Kinds of Blue: Miles Davis, Afro‐Modernism, and the Blues

Abstract

Miles Davis played the blues on his first recording date-in late April 1945, a month before his nineteenth birthday. On these recordings, he performs as a sideman in a sextet accompanying the dancer, comedian, and rhythm-and-blues singer Rubberlegs Williams. 1 Three of the four pieces they recorded were twelve-bar blues. One of them, a tune called ''Bring It on Home,'' features a straightforward R&B style whose standard harmonic palette serves as a foundation for a conventional poetic structure of AAB verses and a bereft lover's plea for the return of ''my woman and my used-tobe.'' Behind the vocal, Davis plays a muted obbligato that sounds so far away from the center of musical action that he might be in a neighboring practice room. A close listening reveals a musician steeped in bebop gestures, including scurrying doubletime passages and upper extensions of chords, such as major sevenths and ninths, that stand outside conventional rhythm and blues playing of the period. 2 In short, the recording contains the seeds of a creative tension that charged Miles Davis's entire career.The recording session took place around the time Davis's Juilliard cohorts were studying for final exams. Davis himself, however, had effectively dropped out from his formal schooling. It was not as if he couldn't handle academic challenges. Davis's biographer, John Szwed, saw the first-semester's report card at a public exhibit at Juilliard. The record shows that Davis earned a solid B average-despite a D in music history-in a varied curriculum that balanced applied and academic studies. 3 Although some of his biographers, and even Davis himself, later belittled what the school had to offer, he had taken his Juilliard studies seriously at first, and he despised what he later called the ''ghetto mentality'' of his jazz peers who disdained classical scores and music theory as oppressive symbols of white culture. 4 , between his Juilliard teachers-whom he claimed ''weren't teaching me nothing''-and his attitudes toward music learning, including music theory and the library scores he borrowed (from ''all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Prokofiev''). These statements appear on the same pages of the autobiography.

AfroModernist Subversion of Film Noir Conventions in John Lewis' Scores toSait-on Jamais(1957) andOdds Against Tomorrow(1959)

“…While the 'masks' Washington wore may have appeared to be white, Baker argues that by taking up the 'tones of nonsense to earn a national reputation' Washington was able to win 'corollary benefits for the Afro-American masses' (Baker 1987, 33). This promotional strategy has been recently linked to the 1940s syncretic works of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (Burrows 2007, Howland 2007) as well as to the Miles Davis-led Birth of the Cool (BOTC) recordings made between 1948 and 1950 (Floyd 1995, Magee 2007. It is this latter set of works that is most significant in relation to the argument presented here as Lewis, in the role of arranger, contributed significantly to their production.…”

La música Jazz en la Institución Educativa: un viaje de traslación de la periferia al corazón del canon de la música culta en occidente

“…Uno de los problemas aparece con todo el grupo de nuevas formas surgidas por influencia del propio estilo definido como jazz canónico, toda vez que en muchos casos algunas expresiones alumbradas, por ejemplo, en la era post-bebop representan posturas irreconciliables con la propia tradición canonizada. Se configuran así dos grupos o corrientes de opinión que pugnan por ejercer el control dentro de la institución y que mantienen posturas antagónicas; por un lado, los neocanónicos, que postulan la preservación de la tradición y una evolución natural de esta, alejada de la influencia de los circuitos comerciales; y los que defienden las nuevas formas surgidas al amparo del término fusión (concepto paraguas que aglutina muchos de los estilos surgidos en torno a la segunda época creativa de Miles Davis), que defienden estas nuevas formas y géneros como la evolución lógica de una música plenamente viva que busca todos los cauces posibles para experimentar y desarrollarse (Magee, 2007).…”

Diachronic Changes in Jazz Harmony

“…When Storyville closed and unemployment for young musicians rose in the southern United States, a "great migration" to Chicago facilitated the birth of a new type of jazz music in the early 1920s (Adero, 1993;Grant, 1972;Grossman, 1989;SchuUer, 1968). The history of jazz style since this time has been strongly infiuenced by individual musicians such as Louis Armstrong (Harker, 2008;SchuUer, 1968), John Coltrane (Porter, 1985;Woideck, 2008), and Miles Davis (Magee, 2007), among others.…”