"Branford Marsalis: Waltzing with the Devil" by Mike Zwerin

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The late Paris-based jazz musician and International Herald Tribune writer Mike Zwerin posted a 41-week series entitled Sons of Miles to Culturekiosque Jazznet. [This page is no longer available] In this series, Zwerin looks back at Miles Davis and the leading jazz musicians he influenced in a series of interviews and personal reminiscences. Here is the Branford Marsalis piece in that series. It was published on August 13, 1998 so add 20+ years to any math in the article.

“The "Tonight" show bandleader Branford Marsalis, whose smiling face, as he once wryly put it, played Rochester to Jay Leno's Jack Benny five nights a week for four and a half million American couch potatoes for two and a half years, is no longer a small-screen staple.

Meet Buckshot LeFonque.

The name is taken from a pseudonym Cannonball Adderley used while moonlighting pop and R&B records in the '50s. Branford/Buckshot was passing through Europe on his way to Capetown doing promo and showcases. His manager asked me to make it clear to the readers that Branford (the first name used all alone distinguishes him from his distinguished brother Wynton; mother and father Marsalis certainly had a flare for names) had not, contrary to general opinion, move into a significantly higher tax bracket when he joined Leno's "Tonight" show. And he was not exactly left wanting leaving it.

Financially, he does very well indeed, thank you very much. The drama of Branford's last decade had been the flirtation of a talented and dedicated but volatile musician with pop-star prostitution while, he said, "the defense mechanism was screaming WARNING, DANGER. He likes waltzing with the devil and he knows how to lead.

He was Sting's soloist and musical director for three years. "The Music tells You," a D. A. Pennebaker documentary film, features Branford running between heavy-duty engagements and includes appearances by Sting, Bruce Hornsby and Jerry Garcia. He played Wesley Snipes's saxophone on the soundtrack of Spike Lee's "Mo' Better Blues,'' ditto for Sean Connery in "The Russia House."

All the while, he led his own quartet, which he described as "the best jazz band in the world. For one brief moment we were the best at what we did. Not many people can say that. I'll carry that for the rest of my life." Along the line he won a few Grammys.

It all started when a "Tonight" show producer called him at 11 one morning asking for a short composition to accompany a skit by two. "Are you joking?" Branford replied. "No way. Music isn't like a punch line." Then he thought for a minute. What the hell: "I'll have it ready by 3."

A major chord at the top. A triangle. A majestic trumpet flourish with trombones in counterpoint. Program the horns on a computer, tympani on a sampler. Hook it all up to a MP-C60 sequencer. He delivered it at 3:30. That was a good day in the gilded cage. He loves rising to occasions, like when they had to nail some klezmer music on a first take. He's at his best under pressure. Unfortunately it was rarely like that with Leno.

Television producers think they are working in the most creative and pervasive medium of them all. If you're on this show, they told Branford, you're going to sell a zillion records. He learned it doesn't work like that. Television watchers don't buy records. They're watching, they don't have time to listen. You can't do both at the same time.

The album "Buckshot LeFonque" (Columbia) bombed when it was released. If you believed the producers, after all that television exposure it should have shot right up the charts. Branford describes it as "experimental pop." It includes an Elton John clip, Gang Starr's DJ Premier rapping, Jamaican house music, a guitar solo by Albert Collins and an Elvin Jones drum sample. He places it "a little over to the left but not far out enough so that people who spend all their time liking stuff nobody else likes are going to rush over and embrace me."

He never considered the "Tonight" show a substitute for music. It would be another stop, a stage, like with Sting. Everyone had told him not to go and play rock with Sting - his father, the pianist and teacher Ellis, his brother, the cats. Everyone. Yet it had been a positive stepping-stone in his career, and the strong survive. Every project is a launching pad to the next level. "Sorry to say," he smiled ruefully, "it seems that even my marriage was like some other kind of stop" (he had been recently divorced).

As far as the musical skill level was concerned, he figures he could have played the "Tonight" show when he was a high school junior. One of the guys in Doc Severinsen's band, which he replaced, told him: "You're going to love this job. You can play golf all day."

If you play golf all day and milk the cash cow in the evening when are you going to play music? Musicians play music, he's a musician. Branford set goals for himself. He recorded John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," performed a Fantasia by Heitor Villa-Lobos with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. He tried to practice two hours a day. He hates practicing, but he does not enjoy sounding bad in public either.

The "Tonight" show producers' promises of "artistic freedom" faded with the ratings. (A lot of people did not think Jay Leno is a funny man.) The band was playing stuff like the "Flintstones" theme and Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein." Branford went on leave.

Everybody's been talking about a hip-hop progeny of Miles Davis but as far as Branford could hear nobody had done it. Some critics say neither did he. Buckshot LeFonque is not disturbed: "When I make a decision to do something artistically, I don't care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion Mozart would never have written 'Don Giovanni.'"

