Kinds of Blue

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Kinds of Blue: Miles Davis,AfroModernism, and the BluesJeffrey MageePublished online: 11 Jan 2007.

To cite this article: Jeffrey Magee (2007): Kinds of Blue: Miles Davis, AfroModernism, and theBlues, Jazz Perspectives, 1:1, 5-27

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Kinds of Blue: Miles Davis, Afro-Modernism, and the BluesJeffrey Magee

Miles Davis played the blues on his first recording datein late April 1945, a month

before his nineteenth birthday. On these recordings, he performs as a sideman in a

sextet accompanying the dancer, comedian, and rhythm-and-blues singer Rubberlegs

Williams.1 Three of the four pieces they recorded were twelve-bar blues. One of them,

a tune called Bring It on Home, features a straightforward R&B style whose

standard harmonic palette serves as a foundation for a conventional poetic structure

of AAB verses and a bereft lovers plea for the return of my woman and my used-to-

be. Behind the vocal, Davis plays a muted obbligato that sounds so far away from

the center of musical action that he might be in a neighboring practice room. A close

listening reveals a musician steeped in bebop gestures, including scurrying double-

time passages and upper extensions of chords, such as major sevenths and ninths,

that stand outside conventional rhythm and blues playing of the period.2 In short, the

recording contains the seeds of a creative tension that charged Miles Daviss entire

career.

The recording session took place around the time Daviss Juilliard cohorts were

studying for final exams. Davis himself, however, had effectively dropped out from

his formal schooling. It was not as if he couldnt handle academic challenges. Daviss

biographer, John Szwed, saw the first-semesters report card at a public exhibit at

Juilliard. The record shows that Davis earned a solid B averagedespite a D in music

historyin a varied curriculum that balanced applied and academic studies.3

Although some of his biographers, and even Davis himself, later belittled what the

school had to offer, he had taken his Juilliard studies seriously at first, and he

despised what he later called the ghetto mentality of his jazz peers who disdained

classical scores and music theory as oppressive symbols of white culture.4

1 Daviss earliest recordings are available on Miles Davis: First Miles (Savoy Classic Masters 17169, 1993,

compact disc) and Young Miles, Volume 1: 19451946 (Masters of Jazz MJCD 131, 2001, compact disc).2 Thanks to one of the journals anonymous reviewers for transcribing a portion of Daviss obbligato,

which encouraged more precision in identifying the passages bebop gestures.3 John Szwed, So What: The Life of Miles Davis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 39.4 Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 60

61. It remains important to distinguish, as Davis did, between his Juilliard teacherswhom he claimed

werent teaching me nothingand his attitudes toward music learning, including music theory and

the library scores he borrowed (from all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban Berg,

Prokofiev). These statements appear on the same pages of the autobiography.

Jazz PerspectivesVol. 1, No. 1, May 2007, pp. 527

ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online # 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/17494060601061006

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What Davis could not abide was his music history teacher, a white woman who, he

claimed, insisted that black people played the blues because they were poor and had

to pick cotton. That a Juilliard teacher of the World War II era even mentioned the

blues in class might seem progressive today, but Davis did not see it that way. He

remembered having risen in class and declaredin words set down some four

decades later, with a dash of his adopted street grammarIm from East St. Louis

and my father is rich, hes a dentist, and I play the blues. My father didnt never pick

no cotton and I didnt wake up this morning sad and start playing the blues. Theres

more to it than that. Then he inserted a seemingly gratuitous barb that suggests that,

for Davis, the incident may have challenged his manhood: Well, he added, the

bitch turned green and didnt say nothing after that.5 Davis did not come close to

graduating from Juilliard; in his freshman year, he was already too busy taking notes

from the men he deemed his true professors, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. And

he never stopped playing the blues.

Afro-Modernism and the Blues Continuum

Accounts of Miles Daviss career tend to emphasize change and contrast, because his

musical path illuminates almost every major movement in modern jazz: from bebop,

to cool jazz, to hard bop, to modal jazz, to a controlled version of free jazz, to jazz-

rock fusion, and, finally, to hip-hop hybrids at the end of his life. I have to change,

he once said. Its like a curse.6 One of the most quoted statements of a highly

quotable man, that remark has become the boilerplate thesis for many interpreta-

tions, a platitude: No other jazz musicianand few musicians of any stripeso

consistently drove themselves into new artistic territory over such a long career as

Miles Davis. Through all those changes, however, the blues acted as a connecting

thread. (See Table 1.) In fact, at almost every critical juncture there appears at least

one key blues piece that has become a fixture in the Miles Davis canon, and some that

became modern jazz standards: Sippin at Bells, Israel, Walkin, Blue n

Boogie, Bags Groove, All Blues, Freddie Freeloader, Eighty-One,

Footprints, and finally Star People, also known as New Blues, which he

played repeatedly in the decade before his death in 1991.7

5 Ibid., 59. The classroom incident and the language Davis used to recall it lend credence to Sherrie

Tuckers claim that what she calls the men and masculinity school of gender analysis can be

virtually equated with Miles Davis Studies. Sherrie Tucker, Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz

Studies, Current Musicology 7173 (Spring 2001Spring 2002): 388. Although not the chief focus of this

article, themes of gender and sexuality charge Miles Daviss engagement with the blues at almost every

turn. What Tucker says about jazz history as a whole could well be claimed about the story of Miles

Davis and the blues: The narrative itself is shaped by [problematic] notions of gender and sexuality and

race (378).6 Ian Carr, Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography (London: Harper Collins, 1998), 209.7 The exhaustive website Miles Ahead documents sixty occurrences of New Blues in the period

between June 1984 and July 1991, meaning that this piece, like the pop tunes Time after Time and

Human Nature, remained a repertoire staple almost until Daviss death (September 28, 1991). http://

www.plosin.com/milesAhead/ (accessed June 7, 2006).

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The blues idiom not only allows us to make connections across the seams in

Daviss career, it also opens up the possibility of considering his engagement with a

phenomenon that has been dubbed Afro-Modernism. This broad term

Table 1 Miles Davis and the Blues, 194591. For complete discography, session details,

and other recordings of the tunes listed below, see Miles Ahead: A Miles Davis Website, at:

http://www.plosin.com/milesAhead/.

