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From Bye Bye Blackbird: An
Elegiac Suite for Miles Davis By Richard Stevenson [Note: The manuscript weaves various voices: sometimes band members', sometimes the poet/critic; hence the italics for some, regular text for others.]
Bird Calls Me Lily Pons
1953 began all right. Sonny Rollins was out of jail. I got a date with Philly Joe, Walter Bishop, Percy Heath and Bird to record for Prestige.
We had to call Bird Charlie Chan cos he had an exclusive contract with Mercury at the time, and Bob Weinstock, the producer, and the guys could ill afford a fine.
Bird had given up shooting junk cos Red Rodney had been busted, sent up to the big house in Lexington. Bird thought the cops were lookin’ to clip his sorry singed wings.
He was drinkin’ a shitload to replace the H and had put away a quart of vodka before the date, so he was fucked up. Still, he treated me like a son, patronized me, ragged my black ass.
I had to set the motherfucker straight. Told him I’d always been a pro on his recording dates; he oughta quit
clownin’ around. and went straight away into his bag.
“All right, Lily Pons,” in some sorry assed British accent. “To produce beauty we must suffer pain – from the oyster comes the pearl.” It was like havin’ two leaders in the band!
“Man, fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” I wanted to say, but I was flustered and just sputtered and spit my way through the take cos Bird and I go back a long way.
Sometimes you get no respect from a brother that way. You play like a motherfucker and pay dues til you got your own rep and still it feels like yer brother’s hand’s in the till.
I started packin’ up my horn, I wasn’t gonna lose face, play his game. “Ah, come on, Miles, let’s play some music,”
Bird moaned. We played some kickass jazz after that.
“Walkin’” (1954)
After the desultory forties you hit your stride with this one, for sure!
Flyin’ fly more like. with la crème de la crème of jazz. Kenny (Klook) Clarke on traps; Horace Silver playin’ funky, down home grits and greens keys while J.J. Johnson slides his slush pump through more kinky corners of tubular steel than the piano has keys; Lucky Thompson fully earns his keep on tenor too while Percy Heath strides down neatly paved streets, holding the groove from which you soar, Miles!
Gone are the old frenetic bop changes while you preach the new gospel according
to Horace. more than a confident walk down
gospel’s polished aisles. a con’s shuffle, the man’s clip clop of eternally flat fleet street feet. A hip swagger of zoot-suited elders toot tootling along, hand in hand
with white collar chic. head bobbin’, prancing, cantering, hot shoes blues, with solos for all that has drawn the electricity from walls for decades now.
Walkin’ the walk.
Twee – twee –eee. Coffee-coloured notes percolate like the best java joint cuppa joe from the ten-cents-a-cup all-night diner days. No twee smooth jazz late night flava swill.
So flavour-full. even with the hats-on, muted simmer of tin pan alley melodies added.
Walkin’?
Blues For Bird
I went into fifty-five; I was feelin’ pretty good. My chops were getting better; I was playin’ where I could.
My ol’lady had me nailed for non-payment of child support. I got rounded up and jailed before we went to court.
Three days on Riker’s Island I sat stewing in stir with cats of all persuasions, sick pimps who procured.
Then along came Harold Lovett, a black lawyer and a friend; I thought the worst was over, my troubles would soon end.
But, no, Harry had heard bad news. They were wailin’ it on the Street, all the boppers nodding in pews were saying you had dropped the beat.
Bird is dead! Bird is dead! The Baroness confirmed it so. Bird is dead! Bird is dead! She held your head and watched you go.
Now the junkies are keepin’ junk time. No fix can save their souls. The dragon is teaching end-rhyme and the sad fact that eyes are holes.
The boppers whistle “Parker’s Mood” for the wax in the saxman’s wings. All the Ornithologists you wooed are blowin’ blues and woodshedding.
We love you, Bird. You taught us fire. But the notes you played scorched earth; you spiraled right off the gyre,
left us the need of a rebirth.
The Legendary Stockholm Concert (1960)
Here I am at the peak of my powers
with the quintessential quintet.
already recorded to form his own sixties powerhouse band. Already bored with our repertoire, he nevertheless blows the doors off the standards we set.
“On Green Dolphin Street” positively swings like greased hinges on a summer screen door. Paul Chambers is all over the bass laying a firm foundation while Jimmy Cobb’s cymbal shivers
in quick scintillating bliss. a butterfly bein’ born on those brushes of his and Wynton Kelly is a pure mountain stream!
The way the cat plays piano, you’d think he was ticklin’ trout, showin’ them how to get home. We stretch out on “All Blues” and “So What,” together bring my Frances’ prancin’ right into
the room on “Fran Dance.” an eighth veil. We shuffle off this mortal coil and straight into Nirvana on some kinda hyper drive.
Man, we are not only “Walkin’” our walk and talkin’ our talk, we are flyin’ fly up in the sky at the Konserthuset tonight! John is some kinda beatific angel without
the white horse and booze.
we can’t do and won’t try. know John’s bird has already flown the friggin’ ark?
We’ve already hit a fly ball outta the damn park.
