Black Music Month 2011: Bassist/Producer Marcus Miller Remembers Miles Davis

from the JazzVideo Guy:

Bret Primack's 1998 interview with Marcus Miler. After a 30-year association with Columbia Records -- which had begun with 'Round About Midnight' way back in 1956 -- MILES DAVIS decided to sever ties with his old company and jump ship to Warner Bros. That was in 1986 and although a large amount of money helped facilitate his move, the iconic jazz trumpeter was in search of fresh musical inspiration. He found it in an unlikely source -- MARCUS MILLER, a 25-year-old Big Apple bass player who had first played with the 'Dark Magus' on his 1981 comeback album, The Man With The Horn. As Davis discovered, Miller was much more than a mere bassist -- he was a gifted multi-instrumentalist who could write, arrange and produce (he also had a parallel career in the R&B world as Luther Vandross's collaborator). Miller came up with Tutu, which with its reliance on synthesizers, drum machines and inclusion of pop elements and funky bass lines horrified many jazz critics. But it was an influential album and took Miles' music to a new generation of listeners.

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Mad Men, Miles Davis and the Aesthetic of Cool

In short, Miles Davis was the personification of cool. Don Draper, not so much. The Notorious Ph.D. breaks it down for us.

Mad Men, Miles Davis and the Aesthetic of Cool
by Todd Boyd

Would it be proper to describe Mad Men as ''cool''? Well, yes and no, but before answering that question, let's ponder the often misunderstood properties of cool.

Cool has a history, believe it or not. It is the lack of historical knowledge about cool's origins that has allowed for the rampant and unfettered exploitation of this concept and its rather elusive properties in modern times. Cool, detached from its history, is style without substance, in the worst way. It is a free-floating signifier of emptiness, unmoored from its complicated birth in a more repressive era.

Cool has been around in one form or another for years. Yet cool, as we know it, is a product of the conformity, paranoia and racism of that which defined the early Cold War era through the mid 1960s. While it is difficult to label a lone inventor of cool, there are the pioneers, and the pioneers of cool all tended to come from the same place: the world of jazz. Imagine luminary cool figures, like the suave Duke Ellington; the debonair baritone ''Mr. B,'' Billy Eckstein; and the original black ''Prez'' himself, Lester Young, as just a few of these pioneers.

John Burkes ''Dizzy'' Gillespie, another progenitor of cool, rocked a beret and horn-rimmed glasses, while making up his own bebop language in the process. Charlie ''Bird'' Parker was never cool in the way these other cats were cool, his slovenly appearance being the primary culprit. But what he lacked in style, he more than made up for through his horn and his transcendent iconic status. The influence he would have on others helps explain why cool has always had a large pool of potential imitators. Bird's legend stretched far and wide, inspiring, among others, a generation of disaffected post-war white boys who came to be known as the Beat Generation, as they went about converting Bird's intellectual and artistic ethos into their own form of literary lifestyle energy; thus making the phrase ''Bird Lives'' a signature moment along the historic cool timeline.

Yet no figure came to embody this notion of Cold War cool more than that cultural behemoth Miles Dewey Davis III, as the title of his album Birth of the Cool would imply. It was during this phase of his lengthy career that the ''Cool Miles'' emerged as a new kind of black celebrity in the 1950s. As someone who moved freely through both black and white cultural spaces, the ever-stylish East St. Louis native came to embody the very definition of cool. He was uniquely suited to do so.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Damn that Rap, Snoop Stole My Music

A discussion on intellectual property and the future of Black expression

Damn that Rap, Snoop Stole My Music
by Mark Anthony Neal

Most rap music fans are probably unaware of Michael Henderson and his rather formidable musical career. Henderson recently filed separate complaints against Snoop Dogg (Calvin Broadus) and producer 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit) in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, charging both with copyright infringement.

In layperson’s terms, he’s accusing them of stealing his music.

The cases continue what has been a more than two decade struggle over hip-hop’s aesthetic principles and intellectual property law. At stake in these skirmishes is the future of Black cultural expression.

