze Prestige PR-7054

Blue Moods Debut DEB-120

Charlie ParkerAll Star Sextet Roost RLP-3210

Charlie Parker Story,Vol.3 Verve MGV-8002

Charlie Parker's GreatestRecording Session Savoy MG-12079

Collectors' Items Prestige PR-7044

Conception Prestige PR-7013

Cookin' with the MilesDavis Quintet Prestige PR-7094

Dig Miles Davis withSonny Rollins Prestige PR-7012

Early Miles Prestige PR-7168

Jazz Omnibus Columbia CL-1020

Jazz Track Columbia CL-1268

Kind of Blue Columbia CL-1355 (CS-8163)

Legrand Jazz Columbia CL-1250 (CS-8079)

Miles Prestige PR-7014

Miles Ahead Columbia CL-1041

Miles Davis,Vols. 1 & 2 Blue Note BLP-1501, 1502

Miles Davis All Stars Prestige PR-7076

Miles Davis & MiltJackson Prestige PR-7034

Miles Davis & the ModernJazz Giants Prestige PR-7150

Milestones Columbia CL-1193

Music for Brass Columbia CL-941

Musings of Miles Prestige PR-7007

The Genius ofCharlie Parker Savoy 12014

Le Jazz Cool,Vols. 1 & 2 Le Jazz Cool 101-2

Charlie Parker Memorial,Vol. 1 Savoy MG-12000

Charlie Parker Memorial,Vol.2 Savoy MG-12009

The Immortal CharlieParker Savoy MG-12001

The Charlie ParkerStory Savoy MG-12079

The Genius of CharlieParker, Vol.8 Verve MGV-8010

Porgy and Bess Columbia CL-1274 (CS-8085)

Relaxin' with the MilesDavis Quintet Prestige PR-7129

'Round AboutMidnight Columbia CL-949

Sketches of Spain Columbia CL-1480 (CS-8271)

Somethin' Else Blue Note BLP-1595(S-1595)

Workin' with the MilesDavis Quintet Prestige 7166