So What: The Life of Miles Davis (Hardcover)

~ John Szwed (Author) "HE WAS BORN ON MAY 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, on the Mississippi River..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Miles Davis, Gil Evans (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jazz genius Davis once said, "Don't you try to make me into a nice guy." Yale professor Szwed neither sentimentalizes nor attacks his subject in this impressive biography, concentrating instead on the fascinating contradictions that led to Davis's artistic greatness. The son of a successful dentist in Illinois, Davis (1926-1991) showed talent for the trumpet early and followed his vision despite disapproval from his mother. He attended Juilliard, married a girl from the wrong side of the tracks and joined Charlie Parker's group, struggling to find his style and overcome feelings of inadequacy against Parker's exhilarating brilliance. While pointing out Davis's love for altering chord progressions and his skill at sketching arrangements in literally seconds, Szwed tracks a life that eventually spiraled out of control. Unsparing accounts of the musician's cocaine and alcohol addiction transcend Davis's life and become a larger portrait of the traps that destroyed so many jazzmen. Davis's love affairs with Juliette Greco and Cicely Tyson grippingly illuminate the narcissism, sexual hunger and violence that made lasting relationships impossible. Szwed offers crisply detailed backstories to such masterpieces as Sketches of Spain, Round About Midnight and Miles Ahead. His prose has a musical pulse, and he highlights the most significant element of Davis's soul: "he told every woman he became involved with that music always came first, before family, children, lovers, friends." Davis's music has been called a "divine disease," and this in-depth study clarifies the nature of that compulsive, satisfying malady in a way that will enlighten listeners and musicians.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Szwed opens his work on this music legend with a warning to readers not to expect him to tell the man's full story. Indeed, this is not an introduction to Davis, and the book requires a fair degree of understanding of either jazz or the fundamentals of music. It's easy to come away with the impression that the cruelty with which Davis could treat himself and others was merely the price of genius, an argument that isn't addressed directly. For all this, though, the volume does deliver on what it sets out to do, which is to examine why Davis has been such a powerful and ubiquitous figure in the world of music. Szwed shows how his subject's art developed, examining both his evolving styles and the smaller, specific changes in the writing and playing of particular pieces by Davis and his bands. The author also illuminates the ways in which popular music developed during the second half of the 20th century. Those interested in the topic or in the process of musical creation in general will find this title well worth reading.
Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (October 29, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684859823
• ISBN-13: 978-0684859828
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #400,537 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best all-around biography yet written about Miles Davis!, October 30, 2002

By	J. Lund "jazzbrat" (SoCal, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Prior to SO WHAT I felt that, as revealing as many prior Davis bios were (including Miles' own book), their sum was somehow less than the parts. That is, there was more to understand about Miles Davis than what was collectively written. Along comes SO WHAT, the most balanced and coherent one-stop source yet for getting to know about the entirety of Miles Davis' life. As much as Miles urged us to let the music speak for itself, the context and environment in which Davis' art was created is important, and author John Szwed is up to the challenge to walk down the many paths that lead to and from Davis' music and life (e.g., discussing the aesthetics of artists as wide-ranging as Stockhausen and Sly Stone, both of whom impacted Miles' musical vision in the 1970s). Szwed doesn't attempt to cram every interesting, revealing, or just plain provocative story from prior books into his bio. Still, his research does come up with some errors previously presented as facts, and there are plently of newfound "Miles Davis stories" to amuse and/or amaze the reader, for better and worse.

What the author seems to do is pick and choose among the previously-revealed tidbits about Miles and use them as supplements to 1) his open-minded knowledge about the entirety of Davis' music (as well as the cultural and commercial environment in which it was created), and 2) fresh, revealing interviews he conducted with family members and others close to the subject at key points in his life. Having unprecedented access to Davis' family was possibly the missing piece of the puzzle needed to really reconcile what was already known about Miles with the many contradictions that sat unresolved for decades (e.g., tough exterior, insecure interior). Even as Szwed stays in tune with Davis' music from beginning to end, he reveals with unprecedented detail just how chaotic his personal life was. Previously I thought Davis was unlucky to have died so relatively young...albeit at age 65. Given all of the substance abuse and other problems he faced (and created for himself), I'm now amazed that Miles lasted so long, and how he could--with a bare minimum of lulls over nearly a half-century--be artistically creative right up to his final hospitalization in 1991.

Being that Miles' life was often sensationalistic to begin with, Szwed plays it cool with this hot topic, writing the way that Davis played, sans ornamentation. SO WHAT stays focused on the big picture...with details that dip beneath the surface throughout Miles' entire life. The information seems mostly accurate; among the errors that I caught were that Szwed states the 1985 Artists United vs. Apartheid SUN CITY project in which Davis participated was a Quincy Jones production (in reality it was led by Little Steven and Arthur Baker). The author is confusing that benefit recording with WE ARE THE WORLD from the same year which Jones did direct (this error undermines Szwed's critique of the SUN CITY album). Also, it's unfortunate that the 20-CD COMPLETE MONTREUX boxed set came along too late to be included here, because the high quality of that music is the best evidence yet that Miles' final years were musically-productive ones. However, all this means is that understanding Davis remains an ongoing process. Even with its few minor flaws, no one to date has better unraveled the enigmatic genius of Miles Davis than Szwed. I recommended this book first, with Paul Tingen's MILES BEYOND next in line.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Streaky Chronicle, Retelling the Legend, December 28, 2002