Title (composer credit if not MD) Date* Representative Davis album(s)***

Bring It on Home (R. Williams, T. Deig) 1945 [First Miles]Pointless Mama Blues (Williams, Deig) 1945 [First Miles]Deep Sea Blues (Williams, Deig) 1945 [First Miles]Billies Bounce (C. Parker) 1945Nows the Time (Parker) 1945Jelly, Jelly (B. Eckstine) 1946Cheryl (Parker) 1947Cool Blues (Parker) 1947Buzzy (Parker) 1947Sippin at Bells 1947 [First Miles]Parkers Mood (Parker) 1948Israel (J. Carisi) 1949 [Birth of the Cool]Bluing 1951 [Miles Davis Featuring Sonny

Rollins; Bluing]Au Privave (Parker) 1951K. C. Blues (Parker) 1952** Walkin (R. Carpenter) 1954 WalkinBlue n Boogie (D. Gillespie, F. Paparelli) 1954 **WalkinSolar (C. Wayne) 1954 WalkinWeirdo (a.k.a. Sids Ahead) 1954 Miles Davis, vol. 3Bags Groove (M. Jackson) 1954 Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz

GiantsGreen Haze 1955 [The Musings of Miles; Bluing]Dr. Jackle (J. McLean) 1955 Music Davis and Milt Jackson

Quintet/SextetNo Line 1956 [Bluing]Vierd Blues 1956 [Bluing]Tranes Blues (J. Coltrane) 1956 Workin with the Miles Davis QuintetBlues by Five (R. Garland) 1956 Cookin with the Miles Davis QuintetStraight No Chaser (T. Monk) 1958 MilestonesWild Man Blues (F. Morton, L. Armstrong) 1958All Blues 1959 Kind of BlueFreddie Freeloader 1959 Kind of BluePfrancing (a.k.a. No Blues) 1961 Someday My Prince Will ComeBlues No. 2 1961 Someday My Prince Will ComeEighty-One (w/R. Carter) 1965 E.S.P.Footprints (W. Shorter) 1966 Miles SmilesGingerbread Boy (J. Heath) 1966 Miles SmilesStar People 1982 Star PeopleNew Blues 1984

Note: Boldface indicates titles of tunes for which there are ten or more recorded performances byMiles Davis, according to the Miles Ahead website.* Date of composition and/or first recording.** Tracks performed with Charlie Parker in 1946, but Walkin version is best known.*** Brackets indicate a later compilation.

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encompasses an impulse that peaked at mid-century and continued to resonate

thereafter. Building on the work of Houston A. Baker, Jr., and others, Guthrie P.

Ramsey, Jr., sees Afro-Modernism as being grounded less in musical style or

aesthetics than in a social phenomenon: the mass migration of African Americans

from the rural south to the urban north in the first half of the twentieth century.8

Afro-Modernism manifests itself in efforts to blend or juxtapose the earthy and the

urbane, the down-home and the cosmopolitan, the simple and the sophisticated. The

chief musical conduit of Afro-Modernismand its richest and most flexible

mediumis the blues. Ramseys rubric itself represents a movement in recent years

to identify and analyze twentieth-century artistic movements that had been excluded

by the concept and rhetoric of European high modernism, which, as Scott DeVeaux

has pointed out, has served as a problematic framework for discussing bebop by

insisting on arts autonomy from social forces such as race, politics, class, and

commerce.9 Other alternatives include George E. Lewiss Afrological perspective

for understanding a variety of post-1945 improvised music, and Miriam Hansens

analysis of classical cinema as a form of vernacular modernism.10 Lewis argues that

discussions of post-1945 improvisation frame the subject within a notion of

American music since 1945, as defined by European modernist efforts to embrace

aleatory, or chance, compositional methods. He finds that such discussions tend to

omit improvisatory approaches developed in African-American idioms, such as

bebop.11 Likewise, Hansen aims to free modernist aesthetics from the exclusive

framework of high modernism in order to embrace a vast range of expressive forms

and styles, including mass-mediated phenomena and even elements of everyday

experience.12 Through the blues, we might say that Davis became an Afrological and

vernacular modernist of music par excellence.

Daviss own background and statements invite us to consider his work in this light.

Poised between north and south, his hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois, situated

him at a crossroads in black musical life. The region was rich in music history and

8 Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of

California Press; and Chicago: Center for Black Music Research, 2003), especially 2730.9 See Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1997), 4, 2223.10 See George E. Lewis, Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives, Black

Music Research Journal 16 (Spring 1996): 91122; and Miriam Hansen, The Mass Production of the

Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism, in Modernism/Modernity 6 (April 1999): 5977;

reprinted in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill (London: Edward

Arnold, 2000), 332350.11 Lewis, Improvised Music, 92.12 Although Hansen does not mention musical idioms under this rubric, the blues, for one, could easily

find a place in the list with which she elaborates on her notion of vernacular modernist phenomena: I

take the study of modernist aesthetics to encompass cultural practices that both articulated and mediated

the experience of modernity, such as the mass-produced and mass-consumed phenomena of fashion,

design, advertising, architecture and urban environment, of photography, radio, and cinema. I am

referring to this kind of modernism as vernacular (and avoiding the ideologically overdetermined term

popular) because the term vernacular combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with

connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability (59).

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tradition. William Howland Kenney has recreated the areas rich musical texture to

show that where Davis grew up, blues and jazz were emblematic not of lowlife, but of

elite society, and to play the trumpet well there was a badge of race pride and

manhood.13 Legendary predecessors such as St. Louis-based Charles Creath and,

later, Clark Terrywho influenced and befriended Davisprovided models for the

kind of elegant, expressive blues playing that came to be seen as a birthright of black

trumpet players in the region.14 Moreover, coming from a well-to-do family, Davis

enjoyed an unusual level of economic stability in his youth. All of these things

prepared him for the moment when he stood and told off his professor in terms that

revealed his belief in the blues as a crucible for merging ideas about race, gender,

social class, and musical style. It was important for Davis to reject not only the notion

that blues simply expressed sadness borne of suffering, but to dismiss the whole idea

that the blues necessarily constituted a kind of transparent self-expression,

unmediated by a critical sensibility informed by artistic choicesa point on which

Albert Murray has insisted in his classic book, Stomping the Blues.15 In the blues of

Miles Davis, we can hear the development of Afro-Modernity in microcosm.16

Of the dozens of blues pieces Davis performed and recorded through his half-

century career, all can be heard as being charged with the Afro-Modernist creative

tension between down-home tradition and cosmopolitan artistry. The following

account, which only begins to suggest the subjects richness, will shift between

considerations of composition and improvised solos in order to zero in on particular

features that demonstrate that tension.

