Miles & Me Read online

  An earlier version of the section entitled “The Spin Interview” in

  Chapter 1 first appeared in Conjunctions 16 (1991).

  Originally published in 2000 by University of California Press

  Copyright © 2000, 2018 by Quincy Troupe

  Introduction © 2018 by Rudy Langlais

  First Seven Stories Press edition September 2018

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Troupe, Quincy, author.

  Title: Miles and me / Quincy Troupe.

  Description: First Seven Stories Press edition. | New York : Seven Stories Press, 2018. | Includes index. | “Originally published in 2000 by University of California Press.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018008490 | ISBN 9781609808341 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Davis, Miles. | Jazz musicians--United States--Biography. | Troupe, Quincy.

  Classification: LCC ML419.D39 T76 2018 | DDC 788.9/2165092 [B] --dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008490

  book design: Nola Burger

  Printed in the USA

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  VD1

  contents

  introduction by Rudy Langlais

  prologue

  one meeting miles

  two up close and personal

  three listening to miles

  four saying good-bye

  epilogue

  q & a with Quincy Troupe by Dan Simon

  index

  photo section

  Introduction

  Rudy Langlais

  “The dead are dying of thirst.” My friend Norman Mailer wrote that years ago in his book about the heavyweight championship fight in Zaire, Africa, between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.

  I once asked him what he meant by those words, and he described something drawn from Egyptian mythology about an afterlife where the dead roamed seeking solace and understanding, if not forgiveness.

  I have since taken these words as my own in the interpretation Henry Miller might have given them, that the living (whom Miller considered “the dead”) long for fulfillment.

  • • •

  In 1985, I was among the dead dying of thirst. After a long career in journalism, which had taken me from the sports department of the largest newspaper in New Jersey to the Village Voice, where I had been the first black senior editor, I had ventured into filmmaking to produce a film about Miller, before I was lured back to publishing by a call to meet with Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse magazine.

  In a surreally memorable afternoon in his East Side townhouse, Guccione told me that he was giving his son a magazine, to be called Spin—a magazine, he said, that he “wanted to be like Rolling Stone.” Surrounded by one of the greatest private art collections in the world, opposite a postmodern cultural Nero, dressed in a long brown terry cloth robe and adorned in gold chains and a bouffant that rose atop a classically handsome face, in the capital of an empire that was Camelot to anyone tired of the Hefnerian kingdom, I heard myself say, “Well, I’m not the guy for that job.”

  To Guccione’s puzzled look, I explained—“Rolling Stone exists and has grown old. I would want to create a magazine that Rolling Stone would want to be like. I’m that guy.”

  I was younger then, and taking a lot of risks. So, I waited for Guccione’s response, which came quickly. “I want you to take this job.”

  The job was to help launch a new magazine to give Rolling Stone a run. I was also that guy, someone who liked doing things for the sheer competition.

  So, we opened our doors and immediately began competing.

  Everyone remembers things his or her own way, and repetition inevitably affects recollection. If failure is an orphan, but success has a thousand fathers, then I am one of the fathers to a wonderful memory and achievement. Spin, true to my youthful boast to Bob Guccione, became the magazine that Rolling Stone wanted to be like. Month after month, stories that we published beat them into the public imagination—always followed by a trailing attempt at the story in the Stone.

  One story, however, was singularly different from all the others we were doing, and it could not be followed or imitated.

  • • •

  Quincy Troupe was an Upper West Side legend when I was introduced to him by one of my writers at the Voice. I remember a few things on first sighting—he had flowing dreadlocks, a massive head, an elegant Asian-meets-African sartorial style. And he had the most famous bachelor pad uptown.

  It wasn’t hard to see why extraordinary women flocked to Quincy. He was a beautiful man, a gloriously talented poet, and an All-American basketball player. What god gifts one man with so many talents?

