East St. Louis and St. Louis were getting so depressing to me around this time that I had to go someplace, even if it was wrong.
A black man named Teddy Hill owned Minton’s Playhouse. Bebop started at his club. It was the music laboratory for bebop. After it polished up at Minton’s, then it went downtown to 52nd Street—the Three Deuces, the Onyx, and Kelly’s Stable—where white people heard it. But what has to be understood in all of this is no matter how good the music sounded down on 52nd Street, it wasn’t as hot or as innovative as it was uptown at Minton’s. The idea was that you had to calm the innovation down for the white folks downtown because they couldn’t handle the real thing. Now don’t get me wrong, there were some good white people who were brave enough to come up to Minton’s. But they were few and far between.
I hate how white people always try to take credit for something after they discover it. Like it wasn’t happening before they found out about it—which most times is always late, and they didn’t have nothing to do with it happening. Then, they try to take all the credit, try to cut everybody black out. That’s what they tried to do with Minton’s Playhouse and Teddy Hill. After bebop became the rage, white music critics tried to act like they discovered it—and us—down on 52nd STreet. That kind of dishonest shit makes me sick to my stomach. And when you speak out on it or don’t go along with this racist bullshit, then you become a radical, a black troublemaker. Then they try to cut you out of everything. but the musicians and the people who really loved and respected bebop and the truth know that the real thing happened up in Harlem, at Minton’s.
I knew that no white symphony orchestra was going to hire a little black motherfucker like me, no matter how good I was or how much music I know.
I was learning more from hanging out, so I just got bored with school after a while. Plus, they were so fucking white-oriented and so racist. Shit, I could learn more in one session at Minton’s than it would take me two years to learn at Juilliard. At Juilliard, after it was all over, all I was going to know was a bunch of white styles; nothing new. And I was just getting mad and embarrassed with their prejudice and shit.
I remember one day being in a music history class and a white woman was the teacher. She was up in front of the class saying that the reason black people played the blues was because they were poor and had to pick cotton. So they were sad and that’s where the blues came from, their sadness. My hand went up in a flash and I stood up and said, “I’m from East St. Louis and my father is rich, he’s a dentist, and I play the blues. My father didn’t never pick no cotton and I didn’t wake up this morning sad and start playing the blues. There’s more to it than that.” Well, the bitch turned green and didn’t say nothing after that. Man, she was teaching that shit from out of a book written by someone who didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. That’s the kind of shit that was happening at Juilliard and after a while I got tired of it.
The way I was thinking about music was that people like Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington were the real geniuses at arranging music in America. This woman didn’t even know who these people were, and I didn’t have the time to teach her. She was supposed to be teaching me!
That’s why I eventually quit Juilliard. They weren’t teaching me nothing and didn’t know nothing to teach me because they were so prejudiced against all black music. And that’s what I wanted to learn.
Another thing I found strange after living and playing in New York for a little while was that a lot of black musicians didn’t know anything about music theory. Bud Powell was one of the few musicians I knew who could play, write, and read all kinds of music. A lot of the old guys thought that if you went to school it would make you play like you were white. Or, if you learned something from theory, then you would lose the feeling in your playing. I couldn’t believe that all them guys like Bird, Prez, Bean, all them cats wouldn’t go to museums or libraries and borrow those musical scores so they could check out what was happening. I would go to the library and borrow scores by all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Prokofiev. I wanted to see what was going on in all of music. Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery, and I just couldn’t believe someone could be that close to freedom and not take advantage of it. I have never understood why black people didn’t take advantage of all the shit that they can. It’s like a ghetto mentality telling people that they aren’t supposed to do certain things, that those things are only reserved for white people. When I would tell other musicians about this, they would just kind of shine me on. You know what I mean? So I just went my own way and stopped telling them about it.
One time after the jam session was over and I had gone home to sleep, there was this knock on my door. I got up and went to the door with sleep in my eyes, madder than a motherfucker. I opened the door and there was J. J. Johnson and Benny Carter standing there with pencils and paper in their hands. I asked them, “What do you motherfuckers want this early in the morning?”
J. J. said, “’Confirmation.’ Miles, do ‘Confirmation’ for me, hum it.”
The motherfucker ain’t even said hello, right? That’s the first thing out of his mouth. Bird had just written “Confirmation”and all the musicians just loved that tune. So, here’s this motherfucker at six in the morning. We had just finished jamming “Confirmation” earlier, me and J. J., at the jam session. Now he’s talking about humming the tune.
