"Sons of Miles - Gil Evans - The Lone Arranger" by Mike Zwerin

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

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

"He has been called "The Lone Arranger," "Duke Ellington's Son," he was a father-figure for Miles Davis and his name's apt anagram is "Svengali."

Gil Evans celebrated his 75th birthday with a concert at the Hammersmith Odeon in London; with Van Morrison, Steve Lacy, Flora Purim and Airto Moreira as guests. It was a real occasion and a happy bus. By chance I was riding on it.

Crossing the Thames on our way to the gig, one of the musicians asked him for an advance. Without hesitation, Gil dug in his pocket and handed over a 20 quid note.

His wife Anita, responsible for keeping track of details like this, raised her eyebrows and although she obviously didn't want to bug Svengali before an important concert, she also obviously thought that such fast and off-the-cuff financing could very easily be forgotten with the passing of time. Like ten minutes.

She coughed and said as close to a whisper as she could manage: "Er, um...Gil. Ahem. Don't you think you should get a receipt?" He looked abashed and took a hit on the small pipe he always carried while she wrote down the details.

Gil's 15-piece band had become a Monday fixture in New York's Sweet Basil. Although the club is small and the pay minimal, regular members included such stars as John Abercrombie, John Scofield, Jon Faddis, Jaco Pastorius, George Adams, Hiram Bullock, David Sanborn and Sting (singing "Angel," "Stone Free" and other Jimi Hendrix material in the band's library.)

The music depended on who showed up, and Gil rarely knew who until they arrived. Like Ellington, Evans was a casting director more than a leader. He affected the music by his mere presence. It sounded according to how he felt on any given night. Instructions were not required because he had already taken care of dynamics, timbre and space by who was hired. He did not choose instruments, he chose instrumentalists. He did not hire a trumpet player, he hired the late Johnny Coles; who might be said to have been playing the Colesophone. He chose musicians for their flaws as well as attributes. Coles splitting notes was just as heartbreaking as it needed to be.

"We don't even need written music anymore," Evans told Down Beat magazine. "Hiram [Bullock] or I strike a chord and away we'll go, improvising ensembles and everything for 10 or 15 minutes. I tell the players not to be terrified by the vagueness.

"If it looks like we're teetering on the edge of formlessness, somebody's going to be so panicked that they'll do something about it. I depend on that. If it has to be me, I'll do it, but I'll wait and wait because I want somebody else to do it. I want to hear what's going to happen."

Gil liked to say that "insecurity is the secret of eternal youth." The first thing you noticed about Gil, after his generosity, intelligence and good humor, were his big ears; like radar dishes. Yes, big ears. And the stone-grey hair framed a craggy face with a childlike smile that defied chronological age. He would not do anything the easy way. He also said: "The worst addiction in the world is convenience."

Born in Toronto on May 13, 1912, he moved to Southern California, where he worked as a pianist and learned the arranger's craft. He led his own band in Balboa Beach, where Stan Kenton got his start a decade later, from 1936 to 1939. He remained as arranger when Skinnay Ennis took it over to play the Bob Hope radio show. In the process he lost his "name" band. He rarely, if ever, said anything about regretting it. He was, after all, the "lone arranger."

In 1941 he went to New York to write for the Claude Thornhill orchestra, which won two successive Billboard polls in the "sweet band" category. Debussy flirted with Charlie Parker on Evans's version of "Yardbird Suite" (featuring Lee Konitz) for Thornhill's band. It was the first time bebop had ever been played by a "sweet band."

Evans described the style: "Everything - melody, harmony, rhythm - was moving at minimum speed. Everything was lowered to create a sound, and nothing was to be used to distract from that sound." He said that "the sound hung like a cloud."

The sound matured when Evans became musical director of the historic Miles Davis "Birth of the Cool" nonet in 1948. In the '50s it evolved into "Porgy and Bess," "Sketches of Spain." and "Miles Ahead," the closest thing he ever had to hits. What an all-American pair they were, Miles and Gil. Their collaborations stay in your head like Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane." Rare combinations of quality and accessibility.

When a golden-spined 6-CD box Miles/Gil retrospective was released by Columbia Records in 1996, the box's booklet said: "Like the late films of Orson Welles, too many Davis/Evans collaborations "have been misunderstood, dismissed or left unreleased." America does not treat its geniuses with much elegance.

