Customer Reviews

It's About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record

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There are many books written about Miles Davis. Several of them are excellent (Ian Carr's, the auto-biography, etc). This book by Richard Cook ranks with the best.

This book's focus is the music. Although Cook uses some definitive Davis recordings as a device to divide chapters and time periods in his career, the author does not limit his analysis strictly to those recordings. The end of each chapter includes several other recordings from the period, including some European imports and common bootlegs.

As co-author of the Penguin Jazz Guide and his own encyclopedia of jazz, Richard Cook knows his jazz, his recordings, and his Miles Davis. His analysis is interesting and enlightening.

I highly recommend this book.

p.s. Don't miss the excellent professional reviews listed above.

OK, the scholarship is impeccable, but who is this for? If you don't know the music, the descriptions of the bands and the albums don't do much for you. On the other hand, if you're such a Miles fan that you have all this stuff, why do you need Richard Cook telling you what you're hearing? You've probably read the liner notes to the CD's or boxes, and it doesn't seem to me that there is much that he adds. This seems to be mostly an expansion on Cook's writing on Miles's music in the Penguin Guide, and if you want to know his opinion as to which CD's to buy, I'd take a look at that instead. As good as this is, I'm not sure why you'd buy it.

The book discusses the recordings and related events and associates in Miles Davis' life, taking 14 albums considered by the author to be of particular importance and making each of these the focal points of the book's chapters. All other albums are discussed within the chronolgically aranged chapters, making the book a good overview of the Davis discograpy.

There is also an accessibly arranged discography of official live and studio recordings spanning the years 1945-1991.

My only gripe is that the printing of the photographs (i.e. in the first edition) is rather poor quality, with some detail in the darker areas appearing as solid black. Hopefully later editions will improve this.

I'm having fun reading this book. It's a pleasure to dwell on lots of my favorite Miles records in the company of a highly knowledgeable fan. Cook knows well lots that I don't, and he has interesting opinions on everything. Not that I always agree: He damns "Moon Dreams" with faint praise -- I've always felt it's one of the two strongest tunes from "Birth of the Cool," and he gives even shorter shrift to the ominous "Deception," which in my mind is the other one. Of course, sometimes I pound the table in agreement, as when he calls "Billy Boy" "an irritating distraction" (for all its acknowledged groove) on the "Milestones" record. That is of course what's fun about these kinds of books (or conversations). It's like comparing sports teams: everybody (i.e., nobody) wins the argument.

There are some less satisfying aspects to the book, such as when he neglects to include the French horn section in his listing of the instrumentation on "Sketches of Spain," surely one of the more important aspects of the sound of that record. Or when he puts the bridge in "Miles" (or "Milestones") as A Aeolean, when I've always heard it as A Dorian (the way the rhythm section treats it: scale on the 2nd degree of G Maj rather than on the 6th degree of C Maj). Maybe I'm being picky...or wrong. And maybe it makes a big difference in the feel of the song.

There's also a peculiar almostness to Cook's language, that recalls to me Mark Twain's statement that "The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." Once again, it's all a matter of opinion and connotation, of course.

Then, sometimes his word choice is thought-provoking: he more than once refers to Miles's sometime ballad approach as "preening." Not sure I agree, but I'm not sure I don't. It certainly asks me to relisten, carefully. Thanks for that.

All in all, an enjoyable trip through Miles's discography with a knowledgeable if not entirely impeccable guide.

The author discusses the career of Miles by focusing on his huge legacy of recordings. The more traditional jazz of Miles was basically between 1945 and 1966. There are 65 record entries in that time frame. The total includes major label as well as bootlegs. From 1967 thru 1991, the year of his death, there are 66 more albums. Miles made his mark in the jazz world with his early playing with Charlie Parker, his Birth Of The Cool Album,Sonny Rollins, and then his band that included Coltrane,Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. Later on he had sidemen such as Wynton Kelly, Hank Mobley, Sonny Stitt,Bill Evans,Jimmy Cobb and Cannonball Adderly. Of course his collaborations with Gil Evans were significant. Next was what I would call the transitional group comprised of George Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. Personally, I lost interest in Miles Davis as he moved more and more into the rock area and seemed to be in search of a new musical identity. So, this book fills in that time period fairly well. I was amazed that so many of the later recordings basically consisted of engineering edits. A worthwhile, if somewhat tedious read. By the way, the author deserves some kind of a medal for listening to all the albums. Particularly, most of the later ones.