Miles Davis Gets the Movie He Deserves

1947 photograph of trumpeter Miles Davis playing with saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianist Duke Jordan (back to the camera), Tommy Potter on bass, and drummer Max Roach, barely visible behind Parker (photograph by William Gottlieb, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain from the William P. Gottlieb collection at the Library of Congress)

Last night I took a break from the concert venues I usually haunt to go over to the Roxie to see the new Stanley Nelson documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool. Back when I was writing for Examiner.com, I wrote about Don Cheadle’s film Miles Ahead under a headline that referred to the “uncompromising dissonance” of the content. To call Davis a “difficult character” (as I did in my article) would be the height of understatement. From a musical point of view, however, there is no doubting that he was one of a kind; and Nelson’s treatment makes it clear that such a description is more than an overused cliché.

To be fair, however, the title of the film is a bit deceptive. Birth of the Cool is, indeed, the name of one of Davis’ albums; but that album accounts for one episode in a career narrative that unfolds with almost as much breadth of scope as does Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Indeed, I do not think that there was more than fifteen seconds of music from the Birth of the Cool album in the soundtrack; and the narration dwelled on little more than the fact that the music was performed by a nonet.

That said, I must confess that, after many years, I finally am beginning to come to a listening experience with Birth of the Cool in which I do not always feel as if I am starting from scratch. Thus, while I was able to recognize those fifteen seconds as coming from Birth of the Cool, I would be hard pressed to identify the track from which they had been extracted! From my own point of view, the Birth of the Cool album documents a transitional series of sessions, coming between Davis playing in Charlie Parker’s quintet and the beginning of his recording sessions with Prestige Records.

Thus, what matters far more is the way in which Nelson was able to map out his entire documentary as a serious of significant milestones (pun definitely intended) that provide a roadmap of Davis’ entire career. I have to confess that I took a personal satisfaction in how much of that music was familiar to me, even the many tracks that I have found difficult in past experiences. Through Nelson’s treatment (and the comments interjected by colleagues) I finally found myself getting my head around “Bitches Brew” as something more than a trendy indulgence. I even caught myself nodding sympathetically to his treatment of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” during his visits to the Montreux Jazz Festival, the venue where, near the end of his life, he reflected back on his three major collaborations with Gil Evans, Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain.

Nelson’s documentary is almost two hours in duration. There is no “top-level” narrator; but there is a rich variety of interviewees commenting on both musical and personal aspects of Davis’ life. In addition, Carl Lumbly provides accounts of Davis’ own words with an acceptable, if not faithful, rendering of the original speaker’s hoarseness. (How Davis’ voice went hoarse is one of the topics that Nelson covers.)

As a result, the pendulum of Cheadle’s “semi-fictional” perspective has now swung to the other side with just the right blend of biography, music, and character insights. From my own personal perspective, I felt that I came out of the screening feeling as if I were a better-equipped listener. Davis accounts for a more than generous proportion of my jazz recordings. However, in the face of all of that quantity, I feel as if Nelson has equipped me to bring more quality to my own listening experiences.