Encountering Miles
How I got a lesson in art, aesthetics and improvisation from the jazz legend
How I got a lesson in art, aesthetics and improvisation from the jazz legend
You turn up at the appointed time, armed with pages of questions, hoping to learn some things you don’t know about a figure who is ridiculously well known and endlessly scrutinized.
You are ready to step into rarified air, as prepared as one can be to meet an icon. You think you know how the conversation is going to go. The terms have been worked out in advance — right down to the number of minutes said person will be available, which topics are “off limits” and all the rest.
And then things unravel. Overworked celebrity is late. Or grouchy. Or mistrustful. Or the star suddenly develops a different agenda. This is what happened on a sweltering day in the summer of 1986. I arrived at Miles Davis’ apartment overlooking Central Park with reasonable expectation for a conversation about music, and instead spent the afternoon scrutinizing the jazz legend’s prodigious visual art output, and talking aesthetics. At the time, I took it as a young journalist’s trial-by-fire lesson on going with the flow—like the Boy Scouts, you gotta be prepared. I see it now as a rare chance to glimpse the thinking of a doubly gifted artist, a maverick who stands as one of the 20th century’s most restless creative forces.
I should have known something was amiss when I met Davis’ publicist, a Columbia Records veteran named Sandra Trim da Costa, in the lobby of his building. It was early afternoon; she said that this was his first appointment of the day, and explained that this was usually a good thing, because he had little patience for the media. Then, as we slid into an aged two-person elevator, she added casually that in addition to making sure our interview happened within the allotted 30 minutes, her other task was to get Davis to select one of his paintings to donate to a benefit auction associated with the Los Angeles Olympics.
Davis heard the elevator door open and shouted for us to come in. We entered a large living room with no furniture, just an electric piano turned all the way up and emitting a powerful 60hz hum. His trumpet was on the floor nearby. The walls were covered in what looked like grey carpeting, even in what was a traditional dining room. Davis met us there, in a gold-trimmed white track suit, and gestured to the balcony, where a large telescope was angled skyward. “Hot day,” he grumbled.
Not wanting to waste time, I got out my notebook and recorder while Davis and his publicist talked over details of the next day’s photo shoot. She mentioned the auction. His face got bright and he went to another room to retrieve his art – Davis was one of those charmers from a by-gone era, a man who would go to great lengths to help with whatever a woman, be it friend or lover or business associate, might have on her agenda. When he returned, carrying a thick stack of paintings on paper and on canvas, it was clear that the interview was going to wait or, possibly, not happen at all. My heart sank. I was a young music critic working for an out-of-town newspaper and wire service (The Miami Herald), and I was not in a position with the label publicist to speak up and/or derail any plan. I expected to be excused.
To be honest, at this point I desperately wanted to be excused — Davis was a famously intimidating presence, known for sending deep chills through every room he entered. The intimidation factor went with the turf; he developed it as a part of his persona, over decades of interactions with headstrong artists and ruthless business people and journalists who didn’t fully understand his role in moving improvised music forward time and again. His eyes radiated zen calm, and at the same time managed to look right through people, as though another’s presence was an annoyance, an obstacle easily overcome. The prospect of talking art with him made me uneasy.
To me, the situation seemed unwinnable. Think about it: What is any stranger going to say to Miles Davis — an icon whose bandmates included such legends as Charlie Parker and John Coltrane — about his recent output, his little-known alternate career as a visual artist? “Nice color choices!” “Great proportions!” I was aware of being supremely out of my element, easily exposed as a fraud; one errant observation could jeopardize my mission, to have a conversation about music. Davis evidently didn’t care. He sat me at the table next to da Costa, and positioned the stack of art in front of us to take advantage of the room’s natural light. He stood slightly behind us, leaning over to adjust the stack and flip the artwork page by page.
“What do you think of that one, Sandra?”
This was exceedingly strange, hearing the raspy animated voice I knew from classic recordings—“See how that sounds, Teo►” (“Circle” from the Miles Smiles LP)—over my left shoulder, soliciting input on his art. Sandra just nodded, saying gently that it was his choice. As Davis moved on to the next few pieces, it became clear that he wasn’t just being solicitous, he really wanted some reaction, possibly even help making a choice. He was used to having an audience. She began to point out things she found striking. Davis had a quirky approach to lines and shapes, and obvious love for the female form in all shapes and hues, in moods of reflection and also fiery determination. The paintings seemed to almost vibrate, alive with a buoyant animation that sometimes resembled Picasso’s sketches. (Since his death, they’ve been published in several books, this being the most recent). It was clear the trumpet legend took painting seriously, and also clear that as he’d done countless times in his music, he’d developed a distinct “language,” a set of cues and devices that were as unique as his thumbprint. He wasn’t a dabbler, wasn’t one of those who, after a few lessons, became adept at copying. He had his own style.