He was not trying to create an art form, just "adding some wrinkles to the package." Drummers, for example, have been trying to imitate sampling machines. Ridiculous - human beings imitating machines. Why not see what happens when you use both at the same time? His drummer triggered the sampler and there were no sequencers on stage so that the numbers could be as long or short as he liked whenever he wanted to change them.

The Buckshot LeFonque band - including singers and rappers - has been on several world tours. They played James Brown songs, Nirvana tunes; they mixed it up. The forms could be complex, with a lot of starts and stops. Moods and tempi changed. It's a lot of information for the musicians to remember. There were written arrangements. Still, he likes to go off on some new direction without warning:

"Call it jazz sensibility. Nothing is engraved in stone. The beginnings and the endings are fairly consistent. Everything else is completely negotiable."”

"KENNY CLARKE: Dropping Bombs on Paris" by Mike Zwerin

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The late Paris-based jazz musician and International Herald Tribune writer Mike Zwerin posted a 41-week series entitled Sons of Miles to Culturekiosque Jazznet [unfortunately, the page no longer exists]. In this series, Zwerin looks back at Miles Davis and the leading jazz musicians he influenced in a series of interviews and personal reminiscences. Here is the Kenny Clarke piece in that series. It was published on July 2, 1998 so add 20+ years to any math in the article.

Kenny Clarke was one of the originators of Bebop drumming almost out of self-defense.

He frequented Minton's Playhouse in the Upper West Side of Manhattan's Harlem district at a time when alto saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker and trumpeter John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie were creating the style of Jazz which has come to be known as Bebop.

Bird and Diz played many of their original compositions at blisteringly fast tempos.

The Swing era style of Jazz that preceded Bebop usually found the drummer playing four beats to the bar on the bass drum, something that was almost utterly impossible to do on the flag-waving Bebop up-tempos.

To keep pace with these barn burners, Kenny Clarke devised a method of playing drums that brought the timekeeping off the floor and put it on the ride cymbal using the right hand while using the left hand on the snare and right foot on the bass drum to accent the beat with pronounced licks and kicks [a practice that came to be known as "dropping bombs"]. The left foot was used to play the second and fourth beat of each bar on the hi-hat cymbals as a way of maintaining and sustaining the time.

Sometimes these hand-to-foot accents were phoneticized as "klook-mop" and when shorten to Klook, it became Kenny Clarke's nickname.

In the 1940s, drummers such as Max Roach, Stan Levey, Art Blakey and Shelly Manne embellished and expanded on what Kenny's was doing and Clarke's playing came full circle as it eventually incorporated "what the young guys were laying down."

© Copyright ® Mike Zwerin, copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with permission.

"Kenny Clarke, the father of bebop drumming, first came to Europe with the Edgar Hayes Blue Rhythm Band in 1937; about the same time as those other backwards stake-claimers; Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster.

"We played Brussels and I just came down to see what Paris was like. I liked it right away." Clarke laughed: "I even liked Brussels."

Clarke - or Klook, as he was known - was born in 1914 and had been living in France so long he could even laugh about liking Brussels (the French tell Belgian jokes, which are sort of like Polish jokes).

He settled in Paris in the 1950s because he wanted "a certain quality of life." It was not a matter of money; on the contrary, he had been busy in New York - too busy: "Economically everything was all right, but there was something I had to clear up in my mind. You know people look for different things in life, but all I wanted was peace and quiet" - there was a twinkle in his eye - "and money."

Clarke knew something was seriously wrong when he found himself hiding from Miles Davis, who was offering him work. Miles always wanted only the best, and he knew where to look for it: "Miles knocked on my door, so I told the little girl I was with to tell him I'm out. He just kept knocking, said 'Klook, Klook, I know you're in there.' I just didn't feel like going on that gig. I'd been recording for Savoy Records almost every day. I was tired, man."

One evening in 1955 he turned on his tv to watch a Maurice Chevalier spectacular and recognized the back of the conductor's head: "When he turned around, sure enough it was Michel Legrand. I called up the station and we got together that night at Basin Street East. I was working there with Phineas Newborn.

"I told him how tired I was of New York. He said he could get me on his uncle Jacques Helian's big band, 'a real jazz band' he called it. I was ready. The following September he sent me a first-class ticket on the Liberté and I left with everything I owned."

Klook came back and recorded with the Modern Jazz Quartet; their first album. The MJQ's leader John Lewis wanted Klook to play with them. The MJQ turned out to be extremely successful. Asked if he ever regretted leaving that gold mine just before it panned out, Clarke answered without hesitation: "Not for one minute. Well, I've thought about that. Someone said: 'Klook, you should have stayed here and made all that money.' But money's only good when you need it."

