Cameron Winter explains his love for Miles Davis: “Music full of darkness”
The labels of who Cameron Winter is supposedly a reincarnation of are coming hard and fast.
Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan’s names seemed to be regularly uttered when trying to understand the contemporary impact of Winter’s work, and in doing so, continue to prove how reductive the entire practice is.
While Winter has made it very clear that both Cohen and Dylan shaped his music, the path he is carving for himself is wholly contemporary. He’s not cosplaying as a 1960s rock star, in the hope of feigning some sort of accolade; instead, he’s truthfully portraying his own sense of self and becoming a modern great in the process. And ultimately, that is where the paths of similarity lie between the three names.
Nevertheless, Winter has been a musical history buff, that’s for sure. Whether he’s professing his love for Tom Waits or taking to Reddit to defend the sanctity of Bob Dylan in the face of his upcoming biopic, he seems to have his finger on the pulse.
So it’s unsurprising that he watched the career of Miles Davis closely, for he was an artist who, like Winter, pushed at the edge of artistic possibility, but rather unlike the New York crooner, did so on a healthy diet of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Naturally, that hedonism intrigued a young mind like Winter’s, as he lamented on Davis’ greatness with both admiration and shock.
He said, “For a brief period in the late ‘60s and early 1970s, Miles Davis’ spiralling drug use and creative genius hit simultaneous peaks (a period which ended abruptly in October of 1972 when he obliterated a sports car full of coke, and every bone in both his legs, against a traffic column. The drug use would go on to make a full recovery, his genius would not.”
Adding, “In these years, Miles would frequently walk into Columbia Studio B and, seemingly with ten ounces of the good stuff dissolving in his rectum, offhandedly churn out total brilliance, music full of darkness and rhythm, at the cutting edge of several genres.”
Davis never shied away from making his drug use public knowledge. In fact, he almost celebrated it and defended it as a means of artistic inspiration. “It enhances creativity,” Davis once told a reporter with the United Press International in 1986. “They say it doesn’t, but it does.”
If his music is anything to go by, and more specifically, his music in the time period that Winter references, then it’s absolutely the truth. But his defence of substance use in the music industry went beyond creativity, he often used it as a means of calling out societal injustices.
He once referenced Billie Holiday as a person who could have been saved from a more open-minded approach to drug use. After she was arrested for drug possession, sent to prison, and then banned for more than a decade from playing in New York’s club circuit during the prime of her career, Davis waged war on conservatism’s attempts to stamp out drug-fueled creativity.
However, Davis’ defence of rampant drug use was likely negated when, as Winter highlighted, he bent a car around a traffic column and almost ended his life completely. Maybe there is a happy medium somewhere in between?