  We first met because I heard that Quincy was moving “back” to Harlem—from that epic apartment in a doorman building on what I considered the most beautiful street in New York, West End Avenue, to a Harlem drenched in poverty and murder and about to welcome the scourge of crack. Quincy was moving right into the middle of it with Margaret Porter, the woman who was to become his wife and mother to his two children, coming to live with him for the first time.

  I asked him to write that story for me—of moving from the luxury of the West Side to the Dantean hell of that Harlem—with a new family. I was deeply moved by his description in our conversations of the feeling that was drawing him to Harlem, a place where he had never lived, coming from St. Louis, but to which he felt he was being called.

  The story he wrote for the Voice, “Drop Me Off in Harlem,” accompanied by the wondrous photography of the great Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee, depicting blacks in their most elegant dress on Harlem’s great boulevards, was poetry—the savage poetry of Algren and Camus; the complex poetry of Faulkner and Baldwin and Ellison; the musical poetry of Ellington and Coltrane, Bird and Miles; the poetry of Quincy Troupe.

  • • •

  Miles Davis haunted my Upper West Side neighborhood in the mid-’80s. He had had homes in the area and frequently played—or just stalked—the landmark club Mikell’s, a jazz-art bar tucked into a kind of country house on Columbus Avenue at Ninety-Seventh Street. As yin to the yang of the elegant “player’s bar” just down the street, the Cellar, where the hustlers, sharps, dealers of all Manhattan’s darkest charms congregated, Mikell’s was a place for poets, writers, dancers, musicians, intellectuals. The bartender was David Baldwin, and his brother, the great novelist, “Jimmy,” often held court there among New York’s uptown cultural elite. At Mikell’s, you could hear Basie, Dizzy, Marsalis, Monk, all swinging. It was cozy and stimulating, unpretentious but demanding that everyone bring “something” to the room—talk, ideas, musicianship, style.

  Miles was known for possessing at least three of those talents. However, he only talked to who he wanted to talk to. With Baldwin, the talk flowed as it does between two friends in a deep bond. To strangers, Miles was known to be savagely dismissive.

  By the mid-’80s, he was also pretty fucked up a lot of the time.

  Many mornings on my way to the Spin offices, I would see him in withering shape. Asleep in his Lamborghini on 101st Street, emerging from apartment buildings known to house crack dens, drunk at a neighborhood restaurant, starting a fistfight in a bar. Scheduled to play at Mikell’s, he would often arrive, take the stand, play a few notes, glare at the crowd, and then leave. Some nights, he just didn’t show.

  Convinced Davis was on some streak that would end in self-destruction, I decided to try to get “the last interview” and approached him on one of those Mikell’s nights when he didn’t play. I introduced myself as the editor of a new magazine he had surely never heard of—and for some reason I will never understand, he gave me his phone number.

  After the beautiful work Quincy had done at the Voice, I
was determined to convince him to come and write for me at Spin. I gave him carte blanche—what do you want to write about? Who do you want to write about? He presented a list—Michael Jackson and Miles were on the list. But when I called him to assign the interview with Miles, I found that his mood had changed. He angrily refused the assignment, with an expletive-laced verbal rejection letter that shocked me for its sheer violence.

  I responded with fury of my own. I just sent him the contract with a message that I left on his answering machine, “It’s fifteen hundred words. You have a three-month deadline. Here’s Miles’s number. I don’t care if you do it or not.”

  Then I put it out of my mind, until the deadline was nearing and now I needed to know if I had a story or not.

  That’s when Quincy stopped taking my calls altogether. For four months, five months, six months.

  My mother used to have an expression, “If you pray to the Lord and you don’t get a response, the answer was ‘no.’”

  He had rejected the assignment, I concluded, and moved on. At the same time, I stopped seeing Miles in the neighborhood.

  Then one day, Quincy walked in unannounced and dropped what seemed like a ream of typewriter paper on my desk. It was, he announced, “the Miles Davis story.” The heft of the box alone told me that it wasn’t 1,500 words. In fact it was ten times that—150,000 words.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” I fumed.