So I started humming it through my sleep, in the key of F. That’s what it’s written in. Then J. J. says to me, “But Miles, you left out a note. Where’s the other note, what’s that other note in the tune?” So I remember and tell him.
He said, “Thanks, Miles,” wrote something down, and then left. J. J. was a funny motherfucker, man. He used to do that shit to me all the time.
During 1945, me and Freddie Webster used to go down almost every night to catch Diz and Bird wherever they were playing. We felt that if we missed hearing them play we were missing something important. Man, the shit they were playing and doing was going down so fast you just had to be there in person to catch it. We really studied what they were doing from a technical point of view. We were like scientists of sound. If a door squeaked we could call out the exact pitch.
I was so nervous on that first real gig with Bird that I used to ask if I could quit every night. IO had sit in with him, but this was my first real paying gig with him. I would ask, “What do you need me for?” because that motherfucker was playing so much shit. When Bird played a melody I would just play under him and let him lead the fucking note, let him sing the melody and take the lead on everything. Because what would it look like, me trying to lead the leader of all music?Me playing lead for Bird—are you kidding? Man, I was scared to death I was going to fuck up. Sometimes I would act like I was quitting, because I thought he might fire me. So I was going to quit before he did, but he would always encourage me to stay by saying that he needed me and that he loved the way I played. I hung in there and learned. I knew everything Dizzy was playing. I think that’s why Bird hired me—also because he wanted a different kind of trumpet sound. Some things Dizzy played I could play, and other things he played, I couldn’t. So I just didn’t play those licks that I knew I couldn’t play, because I realized early on that I had to have my own voice—whatever that voice was—on the instrument.
If it’s one thing white people are united on it is that they all hate to see black people making the money they think belongs to them. They were beginning to think that they owned these black musicians because they were making money for them. So, the word must have gone out that these new rules was hurting these white club owners’ pocketbooks, that they were about to lose the business back to Harlem.
When I decided to quit Juilliard in the fall of 1945, Freddie Webster was the first person I told. Freddie was a strong, nice dude. He told me that I ought to call up my father and tell him first before I quit. Now, I was just going to quit and tell my father later. But when Freddie said that to me I got to thinking about the whole thing. Then I told Freddie, “I can’t call up my old man and say, ‘Listen, Dad, I’m working with some cats named Bird and Dizzy, so I’m gonna quit school.’ I can’t do no shit like that. I got to go back home and tell him in person.” Freddie agreed, and that’s the way I did it.
I caught a train and went back to East St. Louis, walked in his office, which had out the “Do Not Disturb” sign. Of course, he was shocked to see me, but my father was cool about things like that. He just said, “Miles, what the fuck you doing back here?”
I said, “Listen, Dad. There is something happening in New York. The music is changing, the styles, and I want to be in it, with Bird and Diz. So I came back to tell you that I’m quitting Juilliard because what they’re teaching me is white and I’m not interested in that.”
“Okay,” he said, “as long as you know what you’re doing, everything is okay. Just whatever you do, do it good.”
Then he told me something I will never forget: “Miles, you hear that bird outside the window? He’s a mockingbird. He don’t have a sound of his own. He copies everybody’s sound, and you don’t want to do that. You want to be your own man, have your own sound. THat’s what it’s really about. So, don’t be nobody else but yourself. You know what you got to do and I trust your judgement. And don’t worry, I’ll keep sending you money until you get on your feet.”
That was all he said and then he went back to working on his patient. It was something else, man. But I was forever grateful to my father for understanding so well. My mother didn’t like it, but she had learned by now not to say anything about something I had already decided to do. As a matter of fact, it seemed like we were getting closer. I mean, one time in a trip home I had found out that my mother could play a mean blues on the piano. Up until then I hadn’t even known that she was that kind of musician. So, when I came in on this Christmas trip home from Juilliard and she was playing the blues, I told her I liked what she was playing and that I didn’t even know she could play the piano like that. She kind of smiled at me and said, “Well, Miles, there’s a lot of things you don’t know about me.” We both just laughed and realized for the first time that it was true.
