The Miles Davis Story - Page 2

And the documentary doesn't skimp on showing the seamy side of Miles. He certainly treated his women very nicely: his first wife, Irene, (whom he routinely cheated on with a mistress in Paris) had to send him to jail in order to get him to pay support for their three children. His second wife Frances, Miles ordered to give up a promising career as a Broadway dancer to devote more time to her husband (in the documentary, Frances Davis says that Miles loved boxing, and had a punching bag in the basement of their home. "Which was good for me", she says, "because I learned how to duck!"). And in another incident related to women, the DVD shows drummer Jack DeJohnette and his wife Lydia, who tell how Miles almost sacked the drummer from playing on the critical tour that supported Bitches Brew, Miles' best selling album, because DeJohnette wanted to take his pregnant wife on the tour. On that same tour, in Los Angeles, Davis objected to where Lydia was sitting backstage, and refused to play unless she moved. (She says Davis did call her to apologize the next day, however.)

Watching all of this, part of me was torn--obviously, fans of an artist are curious about what makes him tick, and celebrity scandals are what keeps cable TV channels such as E! and VH-1 (with its Behind the Music documentaries) in business. But I would have preferred a documentary with (a) more music and (b) more talk about how the music gets created.

And there is certainly no shortage of live Miles in the can to choose from--the film has numerous short, but utterly hypnotic snippets of videotaped television concerts and live performances, but curiously, fails to even mention Miles' great "final" concert at Montreux in 1990, when he played (for the first time in at least 22 years-if not more) some of the music he created with Gil Evans. Backing him was an all-star cast of musicians, assembled by Quincy Jones. This concert was videotaped and frequently shown on PBS during fund-raising weeks, often with an earlier 1986 documentary about Miles, which is where several of the interviews for this documentary were lifted.

With the exception of some of the historical black and white filmed and videotaped footage, this is an extremely handsome, well-lit and videotaped documentary, shot in HDTV and mastered for DVD in 16X9 anamorphic widescreen (with plenty of chapter stops to make it easy to maneuver around the disc). And there's a wealth of new interviews shot especially for the documentary, as well as still photographs and archival footage (including a few brief clips from the rarely seen Jack Johnson, a documentary about a legendary black boxer whom Miles closely identified with. His roaring soundtrack for the movie was one of the highlights of his jazz-rock fusion period). For someone new to the legend of Miles, it's a certainly a very good place to begin to learn about him.

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

Visit Ed Driscoll's author page — Ed Driscoll's Blog