Miles Davis’s superior musical intelligence | Letters

Dr Richard Carter and Meirion Bowen respond to an editorial which argues that the musician still shapes modern music 100 years after his birth

Your editorial marking the centenary of Miles Davis’s birth rather understates his musical intelligence (The Guardian view on 100 years after Miles Davis’s birth: why he still shapes modern music, 24 May). Unable to play with the facility of dazzling trumpeters like Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro, it was less a case of his preferring “restraint and precision” in his playing than accepting that he was technically not up to their level, and having the ability to adapt.

Listen, for example, to his earlier recordings with Charlie Parker where, following Parker’s blazing solos, Davis stumbles through the chord changes, to appreciate that instead he decided to concentrate on a gentler approach. This emerged in the collaborations with the arranger Gil Evans, foreshadowed in the Birth of the Cool recordings and later with the recordings of Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain, and subsequently his quintets with John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter, where his lack of technique became irrelevant when set beside his great lyricism.
Continue reading...