Davis looked back in an autobiography published by Ediciones B, which begins with this confession: "The strongest feeling I have experienced in my life was when I first heard: Diz and Bird."
"The only original contribution to American culture is the music that our black ancestors brought from Africa to change and develop well here .- Whoever is responsible is expressed disc that have marked the history of jazz - or black music, as he prefers to call it -, the same as in the mid-fifties led a legendary quintet who came to listen to stars like Ava Gardner, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean or Sugar Ray Robinson - who later in his group would welcome some young musicians called Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Tony Williams, Keith Jarrett, Joe Zawinul, John Mc Laughlin ...
Miles Dewey Davis III (Alton, Illinois, 1926) has not ever bitten tongue. In a White House dinner, the wife of a politician ask him what is what he had done important to deserve to be there. "Look, I hate that someone completely ignorant drop like shit. The woman had asked for, so I said: Now, I've changed music five or six times, so I guess that's what I did. I looked at coldly and added: Now tell me what things he has done that have some significance other than being white. "
white
Society The idea that everything is harder for a black in a society dominated by whites is repeated throughout his autobiography. "America is so racist place that inspires compassion. It's exactly like South Africa, except that today is more healthy: your racism is not so visible. "
With a tough language, Miles Davis talks about his family, beginning in St. Louis, arriving in New York in 1944 with the pretext of studying music at the prestigious Juilliard School, the Harlem clubs and the street 52 where bebop was born on his adventures with Parker and Gillespie, contacts with Sartre in Paris of the existentialists, the search for music, arrests, boxing and heroin, which was engaged for several years and he was released only in his father's farm after seven or eight days of atrocious pain: "You feel like you're gonna die, and if someone guaranteed that you would die in two seconds you accept without hesitation. Would you take the gift of death to the torture of life. "
For more than 400 pages of the book parade the biggest names in contemporary jazz history: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Gil Evans, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Mingus, Billie Holiday, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon ... The drugs they took many of them, although he still present: "They come to visit me all the musicians I've known who are dead ... Their spirits walk around me. "
musical criticism could not be excluded from their sharp comments. "Los críticos sin sensibilidad han destruido mucha música de irán calidad ya muchos músicos que no tuvieron capacidad de decir, con tanto vigor como yo: Que os jodan a todos... Como músico y como artista siempre he querido llegar al mayor número de personas posible. Y nunca me he avergonzado de ello. Nunca he creído que la música llamada jazz estuviera destinada sólo a un reducido número personas o a convertirse en una pieza de museo guardada bajo cristal como otras cosas muertas que en algún momento se consideraron artísticas..."
Estilo propio
No ha olvidado lo que su padre, un conocido dentista de Saint Louis, le dijo en el otoño de 1945: Miles, ¿oyes ese pájaro singing out there? It is a mockingbird. You do not have their own song. Copy the songs of others, and you do not want to do that. You will be yourself, have your own song. That's what it really is. "
Long before his death, his health betrays hip operations, larynx, hernias, diabetes, difficulty opening and closing the hand ..." I have scars entire body except the face. I consider a kind of decoration, the story of my survival, I have heard testimony that get out of shit, overcome adversity and go on doing things the best I could. If I am proud of my scars is because I say you can win if you have heart and tenacity and spirit to keep trying. "
Special
version of" So What "recorded in 1958. Miles Davis on trumpet, John Coltrane on tenor sax, Red Garland on piano , Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums.
