Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool

Music has always been like a curse with me.

I've always felt driven to play it.

It's the first thing in my life.

Go to bed thinking about it and wake up thinking about it.

It's always there.

It comes before everything.

Living is an adventure and a challenge.

It wasn't about standing still and becoming safe.

But I've always been the way I am,

been like this all my life.

If anybody wants to keep creating,

they have to be about change.

I was born in Alton, Illinois,

a little river town up on the Mississippi River.

My father moved the family to East St. Louis.

East St. Louis and St. Louis were country towns

full of country people.

Especially the white people from around there.

Really country, and racist to the bone.

Miles grew up in a wealthy situation.

His father was a dentist.

He also had a farm and raised cattle and hogs.

They were the cream of the crop in the city.

He was the second richest guy in the state of Illinois.

Black man.

But, during the period that he grew up in,

it's still Jim Crow America.

And so, his father's wealth wouldn't have protected him

from segregation and racism in a place like East St. Louis.

On my 13th birthday, my father bought me a new trumpet.

My mother wanted me to have a violin,

but my father overruled her.

This caused a big argument between them.

They had been at each other's throats

since I was a little kid.

He would hear his mother and father talking and fussing.

I guess that's what got in his mind as a young boy.

Miles absorbed that. He absorbed all of that.

The anger, that kind of attitude toward women.

I remember my mother picking up things

and throwing them at my father.

He got so mad with her he punched her.

He knocked a couple of teeth right out of her mouth.

It had to affect us somehow,

although I don't really know how.

Miles was considered a genius,

but he was also considered, I guess, weird.

Miles would go into the woods,

listening to the animals or listening to the birds,

and play what he was hearing.

He always had his own way of doing things.

Miles started very early as a member of the trumpet section

in Eddie Randle's Blue Devils.

Miles is young and small

and can barely fill the suit he had to wear for these gigs.

While the other guys in Eddie Randle's band

were working their day jobs, this teenager, Miles Davis,

quickly becomes the musical director

for this popular dance band.

The real pivot point for Miles

is when, during his summer after high school,

he is invited to sit in with the Billy Eckstine band.

Both Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie are in that band.

You've got the laboratory,

the future of modern jazz, right there in this big band.

The greatest feeling I ever had in my life, with my clothes on,

was when I first met Diz and Bird.

I was 18 years old.

I decided right then and there I had to be in New York,

on 52nd Street, where the action was.

Walter Cronkite reporting.

War years always bring on new fads and tastes

and the strangest taste around

is the excitement generated by the musical noise called jazz.

This strange music has been accused of everything,

including the bad weather and the present decay in morality.

52nd Street was a mecca of jazz clubs.

They had jazz clubs on both sides of the street.

I had never heard

no shit like they was playing on 52nd St.

We would go down there and listen in amazement.

That shit was so good it was scary.

Each little place had a speaker outside

where you could hear what was going on inside.

You could stand outside and hear the music

until the club's doorman would chase you away.

Miles enrolled at Juilliard 'cause he wanted to learn music,

and because his mother wanted him

to be a trained musician and all that.

He is serious about Juilliard, he's seriously committed to it.

And he values what Juilliard might have to offer.

A lot of the old guys thought that if you went to school,

it would make you play like you were white.

If you learned something from theory,

you would lose the feeling in your playing.

I would go to the library and borrow scores

by all those great composers.

I wanted to see what was going on in all of music.

And yet he knows there's something else going on,

and it's not happening at Juilliard.

So, he was to go to Juilliard in the daytime,

and at night, he'd be on 52nd Street.

I spent my first week in New York

looking for Bird and Dizzy.

I spent all my money and didn't find them.

Then, one night, I heard this voice from behind me say,

"Hey, Miles, I heard you’ve been looking for me."

I turned around and there was Bird.

Bebop musicians were rocket scientists.

You can compare bebop to the Manhattan Project.

It was developed by some serious sound physicists

blowing their brains out to push this music as far as they could.

So, Miles stepped into a hotbed

of music research and development.

Bebop was a black music.

It was a music by black musicians

who wanted to get away from any kind of hint of minstrelsy.

No smiling, laughing, grinning and dancing.

No entertaining, man.

They wanted to be an artist just like Stravinsky,

just like Stravinsky who was just a pure artist.

Miles saw these very elegantly-dressed characters.

The dignity and the nobility that came with that.

And the swagger.

Very soon after Miles starts his Juilliard studies,

Irene arrives, his high school sweetheart,

with their child and with another baby on the way.

All of a sudden, there she was,

knocking on my motherfucking door.

My mother had told her to come.

It seems almost impossible,

what he would have been trying to do at that age.

There's the domestic situation with children,

there's the kind of time required of anyone

who's a serious student at Juilliard,

but there's also the kind of time and commitment

that this music will take.

And, at some point, something has to give.

Music was everything.

It was everything.

It was sexual, sensuous.

Everything, power. Everything, humor.

And he could not share that.

So, somebody had to play second fiddle to that.

One day, the teacher said,

"The blues grew out of the downtrodden suffering of slavery

and the crying and wailing.

This became the blues of people in chains."

Miles has been back in the room somewhere

and he raises his hand while she's talking.

She says, "Yes?"

He said, "You're a goddamn liar."

He walked out of the room.

Miles, within months,

is hanging with Bird, he's recording with Bird.

He really arrives, like, right away.

Every night, he'd get on the stand with Bird,

Bird would play the head of the tune

and just leave him on stage by himself.

He said he threw up every night

because he was so stressed out and humiliated.

Those 'cats' could wear him out on the horn any night.

But he figured something else out.

He comes up with a style that is truly reflective of who he is.

Straight tone, lyricism.

It is him. It is uniquely, organically him.

Miles meets Gil Evans

and there's this level of mutual respect

and mutual dedication to the music that will last a lifetime.

I liked the way Gil wrote music

and he liked the way I played.

We heard sound in the same way.

By the end of the '40s they're working on a project together.

It's called 'Birth of the Cool'.

A nonet that would create

a kind of melding of modern classical ideas with jazz.

Right now, ladies and gentlemen,

we bring you something new in modern music.

'Impressions in Modern Music'

with the great Miles Davis and his wonderful new organization.

I think the intention was to create a listening music,

a concert music that,

very deliberately, did not have the drive

and the funk of 52nd Street on it.

It's mainly about trying to create new colours,

in a way, where you widen the palette of jazz.

I think he was conscious of the fact that,

to move the music forward,

you've got to go some place it hasn't gone before.

The heart of European civilization

is beating strong again.

Paris ls free.

This is the end of four years of Nazi rule in Paris.

Once more, it is 'The City of Light'.

After the war, France was different, Europe was different,

and they needed a new sound to that era.

And that was jazz.

You can now hear the Miles Davis and Tadd Dameron Quintet.

Here is Miles Davis.

This was my first trip out of the country.