running down the voodoo
thoughts on miles davis, butter, theorists, and sinners,
Writing-to-learn challenges the starting-point of any writing-project. “This could be a thing to write” flashes, but it usually is grounded in poorly-thought, partially-understood, and incompletely lived and examined ideas. That’s why these things used to be called ‘essays,’ or attempts. Drafting slides into “better check that out,” best re-listen to that, maybe read this: all of which prompts re-evaluation, re-assessment, and, usually, reformulation (if not outright rejection) of the “thing to write.” It might be similar to the practice process involved with learning to play something just this side of new and unfamiliar. The last few weeks have been fun learning, discovering, and connecting why I feel strongly about something that might look like a subject I shouldn’t care about, but some version of that process has also been a throughline of the last 3 or 4 years.
In a lecture series at Harvard from 2017, Herbie Hancock tells a couple of stories to position Miles Davis as an important example of a Buddhist mentor and instructor. I’m about to out myself as one of the detested “no-talent, non-playing m-fs” Davis lambasts throughout his Autobiography. It’s easy enough to find the two stories—one about “not playing the butter notes”—and the other about a moment in a 1967 concert when Davis played one note that fixed Hancock’s egregious chording mistake. Hancock, as he tells it, understood Davis to mean that he should avoid thirds and sevenths for Bill Evans’s extended and inverted voicings, or, dare we admit it, the even freer responses you’d get in Ornette Coleman’s emerging harmolodics. Why Hancock spent an hour praising “The Wisdom of Miles Davis,” though, begs the question of why he felt the need to: surely Davis’s place in jazz is unassailable? Well, not everyone sees the wisdom in passing off Teo Macero’s edits of rambling jam sessions, featuring a trumpet squawked through a guitar distortion pedal, as jazz. There’s changes, there’s turning to embrace the strange, and then, there’s letting the vampires in.
The turn of the 60s weren’t kind to Davis. He’d been talking about retiring since the late 50s. Abandoned by the members of the first great quartet in 1962, Davis spent parts of the next year working through replacements until he assembled the group that would demonstrate yet again, that he did have a great ear for talent: Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter, and Tony Williams.
Neither of the interactions Hancock recounts have occurred yet in the most famous of the second quintet performances: at Chicago’s tiny Plugged Nickel in late December of 1965. Instead, Tony Williams, the youngest musician of the group, decided Davis needed a lesson. Just turned 20, Williams decided that he had enough playing the same-old same-old of Davis’s established repertoire. Hancock remembers it one way—that the 4 younger players had gotten to know what each other would play so well that they were bored doing it. They had spent the previous two years playing Davis’s earlier songs so much they knew everything that was going to happen, and because of his medical emergencies, they’d also recorded together in his absence extensively.
Davis had a horrendous Fall 1965: a failed hip replacement, broken leg, pain medication, alcohol, so he was barely in shape to perform. Whatever the case, the other 3 agreed with Williams that for this tiny gig, throwaway gig in Chicago they should play “anti-music . . . the opposite of what a listener or even the other players might expect” (Whitehead). After all, it’s not like anyone would ever hear it again, right? And then they saw the Columbia recording equipment.
On most of the live recordings after 1966, though, they sound more pissed off than grooving. Totally understandable given what was happening outside, but the path towards electrification and studio trickery that Davis chose drove Hancock, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter, and Tony Williams away. Sure, it led to the edited together assemblages of Bitches Brew, In a Silent Way, and the albums that followed. Many people love them and see them as a new beginning for jazz-fusion and even a beginning of hip-hop. Especially after listening to the studio records that Davis drove those young cats through like rented mules, and the corresponding live recordings, well, my revulsion grew for the experimental recordings: they’re almost worse than Yes’s Tales of Topographic Oceans. They make a certain amount of sense as an attempt to see what modern recording techniques could make of jazz—but that’s exactly the problem. The interaction with a real community in a moment by excellent, witty, emotionally-alive musicians that is jazz vanishes when there’s no connection to an audience or a meaningful song-structure. It becomes background music for drug-trips. Worse, as the title Miles in the Sky confirms, it also represents a fatal attempt to follow trends rather than make them. Indeed, this has long been one critical ding against Davis: he’s not “an innovator, but . . . a popularizer of new ideas” (qtd. in Walser 344).