One of the things I never understood about Bird was why he did all the destructive shit he used to do. Man, Bird knew better. He was an intellectual. He used to read novels, poetry, history, stuff like that. And he could hold a conversation with almost anybody on all kinds of things. So the motherfucker wasn’t dumb or ignorant or illiterate or anything like that. He was real sensitive. But he had this destructive streak in him that was something else. He was a genius and most geniuses are greedy. But he used to talk a lot about political shit and he loved to put a motherfucker on, play dumb to what was happening and then zap the sucker. He used to especially like to do this to white people. And then he would laugh at them when they found out they had been had. He was something—a very complex person.
Monk was a quiet dude. Sometimes he and Bean used to get into these deep conversations. Bean liked to tease Monk about a lot of shit. And Monk would take it, because he loved Bean and because—as big and strong and menacing as he could look—he was a real soft, calm and gentle person, a beautiful person, almost serene.
The critics were still putting me down, and I think some of it had to do with my attitude, because I ain’t never been no grinner, or someone who went out of his way to kiss somebody’s ass, especially a critic. Because who most critics like a lot of times depends on whether the person is nice to them. Plus most of them were white and were used to black musicians being nice to them so that the critics would write good things about them. So a lot of the the guys kissed their asses, grinned up on stage and entertained, rather than just played their instruments—which is what they were there for.
As much as I loved Dizzy and loved Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, I always hated the way they used to laugh and grin for the audiences. I know why they did it—to make money and because they were entertainers as well as trumpet players. They had families to feed. Plus they both liked acting the clown; it’s just the way Dizzy and Satch were. I don’t have nothing against them doing it if they wanted to. But I didn’t like it and didn’t have to like it. I come from a different social and class background than both of them, and I’m from the Midwest, while both of them are from the South. so we look at white people a little differently. Also I was younger than them and didn’t have to go through the shit they had to go through to get accepted in the music industry. They had already opened up a whole lot of doors for people like me to go through, and I felt that I could be about just playing my horn—the only thing I wanted to do. I didn’t look at myself as an entertainer like they both did. I wasn’t going to do it just so that some non-playing, racist, white motherfucker could write some nice things about me. Naw, I wasn’t going to sell out my principles for them. I wanted to be accepted as a good musician and that didn’t call for no grinning, but just being able to play the horn good. And that’s what I did then and now. Critics can take that or leave it.
I got tired of the music Benny’s band was playing. It wasn’t music.
Bird would play the melody he wanted. The other musicians had to remember what he had played. He was real spontaneous, went on his instinct. He didn’t conform to Western ways of musical group interplay by organizing everything. Bird was a great improviser and that’s where he thought great music came from and what great musicians were about. His concept was “fuck what’s written down.”
Ross Russell—a jive motherfucker who I never did get along with because he was nothing but a leech, who didn’t never do nothing but suck off Bird like he was a vampire—said something about my playing was flaws. Fuck that jive white boy. He wasn’t no musician, so what did he know what Bird liked! I told Ross Russell he could kiss my ass.
I remember playing with a mute on that date so I would sound less like Dizzy. But even with the mute I still sounded like him. I was mad with myself, because I wanted to sound like myself. I still felt that I was close to getting to that place where I would have my own voice on trumpet. I was anxious to be myself even then, and I was only nineteen. I was impatient with myself and most everything else. But I kept it to myself and kept my eyes and ears wide open so that I could keep on learning.
Mingus didn’t give a fuck what kind of musical ensemble it was; he just wanted to hear his shit played all the time. I used to argue with him about using all those abrupt changes in the chords in his tunes.
“Mingus, you so fucking lazy, man, that you won’t modulate. You just, bam! hit the chord, which is nice sometimes, you know, but not all the fucking time.”
He would just smile and say, “Miles, just play the shit like I wrote it.” And I would. It was some strange-sounding shit back then. But Mingus was like Duke Ellington, ahead of his time.
Man, Doris loved her Charlie Parker.
A week or so before opening night, Bird called for rehearsals at a studio called Nola. A lot of musicians rehearsed there during those days. When he called the rehearsals, nobody believed him. He never had done this in the past. On the first day of rehearsal, everybody showed up but Bird. We waited around for a couple of hours and I ended up rehearsing the band.
