The Electric Surge of Miles Davis How his highest-wattage phase secured his legacy—and ultimately burned him out.
Miles Ahe Ad, Don CheaDle’s recent, feverishly imagined treatment of the lost years of Miles Davis, is a movie full of beautiful trumpet sounds: bending blue notes, puffs of self ironizing loneliness, jubilant noise runs, and savagely abstract displacements of air. But the most beautiful of the lot—which is to say, the most eerily and inexpressibly Milesian—is barely a trumpet sound at all. It’s the sound Miles (played by Cheadle) makes when he picks up the mouthpiece, just the mouthpiece, of his long-idle instrument. It’s 1979, and Miles has been in a bad way for a while: musically inactive, coked out, doldrums bound, and lurking in the basement of his brownstone on the Upper West Side. But now, after years of silence, he is thinking about playing again. His muse, shaggy from a long solitude, is stirring. So he picks up the mouthpiece of his trumpet and blows through it, pffft!, clearing out the devils and the dried spit, preparing to re-pressurize his own interior. And somehow, in the sound he makes— curt but sacramental, a rasp of pure musical energy, before melody, before anything—is supernaturally disclosed the entire creative dimension of Miles Davis. At that moment, it feels—it tastes—like the sound he’s been trying to get to all his life.
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