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In August of 1963, my mother's husband, James Robinson, died back in East St. Louis. I didn't go to the funeral because that really ain't my thing. But I talked to my mother on the phone and she didn't sound too well herself. Like I said, she had cancer and it hadn't gotten any better. Things didn't look too good, and her husband dying just made it worse. My father had died the year before, so she was thinking about all that kind of shit when I spoke with her. My mother was a real strong woman, but I found myself for the first time worrying about her. That was hard for me to do because I'm not the worrying type, so I tried to put it out of my mind. And then some shit happened that just fucked up everybody's head.

I won another Down Beat poll on trumpet and my new band finished second to Monk's in the group category. I wasn't going into the studios first of all because I was still angry with Teo Macero for fucking up Quiet Nights like he did, and also because I was starting to get tired of recording in studios and just wanted to do more live music. I have always thought musicians played better in live situations and so that studio shit had gotten boring to me. Instead I had scheduled a benefit for the civil rights registration drives that were being sponsored by the NAACP and also by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This was the height of the civil rights era, with black consciousness on the rise. The concert was to be held at Philharmonic Hall in February 1964, and Columbia was going to tape the performance.

We just blew the top off that place that night. It was a motherfucker the way everybody played—and I mean everybody.

A lot of the tunes we played were done up-tempo and the time never did fall, not even once. George Coleman played better that night than I have ever heard him play. There was a lot of creative tension happening that night that the people out front didn't know about. We had been off for a while as a band, each doing other things. Plus it was a benefit and some of the guys didn't like the fact that they weren't getting paid. One guy—and I won't call his name because he has a great reputation and I don't want to cause him no grief, plus he's a very nice guy on top of everything else—said to me,

"Look, man, give me my money and I'll contribute what I want to them; I'm not playing no benefit. Miles, I don't make as much money as you do." The discussion went back and forth. Everyone decided that they were going to do it, but only this one time. When we came out to play, everybody was madder than a motherfucker with each other and so I think that anger created a fire, a tension that got into everybody's playing, and maybe that's one of the reasons everybody played with such intensity.

About two weeks after the concert, on the last day of February, my brother Vernon called in the middle of the night and told Frances that my mother had just died in Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. Frances told me when I got home early in the morning. I knew that they had put my mother there, and I meant to go over and see her, but I didn't know it was so serious. Damn, I had done it again. I hadn't read my father's note when he gave it to me and now I hadn't gone to see my mother before she died.

The funeral was to take place in a few days, and Frances and I were going to fly out to East St. Louis to attend. The plane taxied out to take off and then it came back because the pilot had to check something out. When they got the plane back to the gate, I just got off and went home. The pilot was saying they were experiencing engine problems and I'm

superstitious about shit like that. The plane coming back with engine trouble told me I wasn't supposed to go.

Frances went on out to the funeral, which was held at the St. Luke's AME Church in East St. Louis. I just went back home and cried like a motherfucker all night, cried until I was almost sick. I know that a lot of people found it strange that I didn't come to my own mother's funeral, and some of them probably don't understand it to this day, probably thought I didn't care nothing about my mother. But I loved her and learned a lot from her and miss her. I really didn't

know just how much I loved my mother until I knew she was dead. Sometimes, when I'm alone in my house, I feel her presence like a warm wind filling up the room, talking to me, coming to see how I am. She had a great spirit, and I believe her spirit is still watching out for me today. She also knows and understands why I didn't come to that funeral.

The image I will always carry around of my mother is when she was strong and beautiful. That's the one I always want to have of her.

Things had started to go bad for me and Frances around this time. She wanted us to have a child together, and I didn't want no more children, so we used to argue a lot about that. And that would lead to other shit and we would fight. I was in a lot of pain from the sickle-cell anemia, so I was drinking more than I had in the past and I was snorting a lot of cocaine. That combination can make you real irritable, because with the coke you don't get no sleep, and when you try to take the edge off that with alcohol, well, you just end up with a bad hangover and still real irritable. Like I said, Frances was the only woman that I had ever been jealous of. And being jealous and using drugs and drinking, I even thought she was fucking a homosexual friend of hers, a dancer, and I accused her of it. She just looked at me like I was crazy, which I was at the time. But I didn't know it; I thought I was sane and on top of the world.

I didn't want to go nowhere, even to people we knew like Julie and Harry Belafonte, who lived right around the corner. I didn't want to see Diahann Carroll, so when Frances wanted to go, I'd tell her to go with Roscoe Lee Browne, the great actor, or Harold Melvin, who was an excellent hairdresser. So they would take her places. Because I don't dance I didn't want her to dance with nobody else. Crazy shit like that. I remember one time we were in a nightclub in Paris and a French comedian danced with Frances. I just left her out there on the floor and went back to the hotel where we were staying. See, I'm a Gemini and I can be real nice one minute and into something else the next. I don't know why I'm like that, I just am and I accept that that's the way I am. When it would get real bad, Frances would go down to Harry and Julie Belafonte's house until I cooled off.