13 See William Howland Kenney, Just Before Miles: Jazz in St. Louis, 19261944, in Miles Davis and

American Culture, ed. Gerald Early (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2001), 2439.14 Clark Terry was the one who really opened up the St. Louis jazz scene for me (Davis and Troupe,

Miles, 44).15 In Stomping the Blues (New York: Da Capo, 1976), Murray strenuously challenges the stereotype that

the blues bear the stigma of the yoke of slavery (65). Moreover, he argues that the blues reflect the

technology of stylization, not simply raw emotion (90), and the idiom represents not natural

impulse but the refinement of habit, custom, and tradition the end product of discipline, or in a word,

training (98). Yet it was not just white observers like Daviss Juilliard teacher who insisted on the notion

of the blues as raw expression borne of slavery. Black gospel pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey put it this way:

blues were really born shortly after slaves were free and they were sung the way singers felt inside. They

were just let out of slavery but they hadnt gotten used to freedom. Quoted in Michael W. Harris,

The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1992), 98.16 Although singular in the longevity, variety, and consistency of his engagement with the blues, Miles

Davis is by no means a unique exemplar of Afro-Modernism. For a related interpretation of Thelonious

Monks music, see Gabriel Solis, Hearing Monk: History, Memory, and the Making of a Jazz Giant,

Musical Quarterly 86 (2002): 82116. Solis notes how the musicians he interviewed revealed a

widespread interest in Monks ability to integrate and satisfy modernist and vernacular aesthetics in the

creation of music in the context of a distinctly African American musical world (83). Fletcher

Hendersons engagement with the blues anticipates some of the issues that arise in exploring the idiom

within modern jazz, and Hendersons blues compositions from the 1920s and 1930s manifest the

tensions of Afro-Modernism discussed here. See Jeffrey Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher

Henderson and Big Band Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 6267 and 10410.

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Sippin at Bells

We can begin with a piece that Davis himself composed. One of Daviss early original

compositions, Sippin at Bells, has all the earmarks of a bebop blues. Several

commentators have noted that Davis packed the piece with chord substitutions,17 but

how he did so deserves closer attention. Sippin represents a harmonic obstacle

course that owes much to Charlie Parkers blues approach, but it also goes a step

further. That step further can be heard in the process by which the two musicians

link the pillar chords, tonic and subdominant, in the first five bars. (See Example 1.)

Compare Sippin with the Parker standard Blues for Alice, for instance, where

the saxophonist begins on a major-seventh chord in an idiom whose most

characteristic harmonic sonority is a major-minor seventh.18 As the piece continues,

Parker packs the first four bars with a series of iiV chord substitutions, beginning

with the Parkeresque slip down a half-step to the E half-diminished seventh chord

(or Em7b5), an effect borrowed from the beginning of Parkers non-blues

tune Confirmation, but a gesture that became a trademark of the so-called Bird

17 Szwed, 60; Max Harrison, Sheer Alchemy, for a While, and Gary Giddins, Miles to Go, Promises

to Keep, in Bill Kirchner, ed., A Miles Davis Reader (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,

1997), 83 and 252.

Example 1 Chord charts for Charlie Parker, Blues for Alice and Miles Davis, Sippin

at Bells.

18 Considering that both musicians used the major seventh in their blues, it is interesting to note that

Davis recalled arguing with Charlie Parker about whether it was possible to play a D natural in the fifth

bar of a Bb blues (that is, the major seventh of the subdominant Eb). Davis said it should not be done;

Parker insisted that it was acceptable. Later, Davis admitted hearing Lester Young play the note, and it

sounded good. But he bent it. See Carr, Miles Davis, 36.

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Blues.19 Sippin at Bells likewise opens with a major-seventh chord, and sets up

expectations for a series of two-fives with the move from Fm7 to Bb (m. 2), a highly

conventional progression. But then Davis throws in a series of unexpected twists with

a descending chord sequence that continues thus: Bb7-Am7-Gm7-F#m7-B7. The last

two chords are a iiV form of a familiar tritone substitution (for I7) that sets up the

arrival of the subdominant Bb. But whats going on before that? If Davis wanted to

continue in the Bird Blues vein, he might have used the A-minor chord to continue

the series of iiV progressions in the sequence Am-D7-Gm7-C7-F7, leading naturally

around the circle of fifths to the expected Bb harmony in m. 5. Instead, Davis

suggests that pattern, but he omits the fives (D7 and C7). So the piece remains

remarkable as much for the chords Davis left out as for the ones he put in.20 Given

Daviss departure from the Bird Blues pattern, it is also notable that after arriving on

the subdominant in m. 5, Sippin at Bells features a chord sequence identical to

Blues for Alice (cf. mm. 69 in both pieces), a chromatically descending pattern of

iiV progressions that lead to the expected dominant (C): Bbm7-Eb7-Am7-D7-

Abm7-Db7-Gm7-C7.

Sippin at Bells resonates with the Afro-Modernist predicament, which might be

summed up colloquially as The blues: cant live with it, cant live without it. Dizzy

Gillespies claim that bebop musicians didnt like to play the blues may be

authoritative, but even he must have recognized Miles Davis and Charlie Parker as

two of the notable exceptions:

People wanted to hear the beat and the blues, but the bebop musicians didnt liketo play the blues. They were ashamed. The media had made it shameful. WhenId play a blues, guys would say, Man, youre playing that? Id tell them,Manthats my music, thats my heritage. The bebop musicians wanted to show theirvirtuosity. Theyd play the twelve-bar outline of the blues, but they wouldnt bluesit up like the older guys they considered unsophisticated. They busied themselvesmaking changes, a thousand changes in one bar.21

The title of Sippin at Bells conjures hazy but suggestive images of gentility.

According to Davis, Bells was a classy bar that he frequented with Sonny Rollins

where everyone was clean (that is, no drug users).22 John Szwed notes, however,

that Bells was a soda parlor where Davis used to meet his girlfriend (and mother of

his first child) Irene after classes at Juilliard. Despite their disparities, in both

20 The Blues for Alice/Sippin at Bells comparison may be enriched by considering a later blues in F

major: John Coltranes Just for the Love (1957). As Lewis Porter points out, although Coltrane

usually liked a very down-home approach to the blues, Just for the Love features what Porter calls

the trickiest chord sequence Coltrane ever wrote on the blues. [with] so many major seventh chords.

In this latter respect its very much like Charlie Parker, and after a few hearings it becomes clear that

Parker was his inspiration here. See Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1998), 11617.21 Dizzy Gillespie with Al Fraser, To Be or Not to Bop (1979; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1985), 371.22 Davis and Troupe, Miles, 145.

