One hundred years ago (May, 26, 1926), Miles Davis was born. So I thought about writing a few words about him.
I did not come to Miles through the music. I came to him through the myth.
Before I ever sat down with the records, I borrowed a biography of Miles (because to me, he was just Miles) from my local library. Back then, biographies were part of my education. Official bios, unauthorized ones, it made no difference to me. I wanted to understand the people behind the sound.
The book about Miles was different. Heavier. Unique
That was probably the first time I understood what gravitas really means.
How would I define it? To me, gravitas is charisma with weight. Presence with density. A kind of pressure that arrives in the room before the person does. Some would call it aura, although to me the two are different things.
Anyway, Miles had it.
Gradually, page after page, curiosity pushed me from the biography to the records. Kind of Blue. Then Bitches Brew. Then Tutu. I liked them because they were hard. Hard to listen. Hard to understand. Hard to play. I remember reading somewhere that Duane Allman listened to Kind of Blue for weeks on end, and I thought: one day, I want to listen to this album every day for a year.
I still haven’t done it. But it stays on the list.
Kind of Blue. The greatest jazz album of all time.
There is something almost unreasonable about that record. The lineup, by itself, does not explain it. Coltrane, Cannonball, Bill Evans, Jimmy Cobb. Genius in every chair. Someone said that Michael Jordan was the alpha among alphas during the Last Dance season of the Bulls, the one against the Utah Jazz. Well, Miles was the genius among geniuses. The trailblazer, the conductor, the main man.
I asked myself many times why. What made him different. What made him better. What made him Miles. And the answer is always the same: the way he felt things.
With him, everything was connected. Music, boxing, movement, space, silence, posture. All the same vocabulary. The way he talked about footwork in the ring sounded almost identical to the way he talked about improvisation on stage. Look at one of his many interviews on YouTube and you’ll see what I see.
There is a reason his house had rounded walls instead of corners. There is a reason he turned his back to the audience on stage. There is a reason he obsessed over where musicians stood, how sound moved through a room, how a single chair could change the way a band breathed. The man was simply listening with more than his ears. He inhabited music, more than playing it.
I deeply relate to that, because I have always believed that the way you carry yourself in one corner of your life shows up, sooner or later, in every other corner.
Oh, and by the way, like many hypersensitive souls, he struggled in this world. That included surviving heroin addiction, which is an achievement on its own, especially so for someone who lived at his voltage. I have always admired people who can look directly at their own damage and rebuild themselves from it. Honestly, more than cleanly.
Miles was many things: difficult, arrogant, brilliant, self-destructive, visionary. But above all he was a man who he trusted his instinct more than trends, more than audiences, and more than expectations. He kept tuning himself to a frequency he was hearing alone, and over time the rest of us caught up.
A hundred years later, he still sounds contemporary.
Maybe because jazz survived. More likely because a voice that loyal to itself does not really age.
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It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play
