Jazz Democracy
In the mid-'60s, Miles Davis
met a teen-age drummer who said to him, "Man, why don't you practice?" If the
drummer, Tony Williams, hadn't been such a Wunderkind (or
"motherfucker," Davis' preferred term), Davis, who was an amateur boxer, might
have taught him another kind of lesson. Instead, Davis listened--and followed
his advice. Davis tells this story in his autobiography, Miles , and it
speaks volumes about his rapport with Williams and the other members of his
mid-'60s quintet. It's a commonplace that jazz is the musical expression of
American democracy. The unfortunate truth is that jazz more often resembles the
daytime talk show: Everyone gets his or her say before the floor passes to the
next soloist. The Davis quintet was the rare exception, a luminous example of
participatory democracy in jazz.
Columbia
has just released the Davis quintet's studio work in a six-CD box set, and it's
remarkable how well the music has aged. Here is group improvisation at its most
glorious, a conversation between five artists respectful of each other's
voices, listening and responding to one another as equals in interplay as dense
as a Bartók string quartet, yet still somehow managing to swing. (Click for a
couple of small quibbles with the way the box set was put together.)
When Davis formed this band, he had racked up an enviable
series of accomplishments. He had performed alongside Charlie Parker, led a
marvelous quintet with John Coltrane, and collaborated with Gil Evans on such
jazz orchestral arrangements as Sketches of Spain and Porgy and
Bess . Davis' 1959 sextet recording, Kind of Blue , became, with its
haikulike lyricism, synonymous with cool and provided a soundtrack for nearly
every party with intellectual pretensions. More than any other jazz musician of
the day, Davis captivated the paparazzi , which faithfully reported on
his goings-on, his taste for Italian suits, and his richly cultivated contempt
for whites who didn't get it.
But Davis
was in a creative slump in the early '60s. He couldn't keep a band together,
and he was being outpaced by younger players, such as pianist Cecil Taylor and
saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who wanted to liberate jazz from harmonic
conventions. Unlike his former sideman Coltrane, who aligned himself with the
avant-garde and ultimately became its prophet, Davis sought a middle ground
between improvisatory freedom and adherence to form.
He found it with the young musicians who formed
his quintet in 1965. With Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Herbie Hancock on
piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Williams on drums, Davis had a dream team, and
the quintet's music is as much a display of their talent as it is of Davis'.
Williams, who had played on landmark sessions with reedmen Eric Dolphy and
Jacky McLean, accented the backbeat in the drums and played just a little above
everyone else, creating a polyrhythmic, vaguely African template for his band
mates. Shorter, an alumnus of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, complemented Davis
with his elegantly fractured, bagatellelike style of phrasing. Hancock, a
favored pianist in Blue Note's stable, was the most versatile of keyboardists.
He could play in a hushed, romantic style, then plunge, at a moment's notice,
into fiery, Latin-flavored syncopation. And Carter supplied the group with a
harmonic center, becoming, in Williams' words, its "checkpoint Charlie."
The
quintet released six studio recordings between 1965 and 1968: E.S.P.
(1965), Miles Smiles (1966), Sorcerer (1967), Nefertiti
(1967), Miles in the Sky (1968), and Filles de Kilimanjaro
(1968). ( Water Babies and Circle in the Round , which were also
recorded in this period, were released in the mid-'70s.) It is stirring,
complex music, as exploratory as any of its era. Incredibly, hardly anyone
recognized this until the late '70s, when the quintet's work was adopted as a
model by young musicians such as Wynton Marsalis. The reason is simple. In the
revolutionary age of free jazz, with its joyful defiance of form and radical
embrace of pure sound, the Davis quintet seemed just a bit too polished.
Despite Davis' well-known militancy, he didn't care to set his music to civil
rights poetry or to compose preacherly anthems in the manner of Coltrane.
That said, the music bears the unmistakable imprint of the
'60s. The hierarchy separating the leaders and the led, teachers and students,
was dissolving in Davis' music, as it was everywhere else. Davis' apprentices
kept their master on his toes--challenging him to take risks and to experiment
with more open forms. Davis all but scrapped the traditional boundary between
foreground (improvising soloists) and background (rhythm section). The
quintet's music was built from the bottom up, assertively declaring jazz's
African lineage. Williams is the busiest of the musicians, dusting every corner
with percussion confetti. On the gorgeous title track of Nefertiti , for
instance, he is the leading soloist; Davis and Shorter repeat the pensive theme
hypnotically, without soloing, making this tune arguably one of the first
statements of American minimalism. Inspired by Williams, Davis adopted a more
percussive style of improvising, throwing aggressive, staccato darts at the
rhythm section. There's an edginess, a tough guy's melancholy, to Davis' sound.
Gone is the balladeer of earlier years.
The
material was also new. Everyone in the group was composing, especially Shorter,
whose strangely floating, Moorish-inflected melodies are among the most
mesmerizing in jazz. Shorter's compositions are like caramel cages: They sound
so fragile you're amazed they hold together. But, in fact, they're quite
pliable, lending themselves to dramatic shifts in tempo and voicing. Listen,
for example, to the haunting "Masqualero" from Sorcerer , a 22 measure
composition in which Hancock and Carter adapt the song's shape to the soloists,
Davis and Shorter. It's form as a living, organic process.
Within a few years, Davis grew tired of
acoustic jazz, and his final sessions with the quintet are restless,
transitional works that point the way ahead. After the release of
Nefertiti , Davis began experimenting with the electric instruments that
would consume the remainder of his career--to the horror of many in the jazz
community. He invited guitarists George Benson and Joe Beck into the studio,
and he had Hancock perform on a Fender Rhodes electric piano (and even on
celesta). Davis' writing assumed a pared down pop sensibility on tunes like
"Stuff," from Miles in the Sky . It's a cocky funk tune that wouldn't be
worth its 17 minutes if the soloists weren't Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter.
Were
Davis' electric instruments and simpler forms an opportunistic concession to
pop? It's true that some of his later work sounded like the desperate effort of
an aging star to sell records to rock fans. But the quintet's foray into
electric jazz was a natural extension of Miles' studio experimentation, and of
his voracious search for new colors and textures. If Davis was losing interest
in the tricky harmonies of bop, he was acquiring a more painterly, and no less
modernist, approach to sound. Listen, for instance, to the 33 minute "Circle in
the Round," in which Hancock plays celesta and the band is joined by guitarist
Beck, and imagine it being played on FM radio. Sure, it drags a bit without the
volatile repartee of the earlier albums. On the other hand, this druggy,
undulating succession of ostinatos is as "difficult," as dissonant and woolly,
as anything the quintet recorded, suggesting both the psychedelia of King
Crimson and the minimalism of Steven Reich.
What's more, the band's final album, Filles de
Kilimanjaro , on which Hancock and Carter perform on electric instruments,
produced one of Davis' indisputable masterpieces, the majestic 14 minute "Tout
de Suite." It's a spacey sort of blues, with Davis and Shorter playing
furiously against the ethereal, Rothko-like shadings of Hancock's Fender Rhodes
and Carter's electric bass and the anxious pulse of Williams' ride cymbal. At
once lush and frightening, "Tout de Suite" literally vibrates with intimations
of Davis' future explorations beyond jazz. The subtitle to Filles de
Kilimanjaro was telling: "Directions in Music by Miles Davis." In 1969,
Davis ventured into the lugubrious, brooding funk of Bitches Brew . The
quintet was Davis' last remarkable tango with jazz.
