John Coltrane would never have made it without Miles Davis’ impatience: “Just record the shit”
Choose your fighter: John Coltrane or Miles Davis?
If we’re talking about a fist-fight, then Davis and his short-tempered nature would undoubtedly have been capable of launching a pugilistic assault on his counterpart, but as musicians, it’s a much tighter contest that has sparked debate since the 1950s.
Given how they’re both regarded as two titans of jazz, the strength of their contributions to the field is frankly immeasurable, both as performers and as bandleaders. Constantly pushing the boundaries of what jazz music could sound like and reinventing their sound on a constant basis in order to stay ahead of the curve, you simply can’t fault the pair for how committed they were to their craft.
Plenty of others have staked a claim to being up there with the greatest jazz artists of all time, but very few have come close to touching what Davis and Coltrane were capable of, and the fact that the two even worked together at various points must have been a truly overwhelming musical convocation for anyone else fortunate enough to have been in the room.
But was it fortunate? Davis was known for driving many of his sidemen up the wall with his exacting levels of precision, so one could argue that it was frankly a nightmarish situation that one simply had to accept was going to be beneficial. Nevertheless, the meeting of these two exceptional minds was always bound to produce staggering results.
It was clear that Coltrane and Davis had a special bond despite the latter’s prickly nature, but Davis did try to proclaim that without his own fiery attitude, his sax-playing accomplice would never have made it as a successful musician, and that he had to whip him into shape on many occasions due to him sometimes lacking the instinct to play as he felt.
During a 1985 interview with NME, Davis gave his honest opinion on many of his past collaborators, where he made several ludicrously blunt remarks about their abilities and personalities, calling Charlie Parker a “pig” and insinuating that he felt the same about Sonny Rollins.
However, his story of the first time he and Coltrane entered the studio together sees Davis getting frustrated with both Coltrane and a label representative for not having the capacity to recognise what needed to be done. While improvising by himself without the tape running, Coltrane found himself on the receiving end of Davis’s impatience, who insisted that the work had to be done, and had to be done correctly.
“When I first recorded Trane, the guy from the record company said, ‘Miles, who is that out there playing saxophone?’” he recalled. “I said, ‘man, just record the shit. You want us to play, we’ll play, if not we’ll go home’. I mean, Trane was a big thing to be dropping on people! That was hard shit to just think of!”
It’s clear that Coltrane was an immense talent without the guidance of Davis, and that Davis also noticed just how extraordinary his musical talents were, but it was also clear that he needed someone to keep him regimented, forcing the saxophonist to harness his greatest assets at the right times. That being said, nobody could possibly have done what Davis required without him being as strict as he was, so by this metric, he was responsible for pretty much every jazz musician having a career.