By	Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

To be a jazz fan is to be a Miles junkie, so Szwed's book really may require no further justification than the sizable audience it is bound to attract. Nevertheless, he offers 3 defenses for another biography: there is more to be known; there are misunderstandings to be corrected; his book is more a "meditation" than a bio or musical study. He also decries biographies that "fill in the blanks," "heat up the significance," and turn the "biographer into a novelist." It doesn't seem to occur to him that blanks communicate their own significance, that the narrator's decision about what materials to use and how to order them is in itself an "interpretation." There is no way to resolve his contradictory roles as "mediator" and "meditator," but had he at least acknowledged the difficulty we might have had greater faith in his narrator.

To the reader familiar with the Miles' literature, the first 300 pages are bound to seem much like recycled material, leavened occasionally by a quote from an acquaintaince of Miles heretofore not on the record. Moreover, it's hard not to experience impatience at yet another explanation of "bebop," at the gratuitous introductions of jazz giants (e.g. to learn that Sonny Stitt played alto saxophone and sounded like Bird), and at yet another extended description of Miles' major recording sessions ("Kind of Blue," "Sketches of Spain," "In a Silent Way," "B's Brew").

Close to a quarter of the book's representation of Miles' 65 years is devoted to the years 1969-1971. The "Silent Way" recording session is afforded 24 pages whereas the author finds 8 pages sufficient to handle the "Kind of Blue" session. Wayne Shorter receives considerably more space than John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock gets more attention from the author than Red Garland and Wynton Kelly combined.

The author's implicit criterion when it comes to Miles' music is that it's all good, and that each change is an innovation requiring little more than description of what was going on with Miles' choice and deployment of musicians along with his editing of the raw recorded product. In place of specific musical or aesthetic analysis, he constantly sets up "straw men," then refutes them with general sociological-cultural arguments as a way of defending Miles' accomplishment. For example, virtually any critic readily acknowledges that Miles was a better musical complement to Bird than was Diz. By suggesting otherwise, the author is able to "argue" what should be a given. Or he uses Martin Williams' unfavorable response to "Bitches Brew" to portray all such responses in terms that he can attack: "Many critics had an investment in being adult, in resisting the rising tide of rock." His counterargument is to draw on parallel developments in the arts (Eisenstein's theories of film montage to justify Miles' post-production shaping of his records) and the forces of change in popular culture,

Wynton Marsalis, of course, comes off as a misguided bully, shrewd capitalist, and even hypocrite who "understood the social costs of innovation and bohemianism in the arts". Never mind that Miles himself had once heaped abuse on the likes of Louis Armstrong and tapped into the "bank" of pop culture, if not the treasury of commercial trends. Earlier, in fact, the author suggests that Miles is quite capable of playing his audience: "He knew how far not to go." In the absence of footnote numbers, the constructions beginning "he knew" or "he thought" become problematic, raising questions about the author's disavowals of intrusion.

Perhaps most readers will find the final 100 pages the most fascinating part of the book as they recount Miles deterioration. Still, no thoughtful reader can help but be incredulous at the reportage of the apparently indiscriminate, non-stop consumption of uppers and downers, injected street drugs and prescribed medications, beer and hard liquor by a 150 pound specimen (at his peak) who along the way is reported to have diabetes, broken and rebroken ankles, hip replacements, a heart attack, a stroke, while maintaining a prolific love life. (The rumors of Miles having AIDS are simply repeated, along with the observation that he was once treated with AZT. Does anyone bother to check medical records?) The author barely considers the psychological effects of even one of these events--and he fails to address the question of Miles' physical addiction or withdrawal in his final years.

If the book is intended to de-mythologize Miles the icon, it rather succeeds in doing quite the opposite, creating a superhuman phenomenon whose energies, appetites, capacities exceeded even Bird's. By treating the death of Miles' father as just another of many events, it fails to offer the reader a "Rosebud" that might help us see into the soul of the artist, whose own denial of the past need not block our own attempts at understanding its connection with the artist's present.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Prince of Darkness Deconstructed, December 28, 2002

By	"jellul" (Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews

I did not particularly like John Szwed's new biography of Miles Davis. His prose is stolid. His analysis of Miles' music is, at best, pedestrian. His presentation of the milieu in which jazz musicians work and create strikes me as disembodied and rather off-key. Still, this is probably the first book you should read if you are interested in the life of Miles Davis the man. (If his music is your primary concern, consult the bios by Jack Chambers, Ian Carr, and Paul Tingen for analysis of his early, middle, and late (electric) periods respectively.)

All the main events of Davis' life are touched on in a concise, workmanlike fashion. His family and financial problems are outlined in considerable detail and, while hardly edifying, will nevertheless be of interest to many fans. Szwed does do a superb job throughout of deconstructing and explaining the creation and maintenance of Miles' public persona. And it is indeed a persona worth deconstructing. No personality in the history of jazz so permeates the modern jazz sensibility and so seduces the imagination of its enthusiasts as does the great (and wicked) Mr. Davis. In the end, though, Szwed seems just as flummoxed as other commentators in grasping (much less explaining) precisely why Miles Davis came to be one of the towering figures in 20th century music.