Unused Miles Davis op-ed

Tuesday 5/26/26

As I said, I wasn't able to do anything with this and might as well put it here. The idea all along was for everything to eventually be collected between book covers, but it's hard to see that ever happening. Today is Miles Davis's centennial. This will be the best thing that anyone wrote for the day, and the only thing that isn't interchangeable with all the other things, and it didn't get to run. That's the system.

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Making it new for Miles Davis’s centennial.

Jazz trumpeter, composer, and band leader Miles Davis entered this world on May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, and though he formally departed it in September 1991, he’s one of those life-force artists that always seem to be with us. 

In a medium replete with colorful characters, Davis was the most irascible, and infamously so, the firebrand as supernova. He collected slights both real and imaginary as if this were essential to the making of his art, the perpetual assertion of his unique identity.

Having pioneered a given style, he moved to another, the musical embodiment of a thrown knife; ready to do major damage, but in that wonderful, spearheading way of the individualistic rabble rouser who always offers something new, rather than merely rehashes.

We’re big-time rehashers now. We obsess over how things have been done, not how they could be. Those who bemoan the corporatization of society and culture are, ironically, rarely questers themselves. We rely on default settings, rules inside of rules, even when it comes to our musical predilections.

Think of how many times you’ve seen someone who likes a band asking a bunch of other people if they know of any bands who sound like that band.

Davis, who was no stranger to, shall we say, colorful language of a critical nature—this was not a safe space kind of guy—would have sent you reeling with his take on the matter and how much you were messing up. The riot act has nothing on the Miles Davis act.

Why would you prefer more of something that already exists and is available? What’s the point? Yes, you loved that woman once. She’s gone now, so you want, what, the nearest facsimile?

Imagine someone saying to you, “If only I could find Kay II having already been with Kay I.”

You’d think they were nuts, and yet, this is how we live when there’s no reason that we have to save it’s what most everyone does.

Which gets us where? Look at this place. This isn’t going so hot.

Davis sought new lands. Once he arrived there, he invited you in for the partaking. Initially, he was a bebopper, learning with the likes of Charlie Parker. Then, he cooled jazz down, swapped out the fireplace bellows for soft human breath.

Afterwards, came baroque chamber jazz intended for public consumption. Experiments in modality followed. Then, the gritty grooves of hard bop were repurposed for elegance and Davis the virtuosic trumpeter of the 1950s became a virtuosic bandleader in the 1960s. Shortly thereafter, it was time to go electric and unleash the beast of fusion.

We operate as if there’s a rule that everyone can only do one thing, lest people get…what? Confused? We make like freshness is bad, but the predictable—which also means the formulaic—is good.

In publishing, it’s “What books are like your book?” But what if there’s never been anything like it? That’s bad?

Not only is this how culture dies, but joy as well. Joy comes from those moments, those people, those works of art, that make us feel more like ourselves than ever before.

It’s also something we do for ourselves when we aren’t looking for the same old, same old. Children go far in who they are because of their capacity for wonder. We say terms like “comfort zone,” like that’s where we’re okay, but your comfort zones can kill you. And no great art has ever come from one.

These strictures dissuade those who might have been a true artist, which takes everything that person is as it is. An artist now is made to swim against so many currents. They’re hard to even talk about favorably, accustomed as we are to issuing stock words of praise we don’t mean.

But saying something true and real? From our hearts and heads? We usually opt for silence instead, and compliment that which we don’t care about. Mediocrity is lent the leg up.

It cops the awards, gets the hype, and eventually, mediocrity is conflated with quality because of the Oscar, the Pulitzer, the write-ups, marketing pushes. The learned behavior of a status quo. But who is doing the actual thinking and the true believing?

The spearhead that was Miles Davis and his art ran these notions of comfort zones and comparables through the gut. Back then, anyway. Right now? Harder. Much. But a world in which a Miles Davis might not have been a Miles Davis isn’t the world we need. Won’t even provide you with much to listen to that you haven’t already heard.