Miles Davis
Keyboard Magazine, October 1987
One night in L.A. I achieved a long-held ambition of hearing Miles Davis in concert, with Adam Holzman and Bobby Irving on keyboards. Bizarrely, Miles was booked as an opening act. I don’t remember a thing about the headliner, Al Jarreau, and his performance; probably I went back to my hotel before he even began, not seeing how anyone could follow the most provocative innovator that jazz if not American music had ever produced.
The next night would be even more memorable, as I had an appointment to drive up the Pacific Coast Highway to Miles’s house in Malibu. However, that morning a phone call alerted me to a possible problem: It seems he had been rushed to an emergency appointment with his dentist and may not be available that evening. I was advised to stay at the hotel, near the phone, for updates. (The mobile phone era wouldn’t ensnare us all for more than a decade or so.)
From that moment I sat in my room, alternately watching daytime television and the phone. I ordered room service lunch. Morning turned into afternoon. The sun started going down. City lights twinkled on as darkness fell. After maybe ten hours of solitude I figured I’d rush down to the bar for just a few minutes — Happy Hour was winding down and since our appointment time had already passed, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to take a very short break.
The message light on my phone was blinking as I returned. In a recorded message, Miles’s guy informed me that he still wasn’t feeling up to it but might be willing to meet late that night. I called back immediately and confirmed. More hours passed until, as I recall sometime after 11 PM, the final call: Come up right now. Miles is waiting.
Around midnight, I pulled up to his place, a large split-level place that stretched roomily between the coastal road and the Pacific. As instructed, I knocked on the big wooden door. One of his people responded and ushered me inside. Through the foyer, past the Yamaha grand piano to my left that I would soon learn had been a gift from Willie Nelson, into a cathedral-ceilinged living room, with a sunken living room and huge flat screen to my left. African art adorned the walls. Before me, windows opened to the west, admitting the sound and sting of crashing surf. My host led me toward the right and offered me a seat at the dining room table.
Only a minute or so after that, Miles appeared. He was wearing yellow harem pants, shirtless but with a vest I recall as red velvet, covered by beautiful abstract patterns. His eyes — actually, half of his face — hid behind dark glasses. I rose as he approached; wordlessly, he extended a hand, and we sat. A sheet of heavy-stock paper and some colored pens were in place before him. As we spoke, he would sketch a flow of curves and lines which took shape gradually as a dancing female figure, spare and abstract but sensuous and elegant. Yet even while drawing, Miles listened carefully to my questions and responded, always thoughtfully, with poetic eloquence, sometimes with a bite of humor. He spoke in that voice, the hoarse rasp that resulted from a furious shouting argument with a record label executive too soon after surgery to remove polyps in the Fifties.
Being on assignment from Keyboard Magazine, my goal was to elicit reflections from him that would interest our readers: reflections on some of the brilliant keyboard players with whom he had worked, the impact of electronic technology on his ever-evolving creative process and whatever else came up as we spoke. In a sense, this restriction to a relatively peripheral part of Davis’s artistry was a little frustrating. Yet it provided an opening to approach his thoughts about arranging and performance from a neglected perspective, much like talking with Paul McCartney about drums.
One has to decode some of Davis’s language. He spoke elusively now and then. At times random thoughts seemed to pop up out of nowhere and briefly redirect the conversation. These sometimes felt like his mind had wandered in mid-sentence. Maybe it had. But in the end, once the context is established, they made sense. And then he zeroed in when the time is right on something specific — and some of his quotes offer glimpses into his genius for expression.
In retrospect, one thing that has served me well as an interviewer is my ability to focus completely on the moment. Oddly, when in the company of one or another extraordinary figure while “off the clock,” I am easily intimidated. When standing literally between Leonard Bernstein and Julian Lennon as they chatted backstage at a Grammy broadcast, or inches away from Stevie Wonder at a NAMM music industry trade show, or face to face with Pete Seeger one day in the Keyboard office, my instinct is to fade into the woodwork rather than stammer senselessly. But if I was at work with any of them, there was no such problem.
So it was with Miles that night. Yet maybe because of the late hour, or because of something in his manner, I felt that we were segueing into a more relaxed exchange, not as friends by any stretch of fantasy but almost as colleagues. Partly to establish my bona fides I had mentioned when we met that I worked frequently as a piano player in the Bay Area. He chuckled, nodded toward my skinny black tie and joked, “Yeah, you dress like one too!”
This did not prepare me for what happened as we started wrapping up our dialog. With a blue pen, he signed his now completed drawing, “To Bob from Miles,” and pushed it toward me. I was of course astonished and, for the first time that night, the interview being done, left speechless except for some fractured expressions of gratitude.
