Book Reviews

It’s About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record

RICHARD COOK

New York: Oxford University Press, 2007

ISBN 978-0-19-532266-8384 pp., $27.00

Since the publication of Miles Davis’s 1989 autobiography, Miles (co-written withQuincy Troupe), it seems that the primary task of the Davis biographer is saving the

artist from himself. As British music critic Richard Cook notes in his bio-discography,when Miles was asked about writing his own story in 1985 he said, “The trouble with

that is, I’d have to think about all those bitches” (306). A notoriously abusive man,one of Davis’s favorite expressions was the word “motherfucker,” often preceded by

the word “white.” It is rather comical to look at the way Davis’s many biographersnarrate three decades of anecdotes about Davis’s viciousness—in the studio, travelingon tour, or berating his producers—characterizing his demeanor with euphemisms

like irritable, difficult, cranky, tired, and typical. Cook manages to jump this hurdle byfocusing on Davis’s vinyl career, some eighty albums’ worth, not counting the

bootlegged live performances. Onstage and on his records, Davis was known forkeeping his mouth shut and his back to the audience. Cook’s text is for jazz

aficionados more interested in the music than the drama.The generally accepted story of Miles’s career is that it had two parts: the 1950s and

the 1960s, where Miles became the iconoclastic master of the jazz trumpet, movingfrom bop, to cool, to modal styles, always changing his approach before he got

predictable. With his revolutionary fusion of rock and roll in Bitches Brew in 1969,however, Davis’s career began to falter in several ways: even though he began to poachfans from the rock milieu (such as me), he began to lose his audience of jazz purists.

Wynton Marsalis once said, “Miles in the ’70s, that’s not jazz” (276). The cocaine andalcohol also began to take their toll, and other health problems, such as a broken hip

and diabetes, entailed hospitalization and long periods of convalescence. Always thin,he began to look gaunt and creepy. Although he produced some notable later albums,

like Tutu, during what is sometimes called his comeback years, he didn’t seem to havethe same fire. He died abruptly after a stroke in 1991. Cook treats the latter half of

Miles’s career with great care, avoiding unfavorable judgments of the work bycomparison to earlier years. Cook seems aware that when one is evaluating theachievements of longstanding wizardry, it is foolish to condemn the less accessible

ones out of hand.

ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online)DOI: 10.1080/03007760902786124

Popular Music and SocietyVol. 32, No. 3, July 2009, pp. 433–443

Cook’s text is most useful as a reference text for those interested in the albums, and

it is obviously written by someone who cares deeply about the music first andforemost. As he writes in the introduction, his text is organized into fourteen

chapters, each centered on a principal album, but he includes discussion of all theofficial releases and as many bootlegs as he can manage. The result is not a biographyin the traditional sense. It begins when Davis arrives at Julliard in 1945 and meets

Charlie Parker. Davis’s birth date is never mentioned; discussion of his bourgeoisupbringing in East St. Louis takes less than a full paragraph. Rather, Cook excels in

fleshing out the details of most of the albums he chooses to discuss—Davis’stechniques, the contributions of sidemen and collaborators like Gil Evans, and Davis’s

producers.Beyond track-by-track readings of the albums, Cook’s most daring and original

contribution to the Miles Davis story is crediting Davis’s producer Teo Macero and hisrecord labels (principally Columbia) for their roles in fostering Miles’s genius. Maceronot only had great patience with and faith in Davis, but he “piec[ed] together hours of

Davis’s music into workable forms. . . .Years later, when Columbia began releasing the‘complete’ editions of the various periods of Davis’s career, the fragmentary nature of

the trumpeter’s way of working was fully manifest, as was Macero’s skill in creatinglistenable results” (236). In terms of the collaboration between Davis and Macero,

Cook’s discussion of the creation of In a Silent Way is particularly rich (201–09).Given the emphasis on the music, Cook’s book is disappointing, overall, in that it

reads so stiffly. After promising opening chapters on the “Birth of the Cool” and“Miles Ahead,” the discuss-another-album format begins to weary the reader. Cook

concludes each chapter with a list of five or ten other albums that are each numberedand referred to in the text with their numeral in brackets rather than with the title. Forexample, “The music of [1] wanted for profundity, but it was a plausible product”

(268). Presumably, this technique saves on the word count but it contributes to theoverall feeling that this is a reference text rather than a narrative. The other principal

Davis biographies do a better job in holding attention despite their own quirks. Yaleprofessor John Szwed’s 2002 So What is a learned cultural biography that puts Miles’s

career in dialogue with other developments of his age, such as film and post-structuralism. Ian Carr’s Definitive Biography (1999) is perhaps the best single

traditional biography yet on Davis, extraordinarily well written and sympatheticallyhandled, but perhaps overstuffed with detail. And then there is Miles himself, theR-rated account.

Speaking of blue language, one topic where Cook’s biography treads lightly is thatof race. Cook diplomatically informs readers of Miles’s racial anger. He quotes Davis’s

words rejecting a low financial bid for him to play at the Montreux jazz festival: “youroffer is an insult to my color and my talent” (310). As readers of his autobiography

know, Davis could barely contain his fury at prejudice against skin tone, barking hisfeelings on the topic in thousands of creative and unprintable ways. I will always

cherish Miles’s assessment of pop icon Steve Miller as a “sorry ass cat” and “non-playing motherfucker” “who didn’t have shit going for him” (Miles 301). What is

434 Book Reviews

peculiar, however, is the paradox that perhaps Davis’s life-long best friend was Gil

Evans, a soft spoken white man. (The affection was mutual—Evans named his ownson after Miles.) Davis also played unapologetically with white jazzmen, a choice that

puzzled some black musicians. The contradiction between Davis’s outrageously bitterstatements about race (and women) and his extraordinary lyricism as a trumpeterbegs for a sympathetic psychoanalytic explanation that no one has yet attempted.

Szwed begins to hint that Miles’s melancholy underlay his anger, and given the scopeof his cultural canvass one would expect a psychoanalytic sortie, but he does not

develop it (129–30). There is something there.The virtue of Cook’s discography is that it truly does separate the musical

achievement from the nastiness and turmoil of Davis’s life—the coke, the cars, theclothes, the crying women. More than anything else, Davis admired musicians who

could take some time to make a statement, not flashy Lickmeisters who run out ofsteam in two minutes. By focusing on Miles’s musical statements, Cook’s text is avaluable contribution to Davis scholarship, and it offers a distinctive view of one of

the most expressive musicians of his age.

GRANVILLE GANTER

St. John’s University, NYq 2009 Granville Ganter

Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to

Blues and JazzLYNN ABBOTT and DOUG SEROFF

Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2007ISBN 978-1578069019461 pp., $75.00 (hardback)

In a book filled with photographs—many smudged and time-blemished—one

particular portrait stands out. Sitting on a small stool, his crisp, brimmed hat perchedatop a bass drum to his right, Eddie “Rabbit” Robinson stares directly at the camera

with his hands clutching his drumsticks. Robinson, the drummer for Tolliver’s SmartSet, a popular circus and minstrel show band, hailed from La Place, Louisiana, and

had a varied career playing with several ensembles throughout the 1910s. He is alsojust one of the many musicians who float in and around Ragged but Right: Black

Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz, a new book byLynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Despite the numbers of groups and artists representedin this study, Robinson’s photograph speaks to the singularity of the people involved

in the entertainment industry of the early 1900s. Mysterious, enchanting, and eerilymodern, the Robinson photo prefigures the jazz revolution of the 1920s, if not an

entire century of African Americans navigating the identity politics ensconced withinthe music business.

Book Reviews 435