Their collaboration can be compared to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. They were all odd couples - people of very different character. Most of all, there was an imbalance of ego. Gil's ego was certainly no match for Miles's. (Few were.) Miles was not at all embarrassed to take top billing.

It took 15 years for Gil to be finally granted credit for his famous "‘Round Midnight" quintet arrangement for Miles. And on the above- mentioned box's golden spine, Gil's name is tiny and barely clinging - one line from dropping off the bottom. On the sleeve, Gil's name is shades lighter than, and far behind "Miles Davis." On the replica of the LP "Porgy and Bess" inside, Evans is credited only as "orchestra under the direction of..." In reality, even "arranged by..." would be inadequate.

Evans single-handedly raised the line between arranging and composition. The booklet continues: "Evans found in Davis his ideal interpreter, an artist whose strengths served as a focus for Evans's most profound musical statements."

It would seem, then, that a more appropriate credit would be "composed by Gil Evans. Interpreted by Miles Davis." But this would not have been healthy for Miles's ego. Nobody, certainly not Miles, ever did much to (pardon the pun) help Gil balance the score. Gil was not very helpful either. He was not a complainer. To a fault. No way would he sue Miles Davis.

He preferred to take another hit on his little pipe. On a series of ‘desert-island" big band albums under his own name - "Out of the Cool," "New Bottles Old Wine," and "Priestess" in the '60s and '70s, - Svengali transmuted Jelly Roll Morton's "King Porter Stomp," Bix Beiderbecke's "Davenport Blues," Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca," Kurt Weill's "Bilbao" and John Benson Brook's "Where Flamingoes Fly" into hanging clouds of sound.

The hanging clouds met an electric storm in 1974 when he explored the symphonic implications of rock on the album "Gil Evans Plays Jimi Hendrix." A sound cannot be copyrighted and although his was widely reproduced in film music (James Bond movies, for example), commercial jingles and by other people's bands, Evans basically lived from his U.S. Social Security check during his "golden years." He once admitted that his New York senior citizen's public transportation pass came in handy. He laughed about it, there was no evident bitterness.

Later recognition included a National Endowment for the Arts grant and soundtracks for "Absolute Beginners" and "The Color of Money." Still, his 75th birthday tour was of Europe, not the United States. And it was a Frenchman not an American who wrote the first biography of Evans. Laurent Cugny, a bandleader and arranger, called him "an angel. I can't think of a better word. He talked to me for hours about hundreds of musicians and he hadn't a bad word to say about any of them. I have never heard a musician say anything bad about Gil. Cugny continued: "The only people he had problems with were record producers. He called them greedy and they accused him of being an inefficient perfectionist."

Which was true enough. Ironically, however, his music was rarely perfectly executed. Like Ellington's, it did not require "perfection" in the sense of every note being in place. The feeling is what counted and he did know how to find musicians ready and willing to invest theirs; and how to squeeze feeling out of people who may have been otherwise too shy. But so many of his recordings beg for one more take.

"When he told you about his life," Cugny said. "You began to see he was always been a victim of the system. He wanted to record with Louis Armstrong, whom he worshipped, but it never happened. Jimi Hendrix's death ended discussions for a joint project. And he received no royalties for Miles's 'Sketches of Spain.'"

The name of this series is "Sons of Miles." But Gil Evans was more like Miles's father than a son. He was Miles's sun."

"Miles Davis, 'The Prince of Silence'" - Mike Zwerin

© -  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 it's 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 - Mike Zwerin

