Miles at 100

There’s so much Miles Davis around just now, in celebration of today’s centenary of his birth on May 26, 1926. There are stage plays (I went to one in Southwark, starring the trumpeter Jay Phelps), orchestral concerts at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival and the BBC Proms starring Guy Barker and Ambrose Akimusire respectively, tribute albums like A Supreme Blue by Nicholas Payton and Butcher Brown, and audiophile editions of landmarks such as Birth of the Cool and the soundtrack to Lous Malle’s Ascenseur pur l’echafaud. And there’s Radio Three’s composer of the week slot, presented by Kate Molleson, which began very promisingly on Monday. Good. He deserves it all.

I’ve written a lot about him in the past (including a couple of books), and although I want to mark this occasion, I don’t really have anything new to add to the debate. So here’s an unpublished photo I took of him at Montreux on July 7, 1991, during rehearsals for the following day’s concert, when he played Gil Evans’s historic charts in front of a specially assembled large ensemble conducted by Quincy Jones.

He didn’t look strong and his playing was fragile, but the spirit was still there in his eyes and his manner. He wanted to make it good, of course, particularly after overcoming his lifelong aversion to looking in the rear-view mirror. Just under three months later, in a hospital in Santa Monica, he died from a combination of factors, including bronchial pneumonia and a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 65.

I fell in love with his music when I heard “Milestones” — the one with Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones — at my school’s jazz society in, I think, 1960. An older boy had brought it on a UK Fontana EP for us to absorb while clustered around the gramophone. Pretty soon I came to think of what it contains in five minutes and 42 seconds as a rare example of perfection in art, and I’ve never seen a reason to resile from that opinion. The one little trumpet fluff on the bridge of the final theme statement is the dropped stitch in the Persian rug, included by the weaver in acknowledgment that true perfection belongs only to Allah.

Well, I don’t really know about that. But if I could take only one piece of music with me, whether on the next road trip or the final voyage to eternity, that would still be it.