some kind of black


SOME KIND OF BLACK

After viewing Stanley Nelson's documentary  Miles  Davis: Birth of the Cool, I rub in my hands such words and phrases as genius, implacable passions,  tragic sublime, daemonic genius, sacrificial creativity, and duende (traits of which we locate and appreciate  in the persons and works of absolutely gifted African Americans ).  And it is a motherfucking shame that our world chews up and spits out the genuine geniuses we are blessed or damned to know.  Nothing is free.  Everything is stamped with a price.



I salute Stanley Nelson for creating a documentary that isn't  cluttered with suffocating information, that is an audiovisual equivalent of a Eugene Redmond  kwansaba.  The film does not murder us with awe. It offers instead multiple dimensions for critical /creative  thought about human beings and art. About a short, very incomplete list of 20th century  folks who have been models of duende ----Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, John Scott, Richard Wright, Prince, James Brown, John Coltrane, Toni Cade Bambara. The mind can't do the necessary thinking without drinking the bitches brew.



Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool is a tough, grainy, beautifully ugly, tender illustration of the aesthetic of the cool.  In frame after frame diverse African evolution of creative intellect assaults and invites us.



Evolving is not free.  Climate shifts like paradigm shifts in music warn us of an inevitable "truth."  Humanity and  the animal will pay and pay again the price.  The tormented  chronology of the life of Miles Davis indicates how expensive genius can be. The young Miles playing in East St. Louis.  The slightly older Miles searching for Dizzy and Parker in New York.  The fully bloomed Miles creating such classics as Birth of the Cool, Someday My Prince Will Come, the brilliant soundtrack Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud, and Sketches of Spain, coming through the middle passages of addiction to the phoenix rebirth of Bitches Brew and the newly released  Rubberband sessions recorded from October 1985 to January 1986.



Did my ears in 1985 not hear the reborn Miles Davis in Washington, DC as my eyes were paralyzed by the disconnection between my cherished ideal image of the quintessentially elegant Miles Davis (Chicago in the late 1960s) and the fierce and funky reality of who Miles Davis was thirty-four years ago?  And did not my viewing of Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool on September 17, 2019 lesson me about the errors of my mind?



Miles Davis was some kind of black, the epitome of what Federico Garcia Lorca was proposing in "Juego y teoria del duende" (1933), "the endless baptism of freshly created things" that death demands. Amiri Baraka nailed it in Eulogies (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1996)-----"I'll always remember you like that Miles, and yr million children will too.  With that messed up poppa stoppa voice, I know you looken up right now and sayn (growl) So What?"(146).



Jerry W Ward, Jr.                                             September 18, 2019

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