Técnicas de ventas

I came back to New York and tried to work, so I wouldn't have time to think about my father. We played the Vanguard, places on the East Coast. I was playing clubs and going to the gym a lot and then 1 recorded Quiet Nights with Gil Evans in July of that year. (We did other sessions in August and November.) 1 didn't really feel nothing about the music we did on this album. 1 knew I wasn't into what wo were doing like I had been in the past. We were trying to get some bossa nova shit on to that record.

Then Columbia got the bright idea of making an album for Christmas, and they thought it would be hip if I had this silly singer named Bob Dorough on the album, with Gil arranging. We got Wayne Shorter on tenor, a guy named Frank Reliak on trombone, and Willie Bobo on bongos, and in August we did this album. The less said about it, the better, but it did let me play with Wavne Shorter for the first time and I really liked what he was into.

The last thing Gil and I did on Quiet Nights in November just wasn't happening. It seemed like we had spent all our energy for nothing and so we just let it go. Columbia brought it out anyway to make some money, but if it had been left up to me and Gil, we would have just let it stay in the tape vaults. That shit made me so mad that I didn't talk to Teo Macero for a long time after that. He just fucked up everything on that record, looking over the musical score, getting in the way of everybody, trying to tell people what they should play and shit. He should have just kept his ass in the

recording booth and got us some good sound instead of fucking around with us and fucking up everything. I started to get that motherfucker fired after that record. I called up Goddard Lieberson, who was the president of Columbia at that time.

But when Goddard asked me if I wanted Teo fired, I just couldn't do it to him like that.

Before the last session for Quiet Nights in November, I finally agreed to do an interview for Playboy magazine. Marc Crawford, who had written the story on me for Ebony, introduced me to Alex Haley, who wanted to do the interview. I didn't want to do it at first. So A'lex said, "Why?"

I told him, "It's a magazine for whites. White people usually ask you questions just to get inside your mind, to see what you're thinking. And then after that, they don't want to give you credit for thinking what you told them, what they asked you about." Then I told him that another reason that I didn't want to do it was because Playboy didn't have black or brown or Asian women in there. "All they have," I told him, "are blond women with big tits and flat asses or no asses. So who the fuck wants to see that all the time? Black guys like big asses, you know, and we like to kiss on the mouth and white women don't have no mouths to kiss on." Alex talked to me and went to the gym with me and even got in the ring with me and took a few punches upside his head. That impressed me. So I told him, "Listen, man, if I tell you all of this, why don't they make me part of the company for giving you all this information they want me to give you?" He said that he couldn't do that. So I told him if they would give him $2,500 for the interview, then I'd do it. They agreed and that's how they got the interview.

But I didn't like what he did with the interview. Alex made up some things, although it was good reading. In the piece he talked about how the little colored trumpet player—me—always lost out to the white trumpet player when they were picking the best trumpet player in Illinois. This was when I was in high school in a competition for the All State Music Band. And Alex wrote that I abways felt bad about that. Fuck that shit! It wasn't true. I might have lost but I didn't feel bad because I knew I was a bad motherfucker and so did the white boy. Where's his ass at now anyway? I didn't like that Alex dressed shit up. Alex is a good writer but he's very dramatic. I knew later why he was doing it, that's just the way he writes, but I didn't know it before he did that piece on me.

We finished playing Chicago in December 1962—myself, Wynton, Paul, J. J., and Jimmy Cobb; Jimmy Heath came in for one gig taking the place of Sonny Rollins, who left again to form his own group and to go back and woodshed some more. I think it was around this time that he was supposed to be heard practicing on the Brooklyn Bridge high up in the girders; at least that's what everybody was saying. Everybody except me and Jimmy Cobb were talking about leaving the band either to make some more money or to go out on their own to play their own music. The rhythm section wanted to work as a trio led by Wynton, and J. J. wanted to stay around L.A. because he could make a lot of money doing studio gigs and be home with his family. That left just Jimmy Cobb and me, and that wasn't enough to make a band.

