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Saw a wonderful documentary on Miles Davis, the star African American artist, on Netflix.
The blend of archival footage with interviews of relevant people in his life includes clips of the musician himself describing what he was going through at the time.
As a child his parents wanted him to learn to play an instrument. Mother suggested the violin, father insisted on the trumpet. And that was the start of a long creative period that helped define an era in jazz music. The birth of the cool, some called it.
His talent showed early and kept growing.
Right after high school he left East St Louis where he had grown up and travelled to New York to play with stars like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in clubs along a strip on 52nd street.
He went to Europe and captivated audiences with his sound. He loved Paris. But he always returned to New York.
Music was everything to him, he said. ‘I woke up with it and went to bed with it’.
That’s what dominated his life, what guided him and pushed him relentlessly to do the best he could. And the audiences loved him.
Then drugs started showing up.
When he surrendered to them, he would go into dark periods where he turned paranoid and abusive with the women he loved. They put up with it for a while but then left.
The talent, though, never left him.
The dark periods sometimes lasted for months, sometimes for years. But he kept coming back until the end. He died of a stroke at a…