© -  Steven A. 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 introductory piece to that series. PARIS, 1 April 1998 - Miles Davis reinvented himself many times, in many shapes. His alumni include just about every influential jazz musician from his own generation on down. Davis helped deliver Bebop with Charlie Parker, gave Birth to The Cool, explored modality, was the father of jazz-rock and funk-jazz and is the principle inspiration for the young generation now marrying jazz and rap. The poetic sound of the name "MILES", the way he looked, his lifestyle, his trademark rasp and his marriage of quality and commericality have entered the folklore. His combination of musical, visual, sexual, and financial chops is unequaled. The ghost of MILES hovers. -- Mike Zwerin   What Would You Like To Be When You Grow Up      “I am in love with music. I cannot see straight for the love of her. But if music is, as Duke Ellington put it, my mistress, then we have had a stormy relationship. I have cheated on her, lied to, neglected and beat her. On the other hand, she is too demanding. When she nagged I left her and when I neglected her she left me. I spent my time under too many hats, between too many stools. It has been a stormy affair. High-school hipsters slouched through my living room, eyes red, leaning forward with gig-bags cradled in their arms. They wore Dizzy Gillespie goatees and berets. Those who were not junkies scratched their noses and spoke with a rasp to make believe they were. Charlie Parker was a junky and that was hip enough for them. "Groovy, man. What a gas!" they'd say as my father looked over his New York Times in disbelief. They'd climb the stairs to my attic studio where there was a wire recorder, an upright piano and pictures of jazz giants on the wall. Earl Brew burned some piano keys but my mother did not say anything because Earl was black and she was a Socialist. She thought the burns were from cigarettes. When we weren't playing music we were listening to or talking about it. We did not have to ask each other: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" We took professional names. Bob Milner became Bob Mills. Frank Hamburger chose Duke Frank. I was Mike Wayne. Al Goldstein picked Al Young in honor of Lester Young but everybody called him Lester Goldstein. My attic studio overlooked the Forest Hills Tennis Club. The tennis players complained because our jamming jammed their concentration. We were the first Jewish family in Forest Hills Gardens, an exclusive enclave. My father suspected the tennis players were anti-Semitic. The tennis players accused him of operating a rehearsal studio in violation of zoning laws. Lester Goldstein loved to honk out the window during set points and Lester really knew how to honk. I cut high school to catch noon shows at the Paramount, the Capitol, the Strand - Broadway theatres where my heroes rose hungover from pits for the first of five daily shows playing "Blues Flame," "Take The A Train," and "Let's Dance," my own "Star Spangled Banners." I was dazzled by the sparkle of spots off brass. I daydreamed of future hungover noons rising from pits. I knew big-band personnel like other kids knew big-league baseball lineups. My parents took me to a Catskill Mountain hotel for a summer holiday. After breakfast one morning, walking in the crisp mountain air, we passed the hotel-band bass-player coming in with a dazzling suntanned brunette on his arm. We had talked and he knew I wanted to be a musician. "You're up early," I said. He hesitated: "Yes...early." Later I realized he had not in fact been to sleep. How I envied grown-ups who could stay up all night playing music and be with beautiful women. Now when I think of that hack working in the Jewish Alps for the summer, I wonder how children survive their fantasies. In the summer of 1949 I was in New York on vacation from the University of Miami where I was majoring in sailing. No, actually sixteen of us were on full scholarship to play for dinner in the streamlined student cafeteria which was cantilevered over an artificial lake. It was sort of like sailing at that. In those days, to mix metaphors, I played my horn like a kid skiing down a slalom, with more courage than sense. Falling on my face never occurred to me. One night I climbed up to Minton's, where bebop was born, in Harlem. A lot of white cats considered Minton's too steep a slope. I never imagined somebody might not like me because I was white. I was absolutely fearless. I took out my trombone and started to play "Walkin'" with Art Blakey, then known as Abdullah Buhaina, a fearful cat I was later told. When I noticed Miles Davis standing in a dark corner, I tried harder because Miles was with Bird's band. (Miles loved dark corners). He came over as I packed up. I slunk into a cool slouch. I practised cool slouches. We were both wearing shades - no eyes to be seen. "You got eyes to make a rehearsal tomorrow?" he asked me. "I guess so." I acted as though I didn't give one shit for his stupid rehearsal. "Four." Miles made it clear he couldn't care less if I showed up or not: "Nola Studios." Driving over the Triborough Bridge to the house by the tennis courts at five-AM, I felt like a batboy who had been offered a tryout with the team. The next day at four I found myself with Miles, Gerry Mulligan, Max Roach, John Lewis, Lee Konitz, Junior Collins, Bill Barber and Al McKibbon playing arrangements by Mulligan and Gil Evans. We would come to be called "The Birth Of The Cool." That's when I started cheating on my mistress. I went into my father's steel fabricating business to support my young wife and three young children. When my father died, I became President. I was the only President my friends knew. Everybody's Only President had problems presiding. He had a closet full of neckties, custom shirts and a suit for every day of the week. By the age of twenty-three his ambition was to grow old. Responsible people call this attitude "responsible," "mature," "serious." Youth was a preparation for old age, music a tangent and vacations were spent to work more efficiently when they were over. You might have asked Everybody's Only President whatever happened to his burning love for music. He asked himself....Wait a minute. Talk about alienation. What's this third person shit? That was me! I quit the business when my first wife left me, came to Paris to "find myself," practiced my trombone a lot, went back to New York and joined Maynard Ferguson's big band. Realizing my ambition, I rose out of pits hungover. Maynard's band worked opposite Miles and Trane in Birdland for two weeks. I felt extremely hip walking from my Tenth Avenue apartment across 57th street to Birdland carrying my horn. A few weekends later, I drove one of Maynard's cars to Cincinnati and back through a snowstorm for a one-nighter. He gave me two checks; $35 for playing and $102 for driving. And so Everbody's Only President was reincarnated - "responsible, mature, serious." There was a flash. I had moved to Greenwich Village. My local paper, The Village Voice, had no jazz critic. I would be it. I became it. It became me. The idea was to get a name in print so I could work with my own band, a rationalization for cheating on mistress music. Wearing still another hat, I stopped practicing and only started again a decade later, after marrying my French wife when we were both vegetables for too many seasons in the Vaucluse and I had nothing better to do. Which more or less brings us up to date. Oh, I forgot a few details - I have been writing for the International Herald Tribune for 21 years, I toured with a French rock band called Telephone and I had a son...not necessarily in that order. I am the only living trombone player ever to have played with Miles Davis and Telephone. My son, seven at the time, came on tour with us. Kids are good luck on the road and the members of Telephone, kids themselves, carried him on their shoulders, played ping pong and video games and rolled around dressing room floors with him. During concerts, he sat on-stage right behind drummer Richard Kolinka, who juggled his sticks and painted his face like a pirate. When the tour was over I asked my son to keep me company going to the office to get paid. “Gee Whiz?!” he exclaimed. His bright little face lit up: “You mean people give you money for playing music?!”