It’s not my point, but you could just as easily look to another project Ron Carter played electric bass on, Gil-Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Won’t Be Televised,” to find the starting point of hip-hop. Or Mingus’s “Fables of Faubus.”
What Davis tried to do (&, as an aside, why do people refer to these artists by first name?), needs to be heard, not just in terms of what Sly Stone, George Clinton, the Allmans, and Jerry Garcia and the Dead, and above all else, the Santana band of 69-70, were doing in different ways, but also in comparison to Ella Fitzgerald, who casually dropped the grooviest version of “Sunshine of Your Love” you will ever hear. From the Plugged Nickel sets to the In a Silent Way sessions Davis essentially rejected live performance in favor of studio trickery. (And for a different take from Hancock’s on this period, Ron Carter just appears on a Track Star episode in which he politely and elegantly throws both Hancock and Davis under the bus for, if you listen between the lines, betraying the music).
One tell in that Track Star discussion: only one track from Bitches Brew and nothing after. So, even Davis’s son and nephew pivot away from dealing with Davis’s detour away from anything he had done before. Culminating in a Davis who seems to have preferred to listen to pop and funk instead of jazz and nothing that he had recorded before, Davis’s work after Bitches Brew marks one of the biggest schisms in jazz. On one side, you have Davis, who seems to label everything done before in jazz as becoming captured by corporate white people and conservatism. [He has a point, at least with respect to Kind of Blue, which has long been the album that white dudes start playing at cocktail parties instead of the Buffett and Marley they’d blast at frat-boy keggers.] On the other, famously, you have Wynton Marsalis, who, in his Harvard Lecture Series, poses jazz as a metaphor for constitutional democracy that only seems to never mention Miles Davis: he’s incessantly invoked by implication, especially in what happened at the Plugged Nickel.
But memory and history is a tricky thing. Early 60s Davis ran afoul of the younger players he craved to surround himself with because he would not adapt to Coletrane’s (and especially Ornette Coleman’s) newer approaches even though he “had, for the first time, hired musicians of a younger generation in an attempt to harness their creativity and willingness to embrace the burgeoning avant-garde jazz style” (Michaelsen). He’d growled about Coleman: “Hell, just listen to what he writes and how he plays. If you’re talking psychologically, the man is all screwed up inside” (Walser). So, the situation was complicated: Davis needs the young guys, they all need the audiences and the record deals that keep it happening. And what should have happened commercially would be to make more Kind of Blues. Artistically, those 5 players changed the direction of jazz—especially Carter and Williams as they renegotiated the terms of the relationship between rhythm sections and soloists. The larger music-buying public, though, was not ready. Jazz was always a hard sell, and not even Miles Davis could offset the pissed-off reactions his experiments got from jazz purists with larger market share from other communities. And that was before he played his trumpet through a distortion-pedal.
That had not happened in 1965, though. It strikes me as odd that Garrett Michaelsen’s theory of “divergent interaction” to account for what happens in those shows excludes the audience as a source of significant interactions that shape the performance. Carter seems to share this, as he discusses having to play over and around clinking glasses, and arguing couples, but the recordings also capture moments when the audience’s responses and judgments do affect the performances. That first night, the people at the Plugged Nickel rank up there with the crowd at the Harlem Square club boosting Sam Cooke (with King Curtis and Cornell Dupree), or the crowd vibing to B.B. King and Bobby “Blue” Bland. Peter Losin writes and catalogues “just what you’d be likely to hear in a crowded ten-table club on a cold night on the north side of Chicago.” Those people knew their jazz, knew the references, knew the solos, and they let the quintet know it. Without their arbitrating, encouraging, admonishing, witnessing, resonating: these sets don’t work. In spite of Williams’s push towards “anti-music,” the listeners function like the witnesses in Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain: present at a revelation and there to help it emerge.
