10 Takeaways from Miles Davis’ 1985 Interview (including Coltrane’s Greed, Hating Flatted Fifths, & How to Play the Right Thing)

The following selections are from this republished 1985 interview with Miles Davis.

1. Avoid flatted fifths; finish what’s already started

Miles to Bob Berg: “[I told Bob] when you start playing just try and finish what somebody’s left. Don’t just play till it dies. If [Bob] tries to find a tone center, he’ll just fuck around. Play flatted fifths. I hate flatted fifths.”

2. As a soloist, you have to help the rhythm section

“A vocal is rhythm that way. [Vocalists] know when the highs come up, what to push – but when a guy’s just playing, you have to help the rhythm section. A lot of tenor players get into this kind of shit –” [Miles] gets up suddenly and hunches up in front of [interviewer], a mime of a convoluted tenor solo twisting his arms.

3. Bad drummers can’t lay in the pocket.

“The good drummers don’t play all that in-between stuff, only the bad drummers do to break up the time. Because they can’t lay in the pocket.”

4. Ben Webster

[The interviewer] was reminded of “the great Ellingtonian tenorman Ben Webster, who spent his autumnal years playing tunes so tenderly that he didn’t bother to improvise around them.”

Miles: “Ben? Well, you know, the way Ben’s tone was … I can hear him playing now in my head. That’s a style that’s almost gone now. Who plays like that? Lucky Thompson? What’s Lucky doing now?”

5. Play the right thing: what Miles Davis learned from Coleman Hawkins that he applied to Michael Jackson tunes

“On a song like [Michael Jackson’s] Human Nature you have to play the right thing. And the right thing is around the melody. I learned that stuff from Coleman Hawkins. Coleman could play a melody, get ad-libs, run the chords – and you still heard the melody…what’s that thing by [the band] Toto, something about Africa? That’s a nice melody! I can play that melody!

6. On Wynton Marsalis

“You don’t have to do like Wynton Marsalis and play Stardust and that shit. That’s way back then. Those operas are all old.”

7. On the word “jazz”

“You know I don’t like the word jazz, right?” he says, speaking in what might be a conspiratorial whisper. “You’ve heard that? I hope that’s one of the things you’ve heard…We’re not gonna [call my new music contemporary jazz].

8. On the “Peckin'” style

[Me and Sonny Rollins] used to play a style called peckin’, broken phrases … nobody does that any more.”
http://youtu.be/jjfn3p8w9sg?list=PL6E6109CDC1AD24E0

9. On showing Trane what to play over one mode

“I gave him a tone centre of E natural and said, you can play F, G minor, E minor triad, C triad, all these chords … and he’d play all of them. In two bars. In that order, and then in a different order.”

10. On Trane and Bird being greedy

[Interviewer asks] Wasn’t there a time when Coltrane thought he must have played everything?

Miles: “You would say that, you’re not Coltrane! He was a very greedy man. Bird was, too…I suppose geniuses are like that…Trane would find a note he liked and run all kinds of chords on it. But he was a big hog. I seen him with a whole ounce of dope once, the dope was spilling over and he wouldn’t give it to nobody. So much that it was running all over everything! Guys would ask him for some, he’d say no.”

You can read the full interview with Richard Cook here: Miles Davis: ‘Coltrane was a very greedy man. Bird was, too. He was a big hog’ – a classic interview from the vaults

Photo credit: Rex Features