Now, opening night, the Three Deuces is packed. We ain’t seen Bird in a week, but we’d been rehearsing our asses off. So here this nigger comes in smiling and shit, asking everybody ready to play, in that fake British accent of his. When its time for the band to hit, he asks, “What are we playing?” I tell him. He nods, counts off the beat and plays everything motherfucking tune in the exact key we had rehearsed it in. He played like a motherfucker. Didn’t miss one beat, one note, didn’t play out of key all night. It was something. We were fucking amazed. And every time he’d look at us looking at him all shocked and shit, he’d just smile that “Did you ever doubt this?” kind of smile.
After we got through with that first set, Bird came up and said—again in that fake British accent—“You boys played pretty good tonight, except in a couiple of places where you fell off the rhythm and missed a couple of notes.” We just looked at the motherfucker and laughed. That’s the kind of amazing shit that Bird did on the bandstand. You came to expect it. And if he didn’t do something incredible, that’s when you were surprised.
Bird never talked about music, except one time I heard him arguing with a classical musician friend of mine. He told the cat that you can do anything with chords. I disagreed, told him that you couldn’t play D natural in the fifth bar of a B flat blues. He said you could. One night later on at Birdland, I heard Lester Young do it, but he bent the note. Bird was there when it happened and he just looked over at me with that “I told you so” look that he would lay on you when he had proved you wrong. But that’s all he ever said about it. He knew you could do it because he had done it before. But he didn’t get up and show nobody how to do it or nothing. He just let you pick it up for yourself, and if you didn’t, then you just didn’t.
On the way we stopped in some little diner somewhere in Indiana, an integrated place, to get something to eat. We’re sitting there eating, minding our own business, when four white guys walk in and sit down across from us. They were drinking beer and getting drunk, laughing and talking louder than anybody else, like drunken hillbillies can do. Being from East S. Louis, I knew what kind of white people they were, but Max, being from Brooklyn, didn’t. I knew they were ignorant motherfuckers. And them drinking beer just made it worse, right? Anyways, so one of them leans over and says, “What do you boys do?”
Now, Max, who is intelligent but who don’t know what he’s in for, turns to the guy and says with a smile, “We’re musicians.” See, Max don’t understand, this is redneck-cracker shit. Being from Brooklyn, he ain’t never been around it. So then the white guy says, “Why don’t you play something for us if y’all so good?” When he said that, I knew what was coming next, so I just picked up the whole tablecloth with everything on it and threw it all over the motherfuckers before they could say or do anything. Max was throwing shit and screaming. Those white boys was so shocked they just sat there with their mouths open, not saying nothing. When we left I told Max, “Next time just ignore them; this ain’t Brooklyn.”
I wanted the instruments to sound like human voices, and they did.
White people back then liked music they could understand, that they could hear without straining. Bebop didn’t come out of them and so it was hard for many of them to hear what was going on in the music. It was an all-black thing. But Birth was not only hummable but it had white people playing the music and serving in prominent roles. The white critics liked that. They liked the fact that they seemed to have something to do with what was going on. It was just like somebody shaking your hand just a little extra. We shook people’s ears a little softer than Bird or Diz did, took the music more mainstream. That’s all it was.
Anyway, he looked at me and bent over to tell me that I’m playing too loud. Me, as soft as I was playing then? I thought to myself that Bird must be crazy, telling me I was playing too loud. I never did say anything about it, because what the fuck was I supposed to say. It was, after all, his band.
During this time I was going over to Gil Evans’s a lot, listening to what he was saying about the music. Gil and I had hit it off right away. I could relate to his musical ideas and he could relate to mine. Without Gil, the question of race never entered; it was always about music. He didn’t care what color you were. He was one of the first white people I had met that was like this. He was Canadian and maybe that had something to do with how he thought.
Out of Birth of the Cool me and Gil got to be real great friends. Gil was just the kind of guy you love being around, because he would see things nobody else saw. He loved paintings and he would show me things that I wouldn’t have ever seen. Or, he would listen to an orchestration and say, “Miles, listen to the cello right here. How else do you think that he could have played that passage?” He’d make you think about shit all the time. He used to just go inside of music and pull things out another person wouldn’t normally have heard. Later he would call me up at three A.M. and tell me, “If you’re ever depressed, Miles, just listen to ‘Springsville’” (which was a great tune we put on the Miles Ahead album). And then he’d hang up the phone. Gil was a thinker and I loved that about him right away.