Legends of Music - Miles! Live in Concert

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

On January 10th 2015 a group of Dutch Jazz Musicians who referred to themselves as the LEGENDS OF MUSIC performed and recorded a concert at the Philharmonie in Haarlem, The Netherlands which has been released on CD as Miles! Live in Concert.

The group consists of Michael Varekamp on trumpet, Ben Van Den Dungen, tenor and soprano saxophone, Wilboud Burkens, keyboards, Manuel Hugas, bass, Eric Hoeke, drums, Job Geheniau, VJ, and Jimmy Rage, spoken word.

The seven tracks on the CD are a retrospective of Miles Davis’ career beginning with Ascenseur pour L’Echafaud [Ascent to the Scaffold] from the louis Malle 1950s film of the same name to Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time, a song that Miles often performed later in his career.

The following excerpts are from the project commentary located on the Legends of Music website:

“Legends Of Music is a new production team whose objective is to create special music programs based on an equal mix of film and music.  Live improvisation based on composed music is combined with a collage of video and moving pictures. Musicians respond film and VJ reacts to the music and each performance is different and unique!

With a mixture of many styles, each production attempts to be as colorful as possible.

The new CD MILES! Live in Concert is out and will be available for download soon on CDBaby, iTunes and Amazon.

Miles Davis was a musical genius when you take into consideration that he was standing by his musical boundaries at the forefront of a number of new trends in jazz music. The flamboyant trumpeter combined jazz with various elements of the turbulent times in which he lived and jazz gave thereby a host of new possibilities.

Many famous jazz musician began his career in the band of Miles Davis as John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and John Scofield. In essence, you can think of Miles as the best "coach" that jazz has ever produced.

In addition to his contribution to the timeless jazz repertoire including pieces like All Blues, Footprints and So What made ​​legendary albums like Kind of Blue, Milestones and Tutu. These now are still among the best-selling jazz records ever.”

You can locate order information and other details about this events by going to www.legendsofmusic.nl. The following video offers a sampling of the project.

David Stone Martin: A Tribute [Gary Smulyan]

Gary Smulyan: A Tribute

Ronnie Cuber - Baritone Saxophonist

Nick Brignola 1936-2002: A Tribute