CLIFFORD THOMPSON
commitment to his musical principles. On that record, Miles’s band infuses the rock-inspired “Honky Tonk” with the blues sound he had always loved, reminding the listener of rock’s blues roots and testifying to the connectedness of all homegrown American music. Miles’s jazz-fusion period tested his musical limits. In the years that followed, Miles reached a kind of personal limit as well. In 1975, the silences that characterized his music overtook it completely; due to health issues and personal demons, Miles did not touch his horn for four years. ¤ This is where Cheadle’s film picks up the story. While Miles Ahead is set during the 1970s, its beautifully shot sequences take us back into the 1950s and ’60s, to Miles’s princely elegance during his nightclub years, to the romance and chauvinism that marked his relationship with dancer Frances Taylor (the first or second of his three or four wives, depending on where you start counting), and to a lot of wonderful music. As if there were not enough drama in the ongoing saga of Miles’s illnesses, addictions, and other personal troubles, and in his having apparently lost his way as an artist, the story adds a more immediate conflict: his contract battle with Columbia Records, which descends into a fictional — and, frankly, silly — shootout over a stolen tape. What makes this sequence disappointing is that Cheadle, who as an actor does a marvelous job of capturing Miles’s crustiness and the vulnerable soul underneath, could have given a riveting performance by simply sticking to the facts. The film ends with Miles returning in triumph to the music scene, though in fact
he emerged from his hiatus a somewhat diminished musician, at least at first. Over the next few years he gradually regained his strength as a trumpeter. Some took issue with his choice during this period to record versions of contemporary pop tunes, such as his covers of material by Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper on his 1985 record You’re Under Arrest; those critics perhaps did not remember that jazz musicians had been playing instrumental versions of pop hits since at least as far back as the heyday of Coleman Hawkins. By the release of his 1986 album Tutu, named for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Miles was again playing fine trumpet lines. His work with a muted horn on that album is strong, though some were put off by the synthesizer-created sounds on this and later records; whatever one’s feelings about the sound of Miles’s jazz/fusion period, that electronic music had at least been played by human beings, whereas now his signature trumpet came to us through a filter of technology. Miles, our storybook hero, had once again ventured into new territory, which always presents its dangers. ¤ Miles Davis had, as he once put it, changed music four or five times, charting an artistic journey perhaps matched in his era only by that of Picasso. But his was a particularly American journey, exemplifying those classic traits that his countrymen have always treasured in their heroes — adaptability, fearlessness, doing rather than talking. Miles’s life spanned most of what has been called the American Century, and it mirrored that century’s relentless drive, its spirit of exploration, its perpetual openness to the new. 111