Our conversation ended at around two in the morningWith that, we rose and shook hands. His assistant appeared and led me back toward the front door. By this time some friends of his had gathered in that sunken living room area, where they were relaxing while watching — and I remember this vividly — Porky’s II: The Next Day, probably the last film I could have imagined seeing on that flat screen. Miles was about halfway from the table to join them when I got to the front door and said to his assistant, “Please tell Miles again that I really appreciate this drawing he gave me.”
The guy nodded, then turned back toward the house. “Miles!” he barked. “He says thanks for the drawing!”
At this, one of the true giants of the arts in my lifetime turned back to me. With a dancer’s grace, he mimed a fast flurry of boxing jabs in my direction in the fashion of Muhammad Ali and then arced his right hand and bowed, as if taking curtain calls for another triumphant performance.
That drawing is framed and on the wall behind me, protected from daylight by museum-quality glass. But that last image of Miles is etched just as firmly in my memory.
***
The Electronic Seed
When did you hear an electronic keyboard for the first time?
I think the first time was when I heard Cannonball [Adderley, saxophonist] play “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” with Joe Zawinul. I think Joe probably turned me onto that.
What impressed you about it?
Just the way he played. You know, I first heard Joe play “Mercy, Mercy” on the piano, but he adapts to anything new. He can always find something to do. So it’s safe to say it was him.
Did you feel right away that there was something in electronic keyboards that you could use in your music?
No. I didn’t think that way about the instrument. That came later, when you find that you get different sounds as prominent as that sound on the Fender [electric piano]. The Fender Rhodes has no other sound; it has that one sound itself. But then Herbie [Hancock] played so good on the Rhodes. See, I didn’t look at it like that. I mean, you know how crazy I am about [bandleader] Gil Evans’s voicings and chords and stuff. I could hear that you could write a bass line with the voicings that Gil did. We could put a little harmony on top [with a synthesizer] and it sounds full. The Fender picked up the meat of the sound, and when you double the bass it worked better than the piano. The piano never did anything from there.
So when synthesizers came in, you related their potential to the kind of work Gil Evans had done.
That was the only thought I had: What can I get to give me a cheap Gil Evans sound in a small band? That’s the way I look at it, not just because it’s electric. I almost forgot about all that.
How did you get to know synthesizers?
You listen and you talk to people. I’d say, “How can I get a brass sound that I like if I’m playing with five pieces?” Then somebody would say, “Well, the [Oberheim] OB-X is good.”
You have played the OB-Xa a bit.
Yeah, but I don’t get out of it what it can do, because I don’t know that much about it. Adam [Holzman] shows me. I hired Adam because I couldn’t tell Bobby [Irving] how to get that sound that Adam got. So I don’t know. You’d have to ask Adam. I said, “Adam, come on. You can go with us.” So he left his truck out at the airport and he came on. Adam was working in a store, showing people how to work the keyboards.
So Adam’s main thing is to get the sounds you need.
Yeah, but Adam’s soloing his ass off now!
He told me the other day that he brought out a Yamaha KX5 portable keyboard onstage without telling you and caught you by surprise.
That’s right. I just laughed, that’s all. He seems to have a lot of fun with it. People love Adam too. The black people went nuts: They said, “Yeah!” [Laughs.]
When you began working with electronic keyboards, did that change your feelings about the piano’s role in your band?
No, it didn’t change that. You know, they guys who can play piano that I like — Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Herbie — they get that sound out of the piano. If you don’t have them, you can get synthesizers and do something else. I had two keyboards, and Keith Jarrett played both of them. He played the organ and the Fender Rhodes.
“Where’s the piano gonna fit? If you got an electric bass, the balance is off.”
That’s funny, since he’s so much into acoustic music now.
You know, Keith can do anything he wants to do or play any instrument he wants to play — guitar, drums, saxophone. [Trumpeter] Fats Navarro used to do that. He used to play saxophone. You’d go to a rehearsal with Fats and he’d get tired of hearing [saxophonist] Allen Eager playing all fucked up. He’d yank that thing away and say, “Gimme that saxophone! If you’re not gonna play it, I’ll play it.” Nobody knew he could play saxophone like that, but he could play his ass off.