  “Why don’t you try reading it,” the poet challenged.

  So I did. In one afternoon, out of the office so as not to be distracted, sitting on a bench in Central Park, I read it all. And sat still for some time afterward.

  He had done it. He had “found” Miles—a Miles we didn’t know existed, a Miles vastly different from the laconic, angry, brutal, beautiful monster of the trumpet that we knew, hardly knew.

  The piece was poetry and music. And it was pure Miles—and pure Quincy.

  We had never had a story of that length in the magazine, not even close. And we never would again.

  It demanded to be published in its entirety—and we did, giving it two issues of the magazine, with gorgeous photography.

  The story caused a sensation in New York. One day, the Rolling Stones walked in off the street asking for copies of the magazine. Standing at a nearby bar one night, the great Ruben Blades asked if I could get him the first issue, having stumbled across the second. Sting’s office called for copies for him.

  I remember that story as if it were yesterday. If you’re lucky as an editor, there are a handful of stories that manage to bring you joy years after their publication. “Miles Davis” by Quincy Troupe was one of those. It was the best of what we were about at Spin. It was the best of what I had ever wanted to be as an editor.

  It was beautiful.

  —Los Angeles, January 2018

  prologue

  Miles Davis was a great poet on his instrument. His horn could blow warm, round notes that spoke to the deepest human emotions, and it could spit out cracked trills that evoked the angry sounds of bullets firing. Sometimes his trumpet seemed to float over and through remarkably complex rhythms and time signatures with heart-stopping speed and efficiency. His sound could penetrate like a sharp knife. It could also be muted, tender and low, like a lullaby, but it was always charged with deeply felt emotion. Miles’ sound always made us sit up and take notice. It was burnished, brooding, unforgettable.

  When you heard Miles on the radio, you knew right away that it was him. You knew it by the sound because no one else ever sounded like that. Like Louis Armstrong’s, Duke Ellington’s, Thelonious Monk’s, John Coltrane’s, his voice was unmistakably unique.

  Sometimes when he used the mute, whether on up-tempo tunes or slow ones, we knew we were hearing perfection. When he played muted ballads, it was as if he were tenderly kissing our feelings—then he would stun us with bright, rapid-fire bursts of notes that penetrated our souls. Miles not only soliloquized, he also had a “dialoging” style. It was like listening to him having a conversation with himself, with one of his voices imitating a fast-talking, sweet-rapping black street hustler.

  Even when he was first starting out, Miles’ sound and style got your attention immediately, because you knew whatever he played, it was going to be unusual. His music was always unusual because that’s the way his mind worked—unusually. Miles Davis was always unusual. He didn’t get that way just after he became famous—he was special from the beginning.

  His homeboys back in East St. Louis understood that. They knew that he was odd, a little bit different from them and everyone else. They didn’t mind his eccentricities. They gave him the space to be different all his life—but only as long as he didn’t step over the invisible line that both he and they knew was there. Miles seldom crossed that line to “diss” them, because if he had, those homeboys would have made him pay. They weren’t no “pootbutts.”

  Miles knew, too, that they understood him in the way that homeboys always understand the one among them who is different. Odd. A genius. Someone who sees things they never see. Hears sounds they never hear. Voices. The screech of car tires. Maybe a mockingbird riffing on another bird’s song. The lonely voice of an old black churchwoman singing plaintively in the dusky glow of a backwater country evening, somewhere few come to, save mosquitoes or rats or evil white men dressed in bedsheets, carrying guns and flaming crosses.

  In the night air, the trains never seem to stop whistling past, their wheels humming. The roads are unpaved, empty, eerie in the twilight just before the hants come out to enter everybody’s imagination and shut down those dusty roads. The voice of the old black woman floats above the shadows and trees, disembodied yet whole. It rides up there and cruises alongside the night birds circling above some unseen church or log cabin, in some out-of-the-way location back in the bushes, hidden. The voice also circles. Plaintive. Haunting. Achingly real.