19 In his autobiography, Davis recalls being woken up in the middle of the night by J. J. Johnson and

Benny Carter to play (or, rather, hum) Confirmation for them to transcribe, because Parker had just

composed it and all the musicians just loved that tune. Davis and Troupe, Miles, 61.

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accounts Bells represents a respectable venue, and Sippin evokes a certain

propriety compared to other modes of consumption. The title thus appears to

reinforce Daviss effort to challenge social connotations of the blues.

Davis recorded Sippin at Bells in 1947, in his first recording date as a bandleader,

with Charlie Parker as a sideman playing tenor saxophone (instead of his usual alto).

Out of deference, Davis gives Parker the first solo, then plays his own with a decidedly

smooth, unshowy gloss on the complex and unpredictable chords, of which Davis does

not miss a single change. No Dizzy Gillespian pyrotechnics herenot in speed, range, or

volumejust a fluent, no-sweat sprint through the form. Altogether, in both

conception and performance, Sippin at Bells may be heard as a calmly defiant

musical response to his Julliard teachers stereotyped claims about the blues.

Israel

The same characterization equally applies to Daviss performance on Israel, Johnny

Carisis unique blues composition recorded by the Miles Davis Nonet in 1949 and

issued on the legendary Birth of the Cool album in 1957. The works sleek surface,

subtly shifting orchestration, and generally moderate dynamicsall markers of the

so-called cool styleobscure its clear and remarkably straightforward blues structure

and harmony. The influential French critic Andre Hodeir identified Israel as one of

the two incontestable masterpieces of cool jazz (the other is Boplicity).23 His

description of the piece as a rather astonishing renewal of the blues, and of how

Daviss solo interacts with the harmonic support, matches well with efforts to

construe Daviss blues as emblematic of Afro-Modernism: the blue notes help to

make the piece sound like the blues but do not have the kind of expressive singularity

that makes them stand out from the other degrees in the regular blues scale.24

Although Hodeir calls Israel a blues in a minor key, modal ambiguity is one of

the pieces remarkable qualities, a quality that helps to neutralize, or conceal, its

melodic and harmonic bluesiness. That quality comes through clearly when we

examine the scoresnow available in Jeff Sultanofs published transcriptionswhile

hearing the recordings, a luxury that Hodeir did not enjoy.25 Davis takes a two-chorus

solo after the head. (See Example 2.) The first (beginning at 0:44 on record and m. 33 of

the published score) stands out above a spare rhythm-section background. Even here,

we get a glimpse of the brief but piquant dissonances that arise from altered chords (as

in the second measure of the solo, where Davis emphasizes a D against the G7 chords

flatted fifth [Db]) and from major-minor modal clashes (as in the third measure of the

solo, where Davis plays an Eb over a Cmaj7 chord). In Daviss second solo chorus

(beginning at 1:01; m. 45), the rest of the band returns to weave a tapestry of

interacting motifs that further enrich, and destabilize, the tunes modal implications.

Here Daviss solo voice emerges as the principal line in a polyphonic web, and the

23 Andre Hodeir, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 117.24 Ibid., 13132.25 Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool, Original Scores (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, n. d. [ca. 2001]).

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Example 2 Johnny Carisi, Israel, Miles Davis solo (transcribed by Jeff Sultanof).

Copyright # 1954 (renewed 1982), Beechwood Music Corp. All rights reserved.International copyright secured. Used by permission.


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tangy cross-relations come more quickly and regularly. In m. 51, blues implications can

be heard in the brief, simultaneous minor-second (E and D#) between Daviss

improvised trumpet line and the composed trombone part in a Cmaj7 chord, and, in

m. 54, and in the major seventh between the French Horns B-natural and the unison

Bbs in the composed alto saxophone and improvised trumpet parts over a G7b5 chord

in m. 54. Davis, it seems, strove to exploit the potential of modal clash suggested by

Carisis composition.

That Carisi and several of his Nonet colleagues were white raises an important

point: the phenomenon of Afro-Modernism is at once both racially grounded and

transcendent of race. As George Lewis has argued at length, African-American

music, like any music, can be performed [or composed or conceived] by a person of

any race without losing its character as historically Afrological.26 The blues

ultimately forms the meeting ground in which musicians of many backgrounds

worked on the cultural and musical problems posed by preserving, extending, and

disfiguring blues traditions.

The Walkin Blues

The year 1954 is now routinely recognized as a decisive moment in Daviss career and

creative outlook. The change manifested itself through the blues, especially in the

pieces Walkin and Blue n Boogie, both of which Martin Williams has

identified as watershed moments in the jazz tradition. As Gary Giddins put it, these

tracks helped trigger and codify the new counterreformation in jazz known as hard

bop.27 Davis himself recognized the pieces as a breakthrough. Walkin, Davis

claimed, turned my whole life and career around. In his autobiography, he further

adds a comment that suggests a memory filtered through the history books: I

wanted to take the music back to the fire and improvisation of bebop. But also I

wanted to take the music forward into a more funky kind of blues.28 During the

same period, boxer Sugar Ray Robinson became Daviss role model as an African

American hero whose no-nonsense attitude and confident mien came from knowing

he was the best in his field. Davis cites Robinson as the reason he quit drugs: In

1954, he was the most important thing in my life besides music.29 Davis experienced

a new clarity of purpose in 1954, and it emergedlike the Juilliard classroom

incident a decade earlierfrom a convergence of the blues, race pride, and

empowered masculinity, now reinforced by what would become a lifelong fascination

with boxing.30

26 Lewis, Improvised Music, 93.27 Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition, new and revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press,

1983), 2056; Giddins, Miles to Go, 253.28 Davis and Troupe, Miles, 177.29 Ibid., 183.30 David Ake cites Miles Daviss jazz-musician-as-boxer masculinity as a foil to Ornette Colemans

alternative masculinity, as embodied musically in Colemans composition, Lonely Woman. See Ake,

Jazz Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 73.

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That Walkin and Blue n Boogie found their most influential form in Daviss

1954 recordings has obscured the fact that both pieces had existed for years before

that. Blue n Boogie was already almost a decade old, a Dizzy Gillespie piece

conceived in the white heat of the bebop years and preserved in a broadcast by

Charlie Parker and Davis himself as early as 1946. Even then, the number had been a

retrospective glance back at swing: a riff-based uptempo blues that could have found

a home in the bands of Count Basie or Fletcher Henderson (whose 1936 Jangled

Nerves marks one forerunner of the style). Walkin had been around for several

years as well, in various guises and under various titles, first as Gravy and later as

Weirdo and Sids Ahead. The Walkin album featured a group identified as the

Miles Davis All Stars that formed into both a sextet and a quintet, each of which

was recorded at two different Prestige sessions in April 1954. The sextet that recorded

Walkin and Blue n Boogie included trombonist J. J. Johnson, tenor

saxophonist Lucky Thompson, pianist Horace Silver, bassist Percy Heath, and

drummer Kenny Clarke. In these sessions, the musicians set the two pieces in the

authoritative form that laid down the gauntlet for the newly streamlined, fiery power

of the hard bop style.

