Sounds of Joy, Part 1: A Portrait of Miles Davis in the Late 1980s

"I've never suffered, and don't intend to suffer"

Miles Davis in July 1989 (photo by Oliver Nurock, Creative Commons)

Until recently I was only familiar with two Miles Davis albums: Kind of Blue and Porgy and Bess, both from 1959. I didn’t know anything about Miles Davis apart from his name, that he was a trumpet player, and that he was possessed of an especially piercing stare. I listened to those albums and enjoyed them, but I didn’t really hear them. Clearly, I needed to find a way in.

As often happens when I’m supposed to discover something, Miles Davis began to pop up everywhere – on the radio, on the TV, on the CD rack at the charity shop. When I was at the African American Museum in Washington DC in late 2023, I looked up and saw Miles Davis staring down at me from beneath the wide brim of a fedora.

This image is similar to the cover of the 1985 album You’re Under Arrest, which ultimately turned out to be my gateway into Miles’ world. It’s an unusual album, the biggest surprise being that it features Miles covering two massive 1980s hits: “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson, and “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper. In my childhood, Michael Jackson was the most famous man in the world, and I like Cyndi Lauper because she plays the hammer dulcimer and used to cast her mother in her music videos. Miles’ recordings of these tunes were decent enough, but the real revelation arrived when I discovered a pair of live performances from Munich in 1988.

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The live performance of “Human Nature” begins with Miles beckoning his ‘lead bass’ player, Joseph ‘Foley’ McCreary, and inviting him to take a walk, both musically and literally. Miles leads Foley to the corner of the stage, facing away from the audience, and there, almost folded over each other, the two of them enter into an intense musical conversation, with Miles seeming to be imparting some kind of wisdom. After a few minutes, with the lesson completed, Miles places a gentle hand on the younger man’s shoulder and leads him back to his position in front of the drumkit.

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There’s a video of Foley reminiscing at length about his time with Miles, which lasted from 1987 to Miles’ death in 1991. Miles did not enjoy a reputation as an easy person to know, but Foley remembers him fondly as a mentor figure, who had simply reached a point where, as Foley puts it, “he didn’t have to smile if he didn’t want to.”

Foley relates a story where Miles, noticing Foley’s unusual style of dress, became concerned that his young guitarist was using drugs (Miles being intimately familiar with substance abuse, having spent the second half of the ‘70s in a drug-induced haze). So concerned was Miles that he placed a phone call to Foley’s mother, who told him in no uncertain terms that her son was not a drug addict, and that Miles should “worry about that trumpet, and I’ll worry about my son.” So began an unlikely friendship between Miles and Foley’s mother, where he would randomly call her up to discuss his relationship problems.

Miles and Foley’s closeness made me think of other examples of ‘musical intimacy,’ an underdiscussed subject. There are many instances of musicians who understood each other intuitively, to the point where they seemed able to communicate telepathically. One of my favourite examples is Billie Holiday and Lester Young, seen in the video below alongside a host of other jazz luminaries. Lester casts a ghostly figure, sliding into the frame out of nowhere to deliver a silky solo – much to Billie’s approval – before disappearing, never to be seen again.

Miles Davis and Foley clearly had this type of relationship. After Miles died in 1991, Foley recorded an eclectic, genre-defying album called 7 Years Ago…. Directions in Smart-Alec Music, which blended hip-hop, funk, R&B, jazz fusion, and rock. It also included a track called ‘September 21^st 1991,’ which Foley revealed was improvised in the moments immediately after learning of his mentor’s passing. The album is not currently streaming, but has been uploaded in full to YouTube.

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The intro to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” lasts for 15 seconds, but Miles extends it to nearly two full minutes. Finally, the band slides into the familiar chord progression, and Miles begins playing Cyndi’s melody; not following it exactly, but quoting from it, like someone taking care not to stray too far from the path while walking in the woods. Despite this being a live performance, there is no sense of an audience, just an endless black void. All of this could be taking place in Miles’ mind. The sound of the trumpet is dredged from deep within, and Miles is stooped, hunched, almost bent double from pain or passion or some combination of the two.

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Miles Davis appeared on 60 Minutes in 1988. The questions from journalist Harry Reasoner are alarmingly ham-fisted at times (“Are Black musicians genetically better than white musicians?” he asks at one point) but Miles handles them with grace, speaking in that signature raspy voice that gave everything he said a sense of deep import. Reasoner suggests that Black musicians play so well because they “hurt more,” only for Miles to gently but firmly shut him down. “My father’s rich, my mama’s good looking, and I can play the blues. I’ve never suffered, and don’t intend to suffer.”

Miles is paraphrasing from the lyrics of the George Gershwin song “Summertime,” but what he says is true: his family was wealthy, and the young Miles spent happy summers riding horses on his grandfather’s farm in Arkansas.

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Miles plays an ascending melody line that lifts “Time After Time” into its chorus, like a plane breaking through the clouds into the sunlight, his eloquent phrasing more than compensating for the absence of Cyndi Lauper’s lyrics. In the 60 Minutes interview, Reasoner notes that “Miles Davis talks better than just about anyone when he has a trumpet on his lips” and “it speaks for him when he can’t explain himself.”

In the interview Miles comes across as reticent, perhaps even shy – something that was confirmed by his third ex-wife, the great actress Cicely Tyson, in a New York Times interview shortly before her death in 2021: “I got to know the soul of a man who is as gentle as a lamb,” said Cicely. “He covered it up with this ruthless attitude because he was so shy. Shy, you hear me? And in trying to be the kind of tough person that people thought he was, he ruined his life. Yes, gentle as a lamb, you hear me? That’s the Miles Davis I knew.”

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Miles moves through the vast expanse of “Time After Time” alone. The song has expanded, the band are far away from him now, and there are endless worlds to be explored. Sometimes he stops playing altogether, and allows the music to flow beneath him. Eventually he finds a fellow traveller, Foley, and the two of them commune once again.

Miles returned to “Time After Time” night after night for the rest of his life. Each time it was different, as if he felt he had failed to get his point across the previous time, but was determined to try again and again, from many different angles, until he made himself understood.

In Munich on 10^th July 1988, he succeeded.