You know, I always talk about Herbie and Wayne [Shorter, saxophonist], because that’s the band we made the most progress in. But I’ve been where you don’t even think of the piano. I mean, where’s the piano gonna fit? If you got an electric bass, the balance is off. The piano has got that sound; you gotta get the sound out of it that Keith Jarrett does. That’s professional sound, like Herbie gets. When you play acoustic, man, you gotta hear that rosin sound in the bass. You can’t substitute that. But you can get another feel if the electric bass walks for a minute before you realize that you don’t get no erosion and gut string sound.
What was the first synthesizer you actually owned?
A Yamaha. They gave it to me. I don’t know what it was. See, what a synthesizer does, it makes a soloist hear what to do better. You don’t have to strain your ear to hear a piano player. And piano players usually get in the fucking way. If they can play, they usually overplay. They don’t complement a soloist. There’s very few piano players who can do that. Joe Zawinul learned it from playing with [singer] Dinah Washington. Herbie learned it from playing with [saxophonist] Benny Carter. I used to tell Herbie, “You don’t need all of those notes in a chord. If you got the bass playing bass and your voicings are right, the bass is on the bottom. If you can play three notes in a chord with that, you can get that sound. I found that out years ago when I took Hindemith’s Kleine Klaviermusik [Op. 45/5] apart to see how much harmony you got.
Vive la difference
You’re saying it’s the nature of the piano to tempt good players to overplay, while synthesizers lead toward sparser thinking.
That’s right. You can hear that in the soloists, if you’re playing right. Now, Adam and those guys are still learning how to play behind the soloist. I tell ‘em all the time, “Shut up!” Men have the biggest egos! I used to think that women had the egos because the woman dresses up and the man follows her, but that’s just a male/female thing. But men? They’re motherfuckers, man! If their wives get in there, they’ll over play. That’s why Magic Johnson is so good, man. He’s a team player! He doesn’t start showing off because his girlfriend happens to be there. It has to be a team! I’ve seen musicians turn up their amps because they want to be heard when they’re playing a certain part. But the part doesn’t mean anything if you hear it that loud. I hate to say it, but that’s what they do. They go nuts with their equipment.
If men have such ego problems, have you ever worked with a female musician?
Shit, yeah! A woman named Mabel showed me how to voice my first chords. Sarah Vaughan showed me things like “Embraceable You” Dizzy and Monk showed me stuff. I asked Dizzy and Monk so many questions. Dizzy used to show me those minor sixths in the bass. I’d write this shit out as fast as I could on match covers, napkins, any type of paper I get a hold of. I’d say, “Monk, what is that chord?” And he would always tell me. I’d say, “Did I play “’Round About Midnight’ right?” Carmen [McRae, singer] plays good piano too. That’s why they can sing like that. All good singers know something about the keyboard.
“A man’s ego is something else.”
Do you think that overplaying has something to do with age? Maybe young musicians are just trying to check themselves out.
How long does it take to check yourself out? You hear that the first night you do it. I have tapes of everything we do. I must say that Adam listens, though. All of them will listen, but if they do it, they’ll do it once. Then the ego comes back. A man’s ego is something else.
Judging from your concert last night, it seems like Adam’s style does balance out Bobby Irving’s approach on the keyboard.
That shit ain’t happening no more.
Well, it sounded like Adam was mainly doing the solos, while Bobby was more present in the accompaniment.
If you heard him, he was too loud. You’re supposed to be able to feel him, not hear him. I’m always telling tenor players, “You ought to learn to play with people, man!” I could have the technician turn my trumpet up to where I can blast out the whole place, but that would make me sick and I don’t want to go to the hospital and have them put me to sleep. I’m that sensitive about my sound. It’s the sound that makes the night go faster and makes everything work. Don’t be loud every night; make it be a challenge every night.
That’s the only thing I see about egos and synthesizers. It’s not the synthesizer’s fault. It’s the guys who play the synthesizers, man. Look at Joe Zawinul! Joe’s head is as big as this whole place, but he does what he says he’s gonna do. He will not get in your way, because he learned that from Dinah Washington. I learned it from being in those bands in St. Louis. You don’t play while the singer is singing, you play when they stop! That’s the basic thing in playing with a singer or a soloist.
Adam’s always watching me. He plays a lot of things I show him. He loves ‘em. If I play something and he looks at me and hears it, he’ll pick it up. If I motion to him to put an accent on something, maybe he’ll play it in the low register and I’ll say, “No, put it in the high register.” But he follows eye contact. Bobby’s a little old-fashioned. Bobby plays the same way every time, but I’ll tell him, “Bobby, don’t play the turn back to the blues. Don’t play nothin’.” It’s driving me nuts.
When you’re working out arrangements for your band, how much of the synthesizer sounds come from your supervision?
