Going for a song

Going for a song

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article4173264.ece

Clive Davis on Summertime, as performed by Miles Davis

June 22, 2008

In the end, it was third time lucky. My first encounter with Miles
Davis's music came in the mid-1970s, when I was about 16 and
considered myself a soul man. Thumbing through the LPs in my local
library, I came across the fusion set Big Fun, which had a striking,
cartoon-like cover of a naked woman standing in the blast of a giant
trumpet. Perfect, I thought. Excited, I rushed home and, after
putting the disc on the turntable, promptly lapsed into a state of
terminal boredom. Most of Miles's long-winded fusion recordings ­
including the ultra-hip psychedelia of Bitches Brew ­ still have that
effect on me.

A couple of years later, a jazz buff at Oxford, sensing that I was a
rough diamond in need of a musical education, announced that he was
about to play me a disc by one of the greatest bands of all time ­
Miles's mid-1960s quintet with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. This
is it, I thought: here I am, sitting in a room overlooking a
quadrangle, doing what generations of great intellectuals have done
through the ages. Only it didn't work. I was bored again. As I still
am, even though I admire the musicians' devastating technique.

A year or so later, at a jumble sale, I bought a scratched old copy
of Porgy and Bess. Once again, the sleeve did the trick: a debonair,
smiling Miles is taking a break in the studio. And, at last, the
performance lived up to all my expectations. There is nothing
extravagant about the way he plays Summertime; his muted horn simply
adds short phrases over Gil Evans's stately big-band arrangement. It
is a version that has been recycled on so many compilations, it ought
to sound hackneyed. Yet it never does. Less is more.

That experience led me on to Kind of Blue, then to earlier versions
of the quintet, not forgetting Davis's improvised score for Louis
Malle's film Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. Just as important, I learnt a
lesson about jazz: try as we all do to turn it into an intellectually
respectable pursuit, we should never fall into the trap of ignoring
its emotional appeal. Jazz is an immensely sophisticated form, but
when we treat it as quantum physics, we forget why it seduced so many
listeners in its infancy.

The other day, I finished rereading Colin MacInnes's 1950s novel
Absolute Beginners. Aside from sketching the first upheavals in the
racial landscape, he does a wonderful job of explaining why a
teenager would be passionate about Billie Holiday or the Modern Jazz
Quartet. That same teen would no doubt be into Coldplay now, but it's
worth remembering why he once thought jazz was the be-all and
end-all. It was soul music then, and it could be today if we gave it a chance.

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