My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 37

Miles Davis:
A New Revolution in Sound

By

KOFI NATAMBU

PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM PALUMBO

On July 17, 1955 at the second annual Newport Jazz
Festival, Davis was literally invited at the last
minute to join a group of prominent Jazz musicians in
a staged twenty minute jam session that had been
organized by the festival’s famed music director,
impresario, and promoter George Wein as part of an
“opening act” for the then highly popular white
headliner Dave Brubeck.
“That period between the mid-1950s
and the mid-1960s was an era in which
the resources of Jazz were being
consolidated and refined and the range
of its sources broadened. Some of
the Jazz of this period reached across
class and age lines and unified black
audiences. Young people could see this
music as “bad” in much the same sense
that James Brown used the word, and
older black people could see its links to
black tradition.”

—John Szwed

To the yang of ‘hard bop’ Davis
brought stillness, melodic beauty, and
understatement; to the yin of ‘cool’
he brought rich sonority, blues feeling,
and an enriched rhythmic capacity
that moved beyond swing to funk.
By refusing to color-code either his
music or his audience, Davis rose
at the end of the 1950s to the summit
of artistic excellence.”

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— Marsha Bayles

Scheduled merely as a quick
programming lead-in to stage changes
between featured performances by the
Modern Jazz Quartet (mjq), the Count
Basie and Duke Ellington Orchestras,
Lester Young, and Brubeck, nothing
special was planned in advance for this
short set which, like most jam sessions,
was completely improvised by the
musicians performing onstage. Davis
was then the least well known musician
in the assembled group which was

made up of Thelonious Monk,
individuals from the mjq, and other
individual members of various groups
playing in the festival. Wein just
happened to be a big fan of Davis and
added him because he was “a melodic
bebopper” and a player who, in Wein’s
view, could reach a larger audience
than most other musicians because of
the haunting romantic lyricism and
melodic richness of his style. Wein’s
insight turned out to be prophetic.