Thursday, January 24, 2008

Miles of Life


It must have been nearly forty years ago. One of the first albums I ever checked out of the Fort Vancouver Regional library had this kind of Playmate looking woman on the cover in a sailboat. It also had been repaired with tape and had a warm concentric set of rings circle where the album had worn into the Ektachrome based image of the cover. I remember playing it a lot of times. I liked the way the big brassy sound of it and I recall liking the way the music flowed from one song to another, but basically it was kind of like background music for comics or whatever it was I was reading. I was twelve or so.

I had listened to a lot of Miles ten years later, by the time I walked into the Caroline Berg Swan Auditorium when the screening of an old CBS television show of the Miles Ahead session was already in progress. The shots moving through rows of shining notes and swinging yet tightly controlled musicians was so inviting. Can I go back and live on that camera boom in that studio for through those incredibly perfect segues ending with the wonderful New Rhumba.

I'm not alone in my long time love affair with the first side of Miles Ahead. I knew there was a quote in Miles' Autobiography about the anti-depressive characteristics of the opening number, but don't have a copy of the book to look it up. As usual, Google to the rescue. I found a brief essay in as unlikely a location you could come up with for a Miles Davis reference: a brief essay by a fellow named Roger Aldridge in Types & Shadows: Journal of the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts. (I wonder if there is a special organization called "Friends of Miles" --sorry, I couldn't resist) Anyway, Alridge writes: "The autobiography of Miles Davis describes how Gil Evans (the great composer-arranger and best friend of Miles) once called on the phone at 3:00 AM and said, “Miles, if you’re ever depressed listen to “Springsville”,” and then hung up." Aldridge then goes on to write about the uplift he gets when ever he hears this music. I agree. It is strongly nourishing stuff that I've been fortunate to return for the past four decades. And with You Tube too we get to see and hangout on the CBS camera operators boom sweeping with music and watch Evans direct and reflect the joy of a New Rhumba.

Lastly, I think it is worth noting that the only really substantial time that Miles returned to a previous session was in the last summer of his life to collaborate with Quincy Jones at the Montreux Jazz Festival recreating Miles Ahead and much of the other music he created with Gil Evans decades before.

posted by well-executed buffet at 6:07 AM
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