The sextet performs both tunes in a transparent form that features a head followed

by a long sequence of solos and a closing out-chorus restatement of the head. Along

the way, both tunes feature throwback passages. An ensemble riff chorusalmost de

rigueur in swing-era big-band bluesprecedes the final head of Walkin. (In 1958,

Jimmy Smiths band, with trumpeter Lee Morgan, played an almost identical

passageat a much faster tempoin its extended hard-bop blues jam, The

Sermon.31) In Blue n Boogie, the band launches Lucky Thompsons first two

solo choruses with a four-bar ensemble stoptime break whose conception has its

roots in such early standards as Bugle Call Rag, a 1920s tune that became a swing-

era staple.

Daviss solos on Walkin and Blue n Boogie alternate between engagement

and distance from blues melodic figures. In Blue n Boogie, Davis reiterates a

falling major-third figure (D-Bb) so insistently, across several chorusesand usually

at prominent cadence pointsas to suggest a deliberate avoidance of traditional

blues references (see Example 3, where the major third is bracketed). Chorus 3, based

on a two-bar riff containing the third-motif, even appears to play with the contrast

between the major and the minor third. Yet the solo is also chock full of familiar

blues devices, like the fall to Ab (the blue seventh) at the end of the first phrase of the

form to prepare for the subdominant, as in Chorus 3 (m. 28), Chorus 4 (m. 39), and

Chorus 8, where it appears a little late, on the downbeat of bar 5 (m. 89). In

Walkin, Davis likewise explores a non-blues figure beginning on a falling minor

second, that usually takes the form of Bb-A-F or F-E-C, that effaces the blue note

(lowered A and E). (See Example 4, where the figure is bracketed.)

31 Jimmy Smith: The Sermon! (Blue Note 4011, 1958, LP). The riff begins at 18:54 of the twenty-minute

recording. Compare it to the passage that begins at 11:33 of the Walkin recording.


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Example 3 John Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Paparelli, Blue n Boogie, Miles Davis

solo, choruses 16 (transcribed by Jeremy Allen). Copyright # 1944, Universal MusicalCorp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

16 Kinds of Blue

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Example 4 Richard Carpenter, Walkin, Davis solo (transcribed by Jeremy Allen).

Copyright RichCar Music, Inc. Used by permission.


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The improvised melodies that launch Chorus 4 (m. 37) and Chorus 7 (m. 73)

relate to a figure that appears in several other slow-to-medium blues by Davis in the

early 1950s. He revisits, and varies, this figure regularly, especially at the beginnings of

choruses as in his second solo in Bluing (Example 5c), which shows clearly that the

figures extension derives from Victor Herberts turn-of-the-century hit, Gypsy Love

Song, from the operetta The Fortune Teller (1898) (Example 5a).32 Although it is

possible that Davis heard the original tune, a more likely intermediate source is Louis

Armstrong, who used the same phrase in his Tiger Rag solo in the early 1930s

(Example 5b).33 Both takes of Daviss solo in Bags Groove (Examples 5d, e, f, g)

32 Bluing can be heard on Bluing: Miles Davis Plays the Blues (Prestige 11004-2, 1996, compact disc).33 The transcription here is based on a filmed performance of Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra from a

Danish film in 1933, on At the Jazz Band Ball: Early Hot Jazz, Song and Dance from Rare Original Film

Masters (19251933) (Yazoo Video 514). It is also available on various DVDs.

Example 5a Victor Herbert, Gypsy Love Song, refrain, beginning.

Example 5b Louis Armstrong solo, Tiger Rag (1933).

Example 5c Miles Davis, Bluing, second Davis solo, m. 1.

Example 5d Milt Jackson, Bags Groove (take 1), Miles Davis solo.

Example 5e Bags Groove (take 2), Miles Davis solo, chorus 5.

Example 5f Bags Groove (take 2) Davis solo, chorus 6.

Example 5g Bags Groove (take 2), Davis solo, chorus 8

Example 5 The Gypsy Love Song motif.

18 Kinds of Blue

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also feature variants and extensions of this famous tune at the top of a new chorus.34

By invoking an old operetta melody, probably transmitted through Armstrong,

Davis craftily unites disparate musical traditionsoperetta, early jazz, hard bopin

a way that extends the tunes blues contexts.

The third track on the Walkin album, Solar, also evokes the blues, as David Ake

has pointed out, yet the composition stands far from the traditional blues pocket of

Walkin and Blue n Boogie. Although the album credits Miles Davis as the

composer of Solar, the pieces true creator was probably guitarist Chuck Wayne,

who gave it the title Sonny.35 Solar features a twelve-bar form, and a harmonic

progression that, like the blues, leads from the tonic C minor to the subdominant F

(in m. 5), which the piece sustains for three bars. From there, it rounds a circle of

fifths (with a half-step shift up between Db and D to set up the turnaround, which

runs F/Fm-Bb-Eb/Ebm-Ab-Db-Dm-G) that leads the tune far from a blues format. A

iiV turnaround (Dm-G) is built into the progression, so, after a few choruses, the

casual listener starts to hear the sustained C harmony as the end and not the

beginning of the progression. Taking a cue from the pieces title, the form of Solar

might thus be said to contain an orbital progressionone that gets launched

from a blues foundation into another harmonic world before landing back on the

original chord as the form begins anew. In Solar, the blues are not a goal but

simply a jumping-off point for an urbane harmonic excursion, one in which Lewis

Porter hears echoes of another sky-bound tune: How High the Moon.36 If heard as

a unique hybrid of that tune and the blues, Solar stands out as step away from the

straight-ahead hard-bop blues that precede it on the album. Whether or not we

construe Solar as blues-related, the Walkin album marks an important step in

Daviss ongoing Afro-Modernist negotiation with a traditional African American

form.

35 The belief that Chuck Wayne wrote Sonny/Solar, claimed by Wayne himself, has a long history in

the jazz community. See, for example, the biographical sketch of Wayne at www.billcrowbass.com

(accessed May 31, 2006). See also Ake, Jazz Cultures, 195, n. 17, for a balanced perspective on the issue.