  And if you had the privilege of hearing that voice, perhaps you wouldn’t file it away as anything special, something to imitate and relate to for the rest of your life—a reference point for your own life’s experiences, making you sensitive, alert, cognizant of other beautiful, necessary things. But that’s the way Miles heard it.

  Perhaps the voice would remind you of a lonely trumpet sound. But maybe you wouldn’t know that what you heard was special because you couldn’t see that old black woman’s face. And, if you could have met her, you might have been too busy watching her chaw on some snuff to see the wisdom in her old eyes. But Miles did see that face, saw it when he heard her voice. He saw the whole scene, took it all in. Knew that it was real and special and filed it away for later use.

  From the “giddyap,” Miles’ friends knew he saw and heard things they could never see or hear. They told me so. And so they protected him. He was allowed to be and do whatever was necessary for him as long as he was cool and didn’t disrespect them by looking down on them.

  He never stuck his nose all up in the wind as if he smelled something foul when his homeboys walked into a room. No. He never treated them that way. Even when he was looking down from the elevated heights they had helped him to climb, he never cultivated an attitude that would have angered or hurt them. He was always just “one of the boys,” even if they knew—and he knew—he was also apart from them.

  His fame never got in the way. His East St. Louis homeboys were his best friends up to the day he died. He trusted and knew them and they trusted and knew him. To them he was always “Little Davis,” or “Junior,” or “Dewey,” or “Buckwheat”—a name he hated because it alluded to the blackness of his skin, which he was sensitive about all of his life. But some of his old friends called him that anyway, despite his protests, because that’s what they had called him back in East St. Louis when they were all young and full of piss and vinegar and thrived on insulting each other, to see who was the strongest.

  St. Louis and East St. Louis were—and still are—great trumpet towns. That’s because there were so many marc
hing drum and bugle corps bands, which were part of a tradition brought over to St. Louis by Germans from their fatherland—although I don’t ever recall seeing a white drum and bugle corps marching band. (That’s not to say there weren’t any; I just never saw one.) But it was the black marching bands in St. Louis and East St. Louis who put their distinctive creative stamp on the tradition—the high-stepping kicks and the swaying back and forth of the bugles as they were played were black innovations—and who raised the practice almost to a high art form.

  Based in individual black communities and sponsored by local African-American chapters of the Elks and various Masonic orders, these marching bands would liven up the streets on weekends during the spring, summer, and early fall, and I remember them with great fondness. I looked forward with anticipation whenever word came down that they would be gracing my St. Louis neighborhood with their sounds and presence.

  These bands developed a style of playing the bugle, later transferred to the cornet and trumpet, that became known as the St. Louis “running” style. Pioneered by Eddie Randle, Levi Madison, Harold “Shorty” Baker, and Clark Terry (Miles’ real first mentor in trumpet style) and perfected by Miles (who, in his youth, had played in several East St. Louis marching bands), it was characterized by musical ideas, chords, and notes strung together in a continuous blowing, dialoging manner, akin to a fast-talking conversationalist. (Trumpeter Lester Bowie, from St. Louis, provides an example of this style today.)

  This distinctive St. Louis sound was connected to the great trumpet tradition of New Orleans by the musicians who traveled on the riverboats shuttling up and down the Mississippi. But where New Orleans trumpet players employed a hotter, bigger, brassier style (as exemplified by Buddy Bolden, Freddie Keppard, Louis Armstrong, Al Hirt, Wynton Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, and Terrence Blanchard), the St. Louis style was generally cooler, more subtle and conversational (although it, too, could be hot and brassy at times).

  The different styles came out of different cultures. New Orleans is a lively city with a coastal culture heavily influenced by the French, Spanish, Native American, and African peoples. With its Mardi Gras, Congo Square, African ring dance, Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, African drumming, Cajun fiddling, and Creole cooking, the culture of the Crescent City is thoroughly intermingled like a great big pot of gumbo or jambalaya.