A Little History

At his peak, bassist Michael Henderson, was most known for his work as a sideman with Miles Davis during Davis’s electric funk period in the early 1970s appearing on albums like Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971) and Live-Evil (1971). An in demand session musician, Henderson also worked with and recorded with Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. Like his peers Larry Graham and Stanley Clarke, Henderson was of a generation of electric bassists that were redefining the sound of the instrument in the early 1970s, furthering the funk revolution that James Brown initiated in the 1960s.

It was with James Brown in mind that Davis recorded On the Corner (1972), an album in which Henderson’s bass is prominently featured. The genius of On the Corner, was that even as Davis and his musicians liberally borrowed from the musical impulses of Brown, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendix and others, there’s little doubt that On the Corner offers singular evidence of Davis’s creativity and musical genius.

Critic Greg Tate has suggested that On the Corner’s production values were a prototype for later rap production. Indeed Davis’s last studio album before his death in 1992 was the hip-hop influenced Doo-Bop which was produced by Easy Mo Be (Ready to Die). In bringing suit against Snoop and 9th Wonder, Michael Henderson is ironically suing the children and grandchildren of On the Corner.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

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Editor's Note: This past spring Neal co-taught the class “Sampling Soul” with producer 9th Wonder at Duke University.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books, including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy. He teaches Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. Email Mark at mark@theloop21.com. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Miles Davis Chats It Up Circa 1986

Miles Davis interviewed by Bill Boggs on his television show 'Time Out' in 1986.

In Bill's words:

I have been told by people over the years that this was an historic interview. 'Do you ever remember Miles Davis being on a talk show?' Apparently not too many people do cause they keep telling me this is unique. How'd it happen? Well the entire long form story is part of my play 'Talk Show Confidential,' but the Cliff Notes version is: I ran into Miles when I was in a restaurant in Los Angeles. Actually, he came to my table and said hello. 'That Midday was like my Today show,' he told me in that raspy voice. It turned out he'd been watching me for years and said, 'I always wanted you to interview me.' So the way this whole thing happened was he asked me what I was doing and I told him I had a show in Philadelphia called 'Timeout' and he basically said let's arrange to do it. And about a month or so later, there he was. I was not pleased that the producers of the show chose to add other guests. It should have been just Miles and me for the entire hour. But they were afraid he wouldn't carry the ratings-small thinking, in my opinion, since his appearance on the show made headlines and was discussed before and after on local radio. Anyway, the charming Maurice Hines, an old friend joins in as do some young trumpet players-which sort of worked..See for yourself..Miles Davis circa 1986 in Philadelphia.

-Bill Boggs

Miles Still Runs the Voodoo Down

A Paris show illuminates the life and music of the great jazz musician.

Celebrating Miles Davis
By: Joel Dreyfuss|

PARIS—Jazz has always had more respect as an art form in Europe than in its home country, where appreciation too often gets tangled in the politics of race. We Want Miles: Jazz Face to Face With Its Legend is an extensive exhibition on the life and work of legendary Miles Davis at the Cité de la Musique in Paris. It offers the kind of loving attention that few jazz musicians, dead or alive, ever get in America. The exhibit, which opened on Oct. 16, closes on Jan. 17.

Spread over nearly 9,000 square feet on two floors of the music museum, the show covers the full span of Davis’ artistic life, from rare photographs of him in childhood with his family and at age 16 in a St. Louis dance band, to soundtracks of his final recordings in the 1980s and several of the instruments he played.

Davis’ role as a seminal player, creator and innovator in jazz are well-covered in this multimedia exhibit, which includes displays of instruments he played, scores from some of his most famous recordings, video and audio recordings, news clippings and reviews from both sides of the Atlantic. The Davis estate collaborated with the Cité de la Musique by making many of these items available.

The display of musical scores is a refreshing break from the tendency among jazz chroniclers like Ken Burns to disregard the intellectual process involved in jazz and instead focus on personalities and pathology, like drug addiction. The scores, some by arranger Gil Evans, who collaborated on some of Miles’ most famous recordings (Birth of the Blues, Sketches of Spain) and others by Wayne Shorter, who played in the 1960s quintet with Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter, are not particularly revealing. They are often sketchy, but serve as a reminder of the discipline and vast pool of formal knowledge that informs jazz.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root.com

Joel Dreyfuss is managing editor of The Root.