A tribute to legend trumpeter Miles Davis

The Miles Davis Companion, Four Decades of Commentary Edited by Gary Carner Schirmer Books, New York, 1996 274 pages

JAKARTA (JP): If the name Miles Davis was included in a dictionary, these keywords may be used to describe him: jazz, pioneer, genius, temperamental, egotistical, tough, illness- plagued, wife-beater, misogynist, drug addict, shy and insecure.

These impressions of Davis are an indicator of how one person can be perceived so differently by so many people.

One jazz lover may insist that the late Davis was one of the jazz gods, while another may argue that he bastardized music.

But now -- years after he died of pneumonia, respiratory failure and a stroke on Sept. 28, 1991 -- people do not seem to be able to get enough of this one-of-a-kind trumpeter.

At least for Gary Carner, the editor of The Miles Davis Companion, Four Decades of Commentary, the musician's time was too short.

Carner ferreted through piles of literature on Davis and came up with the Companion, an anthology of profiles, interviews, notes, letters and essays on Miles Davis, which have appeared in various publications.

The book features authors, ranging from veteran jazz columnists, poet and playwright, novelist, colleague musician, and bar owner.

The first entry came from a letter written by Miles Davis' first trumpet instructor, from the sixth grade to high school, Elwood C. Buchanan. Throughout his life, Davis credited Buchanan for turning him into an instrumentalist.

Miles Dewey Davis III was born on May 26, 1926, in Alton Illinois. His father was a dentist and a prosperous landowner. Davis studied music at the prestigious Julliard School of Music in New York, but he dropped out after hooking up with Charlie Parker and his band.

Davis is most known for his endless stylistic journey. He initiated new styles or refined old ones, inspiring his followers, before moving on to explore others.

His journey began with "cool jazz", a lighter sounding, low keyed music with a smoother bebop, which he mastered in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Almost 10 years later, Davis moved onto another sound, exploring modal materials, which consisted of limited harmonic structures that rely on scales.

In the 1960s, Davis' style seemed to be maturing technically and emotionally, producing intense records such as Seven Steps to Heaven.

But a decade later, Davis began to flirt with contemporary pop and rock music, such as that of Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix.

He initiated what was later known as fusion or jazz rock, inspiring not only many contemporary jazz musicians but also new forms of music such as acid jazz.

Davis was also an example of how a dedicated artist can avoid living in poverty without having to sacrifice their artistic pride. He had a knack for raking in profits from his investments in blue chip stocks and property.

This afforded him life's finer things, including Mercedes Benzes, Ferraris and Masseratis, swish name-brand suits, meals in exclusive restaurants and fine wine.

But both his wealth and restless talent affected his credibility and made him a target for criticism.

In an essay Play the Right Thing, The New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch led off with the head-on assertion that Davis' success had merely turned his artistic dignity and tenacity into a farcical act to please his observers.

"Davis made much fine music for the first half of his professional life and represented, for many, the uncompromising Afro-American artist, contemptuous of Uncle Tom, but he has fallen from grace -- and been celebrated for it," Crouch wrote.

This observation was partially driven by Davis' obsession with marrying rock and roll with jazz. It even turned his once temperamental stage act, during which he often shunned the audience, into a performance filled with ridiculous rock stunts.

Another contributor to the Companion was Amiri Baraka (born LeRoy Jones), one of the trendsetters of radical African American literature.

In his tributary article Homage to Miles Davis, Baraka sounds like a student infatuated with his teacher, drawing a naive portrayal of an idol he described as "the mystery man".

Perhaps living up to his famous Afrocentrism, Baraka could not pass up on the chance to introduce the race factor.

"Davis was not only the cool hipster of my bebop youth, but also the embodiment of a black attitude that had grown steadily more ubiquitous in the 1950s defiance," he wrote.

But Baraka was able to sum up the musician almost precisely: "Davis ... possesses a mystique that sometimes threatens to obscure his music yet is created in part by the deepness of that music as well as by his legendary personality."

Everyone claims to know the king.

Even Max Gordon, the late owner of one of the world's most famous jazz clubs, the Village Vanguard, had something to say about his bond with Davis.

The relationship between the two was an on-again-off-again love-hate relationship between employee and employer. Miles played at the club for some years.

"Of all the jazz men who worked at the Vanguard, Miles Davis was the toughest to handle," Gordon says, quickly adding: "But whatthehell, he was money in the bank."

For some though, Davis was an embodiment of hatred. A proud, self-confessed misogynist and wife-beater.

Essayist and novelist Pearl Cleage, denounces her previous passion for Davis' "restrained, but hip ... passionate, but cool" music, when she found out that he frequently abused his partners.

"Can we make love to the rhythms of 'a little early Miles' when he may have spent the morning of the day he recorded the music slapping one of our sisters in the mouth?" Cleage says.

This also accounts for jazz writer Greg Tate's obituary on Miles.

Tate says Davis' transient style indicated that he was a "nomad, and nomads are famous for being able to recreate their way of life anywhere".

It was this gift that gave Davis his urgency to keep moving on, "a fugitive for life".

This respect, however, vanishes when Tate recounts the physical and psychological abuse that Davis' partners endured.

The Companion is the kind of book that will make any Miles Davis lover excited when they spot it on a bookstore shelf. But it fails to make a lasting impressing on readers.

The collection of reprinted writings lack substance and a standpoint. It contains none of the vital ingredients that make a reader want to reread the book.

And Carner somehow forgot to exclude repetitive details that keep reoccurring as backgrounds in many of the articles. By the time a reader finishes the book, he or she could recite the names of all Davis' wives and the illnesses he suffered, his childhood and anecdotes from his life.

-- Devi M. Asmarani