The bases are loaded. Why does the unit always dissolve like some kinda hit of anti-acid in water the minute the ball is thrown?
Why will John quit the team now?
is as big as the moon in the sky.
before the ball ever reaches its zenith.
Man, the cat ain’t wearin’ no albatross tonight! Hell, he has no cross to bear that doesn’t have angels sittin’ like shit hawks on it. He had a laurel leaf in his beak before he ever sniffed new land and came back to me. The sea beneath his gilded wings parts like sheet iron under that blowtorch of a horn.
He cuts shapes out of the sky tonight. I know I can no longer clip his wings and expect him to keep landing in the same cool pond with me. It isn’t fame he wants. He has that, is the next tenor colossus after Rollins. He has the green leaf in his mouth. A bird like that don’t need to fly south.
“Heavy Metal Prelude” and “Heavy Metal” ( Live at Montreux, 1988 )
Marilyn Mazur’s a cuckoo clockgone berserk on percussion; Foley McCreary’s high-strung bass rips through concrete like carbon steel.
While the long bass vamp jams are all in the can, and you’re back to playing tunes with changes, you still cook with gas
and blister paint with your solos. Strong as ever, Miles, whatever the critics say. These younger guys bring rock and blues chops to the floor,
but your biggest talent is still melding elements, and, right now, the steel’s white hot under the hammer of your horn.
Three years from the stroke that will take you out of the picture, you blow notes the way a glass blower blows bottles. Sometimes fragile,
fractured or ragged. when you spin the molten glass it falls back into the furnace. Sometimes you turn ‘em and blow gently
until you’ve got a precious vase or bowl. We can see the bubbles and imperfections in the glass, but, still, the shapes are gorgeous.
Still, the translucency of the notes appeal and stretch the lonely fire of new-wrought emotions from bead to sphere. Frozen tears cool to the touch.
“Great Expectations” ( from Big Fun (1969 - 72) )
There she stands before the green bell of a giant trumpet: stark naked but for the huge gold hoops in her ears eyes, chin lowered, her hair done up in corn rows, her buttocks protruding above lissome thighs, rounded heels big flat feet, her breasts high and firm their nipples perky and pert as Corky McCoy’s one-hand novel fantasy. The pimp with the pink fedora and scarf platform shoes and cuffed red-check bell bottom pants stands on the balls of his feet and blows through the gold mouthpiece and decades of compressed valves and tubular steel while two cool spades exchange the secret arm wrestle handshake and one potato two set of slaps and glad-hand greetings on the back gate of the folding two-LP/CD cover another hip cat leaning on the instrument in tight silk shirt patched jeans and knit longshoreman’s bumblebee toque staring out of red-rimmed eyes while a Belafonte/ Satchmo lookalike caricature of the handsome gigolo struts, laughing out of the turquoise blue background and I remember all of it: bellbottoms, scarves, goofy shoes, the ability to choose whatever cartoon lifestyle we wanted to. But the music inside is not so dated, the seamless melding of Indian raga sitar drone and ethereal trumpet blues is beautiful, haunting, otherworldly somehow. The muted wah wah trumpet on “Ife” still cooks, is funkier than any threads we draped over our testosterone-fueled boyish bodies. Each note fits snugger than a poorboy T-shirt and reveals more than our pectoralis majors or curlicued chests. The music went east as well as west and you detonated more than little breath explosions in those machined valves of yours. If hope of a new order gathered steam in the years between these recordings and we all aspired to hipper lifestyles in the sixties, Miles, your music was the soundtrack rock could only aspire to. We too had expectations – large and small and the propulsive percussive ensembles you led might have piped us all like lemmings out of town. But the fire here is a lonely fire and your music stands up – a mountain we somehow never managed to get to Mohammed. What seeps from the percolator of all that funk is not only a coffee-coloured classical brew – the melanin of so many foot soldiers – but the electronic bleats, blats, squawks, and squeaks of all the Haight-Ashbury/ Harlem postmodern sheep and the cry of your horn says the way forward is always two steps back, steeped in attitude. The woman in profile at the bell of the horn has her hands draped dexterously over her pubis
but her belly protrudes. are Nefertiti’s inflated to thirty-five p.s.i. We’re all over our heads in the blue of the sky. We’d drown if it weren’t for all the feedback and distortion. Each note John shreds is the
electric catgut of our nerves. you told us, keep telling us, to listen to.
END
Richard Stevenson's work has appeared widely in journals, small mags, e-zines and what-have-you in a dozen countries and in nineteen full-length collections of poetry, and half a dozen chapbooks, including a previous full-length work on Miles, Live Evil: A Homage to Miles Davis ( Thistledown Press, 2000). His most recent collections are Take Me To Your Leader! (YA verse from Bayeux Arts, 2003), A Charm of Finches: Haiku, Senryu, and Tanka (Ekstasis Editions, 2004), and Parrot With Tourette's ( Black Moss Press, Palm Poets Series, 2004). He teaches and lives in Lethbridge, AB. The Juke Jar Canopic Publishing
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