Let’s get one thing out of the way here nice and early. I don’t watch movies. I haven’t been to a theatre since 2012 and I don’t plan on going soon. I’m sure Miles Ahead will be a fine movie and all, but I’m not interested. I’m not interested in any movie. So, I can’t really speak to how this music works in conjunction to the movie proper. Like I said, I’m sure it does fine.
So instead, I’m going to look at this one from another angle: as a one disc, quickie intro to Miles Davis, a task it does well and accomplishes with time to spare. Let’s dig in, shall we?
A famous story has Davis at the White House in the mid-80s, a dinner guest of Ronald Reagan. Someone turns and asks him what he did to be there and in his distinctly raspy voice, Davis says he only reinvented jazz five or six times. The story’s a little too good to be true – he said it at a dinner given by a different politician – but the point of his remark is true; Davis reshaped jazz a few different times in his career, mostly in a period between 1958 and 1975. Which is also the scope of this soundtrack.
It opens with “Miles Ahead,” taken from the 1957 LP of the same name, where the first shades of his future movements take form. Already an established bandleader, Davis was growing frustrated with jazz’s reliance on trickier and trickier structures. So on this record he worked with Gil Evans’ arrangements, in effect placing his trumpet against a brass and woodwind band, however title track is more traditional (and kind of gives an idea where he was, to set the mood for how things would change).
The big band idea was expanded on Sketches of Spain and its distinctly European-flavoured arrangements and instrumentation (castanets!); an excerpt of “Solea” is also on the soundtrack.
At the same time, Davis was also stripping things down: for Kind of Blue, he used a minimalist approach, only giving his band a few chord changes and rough sketches for the music, instead letting things develop organically as the tapes rolled, a stark contract to the tricky chord changes in the then-fashionable hard bop style of jazz. It’s represented here by “So What.”
Having shown two possible directions for jazz – one heavy on orchestration, one heavy on improvisation – Davis moved forward in a third direction, slowly putting together a band of talented, young musicians: Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter and Ron Carter. Willams was still a teenager, while everyone else was in their early 20s. They played a fast moving style of jazz that took elements of what Davis has been working on with Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain, but married them to popular styles of jazz. It’s a sound you can hear developing, adapting and mutating on “Seven Steps to Heaven,” “Nefertiti,” and “Frelon Brun.”
Since the music presented here isn’t just in chronological order, but likely paired with the general plot of the movie, one can hear the music growing, changing and adapting. Case in point: as the 60s wore on, Davis music started picking up more outside influences. There’s an electric keyboard on “Frelon Brun,” for example, and by decade’s end, Davis has pioneered a mix of jazz, R&B, and rock on Bitches Brew, not to mention taking his minimalist approach to a new level on In A Silent Way.
Although neither is included here, Miles Ahead includes two funky outtakes from Jack Johnson: “Go Ahead John,” and “Duran,” both of which show Davis using slashing guitars, James Brown-influences electric bass and driving, propulsive rhythms, creating a sound that’d echo in bands like The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, Return to Forever, and others.
As the soundtrack shows, Davis kept going deeper and deeper into grooves, pausing only to introduce elements of texture: the buzzes and sitar on “Black Satin,” give it an interesting texture, sure, but the song also creates a circular groove; at the time, people thought it was lazy and wrote it off as Davis trying (and failing) to sell out, but within a decade, hip-hop and dance music were exploring the same terrain of looped beats. This search cumulated in Davis’ 1975 band, represented here by the scorching “Prelude Pt. 2,” a live cut from Japan, which almost threw out melody and chord structures, relying on guitar pyrotechnics and heavy percussion and bass playing.
After this tour, Davis went into retirement with health problems, drug addictions, and a litany of personal demons. He’d eventually start recording again in the 80s – a period represented here with the slow groove of “Back Seat Betty” – but didn’t have the same impact on popular music.
Like I said, above, I can’t really judge this as a soundtrack; I’m sure the plot of the movie follows the general outline of Davis re-inventing jazz a few times with the help of talented young musicians he wisely listened to before succumbing to drug addiction. It’s a familiar tale, really, and I’ve no desire to see it acted on screen.
But as a career-spanning compilation, Miles Ahead does a pretty good job of condensing a large period into a short span of time. It starts with him breaking from tradition, finding new paths and going off in a singular direction, making waves which still influence music. Compared to Super Hits, it shows more of his genre-pushing music; unlike The Essential Miles Davis, it doesn’t dwell on his earlier or later years, instead honing on in on his creative peak.
I think it’s as good a starting place as any (any of the albums represented on this record are great next steps for Davis newbies) and hopefully a few people will see the movie, pick this up and start exploring Davis’ back catalogue. Oh, and the ‘live’ jam featuring Esperanza Spalding, Hancock and Shorter, and Pharoahe Monch’s appearance on “Gone” are nice, too.
Rating: 4.5/5