When I first met him, he used to come to listen to Bird when I was in the band. He’d come in with a whole bag of “horseradishes”—that’s what we used to call radishes—that he’d be eating with salt. Here was this tall, thin, white guy from Canada who was hipper than hip. I mean, I didn’t know any white people like him. I was used to black folks back in East St. Louis walking into places with a bag full of barbecued pig snout sandwiches and taking them out and eating them right there, right in a movie or club or anywhere. But bringing “horseradishes” to nightclubs and eating them out of a bag with salt, and a white boy? Here was Gil on fast 52nd Street with all these super hip black musicians wearing peg legs and zoot suits, and here he was dressed in a cap. Man, he was something else.
Gil’s basement apartment over on 55th Street was where a lot of musicians hung out. Gil’s place was so dark you didn’t know whether it was night or day. Max, Diz, Bird, Gerry Mulligan, George Russell, Blossom Dearie, John Lewis, Lee Konitz, and Johnny Carisi used to be at Gil’s all the time. Gil had this big bed that took up a lot of space and this weird motherfucking cat who was always getting into everything. We would always be sitting around talking about music, or arguing about something. I remember Gerry Mulligan being very angry at that time, about a lot of shit. But so was I, and we would get into arguments sometimes. Nothing serious, just testing each other’s shit. But Gil was like a mother hen to all of us. He cooled everything out because he was so cool. He was a beautiful person who just loved to be around musicians. And we loved being around him because he taught us so much, about caring for people and about music, especially arranging music. I think Bird even stayed there for a while. Gil could put up with Bird when nobody else could.
here Bird is, grinning like some full-ass Cheshire cat, looking like Buddha.
I loved being in Paris and loved the way I was treated. I had bought my some new suits that I had made, so I know I was together, man.
The band was me, Tadd, Kenny Clarke, James Moody, and a French bass player named Pierre Michelot. Our band was the hit of the Paris Jazz Festival, along with Sidney Bechet. That’s where I met Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso and Juliette Greco. I have never felt like that in my life since. The only other times that I felt that good was when I first heard Bird and Diz in B’s band and that time in Dizzy’s big band up in the Bronx. But that was about just music. This was different. This was about living. Juliette Greco and I fell in love. I cared a lot for Irene, but I had never felt like this before in my life.
I met Juliette at one of my rehearsals. She would come in and sit and listen to the music. I didn’t know she was a famous singer or nothing like that. She was just so fine sitting there—long black hair, beautiful face, small, stylish, so different from any other woman that I had ever met. She looked different and had a different way of carrying herself. So I asked this guy who she was.
He said, “What do you want with her?”
I said, “What do you mean, what do I want with her? I want to see her.”
Then he says, “Well, you know she’s one of those existentialists.”
So I told him, right then and there, “Man, fuck all that kind of shit. I don’t care what she is. That girl is beautiful and I want to meet her.”
I got tired of waiting for someone to introduce me to her, so one time when she came to the rehearsal I just took my index finger and beckoned for her to come over to me, and she did. When I finally got to talk to her she told me that she didn’t like men but that she liked me. After that we were togehter all the time.
I had never felt that way in my life. It was the freedom of being in France and being treated like a human being, like someone important. Even the band and the music we played sounded better over there. Even the smells were different. I got used to the smell of cologne in Paris and the smell of Paris to me was a kind of coffee smell. I found out later you could smell that same kind of smell on the French Riviera, in the morning. I have never smelled smells like that since. It’s kind of like coconut and lime in rum all mixed together. Almost tropical. Anyways, everything seemed to change for me while I was in Paris. I even found myself announcing the songs in French.
Juliette and I used to walk down by the Seine River together, holding hands and kissing, looking into each other’s eyes, and kissing some more, and squeezing each other’s hands. It was like magic, almost like I had been hypnotized, was in some kind of trance. I had never done this before. I was always so into the music I never had time for any kind of romance. Music had been my total life until I met Juliette Greco and she taught me what it was to love someone other than music.
Juliette was probably the first woman that I loved as an equal human being. She was a beautiful person. We had to communicate with each other through expressions and body language. She didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak French. We talked through our eyes, fingers, stuff like that. When you communicate like that, you know the person is not bullshitting. You have to go on feelings. It was April in Paris. Yeah, and I was in love.
Kenny Clarke decided right then and there he was staying, told me I was a fool to go back to the United State.s I was sad, too, because every night I would go out to the clubs with Sartre and Juliette and we would just sit in the outside cafes and drink wine and eat and talk. Juliette asked me to stay. Even Sartre said, “Why don’t you and Juliette get married?” But I didn’t. I stayed a week or two, fell in love with Juliette and with Paris and then left.