At the beginning of 1963 I had to cancel bookings in Philadelphia, Detroit, and St. Louis. Each time I canceled, the promoters sued me for expenses and so I had to pay out over $25,000. Then I was booked to play the Blackhawk in San Francisco and I decided not to take Paul and Wynton. I was having trouble with them because they wanted more money and wanted to play their own music. They said they were tired of playing just my book, and they wanted something fresh to do, and by this time they were in great demand. But more than that, I think, Wynton wanted to be a leader, his own man, and after five years with me he thought he was ready for that responsibility. I think he and Paul just wanted to get out from under me because everyone else had left.

I asked the Blackhawk if I could come a week later after I got myself together, and they agreed. I went on out with a new group, with Jimmy Cobb the only leftover from the previous band. But after a few days he left to join Wynton and Paul.

Now I had a whole new band.

RESEARCH

I had hired George Coleman on saxophone because I figured I should start from the ground up. Coltrane had

recommended him, and he agreed to join the band. I asked him who were some other people he liked to play with and he recommended Frank Strozier on alto and Harold Mabern on piano. Now I needed a bass player. I had met Ron Carter (who was from Detroit) in Rochester, New York, back in 1958 when he had come backstage after a show; he knew Paul Chambers from Detroit. Ron was in the Eastman School of Music at the time, studying bass. I saw him again in Toronto a few years later, and I remember him talking to Paul a lot about what we were playing. At that time we were into the modal thing on Kind of Blue. After he graduated, Ron came to New York and was working around, and then I saw him with Art Farmer and Jim Hall's quartet.

Paul had already told me Ron was a motherfucker of a bass player. So when Paul was about to leave and I heard Ron was playing, I went to check him out and loved what he was doing. So I asked him if he would join the band. He was

committed to Art, but he told me that if I asked Art and Art said yes, then he would like to join my band. I asked Art after the set was over and although Art didn't really want to let Ron go, he agreed.

Before I left New York, I had had tryouts for the band and that's where I got all those Memphis musicians—Coleman, Strozier, and Mabern. (They had gone to school with the great young trumpet player Booker Little, who soon after this died of leukemia, and the pianist Phineas Newborn. I wonder what they were doing down there when all them guys came through that one school?) I didn't have to try out Ron because I had already heard him, but he did rehearse with us. And I had heard this great little seventeen-year-old drummer who was working with Jackie McLean named Tony Williams, who just blew my fucking mind he was so bad. I wanted him to go to California with me as soon as I heard him, but he had commitments to gigs with Jackie. He told me he had Jackie's blessing to join my band after they finished those gigs.

Man, just hearing that little motherfucker made me excited all over again. Like I said earlier, trumpet players love to play with great drummers and I could definitely hear right away that this was going to be one of the baddest motherfuckers who had ever played a set of drums. Tony was my first choice, and Frank Butler from L.A. was only a fill-in until Tony came into the band.

We played the Blackhawk and everything went pretty well for a new group, although I knew right away that Mabern and Strozier weren't the players I was after. They were very good musicians, but they just belonged in another kind of band.

Next we played a date down in L.A. at John T's It Club and there I decided I wanted to record some music. I replaced Mabern on piano with a great piano player from England named Victor Feldman, who could play his ass off. He also played vibraphone and drums. On the recording date we used two of his tunes: the title track "Seven Steps to Heaven"

and "Joshua." I wanted him to join the band, but he was making a fortune playing studio work in L.A., so he'd be losing money if he came with me. I came back to New York looking for a piano player. I found him in Herbie Hancock.

I had met Herbie Hancock about a year or so earlier when the trumpet player Donald Byrd brought him by my house on West 77th Street. He had just joined Donald's band. I asked him to play something for me on my piano, and I saw right away that he could really play. When I needed a new piano player I thought of Herbie first and called him to come over. I was having Tony Williams and Ron Carter over so I wanted to know how he would sound with them.

They all came over and played every day for the next couple of days, and I would listen to them over the intercom system I had hooked up in my music room and all over the house. Man, they sounded too good together. On around the third or fourth day, I came downstairs and joined them and played a few things. Ron and Tony were already in the band. I told Herbie to meet us at the recording studio the next day. We were finishing up Seven Steps to Heaven. Herbie asked me,

"So does that mean I'm in the group?"