Thanks to Lewis Porter for calling this matter to my attention. Curiously, of all the music that might have

been used to commemorate Miles Davis, it is a phrase from Solar that appears on his headstone in

Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. A photograph of the headstone appears in David Dunlap,

Architecture: The Life of a Cemetery, New York Times, July 16, 2006, sec. 2, p. 27.36 Ake hears Solar as an altered twelve-bar blues (Jazz Cultures, 195, n. 17), whereas Lewis Porter

hears it as based on How High the Moon (Porter and Michael Ullman, with Edward Hazell, Jazz:

From Its Origins to the Present [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993], 340.) In my view, they both

may be correct. Porter wrote to this author in an email of August 17, 2006: This is an abbreviated form

of How High, where the C minor chord at the start of Solar stands in for the G major of How High,

and the several cadences that follow the Eb chord in How High are abbreviated in Solar. Miles could

have arrived at the title by changing moon to sun, or by changing Sonny to Sunnyeither way, this

would be typical Davis humor.

34 Bags Groove is on many compact discs. Take 2, the more widely accessible one, first appeared on

Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants: Bags Groove (Prestige 7109/OJCCD-012-2, 1954, long-playing

record).


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All Blues

Daviss turn to modal approaches in the late 1950srepresented most notably on the

album Kind of Blue (1959)marks a seemingly paradoxical punctuation to a decade

in which he recorded more blues than any other, paradoxical because modal jazzs

focus on scales deemphasized a foundational element of the blues as Davis had always

played it: harmony. I think Miles was genuinely uncomfortable with chord changes

by that point, recalled Teo Macero, who participated in post-production for the

record Kind of Blue and became a key figure in Daviss creative development.37 Yet

modal jazz did not eradicate harmony so much as shift its emphasis from a vertical to

a horizontal musical plane. In composing All Blues, Davis uses a single pitch

alterationfrom B-natural to Bbboth to effect a subtle modal change and to signal

the harmonic move from tonic to subdominant. (See Example 6.) While suggesting a

merely modal shift from G mixolydian to G-natural minor, the Bb simultaneously

invokes the subdominant chord (C) by emphasizing its blue flat-seventh degree.

The bass vamp, founded on G, continues to support this subdominant passage

because the C scale shares all of its pitches (G, D, E, F) with the G mixolydian scale.

In his autobiography, Davis writes several telling but cryptic comments about an

unnamed composition on the Kind of Blue album. He characterizes the track as this

blues, as well as describes a running sound in the number that approximates the

sound of the African finger piano (or mbira). These two details suggest that he is

describing All Blues. Overall, the description indicates that Davis once again had a

very traditional sound in mind even as he pushed the blues into new territory:

Example 6 Miles Davis, All Blues, head, mm. 16. Copyright # Jazz Horn Music.Copyright renewed. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Square

West, Nashville, TN 37203. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

37 Quoted in Eric Nisenson, The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece (New York: St.

Martins Griffin, 2000), 146. It has been often said that Macero produced the LP, but it was produced

by Irving Townsend, who is clearly addressed by Davis on the session tapes, as reported by Lewis Porter

(Coltrane, 325). Porters graduate student Ryan Maloney did extensive interviewing and research with

Macero for his M. A. thesis. Maloney determined that Macero was present at the March 2, 1959, Kind of

Blue recording session, and participated in the post-production work on the album.

20 Kinds of Blue

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I wrote this blues that tried to get back to that feeling I had when I was six yearsold, walking with my cousin along that dark Arkansas road. So I wrote about fivebars of that and I recorded it and added a kind of running sound into the mix,because that was the only way I could get in the sound of the finger piano.38

Earlier in the autobiography, Davis describes the music he heard on that dark

Arkansas road: I think that kind of stuff stayed with me, you know what I mean?

That kind of sound in music, that blues, church, back-road funk kind of thing, that

southern, Midwestern, rural sound and rhythm.39

Eighty-One

As noted, Sippin at Bells, Israel, the Walkin blues pieces, and All Blues each

represent a distinct style in the standard narrative of jazz history (bop, cool, hard bop,

modal). Nevertheless, for all their obvious differences, each of these numbers co-exist

within a conventional framework that assumes a hierarchical relationship between

subsections of the band, frontline melody instruments, and supporting rhythm

section. In playing the piece Eighty-One, Davis and his group perform a more

complete deconstruction of the traditional blues, and of assumptions about

conventional instrumental roles. Co-composed by Davis and bassist Ron Carter,

the piece appeared on the 1965 album E.S.P. by Daviss so-called second quintet,

which featured Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Tony Williams on drums, Herbie

Hancock on piano, and Davis and Carter. Their innovations had been foreshadowed

by this groups public performances of Walkin in the early and mid-1960s. In

different ways than Eighty-One, the earlier performances present radical

reformations of traditional blues by taking blistering tempos that liquefy any sense

of harmonic foundation.40

Yet, as a composition, Eighty-One represents a fundamental rethinking of the

harmonic, melodic, timbral, and textural possibilities of the blues, and of the

underlying role of a groove. At the same time, the pieces links to traditional, even

pre-war, blues traditions are stronger than any bebop or hard-bop piece Davis ever

recorded. In a way, the piece sounds like an abstraction of James Browns mid-1960s

style. Browns brand new bag of the period emphasized earthier grooves, repetitive,

cyclic patterns, static harmonic scaffolds, taut brass shouts, and a rich blues

foundation. This distinctive sound developed around the same time as Eighty-One,

and this idiom crystallized in Browns seminal I Feel Good and Papas Got a

Brand New Bag recordings of 1964 and 1965, respectively. With these recordings,

Brown launched the musical style that came to be known as funk. Even if Davis

39 Ibid., 29.40 Two extended versions of Walkin were recorded later in 1965 at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago.

On the album Highlights from the Plugged Nickel (Sony SRCS 2461, 1995, compact disc), Davis launches

the performance at a tempo close to 350 beats per minute. For listeners who know the tune, the tempo

makes a joke of its title. The original 1954 version moved at a deliberate tempo of ca. 128 beats per

minute.