When I got ready to leave, there were a lot of sad faces at the airport, including mine. Kenny was there waving goodbye. Man, I was so depressed coming back to this country on the airplane that I couldn’t say nothing all the way back. I didn’t know that shit was going to hit me like that. I was so depressed when I got back that before I knew it, I had a heroin habit that took me four years to kick and I found myself for the first time out of control and sinking faster than a motherfucker toward death.
Sometimes we’d get so high that we’d leave our works at Bishop’s house. Then we’d go hang around Minton’s and watch the tap dancers dueling each other.
I loved to look at and listen to tap dancers. They are so close to music in the way they make their taps sound. They are almost like drummers and you can learn a lot from just listening to the rhythms they get from their taps. In the daytime, outside Minton’s next to the Cecil Hotel, tap dancers used to come up there and challenge each other on the sidewalk. I especially remember duels between the dancers Baby Laurence and a real tall, skinny dude named Ground Hog. Baby and Ground Hog were junkies, and so they used to dance a lot in front of Minton’s for their drugs, because the dealers liked to watch them. They gave them shit for free if they got down. There’d be a crowd all around and they would be dancing like motherfuckers. Baby Laurence was so bad, man, it’s hard to describe how great he was. But Ground Hog didn’t take no backseat to Baby, now. He was real hip and cleaner than a broke-dick dog, you know, his clothes and everything. Barney Biggs was another great tap dancer, and so was a guy named L. D., and Fred and Sledge, and the Step Brothers. Most of these guys were dope addicts, though I don’t know about the Step Brothers. Anyway, if you weren’t in the “in” crowd you didn’t know nothing about the dancing in front of Minton’s. Those tap dancers used to talk about Fred Astaire and all of them other white dancers like they were nothing, and they weren’t nothing compared to how these guys could dance. But they were black and couldn’t ever hope to get no break dancing for real money and fame.
By this time I was getting really famous and a whole lot of musicians were starting to kiss my ass like I was somebody important. I was into whether I should stand like this or that, should I hold my trumpet this way or that way when I played. Should I do this or that, speak to the audience, tap my right foot or left foot. Should I tap my foot inside of my shoe so nobody would see me doing it? I was into that kind of shit when I got to be twenty-four. Plus, while in Paris, I had found out that I wasn’t as bad a player as a lot of them old-time motherfuckers had said I was. My ego was bigger than it had been before I left.
I remember that day being a cold and mushy day, a day when snow can’t seem to decide if it wants to be snow; a fucked-up, raw day.
He started playing around with the melody and fucked it up again, right? After the set was over and I’m introducing everybody in the band over the microphone—I used to do that shit back in the real old days—when I got to Jackie I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Jackie McLean, and I don’t know how he got his union card, since he never does know how to play ‘Yesterdays.’” Well, the audience didn’t know whether I was joking or not, whether to applaud for Jackie or to boo the motherfucker. After the set, Jackie runs up to me in the alley behind the club where Art and I were getting high and says, “Miles, that wasn’t right, man, embarrassing me like that in front of Duke, man, who is my fucking musical daddy, you motherfucker!” He was crying!
So I said to him, “Fuck you, Jackie, you ain’t nothing but a big fucking baby! Always talking about some shit that you’re a young cat and so you can’t learn that old music. Fuck that and you too! I told you, music is music. So you’d better learn the music or you ain’t gonna be in my fucking band for much longer, you hear me? Learn the music that’s required of you in order to play. You talk about Duke being out in the audience and that I embarrassed you when I introduced you like that. Well, motherfucker, you embarrassed yourself when you didn’t play ‘Yesterdays’ right. Man, you don’t think Duke Ellington knows how that tune goes? Are you crazy? I didn’t embarrass you, you embarrassed your motherfucking self! Now, fuck all that crying and let’s go back to the hotel.”