Klook had nothing against money. He was in fact known to be a hard negotiator, and he did well in Europe. But he was someone who followed his own inclinations; who wanted to take life, and music, on his own terms.

Back in the late 30s he got tired of playing like Buddy Rich - boom boom boom boom on the bass drum. He took the main beat away from the bass drum and put it up on the ride cymbal. The beat became lighter. The bass drum was then used only for kicking accents. "Dropping bombs" it was called. In 1940, Teddy Hill fired Clarke for dropping bombs with his big band.

One year later Hill called Clarke and asked him to organize a band for Minton's, a club he was managing on 118th street in Harlem. He hired the eccentric and then unknown pianist Thelonious Monk. Dizzy Gillespie ("a saint," said Clarke) sat in regularly; as did Charlie Christian and Charlie Parker ("a prophet"). And that's how bebop was born.

After a three-year spell in the Army, which brought him back to Paris ("I made a lot of friends, real friends"), he returned to New York; "sort of disgusted with everything. I didn't know what to do. I didn't feel like playing. Dizzy talked me into playing again."

Fate continually pushed him to Paris. He was back again in 1948 with the legendary Dizzy Gillespie big band ("One night in Sweden the band was swinging so hard, Dizzy jumped up on the piano").

During the early '50s a lot of African American musicians began taking Moslem names. In the terrible, up-tight Eisenhower 50s, before the Civil Rights Movement, there was a practical as well as a religious reason. On police cards they could be listed as Moslem instead of "colored." As silly as this may seem, some keepers of segregated hotels were persuaded that they were visiting Arab dignitaries. Clarke called himself Liaqat Ali Salaam.

Klook followed his own vision. American musicians who settled in Europe tended to be more open, more interested in life's variety, more interesting than average. These people were non-conformists in a metier known for non-conformism.

Despite their concertizing in major halls by then; playing the White House and teaching in universities, jazz musicians retained their outlaw side. Europe still appealed to it. It was hard for the computers to keep track of people who were working in three countries in a week, some of them behind the Iron Curtain, and getting paid cash-to-boot.

French residence, a Dutch wife, Danish plates on their Swedish car and plenty of work in Germany - it was tailor-made.

In his book "Notes and Tones," the drummer Arthur Taylor quoted Clarke as saying in 1972: "To organize, you must be organized within yourself first. Because otherwise it turns out like the trade unions, in other words gangsterism. The Black Panther, for example, that's all gangsterism."

And commenting on the Afro hairdo craze: "I think it's a whole lot of needless work. The time it takes them to keep their hair in an Afro could be spent reading." These were not terribly politically correct things for a black man to say at that time. But Europe gave Clarke his own perspective.

In the early '70s, when big bands were about as dead as they would ever be, Clarke co-led, with the Belgian arranger-pianist Francy Boland, one of the best of them. This all-star Euro-Americano aggregation created some of the fattest, most swinging big band sounds ever, and almost single-handedly kept the genre in the public's ears - at least the European public. Americans were concentrating on electricity. "Fusion," they called it.

With electronic jazz, form beat content. How music was reproduced or amplified, the quality of the sound reproduction, tended to be considered more important than its stuff. While Herbie Hancock traveled with a big pile of computer magazines, and George Duke's table talk was more like an engineer's than a musician's, Klook said: "You shouldn't become wrapped up in technical things as far as music is concerned, because music comes from the heart."

In other words, lifestyle comes first: "That's it. If music can help me along the road, so much the better. There's a difference in the mentality here. People are not afraid to walk around their neighborhood, to become friends; socially you feel adjusted. As a black man, as a musician - as a person, I've been lucky to be able to live here.

"I found a little house in Montreuil [a Paris suburb] about four years after I got here. Things were going good, so I just bought it. And when I bought the house I said, "Well, here I am. This is home.""

"Miles Davis, 'The Prince of Silence'" - Mike Zwerin [From the Archives]

 © -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Here’s the second in Mike Zwerin’s fine series Sons of Miles which he posted to Culturekiosque Jazznet.

“Miles Davis, "The Prince of Silence," was the last in the line of Kings, Dukes, Counts, and Lords who forged the basic vocabulary of jazz. He reigned with undisputed power, opening melodies like flowers, into the early 90s despite active nobles and young pretenders assaulting the throne.

He did not like to be called a "Legend." When he hit 60, he told me: "A legend is an old man known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it. Just call me Miles."

Whatever you call him, his treasury was overflowing. Money was every bit as important to Prince Miles as creativity. Or rather they were inseparable. He related to money and superstardom as integral to his art. They were evidence of communication, arts in themselves. Making record companies and promoters pay maximum dollar for his services forced them to invest heavily in promotion to protect their investment, which inevitably improved business and they paid even more next time.

