Showing posts with label jazz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jazz. Show all posts

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Miles underground

A strange quote from the 1989 autobiography of the great jazz legend Miles Dewey Davis III:
I did some weird shit back in those days, too many weird things to describe. But I’ll tell you a couple. I remember one day when I was really paranoid from snorting [cocaine] and staying up all the time. I was driving my Ferrari up West End Avenue and I passed these police-men sitting in a patrol car. They knew me - all of them knew me in my neighbourhood - so they spoke to me. When I got about two blocks away from them, I became paranoid and thought that there was a conspiracy to get me, bust me for some drugs. I look down in the compartment on the door and see this white powder. I never took coke out of the house with me. It’s winter and snowing and some snow got inside the car. But I didn’t realise that; I thought it was some coke that someone had planted in the car just so I could get busted. I panicked, stopped the car in the middle of the street, ran into a building on West End Avenue, looked for the doorman, but he wasn’t there. I ran to the elevator and got on and went up to the seventh floor and hid in the trash room. I stayed up there for hours with my Ferrari parked in the middle of West End Avenue with the keys in it. After a while I came to my senses. The car was still sitting where I had left it.
I did that another time just like that and a woman was on the elevator. I thought that I was still in my Ferrari, so I told her, “Bitch, what are you doing in my goddamn car!” And then I slapped her and ran out of the building. That’s the kind of weird sick shit that a lot of drugs will make you do. She called the police and they arrested me and put me in the nut ward at Roosevelt Hospital for a few days before letting me out“.

From 1975 until 1980, Davis was a self-confessed hermit, living without any meaningful contact with the outside world. He spent his days drinking Heineken and brandy, and taking heroin, cocaine, or injecting speedballs into his legs. A speedball is the lethal combination of cocaine and heroin that killed John Belushi and River Phoenix. Davis also says he “fucked all the women I could get into my house” (p. 325). And through it all, he never once picked up his horn throughout more than four years.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Miles Davis

I've just been listening to the first great Miles Davis Quintet. In the 1950s they recorded some classic jazz albums including the quartet Workin', Steamin', Relaxin', and Cookin'. On saxaphone was none other than John Coltrane, and the rhythm section was Miles' close friend 'Philly' Joe Jones on drums, Paul Chambers on bass, and on piano, the great touch of Red Garland.















Here is an excellent online biography of Miles Davis.