Bird treated me like I was his son, or a member of his band. But this was my date and so I had to get him straight. It was difficult, because he was always on my back about one thing or another. I got so angry with him that I told him off, told him that I had never done that to him on one of his recording sessions. Told him that I had always been professional on his shit. And do you know what that motherfucker said to me? He told me some shit like, “All right, Lily Pons. . . . to produce beauty, we must suffer pain—from the oyster comes the pearl.” He said that to me in that fucked-up, fake British accent. Then the motherfucker fell asleep. I got so mad all over again that I started fucking up. Ira Gitler, who was producing the record for Bob Weinstock, came out of the booth and told me I wasn’t playing shit. At this point, I was so fed up that I started packing up my horn to leave when Bird said to me, “Miles, what are you doing?” So I told him what Ira had said, and Bird said, “Ah, come on Miles, let’s play some music.” And so we played some real good stuff after that.
Mingus? Man, that motherfucker would talk all the time. Now he would be talking about some heavy shit a lot of the time, but sometimes that shit was lighter than a mosquito’s peter.
I was sick. I wanted to scream but couldn’t scream because my father would have come from his big white house next door to see what was wrong. So I had to keep it all down inside of me. I used to hear him outside, walking past the guest house, stopping and listening to see what was going on. When he’d do that I wouldn’t say nothing. I’d just lay up there in the dark, sweating like a motherfucker.
I was so sick trying to kick that habit. I got to feeling bad all over, all stiff in my neck and legs and every joint in my body. It was a feeling like arthritis, or a real bad case of the flu, only worse. The feeling is indescribable. All of your joints get sore and stiff, but you can’t touch them because if you do you’ll scream. So nobody can give you a massage. It’s the kind of hurt I later experienced after an operation, when I had hip replacement. It’s a raw kind of feeling that you can’t stop. You feel like you could die and if somebody would guarantee that you would die in two seconds, then you would take it. You would take the gift of death over this torture of life. At one point I even started to jump out the window—the apartment was on the second floor—so I could knock myself unconscious and get some sleep. But I thought that with my luck I would just break my motherfucking leg and be laying out there suffering.
This went on for about seven or eight days. I couldn’t eat. My girlfriend Alice came over, and we fucked, and damn if that didn’t make it worse. I hadn’t had an orgasm in about two or three years. It hurt the fuck out of my balls and everyplace else. It went on like this for a couple more days, then I started drinking orange juice, but I would throw it up.
Then one day it was over, just like that. Over. Finally over. I felt better, good and pure. I walked outside in to the clean, sweet air over to my father’s house and when he saw me he had this big smile on his face and we just hugged each other and cried. He knew that I had finally beat it. Then, I sat down and ate up everything in sight because I was hungrier than a motherfucker. I don’t believe I have ever eaten like that, before or since. Then I sat down and started thinking about how I was going to get my life back together, which wasn’t going to be an easy task.
Most white record producers just wanted to always make the shit sound whiter, and so in order to keep it black, you had to fight them every step of the way. Bob wanted to do some tired shit, some pseudo-white shit. But he changed after a while—I can say that much for him. He never did pay no real decent money—even later, when he was making all them fucking masterpieces—and he wanted me to give up everything for the little money he was paying me. That’s the way they treated jazz musicians—especially black jazz musicians—back in those days. And it ain’t much better for most today.
I remember this because I wanted to turn out all the lights when we were doing “Blue Haze” so that everyone could get into a certain mood that I wanted. So when I asked them to turn out the lights in the studio, somebody said, “If we turn out the lights we won’t be able to see Art or Miles.” That shit was funny.
That summer Juliette Greco came over to New York to talk to the producers who were filming Ernest Hemingway’s book The Sun Also Rises. They wanted Juliette to be in the film. By now she was the biggest female star in France—or close to it—so she had a suite the Waldorf-Astoria down on Park Avenue. She got in touch with me. We hadn’t seen each other since 1949, so a lot of things had happened. We had written a couple of letters, sent messages to each other through mutual friends, but that was about it. I was curious to see how she would affect me, and I’m sure she felt the same way. I didn’t know if she know about all the shit I had been in and I was curious to find out if news of my heroin problems had gotten over to Europe.
She invited me down to see her and I went. But I remember being a little wary because of what happened to me before when I left Paris and she was all up in my head, all up in my heart and blood. She was the first woman I think I really loved, and being separated like that almost broke my heart and sent me falling down the pit and into heroin. I knew I wanted to see her—had to see her—deep down in my heart. But just in case, I took a friend with me, the drummer Art Taylor. That way, I could control the situation as best I could.