What separated this Prince from most of his subjects is that he made creativity pay royally. ("I do what I do good. Better than good.") He divided his time between five-star hotels, a large apartment overlooking Central Park in New York and a million dollar villa in Malibu, California. He drove expensive sports cars. Money was part of what made him - whether he liked it or not - legendary.

"Don't play what's there," he told his young musicians: "Play what's not there;" and "don't play what you know, play what you don't know." Legends say legendary things. "I have to change," he said: "It's like a curse." He played key roles in the birth of bebop (with Charlie Parker), cool-jazz ("Birth Of The Cool"), modal jazz ("Kind Of Blue") and jazz-rock fusion ("Bitches Brew"). "I can put together a better rock 'n' roll band than Jimi Hendrix," he bragged.

In the 1960s, John Coltrane (who would become a legend too) was a perfect musical foil for Miles. With Philly Joe Jones, drums, Paul Chambers, bass, and Red Garland on piano, this was one of the best jazz bands in history. Trane's streamlined, full-blooded goosebump-raising "sheets of sound" on the saxophone contrasted the eloquent serenity of Miles' courtly, spacial trumpet (audiences would applaud his silences) - 20th century speed and complexity in tandem with elegant 19th century romanticism. Before leaving Miles to form his own band, Coltrane had been searching, a captive of his own intensity, playing 45-minute solos in the middle of what were supposed to be one hour sets.

"Can't you play 27 choruses instead of 28?" Miles asked him.

"I know I know," Coltrane replied:

"I play too long.

But I get so involved I don't know how to stop."

"Why don't you try taking the saxophone out of your mouth?" Miles advised. One legend to another.

Twenty years later, Miles was still having trouble with saxophonists playing what he called "duty shit, all the things saxophone players think they are supposed to do." He asked tenorman Bob Berg why he had soloed in a place where he was not scheduled and had never before played.

"It sounded so good," Berg replied, "I just had to come in."

"Bob," said the Prince of Silence, "The reason it sounded good was because you weren't playing."

Miles was regally relaxing in one of the series of grandiose hotel suites in which I interviewed him over the years. People waited on him, a young woman usually sat by his side. He was obviously accustomed to luxury, looking like he expected and deserved it. He reminded me of an African Prince in his chambers.

We were in a penthouse atop the Concorde-Lafayette Hotel at Porte Maillot. Paris was at our feet. Drinking herbal tea, he had the world on a string. I thought of when, not all that long before, he had ingested more potent substances.

For many years, Miles had been famous, or infamous, for one negative habit often associated with those who are considered to be "hip" - drugs. The black creators of that revolutionary urban American improvised music which came to be called "bebop" endured critics who said that their jazz was not really "music." While the sounds they invented were adapted by so-called "serious" composers, who were acclaimed by these same critics (all white). The composers' jazz-influenced works were performed in prestigious halls and on the soundtracks of big-budget movies while the creators worked in Mafia-controlled saloons and collected no royalties.

Bebop fathers fought alienation by constructing their own secret culture with its own style and language - "bad" meaning "good" is vintage bebop argot. Drugs were part of the huddle; they seemed to cure alienation for a minute. Not coincidentally, drugs disappeared when respect - and money - arrived. Jazz was presented in Carnegie Hall, Clint Eastwood made a movie about Charlie Parker, Miles became a pop star. When Miles cleaned up his habit, he made it "hip" to be "square."

"What do you want to know?" he asked me, in that legendary rasp which has become an emblem of "hip" to generations of hipsters and hippies.

Remembering that he had once said: "Music is like dope. You use it until you get tired of it," I asked him if he had tired of cocaine, heroin and the rest.

He turned the pages of a large sketch pad, drawing flashy, fiery-haired bright-lipped women with an assortment of felt-tipped pens. Miles began to paint late in life. Since his death, neckties based on his paintings have become available in better stores everywhere, collectors pay high prices for his original works. He turned the pad around to show it to me:

"You like these chicks? These are Parisian women - sunken cheeks. Speaking French does that. They speak with their tongues out. Language forms your face."

Drawing more sunken cheeks, he began to answer my question: "I had to stop doing everything..."

He was wearing rose-rimmed dark glasses and an understated expensive trim white shirt. His hairline had receded but what remained was curly and luxuriant. Miles Davis was the first jazz noble to have a hair transplant. There was some weight on his bones for a change. It was difficult to refrain from staring at his healthy velvety jet-black skin-tone. He was a beautiful looking man who had affairs with Juliette Greco and Jeanne Moreau while in Paris recording the soundtrack for Louis Malle's film "Elevator To The Scaffold." (The soundtrack holds up better than the movie).

"Everything," he repeated: "Listen." His hoarse whisper sounded like there was a mute in his throat. "I was snorting coke, right? Four, five grams a day. Go out drinking brandy and beer around the clock. Get up at midnight, stay out the rest of the night and half the day. Smoke four packs of cigarettes. Using sleeping pills too. One day I wake up I can't use my right hand. Can't straighten it out. Cicely panics..."

