Jaguar Magazine 03/2017 – English

MILES DAVIS DEFINED AND REDEFINED THE ESSENCE OF JAZZ.
TIGHT-FITTING SUITS, WONDERFULLY ECCENTRIC PERFORMANCES AND
A PASSION FOR CARS MADE HIM A 20TH CENTURY ICON
WORDS: Richard Williams
ILLUSTRATION: Gregory Gilbert-Lodge
PHOTOGRAPHY: REDFERNS GETTY IMAGES
Miles Davis turned his back
on his listeners, and they
loved him for it.
Sometimes, while one of
his sidemen – John Coltrane, say, or
Keith Jarrett – was holding forth, he
even left the stage altogether. His
reasoning was clear. It was meant as a
compliment to the listeners, he argued,
to behave as though they would not
want to keep staring at him when he
was not actually doing anything. He
was making his own assumption about
the seriousness of their interest in the
music. But the irony is of course they
wanted to look at him, even when he
was doing nothing at all. Because his
presence, even his silences, animated
the music, and the whole of jazz along
with it.
For a while in the late 1960s each of
his albums carried the tag ”Directions
in Music by Miles Davis” on the cover.
What to many may have appeared
presumptuous or arrogant was in fact
a simple statement of truth. Even then,
he was changing the course of jazz for
the third time – or was it the fourth?
And where he went, others followed.
Miles Davis began as an apprentice
of Charlie Parker, mastering the tricky
language of bebop before rejecting
its hectic angularity in favour of an
approach that better suited his own
temperament: something cooler in
tone, more lyrical, but retaining a
compelling aloofness. Others began
the long scramble to keep up.
With Kind of Blue in 1959, the best
selling jazz album of all time, and the
great orchestral suite Sketches of Spain,
conceived with his musical soul-mate
Gil Evans the following year, he brought
this period of his career to its peak. No
wonder Sketches of Spain appeared in
an early episode of Mad Men: it was not
just Miles’ music that all the real-life
Don Drapers adored, but his style.
Many jazz musicians had cultivated
an arresting look – the berets, zoot
suits and hand-painted neckties of the
beboppers in particular – but Davis’
slim-fitting suits and sleek sports cars
(including a Jaguar XJ-S), representing
a shift beyond Harlem towards a more
European attitude, seemed the perfect
complement to the restraint and refinement
of his sound. His cars were an
extension of him, and a step ahead of
the crowd. Herbie Hancock, who played
in one of Davis’ quintets, once said:
“The way he moved, the way he
walked, the way he stood when he
played, what came out of his horn and
the cars he drove, all of that was stylish
and part of his persona.” It’s no wonder
Davis chose the svelte XJ-S, itself a
great performer, refined and beautiful,
if unconventional.
He could have spent the rest of his
life profitably circling in the holding
pattern of that sound and style. But an
incurable creative restlessness ruled
his soul. In the mid-’60s he recruited
a bunch of musicians from the next
generation and mentored them into
the most ferociously creative small
group jazz has ever seen.
At the end of the decade he listened
to both James Brown and Jimi Hendrix,
envied them the age of their audiences,
turned his back on the pinstripe suits
and the ballads, and played to 600,000
rock fans at the Isle of Wight. His last
20 years had their ups and downs but
when he died in 1991, aged 65, it took
jazz a while to recover the direction he
had supplied for so long.
A great performer,
refined, elegant and
unconventional - no
wonder the sleek Jaguar
XJ-S was in tune with
owner Miles Davis’
leading sense of style
THE JAGUAR 55