![]() Symbolically, because the music represented creativity at full tilt, at a pitch of invention almost indistinguishable from the destruction (aesthetic and, as it also turned out, personal) necessary to establish its conditions. Musically, because Miles was channeling Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, and the tearing noise at the edge of a James Brown scream, while sounding nothing like any of them. Futurity coursed through him, through his art, a continual superhuman crackle.Įlectric Miles grabs us in three ways: musically, symbolically, and politically. The Miles of Cheadle’s Miles Ahead is, properly speaking, post-electric: Limping around and cursing people out in his cindery whisper, the great man is still neurologically fried from the high-risk, high-yield experiments of a few years earlier, the experiments that continue to freak out musicians and engross musicologists. Critics wept-literally, in the case of one tearful pundit at a 1973 concert-as Miles surrounded himself with electric guitarists, electric keyboardists, and extra drummers wired himself up with a wah-wah pedal and fired frosty fillips of trumpet-sound into halls of reverb. “Electric Miles” is the version who plugged in to the zeitgeist, traded his suits for hipster finery, and opened up his music to distortion and groove-based repetition, either transcending or dramatically repudiating (depending on your perspective) his roots in acoustic jazz. This year’s contribution to Miles studies is Bob Gluck’s The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles, which locates the music of his electric epoch within a historic continuum of exploratory jazz. Last year, two books were published about Bitches Brew, the churning, chthonically powerful double album of Afro-rock improvisations that Davis released in 1970: George Grella Jr.’s Bitches Brew, and Victor Svorinich’s Listen to This: Miles Davis and Bitches Brew. We are currently fascinated-and Cheadle’s film is part of this-by Miles’s electric period, 1968 to 1975. It might be said that he sacrificed his nervous system to it not once but two or three times, recording these and other losses in trumpet lines that strike the ear, to quote the critic Lester Bangs, “like shots of distilled passion.”Ĭheck out the full table of contents and find your next story to read. Futurity coursed through him, through his art, a continual superhuman crackle. “It’s like a curse.” And indeed there was something hexed or pursued about his unstoppable evolutions. And the mystical mood engineer of 1959’s Kind of Blue (cleaned up after junkiedom, with John Coltrane at his side) evaporates before the scowling noise addict of the mid-1970s, leaning on the keys of an organ with a misanthropic elbow. The immaculate apprentice on Charlie Parker’s bandstand in the 1940s segues into the withered extraterrestrial of his 1980s comeback. The sounds and images will not stay still, extremes of cool alternating with zaps of profane energy. Think about Miles Davis, try to hold him in your head for a minute, and you experience a kind of galvanic squiggle across the imagination, like the fingertip signature of some higher-voltage being. At that moment, it feels-it tastes-like the sound he’s been trying to get to all his life. And somehow, in the sound he makes-curt but sacramental, a rasp of pure musical energy, before melody, before anything-is supernaturally disclosed the entire creative dimension of Miles Davis. So he picks up the mouthpiece of his trumpet and blows through it, pffft!, clearing out the devils and the dried spit, preparing to repressurize his own interior. His muse, shaggy from a long solitude, is stirring. But now, after years of silence, he is thinking about playing again. It’s 1979, and Miles has been in a bad way for a while: musically inactive, coked-out, doldrum-bound, and lurking in the basement of his brownstone on the Upper West Side. It’s the sound Miles (played by Cheadle) makes when he picks up the mouthpiece, just the mouthpiece, of his long-idle instrument. But the most beautiful of the lot-which is to say, the most eerily and inexpressibly Milesian-is barely a trumpet sound at all. M iles Ahead, Don Cheadle’s recent, feverishly imagined treatment of the lost years of Miles Davis, is a movie full of beautiful trumpet sounds: bending blue notes, puffs of self-ironizing loneliness, jubilant noise runs, and savagely abstract displacements of air.
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