Miles Dewey Davis III, son of a middle class dentist from Alton, Illinois, was married to the actress Cicely Tyson, who won an Emmy Award (the American TV Oscar) for the title role in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman." The marriage ceremony was performed by Andrew Young, mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, at the home of comedian Bill Cosby. This was the cream of the African-American aristocracy. Cicely and Miles were later divorced. In his autobiography, he accused her of trying to pull out his hair-weave.

"Cicely panics," he continued: "Let's go see Dr. Shen," she says. Acupuncture doctor. Dr. Shen gave me needles...here, here, here. He gave me herbs to clean my body out. Chinese medicine. I shed my skin. A whole layer of skin fell out. Weird stuff came out of my nose. I didn't know which drug was messing up so I just decided to stop them all. Now I swim 40 minutes every day. The only habit I got left is sweets.

"Cigarettes are the worst of all. You're better off snorting coke than smoking cigarettes. I saw Wayne [Shorter] stand there and light a cigarette. I said, 'Why you doing that?' He said, 'I need something to do with my hands.' I said, 'Why don't you put them in your pockets? You got four pockets.'"

I asked him what he would have done if Dr. Shen had told him to give up the trumpet too.

"Change doctors," he shot back without hesitation. "I was told that once, when I was, like, sixteen. Sonny Stitt came to St. Louis, right? And he had his hair straightened. He showed me how to do it, did it for me. My hair was wet. I was running around trying to be hip, right? So then I had to come back all across town to go home. I got sick. Went to the hospital. The doctor said, 'What, you play the trumpet? You can't do that any more.' If I'd listened to him, I'd be a dentist today. Isn't that a bitch?"

Miles was not exactly healthy to begin with, the rest was self-inflicted. He went in and out of surgery for sickle-cell anaemia, banged up his Lamborghini ("Shit! Both ankles"), had an ulcer, bouts of insomnia (the coke didn't help), polyps were removed from his vocal cords. After a hip operation (Miles was so hip, he even had hip operations) forced him into a wheelchair, he insisted on being wheeled from limousine to boarding ramp after he was loping around stages like a gazelle. "That's just Miles being princely," his guitar player explained.

Miles was famous for turning his back on audience. I asked why he did that.

He lowered his head and stared up at me, glowering with narrowed menacing eyes, grinding his mouth like there was gum in it which there wasn't. Miles loved to play the devil, although I always thought it was just that - a game. When a woman once came up to him and said, "Mr Davis, I love your music,"he leered: "Wanna fuck?" (She did not think that was funny.) Now he hissed to me: "Nobody asks a symphony orchestra conductor why he turns his back on the audience." After 1970, when his "rock" period began with "Jack Johnson" and "Bitches Brew," Miles took to standing in the middle of his bubbling cauldron of binary electronic avant garde exploration on the cutting edge of distortion, signaling tempo and dynamic changes with an implied wave of his green trumpet or a pointed finger. At the same time, he denied the existence of signals:

"The music just does what it's supposed to do."

His most musical as well as commercial collaboration was with the older white arranger/composer Gil Evans, a father figure to Miles. On their albums together - which were, well, symphonic - Miles was at the height of his power. He was like a violin soloist playing a concerto with Gil's big band. Their "Sketches of Spain" was a big hit. Gil said: "Miles is not afraid of what he likes. A lot of other musicians are constantly looking around to what the next person is doing, wondering what's in style. Miles goes his own way."

Now there was a silence in the suite on top of the Hotel Concorde-Lafayette. When you're with Miles Davis, silence is not exactly silent. There was a palpable vibe in the air. He went on happily drawing away. Miles taught me whatever I know about silence, apparently not enough. I grew paranoid. I blamed myself for the conversational stagnation. I was the journalist, I needed a question - fast. Make me sound intelligent. Whatever came to mind: "Do you still practice?"

He had finished another drawing. He drew the way he once smoked and snorted - compulsively. Perhaps it was drug-substitute gratification. He turned it around, showed it to me and said: "Yeah. Practice every day. People know me by my sound, like they know Frank Sinatra's sound. Got to keep my sound. I practice seventh chords. Practicing is like praying. You don't just pray once a week."

"Do you pray?"

"I was on a plane once and all of a sudden it dropped. I had this medal Carlos Santana gave me around my neck.

It has a diamond and a ruby and a picture of some Saint on it.

I touched it.

I think that thing saved me.

Well, just say I pray in my way."

