Miles Davis: The man Quincy Jones called the musical “Picasso”
All music should really be looked at as an art form. For all the people trying to make an assembly line of hit songs that will turn a profit by the end of the next fiscal year, it takes a true artist to look at the album as a blank canvas and put all of the darkness in their soul into musical notation so that everyone can feel what they feel. Quincy Jones was already known as one of the great overseers of what popular music could sound like, but as for artistic expression, he thought Miles Davis should be up there with the best artists in the world.
Then again, that’s saying a lot coming from Jones. Although most people might know him as the man who put most of his hard work into making timeless hits for people like Michael Jackson, the famed producer had a lot more going for him than just turning the knobs half the time.
He always worked within the confines of the song, and he had the training to know when something sounded like garbage. Let’s not forget that this was the same guy who had put instrumental bands together beforehand and was fluent in jazz vocabulary, so he wasn’t afraid to call the shots like a grown-up and put together songs that were as sophisticated as they were catchy.
Before Jones had started changing the pop landscape, Miles Davis was taking jazz into the mainstream. While jazzy pop had dominated the charts in the pre-rock-and-roll days with artists like Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, Kind of Blue was one of the first times when fans started to realise what they were hearing. Davis was playing a new modal form of jazz, and his tasteful playing on ‘So What’ is still heralded as some of the greatest ever made.
Once rock and roll started to take hold of the culture, Davis wasn’t about to dumb it down for the masses. His stuff still needed to be musical, and Bitches Brew was his way of embracing the rough sounds of the new school. Regardless of his jazz background, this felt like the instrumental album Jimi Hendrix would have killed to have written, putting a psychedelic twist on blues, jazz and soul music.
That was enough for Jones to admit Davis’s genius, later recalling to VH1, “Miles Davis was like the Picasso of our world. He loved change, he loved to grow, and not only did he make the changes, but he led them.” If Davis’s hunger for change taught Jones anything, it was about trying to keep himself three steps ahead of everyone else.
Although an album like Thriller may have been one of the most celebrated pop records for its time, the reason it’s held up so well is partly down to what Jones brought to it. He was always a stickler for finding the best songs that he could, and when he told Jackson that what he was making wasn’t good enough, the ‘King of Pop’ went back to the drawing board and came back with ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Beat It’.
Davis didn’t really need pop success to be satisfied, though, eventually turning towards making jazz fusion records for the rest of his career. It might not have been the most sonically pleasing record that would get on the charts, but if any musician is looking to up their game on their instrument, they owe it to themselves to take the deep dive into Davis’ back catalogue.