38 Davis and Troupe, Miles, 234.


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claimed that his interest in Browns music appeared a few years later, we can already

hear some important parallels in the mid-1960s.41

Built on Ron Carters funky ground bass, the head of Eighty-One consists of

twenty-four bars comprising two complete blues choruses (see Example 7). The

theme contains motivic fragments, long tones, and long silences shattered by brass

and saxophone blasts. A lead sheet of the headtypically lacking the bass and drum

activityis laughably sparse: the last half of both blues choruses contain two bars of

rest (mm. 78, 1920), followed by a single long tone (F) held out to the end. Only

the beginnings of each blues chorus contain anything like a conventionally linear

melodic idea. But even these melodic ideas are fragmentarylike remnants of a

melodic conception shredded by an ideal of collective interaction.

The tunes harmonic progressionwhich features the down-home blues moves

to the subdominant in bars 2 and 10could hardly be simpler and more familiar:

Example 7 Miles Davis and Ronald Carter, Eighty-One, lead sheet. Copyright# 1965Jazz Horn Music and Retrac Productions, Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights on behalf of

Jazz Horn Music. Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Square West,

Nashville, TN 37203. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

41 In his autobiography, Davis recalls that James Brown was starting to get hot in 1964 (Davis and

Troupe, Miles, 271) but that he only began to listen to a lot of James Brown after he returned from an

overseas tour in late 1967 (88).

22 Kinds of Blue

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Example 8 Miles Davis and Ronald Carter, Eighty-One, Davis solo (transcribed by

Jeremy Allen). Copyright # 1965 Jazz Horn Music. Administered by Sony/ATV MusicPublishing, 8 Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. International copyright secured. All

rights reserved.


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I-IV-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-IV-I-I. The simplicity of this design is superficially undermined

by the fact that each chord is a sus4 chordthat is, a chord featuring the suspended

fourth degree, instead of the more conventional, and blues-oriented, third degree.

Interestingly, Daviss solo consistently emphasizes the flat-seventh degree in the tonic

region (first four bars) of each chorus, a traditional blues inflection. (See Example 8.)

Though cleanly played herewithout any slurs, growls, bends, or other gutty

blues devicesthis detail marks a sharp contrast with earlier tunes and solos that

featured a major seventh, as in the head of Sippin at Bells and the Gypsy-Love-

Song figures that reverberate through Walkin, Bluing, and Bags Groove.

Played over Carters bass groove, the solo also evokes a playful, almost dance-like,

style marked by lots of silence alternating with quick and sudden scalar outbursts, as

in Chorus 2 (beginning at 1:14, mm. 2021) and Chorus 3 (beginning at 1:34, mm.

3233).

Despite the traditional harmonic and melodic gestures of Eighty-One, the effect

of the quintet members engaged in a five-way dialogue sounds difficult, and even

abstract. Carter and Williams add a level of variety and complexity by changing the

groove for the last chorus of each solo, from the funky, straight-eighths pattern used

for the head, to a more traditional swing feel that features a walking bass and a

familiar shuffle rhythm on the ride cymbal. All of this points to a key feature of

Daviss second quintet: equality between melody instruments and rhythm section to

create a balanced interaction among the musicians. Like Daviss hard-bop blues

pieces, Eighty-One stands out as a blues vehicle that moves both backward (in

form and harmonic foundation) and forward (in melody, texture, and groove). That

is, it stands out as another solution to the Afro-Modernist predicament.

New Blues

When Davis turned to electrically charged rock- and funk-inspired music in the later

1960s, he also turned away from new approaches to the blues form. The blues

continue to fuel his work, however, as in Miles Runs the Voodoo Down from the

Bitches Brew album, and in his regular return to earlier standards, such as Walkin,

No Blues, and All Blues.42 But nothing he conceived in the decade and a half

between 1966 and 1981 came close to re-engaging with the blues as much as his piece

Star People, from the 1983 album of the same name.43 Throughout his last decade,

Davis played this piece over and over again, usually under the title New Blues. The

latter moniker is both revealing and deceptive. It is indeed a new blues: the sound of

42 Table 1 reinforces (but perhaps exaggerates) the point that Davis turned away from the blues, as he

continued to play Walkin, No Blues, and All Blues. Similarly, both Footprints (Wayne

Shorter) and Gingerbread Boy (Jimmy Heath) were regular features in the late 1960s after they were

first recorded in 1966 on the Miles Smiles album (Columbia/Legacy 9401, 1967, LP; reissued on Sony

1216, 2006, compact disc). For details on Daviss public and studio recordings of these tunes, see the

Miles Ahead website, under titles listed in the Tunes link.43 Miles Davis, Star People (Columbia FC 38657, 1983, LP; reissued on Sony International 25395, 2001,

compact disc).

24 Kinds of Blue

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the electric bass, of Daviss silence-filled solos, and, especially, of the electronic

mashed-potatoes sound of the Oberheim synthesizeremblematic of American pop

circa 1980make this piece sound far removed from traditional blues as one can

imagine. Yet its slow tempo, funky grooves, and loping compound duple meter (with

each vast beat divided into three) echo the urban-blues sound of the 1950s and early

1960s, as defined by such figures as Muddy Waters and B. B. King.44 In other words,

the tension between tradition and innovation (or at least novelty) that charged

Daviss first recordings with Rubberlegs Williams, remains on display some four

decades later.

In the eighteen-minute version recorded on the Star People album, we can hear an

extension of what Robin D. G. Kelley calls Daviss pimp aesthetic, which is marked

by a confident, alpha-male sensibility keenly aware that all behavior is role playinga

quality that Kelley himself finds in many of Daviss blues recordings45 From title to

musical core, Star People parodies that sensibility. It starts with a nebulous wash of

harmony from the Oberheima deceptive herald of the blues to come, and one that

(adding to the impression of artifice) was recorded in a different time and place.46

The piece hits its blues groove at an astonishingly slow tempoa slow strut marked

by an exaggerated shuffle in the drums and bass. Now and then, the sound of

miniature chimes sprinkles the texture like sequins on the space-age suits Davis wore

in his later years. Some twelve minutes of blues solos follow, featuring Davis in a

ruminating rhapsody marked by his trademark Harmon-muted tone thatlike a

method actors interior monologuebetrays the soulful vulnerability behind the

swagger. At the same time, the solo features some repeated figures evocative of a

basketball dribble, a sports reference that Davis acknowledged.47 At 12:39, the

Oberheim interrupts with a dreamy interlude, as if the blues had never happened.

And then the process begins again (at 13:20), built from the ground up with a firm

but glacially slow groove.