Jazz festivals will come to be divided into pre- and post - Miles Davis eras. For 20 years from 1971, Miles lent credibility to the rock backbeat. (He opened for The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane at The Fillmore.) His presence continued to hover, providing a sort of tacit legitimacy for rock bands on jazz stages. After his death in the Fall of 1991, it has become more difficult to rationalize. Miles did not play rock for the money. He was in search of communication, or, at worst, the fountain of youth. Sure, he wanted a large audience. He was no loser. But anything Miles touched can be defined as jazz, like Louis Armstrong. Now we're stuck with the youth without the fountain.

During the summer 1991 jazz festival season, Miles did something he said he would never do - look back. He led an all-star assortment of ex-employees - Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Jackie McLean, John McLaughlin, etcetera - in Paris. Quincy Jones conducted Miles soloing with a big band performing "Sketches of Spain" in Montreux. 'I cannot help but wonder," I wrote on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, "if this unexpected flurry of nostalgia at the age of 65 is some sort of last roundup." That same summer, Jack Lang awarded him the Legion of Honor. I wrote: "It seems somehow like final punctuation." Later, I realized that I had written his obituary two months early, which really spooked me. Because I also wrote: "Miles Davis is playing the soundtrack for the movie of my life and when he stops, the movie's over."

Well, I'm still here. But life post-Miles is not easy. There is nobody to remind us of the importance of personal sound and silence. The silent sounds of "Tutu," recorded in the late 80s, reflect the best of our contemporary urban experience - a peaceful garden in the middle of a polluted city, a warm café in winter, the metro when it is not on strike, walking streets, a friendly taxi driver, tree-lined empty boulevards at dawn. It has become much harder to ignore all the noise.

Miles was a regular at the "Grande Parade du Jazz" in Nice. Neighborly noise considerations forced a midnight curfew. When the stage manager waved off the band ten minutes early, Miles was furious. He wanted those ten minutes. He brought the band back until midnight on-the-nose. Money making as an art form involves doing what you want to do anyway even without the money.

Miles was also a master of the art of Good Publicity. His sparring with Wynton Marsalis in the press was a good example. Marsalis is the leader of the under-30 generation of tradition and blues-oriented players which has installed itself as the immediate future. It can be called a movement. They build on the past and one day may leap into the future.

Right now; though, most of them sound like other, mostly dead, people. They are intelligent, clean-living and highly specialized technocrats. Marsalis secured his influence on them through his post as Director of the Lincoln Center jazz program at just about the time Miles Davis died. There was a void, although I beg to differ with those who consider Marsalis to be Miles' heir. Marsalis is not "cursed" by change, and he has yet to learn the value of silence.

Marsalis accused Miles of deserting "true" jazz by playing rock. Miles accused Marsalis of ditto for playing European classical music. Back and forth, taking one to know one. Miles said: "Wynton is just doing a press number, which he is always doing. Music shouldn't be like two gladiators fighting."

Which of course made a great press number. Miles was photographed giving Wynton one of his drawings. They were both smiling like two heavyweights promoting a championship match.

So as we ride away into the sunset towards the future of jazz, we remember the words of the Prince of Silence: "When I'm not playing music, I'm thinking about it. I think about it all the time, when I'm eating, swimming, drawing, there's music in my head right now talking to you. I don't like the word jazz which white folks dropped on us. And I don't play rock. I make the kind of music the day recommends."”

Sons of Miles - "Barney Wilen: If You Are Good At It, Do It" by Mike Zwerin [From the Archives]

 