"You're making the record with me, ain't you?" I said.

I knew right away that this was going to be a motherfucker of a group. For the first time in a while I found myself feeling excited inside, because if they were playing that good in a few days, what would they be playing like in a few months?

Man, I could just hear that shit popping all over the place. We finished Seven Steps to Heaven and then I called Jack Whittemore and told him to get as many playing gigs as he could for the rest of the summer, and he booked me solid.

We finished the new album in May 1963 and we went out on the road to the Showboat in Philadelphia. I remember Jimmy Heath being in the audience. After I got through playing my solo, I went down and asked him what he thought of the band, because I respected his opinion. "Man, they're great, but I wouldn't want to be getting up there playing with them every night. Miles, them motherfuckers are gonna set everybody on fire!" That's just what I thought, only I found myself loving to play with them. Man, they were so quick to catch on to everything. And he was right; they were great.

So we Played Newport, Chicago, St. Louis (where VGM made a record, Miles Davis Quintet: In St. Louis), and a few other places.

After we played the States for a few weeks, we went over to Antibes in the south of France, close to Nice on the Mediterranean, and played that festival there. Man, we just killed them over there. Tony just blew everyone away because no one had heard of him, and the French pride themselves on keeping up with what's happening in jazz. He just lit a big fire under everyone in the group. He made me play so much that I forgot about all the pain in my joints which had been bothering me a lot. I was beginning to realize that Tony and this group could play anything they wanted to.

Tony was always the center that the group's sound revolved around. He was something else, man.

He was the one who started me to playing "Milestones" again in public, because he loved it so. Not long after he had come into the band he said that he thought the album Milestones was "the definitive jazz album of all time" and that it had "the spirit in it of everyone who plays jazz." I was so stunned that I could only say, "No shit!?" Then he told me that the first music he "fell in love with" was my music. I just loved him like a son. Tony played to the sound, and he played real hip, slick shit to the sounds he heard. He changed the way he played every night and played different tempos for every sound every night. Man, to play with Tony Williams you had to be real alert and pay attention to everything he did, or he'd lose you in a second, and you'd just be out of tempo and time and sound real bad.

After we played Antibes (CBS-France recorded that performance as Miles Davis in Europe) we came back to the States and went out in August to play the Monterey Jazz Festival out in northern California, just south of San Francisco. While we were there Tony sat in with these two old musicians, Elmer Snowden, a guitarist who was in his late sixties then, and Pops Foster, a bassist, who was in his seventies, I think. Their drummer had never shown up. So he played with them two guys he had never heard of, had never heard their music, and was a motherfucker; just turned Pops and Elmer and the whole entire festival out. That's how bad that young little motherfucker was. Then a little later after he got through playing with them, he went on with us and really kicked ass. All this from a seventeen-year-old who nobody had hardly heard of before the beginning of the year. By now, a lot of people were saying that Tony was going to be the greatest drummer who had ever lived. And I'll tell you this: he had the potential, and nobody ever played as well with me as Tony did. I mean it was scary. But then Ron Carter and Herbie Hancock and George Coleman weren't no slouches either, so I knew we had a good thing going.

I stayed in California for a while doing a musical score with Gil Evans. It was for a play called Time of the Barracuda, and Laurence Harvey was the star. They were doing the play in L.A. and so Gil and I stayed at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. Laurence would come by to listen to the music we were doing. He had always been a big fan of mine, coming everywhere I played in Los Angeles, so he really wanted me to do this music. I was also an admirer of his acting, and I thought doing the score was a good idea. We finished the musical score but then the play folded because of disagreements between Laurence and some other people; I never did know what went on. They paid us for what we did, and Columbia recorded it but never brought it out. I guess it's somewhere in their tape vault. I liked what we did on that music. We had a full orchestra, and the record was produced by Irving Townsend. I think what probably happened was that the musicians union wanted a live band in the pit during the play instead of some taped music. After that Gil and I didn't do that much together musically. We remained close friends, but I was just going in another direction with this new band.