Harry Paterson

During one of the several lives that have, thus far, comprised my forty four years on this God-forsaken shit-hole, I used to play a bit of trumpet. No great surprise, then, that I’m a bit of a Jazz cat. Not all Jazz, of course. There are few genres of music quite so diverse, eclectic and wide-ranging as jazz and while there’s a lot to love there’s a lot to detest, too. Trad? No thanks. Too corny, too twee and lacking in dignity. Free jazz? Well, not for nothing is it regarded by many as the music of choice for wankers. Bop, though, Be Bop, Hard Bop and Post-Bop, too, well now you’re talking. Freddie Hubbard, Donald Byrd, John Coltrane, Hank Mobley and, obviously, Miles Davis. Ah, yes. Him…

Curiously, I like a great deal of his work almost in spite of him. Take A Kind Of Blue, for instance. Revelatory, astonishing and ground-breaking. Arguably his best ever album and definitely his most well known and best selling; it’s the kind of music that transcends genres, tastes and fashions. If you know someone with only one jazz album in their collection, it’s a pretty sure bet it’ll be A Kind Of Blue.

But Miles’ distinctive and highly recognisable approach to the trumpet has never really been my bag. Scattered liberally throughout A Kind Of Blue are cracked and split notes aplenty. Thin, reedy tone, limited in terms of range, heavily favouring the middle register and with no vibrato, it’s the antithesis of the kind of playing hammered into me during a traditional, classical education in the art of the trumpet.  And yet his musical imagination and ability to ‘see’ a phrase or a sequence of notes that others couldn’t, is sublime. A Kind Of Blue, while featuring some of his poorest playing, physically, also displays some of his most memorable phrasing with those famous ‘hanging’ notes deployed to stunning effect.

And so it was, while chatting to a couple of friends, recently, about Miles Davis, that I realised with something approaching astonishment, that I’d never read a Miles biography. Nope. Not a one. No big deal to most, maybe, but for someone whose obsession with music is equalled only by an almost pathological love for books, it’s quite remarkable. Y’see, I hammer through biographies of musicians and books on music, generally, with the sort of gusto and enthusiasm the Metropolitan Police bring to the policing of unarmed, law abiding, peacefully protesting crowds of teen-age students. I don’t murder the books, though. Obviously…

Anyway, a hurried search of the hundreds of volumes here at Chez Paterson eventually turned up Dark Magus: The Jekyll and Hyde Life of Miles Davis. Penned by his son, Gregory Davis, It’s slim pickings, page-wise, less than 170, excluding the appendices and outro bumf, but Davis junior sure packs in some riveting anecdotes and memories concerning his famous father.

A memoir rather than a conventional biography, Gregory Davis’ stated intention was to show the whole man rather than the myth and the legend. To bring the reality of Miles Davis to the reader, warts and all and it’s some pretty shocking shit. Without giving anything away, forget everything you thought you knew about Miles Davis until you’ve read this. In the meantime, if anyone can recommend a decent, full-length biography, be sure to drop me a line and let me know.