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved. Here’s another profile from the 41 chapters in Mike Zwerin’s fine series Sons of Miles which he posted to Culturekiosque Jazznet.  “After a solo with Miles Davis' band in the Club Saint Germain during the winter of 1958, 21-year-old Barney Wilen unhooked his saxophone, came to the bar, ordered a double and said: "You know what Miles just said to me? He said: 'Why don't you stop playing those terrible notes?'" Not having a low insecurity threshold, Wilen immediately went back to the bandstand to play some more of whatever you call them. It would take more than words to kill Barney.  His healthy ego can be traced in part to inheritance. His father, an American, was a dentist before becoming an inventor. He collected big royalties on patents covering flippers, goggles and other underwater gear just before the demand for them went way up. Born in Nice in 1937, Barney grew up "right in the middle of that F. Scott Fitzgerald French Riviera scene. My father was Suzanne Langlen's tennis manager for a while." The family left to escape the war but "we were on the first boat back after it was over." In addition to his father's strong personality, Wilen can look back much further on his French mother's side of the family for ancestral inspiration. Talking about ancient relatives, he said: "Pierre Josef de Tremblay was Richelieu's secretary. And the Michaux brothers were counsellors to Czar Nicholas during the Napoleonic wars. These were the guys who had the brilliant idea to burn down Moscow. "Blaise Cendrars, the poet, who was a friend of my mother's, was the one who convinced me to be a musician," Wilen continued. "My mother used to hold regular literary teas to bring people together. I remember particularly various friends of Marcel Proust and Consuelo de Saint-Exupery [widow of the writer/airman] and so on.  "My father wanted me to be a lawyer or go into real estate and he you might say ‘sequestered' the alto sax my uncle Jesse had given me just before I was going to take part in a contest sponsored by the Hot Club de France. I hustled like mad and eventually found a baritone sax, which I had never played before.  "Everybody said I sounded like Gerry Mulligan. Gerry was big that year, so I didn't mind. Our band won the contest.  "'Do what you want,' Cendrars told me. 'Don't think about what other people say. If you like it and feel you can be good at it, do it.'" In the early 1950s, teenager Wilen opened a youth club featuring jazz. Family connections combined with energy and talent coaxed help from the city of Nice, and from his father's friend Jacques Medecin; then a journalist. After that he was the mayor of Nice and since then he's been in and out of exile in Uruguay.  Playing every night, he got better fast. Wilen, which comes from Wilensky and is "either Polish or Russian, I'm not sure," moved to Paris in 1957. He was one of the few European born players that Americans were willing to play with. He accompanied Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk on the soundtrack of Roger Vadim's film "Les Liaisons dangereuses," and was very strong being featured with Miles on the soundtrack of Louis Malle's movie, "Lift to the Scaffold."  Inherited money and a multi-talented free spirit occasionally took Wilen away from jazz. After hearing some recorded pygmy music in the Musee de l'Homme in Paris, he arranged financing, put a team of filmmakers, technicians, journalists and musicians in four Land Rovers and left in 1970 to "go to Africa and look for and record these people." Moving back and forth several times with revolving personnel, the project preoccupied him for a total of six years. Because of an accumulation of problems like the war in Biafra, a plethora of land mines, a period in prison, some bad planning and intense social pressure, they never did record (or find) the pygmies. "All the pygmies seem to have left by the time we got there," Wilen said. He was the model for the central character in a six-part story called "Barney," about a jazz musician, which ran in the French adult comic magazine "A Suivre" (To Be Continued). The story was collected into a hard- covered album.  The hero is insecure, a "loser," a scowler, a womanizer, moody, strung out on heroin, and usually needs a shave. It is neither flattering nor, according to Wilen, accurate. When he asked: "Why me?" the editors replied: "Because you're the rockiest jazz musician we know." Wilen described himself as a "putter together." Although he worked regularly, and his name was well known in French jazz circles, his reputation gradually faded as a new generation of fine players came of age. His pale, emotionally drained face did not smile easily. Despite an impressive reserve of positive energy, he tended to duck his fate.  He moved back to Nice. He put together, managed and played with a punk rock band called Moko. He also put together a "Jazzmobile" organization, which, like its New york namesake, took music to people in outlying districts on flatbed trucks.  Then he brought the same concept to Paris, renamed "Zapmobile" because of trademark restrictions. The debut concert, called "Me and My Friends," was played on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees. Followed by a month-long series of concerts on a barge.  Wilen also put together a musical comedy, a series of sketches about "looking for Charlie Parker's saxophone." The project was not helped by the fact that he'd been "dodging finance companies who were after me for 200,000 francs for three years as an aftermath of my last theatrical production.  "But I'm not worried," he said at the time. "I've been existing more than living lately. I've got nothing to lose - no houses, no automobiles, no major appliances. The moment I do accumulate some belongings they seem somehow to go suddenly down the drain." PS: Barney Wilen had accumulated more and more critical success and musical knowledge and by the mid 90s, he was stronger than ever and he had a wonderful band with the Franco/Americano Laurent de Wilde on piano. So Barney had become so strong once more that when he died just shy of 60 it was a shock. A loss.  Going suddenly down the drain one way or another seemed to be his karma.”

"Shirley Horn: The Art of the Slow Ballad" - by Mike Zwerin

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The late Paris-based jazz musician and International Herald Tribune writer Mike Zwerin posted a 41-week series entitled Sons of Miles to Culturekiosque Jazznet. In this series, Zwerin looks back at Miles Davis and the leading jazz musicians he influenced in a series of interviews and personal reminiscences. Here is the Shirley Horn piece in that series. It was published on September 17, 1998 so add 20+ years to any math in the article.

“PARIS - Shirley Horn's grandmother told her that empty barrels make the most noise.

"Space is a valuable commodity in music," Horn said. "Too many musicians rush through everything with too many notes. I need time to take the picture. A ballad should be a ballad. It's important to understand what the song is saying, and learn how to tell the story. It takes time. I can't rush it. I really can't rush it."

She put on a dark pair of dark glasses: "Is this going to take long?"

Toots Thielemans, who was in the room, stopped doodling on his harmonica and said: "They're going to have to invent a new turntable at a slower speed for Shirley's ballads."

Time is redefined in Horn's presence. Toots paused. Somebody's small child in the hotel suite stopped fidgeting. It was like "slow" was infectious. We waited for slow room service with unusual patience. We were all six of us in Horn's time zone. I stopped thinking about the hot lunch awaiting me at home.