This made discussing the works even more challenging. After we’d gone through about six or seven of them with me saying nothing, Davis asked for my opinion. I froze. First because of my inexperience, but then because I was aware that this was a test of sorts: Davis would be checking out my responses. The quality of our interview, if it ever happened, would depend in part on whatever I would say. You enter the ritual of the interview expecting a bit of “sizing up”—it’s one way to establish trust, creating the conditions for the give and take. But normally you expect that discourse to happen in the vicinity of the artist’s known works, not in an entirely different realm. Not in a mode of expression that, like music, can be abstract and analysis-defying. And I had no grounding, training or experience in this specialized realm. If I’d set out that morning hoping for one sort of aesthetic discussion, here I was embarking on an entirely different one.
Keeping quiet was not really an option. Bluffing wasn’t palatable, either — this was Miles Davis, known above all for not suffering fools. I flashed back to my third grade teacher, whose daily mantra was “Don’t be afraid to ask questions whenever there’s something you don’t understand.” So I began to try to understand what Davis was doing, by asking about how he did it. I started with his painting routine: Did he go to the park like so many New Yorkers? (No.) Did he work at it every day, the way he did the trumpet as a young man? (As best I can remember, he talked about how it’s like anything else, in that becomes more natural if you do it a lot.)
Did he arrive at the canvas with a specific image in mind, or wait for inspiration? This question intrigued him, and he went off on a riff about how people wait forever for some “muse” to show up instead of chasing what might be right in front of them. I asked if he sensed any kinship between his line drawing and the lines he created in music; he said something flip, like “they both come from me.” Later, much later, this registered as deceptively profound. After all, many who are evocative in one discipline often attempt other disciplines — with erratic results. Davis had a thing, a core identity that prevailed across different mediums and modes of expression. In both pursuits, his lines could be wild and shaky and vulnerable, defined by the courage to share something less than perfect. That willingness to be human—to let the note crack, or the line trail off into errant nothingness—operated in the manner of a magnetizing force, overriding the small-minded considerations of “technique” and zoom straight to the level of soul. He didn’t play notes on the trumpet; he put the sound of pure conviction into the horn.
The fire translates: His art is not the line itself, it’s what the line can tell us about intention, desire, the search for illumination.
What separates Davis from others is not simply the radical musical revolutions he started or the “boldness” that characterized them, but rather a governing fierceness that he had on board, this informed everything he did. It was a conviction that not just details matter; moods matter, too. It’s a belief in the small gesture, the stray thought, the single note. It’s the willingness to seek what was apt and not what was dazzling. As we looked at the art, I sensed a quality I’d felt in his music from the first time I heard it: this person knows exactly what he wants to convey. Even if he doesn’t know, in step-by-step terms, precisely how he will do it.
I wondered how he knew when a painting was finished. This prompted a long discussion about how hard it can be to leave something alone – especially if the page isn’t exactly “full” of information. He talked about following intuition, and how in some oriental painting the goal is a single unbroken stroke, nothing more is considered relevant. It was clear this appealed to his sense of minimalism. Once one knows the feeling of playing a single perfectly evocative note, as Davis did better than just about anyone, the impulse to “fill the canvas” with information disappears.
By this point, I sensed that in some small way that ice had been broken; Davis appeared moderately comfortable sharing thoughts on art-making, which he’d done throughout his life but became obsessed with only in the last decade or so of this life. He pointed out a few things, and his words and slow hand gestures combined to offer a glimpse of how he looked at and appreciated art. I began to realize that somehow I’d made it through Level One of the well-documented Adversarial Game of Interviewing Miles. I wished for the tape recorder or a notebook, but it was across the room, and Davis clearly preferred for this be off the record. It’s a shame, I think now, because he shared some wonderful insights, ventured into areas he didn’t visit during conventional interviews.
Along the way, he dismissed some paintings immediately, rejecting them as “early” or otherwise flawed. At one point Sandra said “Wait! Go back to that one!” He did, and as he looked at the work, he recalled that this was a relatively recent piece, one of a number of paintings he did after returning from a tour. He explained that he was exhausted and a little bit sick of playing music when he got home; he spent the first week home talking very little and painting constantly. I asked what he remembered about the tour, what made it so grueling. He didn’t answer, instead leaving the room. He returned with a cassette, a board tape from one of the dates, saying that he hadn’t listened to this one, which several folks in his band regarded as a particularly good night. He popped it in, creating an unusual Miles Davis multi-media experience in his dining room: We pored over the vivid images of his art, accompanied by the tender, equally vivid sound of his band playing Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.”
Eventually he and Sandra settled on a painting — really just about any of them would have worked. She suggested that we begin the interview, which was weird, because I’d been asking questions for probably an hour. Davis reached over and stopped the cassette, and I can still remember the look on his face as he turned around. Fun time was over for him. Ahead was work.
“Now,” he said deliberately,
in that gravelly voice, “what did you want to ask me?”
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Artwork images reprinted from Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork, by Scott Gutterman, published by Insight Editions. Copyright © 2013 Miles Davis Properties LLC.