Gerald Early: Miles Davis as Ahab and the Whale

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 1997 by Early, Gerald

For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these still drive us on.

--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

The first jazz musician who struck me as a distinct personality, as someone who seemed worthy of my boyish attention, as an individual whose temperament and will mattered, was Miles Davis. I heard the trumpeter for the first time when I was about twelve years old. My sister, Rosalind, had bought a record entitled "Sketches of Spain" which she played quite a bit, going through her Spanish phase as all of us are apt to do--go through some foreign phase--at some point in our lives, feeling that if we can't go native we can at least fantasize about the possibilities of what going native must be like. In the beginning, I did not pay much attention to this record. In fact, I can honestly say that I did not like it at all when I first heard it, but it became a great deal more appealing with repeated listenings. (This is not true with all music or indeed all art: that is to say, that conditioning makes it a fonder experience. I worked in a record store as a young adult and heard some Top Ten hits over and over again for weeks on end and never felt any more disposed to like them. Indeed, my contempt for some of them intensified.) "Sketches of Spain" didn't quite sound like jazz as I had been accustomed to hearing it. I found it hard to think of as a jazz record at all. I became curious about this man who played the trumpet on this record. What instantly struck me about Miles Davis one day after hearing this record played for the hundredth time (my sister was pretty passionate about her Spanish phase in the way that, regrettably and admirably, only the young can be), was that what made Miles Davis special was that he was a man who was not afraid to be himself. For me, as a black boy in an odd world where being black was not such a rigorous disadvantage as to make me either tragic or romantic but was enough of a social and political penalty to make certain passages in life more inconvenient than they should be, this discovery was something of a delight. For my greatest fear as a black boy growing up in a world where I was despised and petted simultaneously because of my blackness as, first, that I could never find out who I truly was, and, second, that even if I did know myself well enough, I would never have the courage to be myself because I already knew that both blacks and whites expected me to be something to please them in their blackness or their whiteness. Two years later, in 1964, I was to make this discovery again when I saw Bob Gibson--as black-skinned as Miles Davis and as fierce, a furiously handsome man--of the Cardinals pitch in the World Series. But Miles Davis stayed with me for my entire adulthood, stays with me still. Gibson never survived in my consciousness beyond the 1968 World Series when he was beaten. Gibson was a boyhood hero, an important one but still a hero of passage. Miles Davis was a heroic figure I discovered as a boy but was to be far more instructive to me in my manhood. When Cardinal manager Johnny Keane was asked in 1964 why he kept pitching the tired Gibson down the stretch when the Phillies, who had the lead, collapsed, he said: "I was committed to his heart." And I would like to think over these years of listening to Miles Davis that I was and continue to be largely committed to his heart which was, that organ, the unabashed commitment he had to the power of himself.

"Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down its tongue with a cord?" says God to Job. "Can you fill its skin with harpoons, or its head with fishing spears? Lay hands on it; think of the battle; you will not do it again! Any hope of capturing it will be disappointed; were not even the gods overwhelmed at the sight of it?"

I have always thought of Miles Davis as the pursuer of Leviathan through the chances he took with his art, thought of him as the victor in the early 1970s with his electric art which seemed as thrilling to me as an undergraduate as it was possible for any art to be for any human being. And I thought that he, in the finality of his career, sick, defeated, wasted-looking, playing with bands that were beneath him, playing music that was probably beneath him as well, had lost, had been swallowed whole by Leviathan, defeated by the Hobbesian civil state of conformity and mediocrity as we all are when the last reckoning is made. But then, too, I thought of Miles Davis, Prince of Darkness, as he was called, as our last true Leviathan who, for a time, better than any other artist, black or white, brought together art and politics in such a seamless, invisible way as to make him absolute ruler of the world of popular culture. "Who can stand before it? Who can confront it and be safe?" For there was no safety, alas, in the music of Miles Davis, even though, at times, it seemed the safest music in the world. In the end, perhaps, he was as afraid of being himself as anyone else, as everyone else always turns out to be. Or perhaps to be yourself is an exhausting enterprise and one simply drops from the absurdity of the weariness. But the struggle with his fear that one senses in his art was something titanic, mythological as he fought both the monster of depravity in the world and the monster of depravity in himself.