MILES DAVIS

Miles is an absolute mother-fucker of a musician. He’s just simply one of the most vitally important makers of music that stalks the earth today, both as a player and improviser on his own and as a leader and shaper of other musicians. Miles Davis, virtually alone among the important jazz creators of the ’40’s and ’50’s, has dared to grow and change and venture into new shapes and forms.

Miles doesn’t go out of his way to be kind. He acknowledges his debts and sometimes praises the musicianship of others (though not over-generously) but he is quite outspoken about the fact that he no longer has any use, any time, for the conventions of music The Way It Used To Be. He has left his former contemporaries sadly and finally behind; they are hors concours, and he knows it, and he says it. Miles Davis today sounds like no one else at all. He is as far away from his early ’40’s professional beginnings as time could possibly let him be. He hasn’t wasted his years.