Similarly, when Robert Walser tried to explain Davis’s importance—in spite of his technical and theoretical limitations—using Henry Louis Gates’s and Houston Baker’s literary theories, he also ignored the audience. Walser argues:
"Prevalent theories of jazz analysis, borrowed from the toolbox of musicology, provide excellent means for legitimizing jazz in the academy. But they are clearly inadequate to the task of helping us understand jazz and to account for its power to affect many people deeply—issues that ought to be central for critical scholarship of jazz” (359). Walser claims this legitimation silences rhetoric and effaces signifyin’: “such methods cannot cope with the problem of Miles Davis. The missed notes, the charged pauses, the technical risk-taking, the whole challenge of explaining how this powerful music works and ‘how’ it means” (Walser 359).
That’s only 1 of the problems of Miles Davis (and it’s really answerable by pointing to Billie Holiday, or, to go to one of Davis’s preferred singers, Willie Nelson.
Then there’s the matter of scholarly hubris in the counter-factual claim that jazz affects “many people deeply.” Some people, sure. Davis’s problem, though, was that he was affecting fewer and fewer people. Indeed, the more honest questions would be how and why does jazz fail to affect and attract listeners? Honest responses—not, that is, the snootily “culture industry” Adorno and Horkheimer dismissals of ordinary people would involve audience assesssment and studying how music comes to signify in the relationships between people and performers.
The real Davis problem, I think, is that the Plugged Nickel recordings reveal an appreciative and engaged (if small) audience. It’s not that Davis turned his back on audiences, or just left the bandstand completely during other solos. He abandoned that community (one which as Miles Dewey Davis III, son of wealthy dentist, he felt little direct connection and much animosity at being grouped together with them because of racism) to chase after bigger and more. Only to acquire even more indignities like opening, at one point, for Steve Miller and Neil Young. Instead of re-inventing jazz again as he did during the 50s and into 1965, the post-Bitches Brew career, to over-simplify just a little, chases after Sly Stone and what would become Parliament-Funkadelic.
When Michaelsen neglects to include the audience as a significant source of “meaning and interaction in improvised utterances;” when Walser neglects them in his theorising of “signifyin,” they are doing something I want to try to avoid here. Walser’s concern with legitimating jazz reveals that he doesn’t really think that the academy believes that the original audience matters. Michaelsen writes as much: “As a first step towards enabling an understanding of meaning and interaction, I propose a way of hearing a musical source in which the listener/analyst privileges the separation of that source into discrete streams, which tend to correspond with individual player’s parts in the case of jazz improvisations.” “Interactions,” he postulates, “are moments during which one player intervenes in the course of another, thereby altering the other’s path. An interactional narrative is thus a story of what happens and might have been, and how what does occur is novel, but for the collision of different things with potentially different trajectories.” The listener/analyst, that is, the legitimator, is the significant audience.
Carter says that he always needs to see his collaborators to see if they’re paying attention, if they’re annoyed by what he’s doing, if they want more. He tells Track Star that his prime moments occurred when he made Hancock stop playing. But, still, there’s no reason why player interventions should necessarily over-ride what an audience member, or, say, sound techncian, might do. Losin, in fact, noting that the subsequent Plugged Nickel recordings contain virtually no audience engagement, speculates that a CBS tech might have told them to be quiet (and Carter indirectly confirms this in the Track Star discussion). Verbal and non-verbal audience interactions indicate another narrative short-coming in Michaelsen’s analysis: the forced choice of “collision” and “intervention” he applies to the collaborations. His framing repeats Davis’s boxing metaphors, which also shows up in Hancock talking about Davis “bobbing and weaving” to find his way in their challenging accompaniments.