If I’m in the band, it’s gonna be my suggestions. But they usually know the sounds I want them to do. When their wives and girlfriends come in, that shit goes out the window. You have to remember that they don’t know what unless you tell them. I’m crazy about the way Prince sounds, and the way Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis do things, and Cameo. Larry [Blackmon, Cameo’s drummer and leader] wrote me a composition. That shit was nice! He writes his ass off, man! I saw him in the beauty parlor and I said, “Larry, write me a reggae.”
This is the story. Years ago, when I wanted to learn how to box like my friend, my father said, “You want to learn something? Get the best to teach you.” Okay, I got the best. So this guy Lee Black showed me something slick. He showed me how to pull guys in when the referee isn’t there [Miles puts an arm around my neck and draws my face an inch or two from his nose] and hit with the elbow. Lee says, “I want you to hear my son. He wants to be a musician.” I said, “Lee, just show me the hook.”
So anyway, I did Cameo’s video. So when they played Radio City, I went there to hear them. I went backstage and Larry was getting a massage. His security was tight, but I see Lee Black up there. I said, “Lee, what the fuck are you doing up here, man?” I thought maybe he was one of the bodyguards. He said, “Larry’s my son! Remember when I brought him up? You told him, ‘Music is like dope. You use it ’til you get tired of it.’ Well, Larry said he never forgot that.
Visions of Music
You did a video for one of your own records too — Decoy.
That wasn’t nothing. I didn’t like that so much.
You like the idea of videos, though?
Yeah. They’re a lot of fun. What you get in videos is what guys like Larry and Prince think. And who should know more than them?
When you write something, do you imagine visual images that go with the music?
Not unless I want to. I don’t even have a name for the things I write. When I want to do something — make a video, whatever — my head is where I want it to be at that time, so I can tell people what I want, like Larry does.
I’d like to find out a little more about the instruments you own. I’ve heard, for example, that Willie Nelson gave you an E-mu Emulator.
He gave me an Emulator. Gil [Evans] and I were using it, but somebody broke into the house and stole it. Gil was showing me how to use it. The name itself tells you what it does.
You know, synthesizers don’t bother me like you think, from the questions you’re asking me. If there’s some sound I want, I’ll ask Adam, “What makes this sound?” Like I just told him, “You play too much reverb.” So Rob tells me, “Well, maybe it’s me.” I said, “Man, I’m ’bout to knock Bobby and Adam out, and you’re telling me you’re doing the reverb?”
“White guys play the notes too long. I don’t know why!”
The thing is, when you’re in a band like this, it’s got to sound like that. [Miles snaps his fingers.] You can’t have chords laying over. I don’t like that. I told Adam, “White guys play the notes too long. I don’t know why!” When [guitarist] John Scofield used to play with us, man, he would play so far behind the beat! I’d say, “John, goddamn!” So Adam knows how I feel. He plays on top of the beat all the time. When those chords lag over, if they’re playing with a lot of reverb, that’s hard for me to play. I’m playing a phrase and getting ready to go to another phrase. But if I’m finished with the phrase and the chord is still going, it drives me nuts! Then, talk about a man’s ego, they say, “I thought you liked the way I play!”
Who have you worked with over the years who didn’t have that kind of an ego problem?
Bill Evans is the first one I can think of. And Gil Evans. Gil tells me that all the time. He says guys make him so sick, playing solos. He calls it “duty playing,” like there’s certain things you’re supposed to do on a saxophone when you get a solo. That isn’t respect for the composition at all! That’s just shit that you play on the saxophone so that all the other saxophone players know that you know this too. It drives Gil crazy. I tell him, “You should be in my band for a while [laughs].”
But Bill Evans was easy to work with.
Yeah. And John Coltrane. Coltrane never did say shit [i.e., anything negative]. Listen, I got [saxophonist] Gary Thomas from Baltimore, and [saxophonist] Bob Berg quit. I called Bob up and said, “Man, you don’t like us anymore?” He said, “You got a saxophone player. He’s playing my shit!” Goddamn, I didn’t know Bob was like that. I had Cannonball and Coltrane, and Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. They worked together fine. But I knew where he was coming from; he wanted that all by himself. So I told him, “Bob, you play too long. Why did you come in on this part, where you weren’t supposed to play?” He said, “Well, it sounded so good I had to come in.” I said, “Bob, the reason it sounded so good was because you weren’t playing! You were listening to it!”
They’re wondering, “Well, why am I here if I’m not gonna play? Why does he have me playing this part when I could push up past it?” … I had a lot of trouble with [guitarist] Mike Stern. He played the same thing, whole-tone chords.