And then there were all the women calling me at home. If Frances picked up the phone while I was talking to one, I'd get mad about that and we'd argue and have a fight. I had turned into something like the Phantom of the Opera. I used to sneak around through this tunnel under my building, all paranoid and shit, used to find myself down in there sometimes like a madman. I was a mess and getting worse. Strange people were coming to the house delivering my cocaine and Frances didn't like that.

My children must have seen what was going on. My daughter, Cheryl, was going to Columbia University, and Gregory was trying to box. Gregory was a very good boxer; I had taught him a lot of shit 1 knew. He idolized me and wanted to be like me, even play the trumpet. But I used to tell him that he had to do his own thing. He wanted to be a professional fighter, but I wouldn't let him because I was thinking that he might get hurt. I loved boxing for myself, but I think I wanted something better for Gregory, although neither of us knew what that was. Later he went to Vietnam. I don't know why that boy did that, but he said he needed some discipline. He felt he didn't have no purpose in his life at the time.

Little Miles was too young then to feel the tensions between me and Frances, but the other kids knew and felt bad about how things were going. Although Frances wasn't their real mother, she had been very good to them and they liked her a lot. I felt that Frances and I would eventually work things out.

JAPAN

Then the shit hit the fan in the group when George Coleman quit. Tony Williams never liked the way George played, and the direction the band was moving in revolved around Tony. George knew that Tony didn't like the way he played.

Sometimes when I would finish my solo and start to go in the back, Tony would say to me, "Take George with you."

Tony didn't like George because George played everything almost perfectly, and Tony didn't like saxophone players like that. He liked musicians who made mistakes, like being out of key. But George just played the chords. He was a hell of a musician, but Tony didn't like him. Tony wanted somebody who was reaching for different kinds of things, like Ornette Coleman. Ornette's group was his favorite band. He also loved Coltrane. I think Tony was the one who brought Archie Shepp to the Vanguard one night to sit in, and he was so awful that I just walked off the bandstand. He couldn't play, and I wasn't going to stand up there with this no-playing motherfucker.

Another reason George left was that because my hip was bothering me a lot I sometimes couldn't make gigs, and they would have to play as a quartet. He used to complain how free Herbie, Tony, and Ron played when I wasn't there. They didn't want to play traditionally when I wasn't there, and they felt that George got in the way. George could play free if he wanted to; he just didn't want to. He preferred the more traditional way. One night in San Francisco he had played free, I guess just to prove a point to everyone, and it fucked up Tony's head.

I want to clear up the story about me wanting to get Eric Dolphy in my band when George left. Eric was a beautiful guy as far as his personality went, but I never liked his playing. He could play; I just didn't like the way he played. A lot of people loved it; I know Trane did, and Herbie, Ron, and Tony did, too. When George quit, Tony did bring up Eric's name, but I didn't even consider him seriously. Sam Rivers was the man Tony was really pushing because he knew him from Boston and Tony's like that; he was always pushing people he knew. Afterwards, around 1964 when Eric Dolphy died, I got a lot of criticism because I was quoted in a Leonard Feather blindfold test in Down Beat saying that Eric played "like somebody was standing on his foot." The magazine came out just about the time Eric died, and everyone thought that was so cold-blooded. But I had said that months before.

My first choice to replace George was Wayne Shorter, but Art Blakey had made him musical director of the Jazz Messengers and he couldn't leave then. So we hired Sam Rivers.

We traveled to Tokyo to play some concerts over there. It was my first trip to Japan, and Frances went along and learned all about Japanese food and culture. By this time I had a road manager named Ben Shapiro, so he took a lot of business off my shoulders, like paying the band, getting hotels and flights, and shit like that. That left me free to enjoy myself. We played Tokyo and Osaka. I'll never forget my arrival in Japan. Flying to Japan is a long-ass flight. So I brought coke and sleeping pills with me and I took both. Then I couldn't go to sleep so I was drinking, too. When we landed there were all these people to meet us at the airport. We're getting off the plane and they're saying, "Welcome to Japan, Miles Davis,"

and I threw up all over everything. But they didn't miss a beat. They got me some medicine and got me straight and treated me like a king. Man, I had a ball, and I have respected and loved the Japanese people ever since. Beautiful people.

They have always treated me great. The concerts were a big success.

When I got back to the States I was feeling no pain whatsoever. I was in Los Angeles when I got the great news I had been waiting for:

Wayne Shorter had left the Jazz Messengers. I called Jack Whittemore and told him to call Wayne. In the meantime I told everyone in the band to call him, too, because they loved the way he played as much as I did. So he was getting all these calls from everyone begging him to join the band. When he finally called I told him to come on out. To make sure he did, I sent that motherfucker a first-class ticket so he could come out in style; that's how bad I wanted him. And when he got there the music started happening. Our first gig together was to be at the Hollywood Bowl. Getting Wayne made me feel real good, because with him I just knew some great music was going to happen. And it did; it happened real soon.

CHAPTER 13