We drove on down to the Waldorf in the little used MG sports car I had and gunned the engine as we pulled into the garage. Man, this fucked up all them white people; two weird-looking niggers driving up in an MG at the Waldorf. We walked up to the front desk, and the whole lobby is looking, right? Shocked out of their fucking minds to see two niggers in the front lobby of the Waldorf who weren’t hired help. I walked up to the desk and asked for Juliette Greco. The man behind the counter says, “Juliette who?” Now, this motherfucker’s looking like this couldn’t be real, like this nigger must be crazy. I say her name again and tell him to call upstairs. So he does, and while he’s dialing he’s giving me an “I can’t believe this” look. When she tells him to send us upstairs, I thought the motherfucker was going to die on the spot.
So we walk back across the lobby, which is silent as a mausoleum now, catch the elevator, and go on up to Juliette’s room. She opened the door, threw her arms around me, and gave me this big kiss. I introduced her to Art, who’s standing behind me looking shocked, and I see the joy go out of her face. I mean, like you know she didn’t want to see that nigger right then and there. She was real disappointed. So we go in and she’s looking like a motherfucker, finer than what I remember. My heart is beating fast and I’m trying to get my emotions under control, so I reacted to Juliette by being cold to her. Went into my black pimp role. Mainly because I was scared and had also picked up a pimp’s attitude while I was a junkie.
I say to her, “Juliette, give me some money, I need some money right now!” She goes in her bag and pulls out some money and gives it to me. But she’s wearing this shocked look on her face like she don’t believe what’s happening.I take the money and walk around looking at her all cold—but inside I’m wanting to grab her and make love to her, but I’m scared of what that would do to me, scared that I might not be able to handle my emotions.
After about fifteen minutes I tell her I got something to do. She asks me if I will see her later, if I maybe could go to Spain with her while she’s making the movie. So I tell her that I’ll think about it and call her later. I don’t think she had ever been treated like that before; so many men wanted and desired her she probably had gotten her way on anything she wanted. As I’m going out the door, she asks me, “Miles, are you really coming back?”
“Aw, bitch, shut up; I told you I would call you later!” But inside I’m hoping that she will find some way to make me stay. But I dogged her so bad on that first time I saw her again, she was too shocked to do anything but let me go. Later, I called and told her I was too busy to go with her to Spain, but that I would check her out later when I came to France. She was so shocked she didn’t know what to do, but she agreed to see me later, if and when I came to France. She gave me her address and phone number and hung up and that was that.
We did eventually get together and were lovers for many years. I told her what my problem was when I met her at the Waldorf, and she understood and forgave me, though she said she had really been confused and disappointed in the way I treated her. In one of Juliette’s later films—I think it was a film by Jean Cocteau—she puts a picture of me on the table by her bed and you can see it in the film.
They played a couple of tunes without me and then I joined them on “Now’s the Time,” which was a tribute to Bird’s memory. And then we played “’Round Midnight,” Monk’s tune. I played it with a mute and everybody went crazy. It was something. I got a long standing ovation. When I got off the bandstand, everybody was looking at me like I was a king or something—people were running up to me offering me record deals. All the musicians there were treating me like I was a god, and all for a solo that I had had trouble learning a long time ago. It was something else, man, looking out at all those people and then seeing them suddenly standing up and applauding for what I had done.
They had all these parties that night in this big fucking mansion. We all go there, and all these rich white people are everywhere. I was sitting over in a corner, minding my own business, when the woman who had organized the festival, Elaine Lorillard, came over with all these grinning, silly-looking white people and said something like, “Oh, this is the boy who played so beautifully. What’s your name?”
Now she’s standing there smiling like she’s done me a fucking favor, right? So I look at her and say, “Fuck you, and I ain’t no fucking boy! My name is Miles Davis, and you’d better remember that if you ever want to talk to me.” And then I walked away leaving them all shocked las a motherfucker. I wasn’t trying to be nasty or nothing like that, but she was calling me “boy,” and I just can’t take that kind of bullshit.
During the time while we were cutting that album, a horrible thing happened—a young, fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi by a gang of white men for talking to a white woman. They threw his body in the river. When they found him and pulled him out he was all bloated. They took pictures of him and put them in the papers. Man, that shit was horrible and shocked everyone in New York. It made me sick to my stomach. But it just let black people know once again just how most white people in this country thought of them. I won’t forget them pictures of that young boy as long as I live.
