Wednesday, February 24, 2021
Kind of Blue and Kind of Bloody
Responsible for revolutionizing the music four times with his innovations in bebop, cool, modal and fusion jazz,
Miles Davis struck a protest stance with his defiant attitude.
Duke Ellington projected African-American elegance; Davis personified Black cool, progressively making it clear that a race man stood behind his trumpet.
In 1959, Manhattan’s
Birdland (named for the iconic jazz saxist
Charlie “Yardbird” Parker) was the epicenter of jazz. Davis headlined that August. As he stood outside the club after escorting a white female friend into a taxi, police harassed him, asking him to move along. Pointing to his name on the marquee, Davis stared down an officer until the cop assaulted him, spilling blood all over his bespoke suit; eight days after he recorded
Kind of Blue, one of the century’s most enduring masterpieces, the
NYPD attacked and arrested Miles Davis for loitering. The incident only fueled his righteous anger.
In 1961, he raised his voice to
Columbia Records about distributing his albums with white women on the cover to facilitate sales to white people, insisting LPs like
Someday My Prince Will Come, Filles de Kilimanjaro and
Sorcerer feature his model-esque wives instead. In 1971, he recorded
Jack Johnson, the soundtrack to a documentary about the first Black world heavyweight boxing champ (who scandalously married three white women over the course of his life and suffered a racially motivated felony conviction in 1913). In 1985 he contributed horn lines to “Sun City,” a political take on the “We Are the World” model that found
Run-DMC,
George Clinton,
Bob Dylan and
Bono, among others, objecting to Apartheid in South Africa, and the following year titled an album
Tutu after South African activist Archbishop
Desmond Tutu.
Davis could be as cool as
Sean Connery’s James Bond and as militant as the
Black Panther Party.
Two years ago,
The New York Times launched the 1619 Project, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning initiative meant to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative” by commemorating the 400th anniversary of slaves landing in America. But during the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-1950s and ’60s, it was 1862, the year
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that served as a temporal marker. Thus, drummer
Max Roach and lyricist
Oscar Brown Jr. planned a suite of songs honoring the centennial of that famous executive order.
But the lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C., and the growing prominence of organizations like the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) created such urgency that Roach and his collaborators released
We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite two years early, in December 1960.
Featuring a black-and-white cover depicting musicians seated at a lunch counter, a white soda jerk lurking in the background, and song titles like “Freedom Day” and “Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace,”
Roach, saxophonist
Coleman Hawkins and singer
Abbey Lincoln confronted inequality head-on. In the “Protest” section of “Triptych,” Roach goes supernova on his drums while Lincoln uncorks a series of bloodcurdling screams. It feels like centuries of catharsis, certainly not the sort of jazz that pairs with a glass of pinot grigio.
We Insist!—a signal achievement—captures an irrefutably activist moment.
Click here for Part 3, Whitey's on the Moon.
PLAYLIST: MOANIN'
