Five shots and the Blue Coronet: the harrowing attempted murder of Miles Davis in 1969
Miles Davis was a man and a myth, but also almost murdered at one point if he wasn’t careful to watch his back.
Not that I am condoning death plots being made against anyone at all, but you could see why the kingpin of the jazz scene might have had a bigger target on his back than most. As much as he was one of the singular all-time greats, this also came with a weight of jealousy and resentment from those who, despite recognising his talent, thought he was taking up too much room.
That’s not even to mention his string of lovers, which doesn’t always make for the most pleasant reading with allegations of domestic abuse, run-ins with Jimi Hendrix over purported affairs, and more divorce proceedings than you could shake a stick at. But in the midst of all of this, by the side of one of the many women he shared his time with, he came inches away from losing his life.
The year was 1969, and it was October – mere months after Davis had released In a Silent Way, and still a year out from the arrival of the iconic Bitches Brew – that really puts it in perspective when you consider that albums like those may never have seen the light of day if the bandleader had, indeed, succumbed to his brush with death that fateful night.
The trumpeter had just performed at the Blue Coronet in Brooklyn when he got back in his car and drove his lover at the time, Margarette Eskridge, back to her house. The couple did get there, but no sooner had they pulled up than another car of three men also stopped, bearing a gun and firing five bullets.
By some miracle, Eskridge was entirely unharmed, and four of the shots also missed Davis completely. One grazed his hip, but other than that, the pair were extremely lucky to not only be alive, but with little more than a bit of psychological shock to get over in terms of injuries. Yet it also begs the question – why on Earth had the men set out to kill the jazz hero anyway?
That might have had something to do with the gunmen’s perceived take on his musical ethics. “I later found out that the reason I had been shot was because some Black promoters in Brooklyn hadn’t liked the fact that white promoters were getting all the bookings,” Davis wrote in his autobiography.
“When I played the Blue Coronet that night, they thought I was being an asshole by not letting the Black promoters do the booking.”
Miles Davis
While not getting tied down to the politics of race and business, it was clear, just from the fact of his very existence, that Davis was a beacon of the Black community and the music and culture they represented. For better or worse, that was often a heavy weight to carry, and placed him on a pedestal which could have terrifying, untold repercussions, exactly like this.
It was, of course, purely a case of the stars aligning themselves that night that the outcome was not much worse, and the jazz icon lived to see another day. With Bitches Brew on the horizon, there was no time to wallow in what could have been – as with every other moment in his life, it had to be pedal to the metal.