When you do that, when you play a chord that can cover the sound of what you’re trying to do, you spoil the concept of the composition.
Favorite Pianists
You know, Keith Jarrett once said that Miles Davis will work with a musician even if that musician can only play two notes, as long as those two notes sound good to Miles.
That’s right [laughs].
So I’d like to find out what it was that attracted you to some of the keyboard players you’ve worked with. Red Garland, for instance.
I like the way Red feeds the soloist. Also, I was in love with the way Ahmad Jamal plays, and Red used to play something like that.
The next pianist you worked with after Red was Bill Evans.
Well, Bill had this thing for Ravel. We were both crazy about Ravel. He used to show me different things that Ravel did. He’d play me that Concerto for the Left Hand and show me the modulations that Ravel did. Gradually we went into playing modal things, like Kind of Blue. Bill was something else. It’s a drag he’s dead, because you can’t hear him. I can’t hear him play “Alfie.”
He was more of a chordal player than a single-line player, wasn’t he?
Bill played lines, but they were different. He and Keith Jarrett were different. Chick Corea is different. Chick knocks me out at that tempo. [Davis taps out a medium-up tempo.] Then you get Herbie. Herbie can do anything. He and Keith, I think they must have drunk the same dye [laughs].
You’ve done some work with George Duke too.
George Duke is another. George, Herbie, all of ‘em are good musicians, good keyboard players. George knows what he wants to hear, just like Herbie.
…
Potpourri: Bass Lines, Repertoire …
Over the years you’ve gone from acoustic bass to electronic and sequenced bass lines. How do you decide what kind of approach to use in putting down a bass line?
Well, all of my bass lines, the ones I like, come from Marcus [Miller], when he was with the band. It’s just the way he plays. Marcus walks in rhythm. If you want a model of a musician, I would pick Marcus and Herbie and Wayne [Shorter]. Wayne knows a whole lot of stuff. He’s real laid-back, but he’s an artist. Joe Zawinul plays good bass lines too. But you get guys like Marcus or Darryl [Jones] and you don’t need to write a bass line. They’ll find something. Darryl’s always looking for something. He’s got all them fucking pedals. But it ain’t in the pedals; it’s in his head already. He’s a hell of a musician! He don’t need no fucking pedals, not all the time. You know, I tried to get [Charles] Mingus in the band when I was with Bird [Charlie Parker] and Max [Roach], but we never could get it together.
How do you decide which songs to add to your repertoire? Ray Charles talks about how he loves the song “Stardust” but has no interest in singing it himself. Do you have similar feelings about certain songs?
Yeah, a lot of them. Usually, when I like a song, I can’t remember it, because I just like the way it makes me feel. But when I play it, I remember it. It’s like knowing a girl and not making love to her: When he does make love to her, it’s different shit. If I play it, I always have to give it the respect it deserves. “Human Nature” was like that. And I used to play “My Funny Valentine.” If I play ballads like that, with straight melodies, I have to like ’em in the beginning from the way they make me feel. But when I play it, that means I can play it any time I want. I have to make it sound like I like it, from the feelings it gives me, like it sounds okay without me. But when I play it, I have to make you like it like I like it.
Does your choice of songs depend on what combination of musicians you’re working with at that time?
Like I said, when I hear a song that I like, I have to make everybody in the band like it when I play it.
How often do you sit down and play the piano just for your own pleasure?
You know, if I were to play the piano for two or three days, I’d sound like a piano player that I like. But I’m usually doing this [Davis has been sketching throughout our interview]. And when I do this, I don’t do anything else. I can hardly get to the horn.
Do you compose at the piano?
Well, my mind is so fast that by the time I listen to a melody I’m doing on the piano, it’s gone. Gil Evans tells me, “Man, I told you years ago, when you sit down to play, put the tape on! You don’t have to like it, just give it to me.”
My last question. A bass player I frequently work with told me two nights ago that his four biggest influences were Debussy, Beethoven, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis.
[Pleased and surprised.] Oh, yeah?
He asked me to ask you how you feel knowing that so many people have that kind of respect for the work you’ve done over the years.
Well, it means that he likes music the way I like it. There are certain things you like, and you end up being 61, like I am. He probably just likes the way I went into doing things in music and making it work, which is your whole life. I don’t take no feeling after that. It doesn’t bother me at all, him saying that, because I know how he feels. He must feel like I feel about music. I can’t wait to wake up the next morning to see what’s happening.
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Amazing!
Wow, I could listen to (read) him talk all day. Very interesting and strong point of view.