Acting the Blues

All of the blues pieces considered here, and many others, manifest Miles Daviss

ongoing effort to maintain contact with the blues tradition while keeping it

contemporary, urbane, and cosmopolitan. Although they represent disparate

aesthetics, the blues pieces can be heard as unifying features in a constantly changing

style. They all exhibit variations on the Afro-Modernist impulse to reconcile tensions

between the rural, Southernand, as Dizzy Gillespie pointed out, sometimes

45 Robin D. G. Kelley, A Jazz Genius in the Guise of a Hustler, New York Times, May 13, 2001, sec. 2,

p. 1, 20.46 See George Cole, The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis, 19801991 (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 2005), 119.47 Quincy Troupe, Miles and Me (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 81.

44 In Kings Five Long Years (recorded in 1963), to cite a famous example, the slow groove articulates

an explicit 12/8 meter at just over sixty beats per minute (The Best of B. B. King, Vol. 1, Flair V2862-30,

1991, compact disc). Daviss Star People recording clocks in at a tempo that is only slightly slower.


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shamefulresonance of the blues tradition, as well as the urbane, middle-class

Northern lives of Miles Davis and his post-war generation of jazz musicians.

Although Davis himself never discussed the music in these terms, this perspective

does complement a theme in the bountiful Miles Davis literature, which regularly

highlights the identification and analysis of duality in his life and work. Not all of

these writings necessarily relate to the Afro-Modernist idea, yet it seems worth noting

that something about Miles Davis inspires interpreters to note oppositional forces in

his life and work. Davis himself reinforced the notion of a bifurcated self-conception

in his autobiography, where he notesplayfully or dead seriously?that being a

Gemini Im already two.48 One of his biographers, Ian Carr, perhaps overstates the

case when he links Daviss bisexuality (an inclination that has been rumored but one

that no other biographer or memoir has confirmed or documented49) with the

Janus-like power of his musicits arresting strength and the immense subtlety of its

more emotional resonances.50 Similarly, the feminist scholar Hazel Carby identifies

the basic tension in Daviss autobiography as gender charged, as she argues that Davis

sought freedom from confinement associated with women, and freedom to escape

to a world defined by the creativity of men.51 She sees Davis himself as promoting a

split perspective on his artistic sensibility, which she describes as female-male, body-

soul divisions.52 More to the point of the Afro-Modernist approach advanced here,

Gary Tomlinson identifies yet another duality as foundational in Daviss life and

work. Tomlinson writes of Daviss ambivalent background. [and] values shaped

by two contrasting statuses, a disenfranchised ethnic one and an empowered

economic one. He adds that almost from the beginning, then, Daviss musical

achievement was an acutely dialogical one, reveling in the merging of contrasting

approaches and sounds.53 The classroom incident at Juilliard aggressivelybut only

temporarilyrelieved the tensions by bringing together race, class, gender, and

musical impulses in a single act of defiance that took a lifetime of music-making to

resolve.

The Afro-Modernist blues aesthetic complements and enriches such dualistic

views. For all his changes in style, Davis always found an ideal frame for self-

construction in the blues, from the smooth, urban sophisticate in Sippin at Bells,

to the self-parodying yet poignant pimp strut of Star People. In 1986, Davis played

the role of a pimp and drug dealer in an episode of the television program, Miami

Vice (NBC). When I did that role, he recalled, someone asked me how I felt acting

48 Davis and Troupe, Miles, 338.49 Whether or not Davis was bisexual has been the subject of notable speculation. Carr presents no

evidence for it; Szwed does not address it; and two men who worked closely with Davis, Quincy Troupe

and Chris Murphy, address it frankly but claim they could not confirm it. See Troupe, Miles and Me, 77

78, and Murphy, Miles to Go: The Last Years (New York: Thiunders Mouth Press, 2002), 21214. Not

surprisingly, in his autobiography, Daviss discussions of sex appear only in discussions of women. See,

for example, Davis and Troupe, Miles, 4024.50 Carr, Miles Davis, 48182.51 Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 138.52 Ibid., 146.53 Gary Tomlinson, Miles Davis, Musical Dialogician, in Miles Davis Reader, ed. Kirchner, 24041.

26 Kinds of Blue

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and I told them, Youre acting all the time when youre black.54 The point might

well be extended to the blues, where instead of expressing unmediated emotion,

Davis reinvented himself and his music at every turn. The blues became his ultimate

stage for musical role playing. At the root of that self-construction lies a tension

understood keenly by a man perpetually ready to tap the blues, while reminding

everyone within earshot that blues authenticity can belong to an upper-middle class

African American man whose father never picked cotton. Over a recorded career

extending across nearly half a century, we can hear in Daviss blues his continual

restatement of his defiant classroom declaration: Theres more to it than that.

Acknowledgements

This article took root as a brief essay in a Bloomington, Indiana, arts and entertainment

monthly (Kinds of Blue: Shades of Miles Davis, The Ryder, February 2005, 18, 20).

Expanded versions were presented as lectures at Indiana University, Georgetown

University, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Im grateful to Jeremy

Allen, David Baker, Richard Crawford, Luke Gillespie, John Howland, David Lasocki,

Gayle Sherwood Magee, and Gary Potter for discussions and correspondence that

helped to enrich and refine this article, and especially to Lewis Porter and the journals

anonymous readers for extensive commentary on earlier drafts. Thanks to Jeremy Allen

also for transcriptions of the solos on Walkin, Blue n Boogie, Bags Groove

(take 1), and Eighty-One, and to Jake Rundall for preparing the musical examples.

This article is dedicated to Miles Magee.

Abstract

Musicians and scholars alike tend to view Miles Daviss career through the lens of

change, emphasizing his stylistic shifts among modern jazz styles from bebop to cool

to hard bop to modal jazz to fusion and beyond. Davis himself supported that view

with his famous claim that I have to change. Its like a curse. Through all the

changes, however, the blues form a connecting thread that runs from his earliest

recordings as a rhythm-and-blues sideman to his final years on tour. Although

Daviss diverse blues compositions and improvisations reflect his many stylistic shifts,

they are also linked by the cultural phenomenon recently dubbed Afro-Modernism,

expressed as a tension between tradition and innovation, rural and suburban, south

and north, downhome and cosmopolitan. Seven blues recordings spanning almost

four decadesincluding Sippin at Bells, Israel, Walkin, Blue n Boogie,

All Blues, Eighty-One, and Star People (a.k.a. New Blues)reveal that

tension in the ways in which Davis and his collaborators treat melody, harmony,

rhythm, tempo, form, texture, groove, and other musical elements. Such an approach

aims to integrate cultural and musical perspectives on Daviss life and work, and by

extension, illuminate a key theme in postwar American life.

54 Davis and Troupe, 375.


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Kinds of Blue

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Transcript of Kinds of Blue