"I speak slowly," she said. "There's a place in Paris where I'd like to work one day. It's called the Slow Club."

Two dreams-come-true, Shirley Horn is a Sarah Vaughan who does not overwhelm you with everything she knows at once, and a pianist with the sophistication of a Herbie Hancock who does not sacrifice all 10 fingers on the harmonic altar. Yes indeed.

She is an entertainer who can, without hype, be called an artist. She continues the line of singer/pianists that runs from Fats Waller through Nat (King) Cole. Her album "You Won't Forget Me" was a sure-fire hit from the get-go.

Major league soloists including Miles Davis, Buck Hill, Branford and Wynton Marsalis and Toots Thielemans confirm the accolades musicians like Quincy Jones, Ahmad Jamal and George Shearing have for decades bestowed upon her. With a triumphal stand at New York's Village Vanguard, the album and more work in general than she wants to handle, Horn was finally forced - she considers travel a plague - to graduate from the in-hiding hometown-heroine role she has played to the hilt for decades in Washington, DC.

Once upon a time, the phone rang while she was feasting with her family on organically raised chicken on her mother-in-law's farm in Virginia. Her mother-in-law took it and said: "Man says he's Miles Davis."

To make the fairy tale short, she went to New York where Davis told the owner of the Village Vanguard that Miles would not work there unless Shirley Horn was on the same bill. Miles is Miles, she worked. Lena Horne was in the room.

So was Sidney Poitier, who told Horn: "I really enjoyed your music."

She started piano at four, studied composition at Howard University at 12 and at 18 was awarded a composition scholarship by Juilliard. There are not many credits to her career. It has been a slow career.

She studied with no famous teacher, and worked with no prestigious leaders. She's always led her own trio. Never been a side person. Her name came up increasingly in musicians' conversation throughout the 1980s but bringing up her daughter came first. Horn was a grandmother before she began to appear in upscale East Side New York clubs like Michael's Pub and The Blue Note.

She was in Paris for two (sold-out) concerts, to promote her new album, and to discuss the next one, a collaboration, with Toots.

"I love Shirley," Toots said, followed by a chin-dropping grin. "She plays good for a girl. She plays good for a boy too."

A jazz impresario once accused her of being a cocktail piano player. "Not pianist, piano player," she emphasized the condescension, trying not to look too hurt. When I asked her if a cocktail piano player was actually such a bad thing to be, she replied, hesitating: "No."

For a minute it looked as though it was going to hang there like that, the classic interviewer's nightmare. Toots, however, to the rescue: "It depends on who's drinking the cocktails."

Horn laughed: "I love Toots."

Me too. Saved by the harmonica player. Toots has no trouble with words.

"Are we almost through?" she asked.

For many musicians, music is therapy, never to be explained. They may try, with distaste or desperation, because it is expected of them. Melodious metaphors do not come naturally to these people, and the music is the metaphor to begin with so why bother?

On the other hand, there are those who speak better than they play. Explanations can be a substitute for substance. The talkers spout hot quotes and put judgmental jewels on the table because they believe, not totally in error, that's what the media wants.

An interview with Keith Richards is an example of the latter - Shirley Horn the former. Her defenses are even more difficult to break down because she appears to choose not to speak. It's not even out of a sense of duty, she's playing hide and seek: "Do you have many more questions?"

Horn's minimalist interviews are in perfect harmony with her music. It is astounding how much speed she can inject into a slow tempo, how much drama there can be between two beats.

She's all ellipses. Hungry propelling silences are the body of her work... the good-old three-dot Walter Winchell transitions keeping you on the edge until the next tidbit. With her, it's not like waiting for something to happen. Her ellipses do not, as in the dictionary definition, represent omissions or quick transitions.

Imagine her singing: "cause his...is...is the only...music..." The spaces hang out there on hold...you begin to wonder if it's terminal...certainly a strange place to end a song. Maybe she's forgotten the words...or just being weird...with that impish smile...toying with us...until the full impact of that effortlessly stretched, dramatically shaded blank space brings a gasp when the phrase is finally resolved at the last millisecond. "...that makes me dance."

Toots and Horn ran down material for their upcoming album of sad songs titled "Tears." Fascinated by such fine musicians at work, I was amazed to discover that four hours had flown by slowly since I arrived. When I put on my coat at 6:30 P.M., Horn said: "Are we finished already?"

They studied a menu from a Belgian mussels restaurant downstairs where she had dined several days before. "My dear," Toots asked Horn affecting an aristocratic tone. "How did it come to pass that you have this menu?"

"This!?" she looked at it in mock horror, and then at me. "I took it, she continued. "Yes, Shirley Horn stole a menu. See? You wait long enough, you finally learn some truth about me."”