That combativeness informs many of their live performances. It makes sense—especially for Davis, who not only suffered his own unjust beating at the hands of NY cops, but knew first-hand what got inflicted on Bud Powell (as good a candidate for Baldwin’s Sonny as you can find), or Billie Holiday, for that matter—that he’d frame life as pugilism. But, as Thomas Pynchon slyly notes in Gravity’s Rainbow, music—and Charlie Parker’s discovery of bebop harmonies, can change how you listen: “which would you rather do? The point is . . . a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland” (GR 440). Maybe if Walser and Michaelsen had included some bell hooks or audre lorde in their theoretical matrices, they could have seen Davis’s rejection of intimate, hip, black audiences as a turn towards a mechanistic assemblage instead of interactive channeling and communicative collaboration.
Have you seen Sinners? The juke scene? Every point one could possibly want to make about intergenerational and intercultural interaction and interchange manifests in your eyes and glories for your ears and shakes your butt for wondrous minutes. Which brings me back via the detour of a long-running parental topoi about how and why addict pianists like Bill Evans and Lenny Tristano played differently than foodie pianists like Oscar Peterson or Fats Waller, to Hancock’s “butter notes.” This attempt to think through all of this stuff started with a snarky response that why should we listen to a guy who hated food try to prescribe flavor to us? If Davis “ran the Voodoo down” (whatever that means), he also let the vampires get to him. It took a long time, his resistance makes for performances every bit as challenging and memorable as Holiday’s, but he did turn his back on the audience that got him and could have sustained him in a way that Ferraris, drugs, and women he abused and never got to know did not.
Writing-to-learn differs from writing-to-report or communicate because it is still self-focused. We probably all know how many drafts, how many versions of something we thought was done, might have to happen before we learn that we were still learning. We weren’t really concerned with the others because we were still wrapped up in taking the notes, outlining the beats, composing the relationships. We knew we could begin to fix things in the edits.
When Jimmy Cobb hits that big ride cymbal crash after a minute-and-a-half build in “So What,” a listener knows: here’s something to listen to that makes this track a moment. There’s a path that he and Paul Chambers have made, and Adderley and Coltrane have marked out before Davis begins the first solo. What they were doing might have been harmonically innovative, but they knew what they were doing with it and had something to say.
Skip ahead a decade or so and listen, for example, to anything on Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay, or even Gabor Szabo’s 60s albums and compare them to Bitches Brew, In a Silent Way, or On the Corner. Since Davis had stopped providing charts, music, or even chords—and merely directed them to “keep it tight,” those ecordings have become playing-to-learn. Players on a Dylan session could get away with something like that since the basic forms persisted. Hancock, Carter, Williams, and Shorter could work with that live and in the studio because they had the two years of knowing what each other would do. The players—John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Billy Cobham, Joe Zawinul, for starters—were amazing, but they lacked a communicative form, a meaningful harmonic structure, and rhythm. So, they noodled and left it to Teo Macero to splice something together that he thought he heard.
Confirmation bias is powerful, and for folks who hear something powerful in those recordings, great. What I hear listening to the guy who played my favorite version of “Round Midnight” try to make a trumpet squawk kinda like Hendrix around a hi-hat rhythm is . . . to jump references, scarily like the Spinal Tap free-jazz exploration.
Kevin Whitehead. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/05/nx-s1-5701321/live-at-the-plugged-nickel-revisits-miles-davis-1965-stint-in-chicago
Peter Losin. “Miles Davis at the Plugged Nickel.” https://www.plosin.com/milesAhead/PluggedNickel.aspx
Garrett Michaelsen, “Making “Anti-Music”: Divergent Interactional Strategies in the Miles Davis Quintet’s The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965.” MTO Volume 25, Number 3, September 2019.
Robert Walser, Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis.” The Musical Quarterly , Summer, 1993, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 343- 365