Film ‘Miles Ahead’

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“Miles Ahead,” directed by Don Cheadle. Written by Don Cheadle and Steven Baigelman, with Don Cheadle, Emayatzy Corinealdi, and Ewan McGregor.

From the catalogue of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, one could construct a plausible history of jazz. The same cannot be said of Miles Davis. Yet, who would dispute the considered judgment that, of the two, Da­ vis is the greater artist?

While Marsalis in his recordings and performances has commented expertly on jazz history, Davis has made jazz history—and not just once. In fact, he al­ tered the shape of this distinctly American music sev­ eral times in successive decades, with “Birth of the Cool,” (78 rpm singles, 1949), “Kind of Blue,” (1959) and “Bitches Brew” (1969) marking only a sample of his creative peaks.

Jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, himself no stranger to critical and commercial success during a five decade career, begins his autobiography with an episode from his years playing in the Miles Davis Quintet. One night on stage, with the band driving itself at a furious pace, Hancock blunders into a terrible, musical mistake: a chord so badly placed—“hanging out there like a piece of rotten fruit”—that it will ruin the entire perfor­ mance. But something happens.

As Hancock explains, “Miles pauses for a fraction of a second, and then he plays some notes that somehow, miraculously, make my chord sound right. In that mo­ ment I believe my mouth actually fell open. … And then Miles just took off from there, unleashing a solo 10 SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 2016 that took the song in a new direction. The crowd went crazy.”

Such scenes of creativity—an essential reason for making the film in the first place—may not be miss­ ing from the movie, but they play too small a part. The setting, in terms of Miles’ career, is largely the five-year period in the 1970s when he did not record or perform, and expanded, with almost stream-of-con­ sciousness flashbacks, to more creative periods in the studio or on stage.

This creative decision to key in on the private side of the man could have been fruitful. Davis was not only a dynamic musician but also an outsized personality— flamboyant, haughty, self-centered, cruel, extrava­ gant, and more. He was Black and proud before James Brown sang the phrase. The emotionally turbulent and troubling episodes from Miles’s life, especially with his dancer-wife Fran, could have resulted in the movie being titled “Sketches of Pain.”

The artistic problem in the film is actor/director Don Cheadle’s decision to depict Miles as a gangster, apparently following the dubious logic that a creative artist is a rebel who is a nonconformist who is there­ fore a near-criminal. Since this image of Miles is less than well founded, an outlandish script needs to be devised to show the artist as outlaw.

So, the plot—which revolves around Davis’s efforts to retrieve the tape of a lost recording—is simply non­ sense. It’s merely a string on which to hang a number of scenes that show a portrait of the artist as a wild man, a drug-fueled genius/lunatic. The desperate and bizarre effort to recover the tape of a lost recording session leads to tough-guy scenes, shoot-outs, and

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website: http://socialistaction.ca staff member of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, made a strong case against nuclear power and in favour of renewable energy. Jaime Gonzales, a leader of the So­