June 21, 2011
Miles Davis: Peeking Through the Blindfold
Richard Brody
A little background regarding Miles Davis’s 1964 Downbeat blindfold test, alluded to by my colleague Macy Halford, in which he flung insults at Eric Dolphy (who, by the time the text ran, in June of that year, would be dead, of diabetic shock), at Cecil Taylor (a pianist of virtuosity to match his intellectual brilliance and fearless individuality), and even at Duke Ellington, for his role in the recording “Money Jungle” (a collaboration with Charles Mingus and Max Roach which is the one jazz record I know that gives me the same feeling as when I listen to Beethoven’s late quartets).
Davis was, at that moment in early 1964, torn apart: he was nearing forty; he had only recently formed a new band, featuring the seventeen-year-old drummer Tony Williams, the bassist Ron Carter, and the pianist Herbie Hancock; and that band had a taste for the new thing in jazz. Carter had recorded with Eric Dolphy several times (playing cello on the superb 1960 quartet recording “Out There,” which happens to be the album that got me into jazz, at the age of fifteen), and Williams played with the modernist Sam Rivers in his native Boston, made his first recordings playing some very challenging music with Jackie McLean, and, on Dolphy’s last major-label studio recording, “Out to Lunch,” played with a rhythmic freedom—a calculated indeterminacy—that was closer in spirit to the work of Sunny Murray or Andrew Cyrille (of Cecil Taylor’s bands) than to anything Davis was up to. When Davis was looking for a new saxophonist, Williams suggested Dolphy; Davis said no. He recommended Archie Shepp; Davis listened and rejected the notion. When Williams proposed Rivers, Davis took him on briefly (and recorded with him in Tokyo).
The tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter came on board soon thereafter, and in the studio played a brave, honorable, somewhat involuted supporting role (though he also did the lion’s share of the composing), but on such club dates as “Live at the Plugged Nickel,” Shorter, Williams, and company play one way with Davis and another way when Davis lays out—at which time their music rises to a furious, free-jazz expansiveness, and Shorter’s playing seems most closely reminiscent of that of the late Dolphy. (Here’s a 1967 concert performance that highlights the contrast.)
There’s a lot more to Davis’s vastly complex aesthetic psychology and artistic transformations and conflicts. It’s enough to note that he knew he needed something from Dolphy and Taylor—and that he needed it more than they needed, at that point, anything from him—and that this would have sufficed to arouse the lion’s wrath and provoke him to a mighty artistic challenge.
P.S. The Dolphy piece in question isn’t “Mary Ann” but “Miss Ann”; the video above has the version Davis listened to for his blindfold test, from the album “Far Cry.” The composition also happens to be one he played at a 1964 club session, recorded shortly before his death and released as “Last Date.” That late perfomance (if anything recorded by a thirty-six-year-old can be considered “late”) is a masterwork of intricate, spontaneous, impassioned construction.
Source
