“The whole world is drunk”: Miles Davis’ favourite cocktail
With mixology’s endless variations, and the instant impression one’s drink of choice can emit, an artist’s favourite tipple can speak volumes about the kind of character they are. When considering composer, bandleader, and 20th-century jazz titan Miles Davis‘ alcoholic penchant, one would expect a beverage befitting the legendary trumpeter with an album titled Birth of the Cool. Clothes may maketh the man, but his drink reveals his soul.
For some artists, their alcoholic fancy forms a little piece of their myth. It’s impossible not to envisage Motörhead’s Lemmy pouring copious amounts of Jack Daniels and Coke at his beloved Rainbow Bar and Grill on LA’s Sunset Strip toward the end of his life. There’s also the slew of officially licenced liquors and beers serving as lucrative merchandise, Kiss (of course), Bob Dylan, and Cardi B all lending their name to some vanity brew – Iron Maiden’s ‘The Trooper’ is a genuinely drinkable golden malt for anyone who likes their Newcastle Brown Ale.
A personal choice of drink, away from commercial pursuits, is an infinitely more interesting insight. Lothario Serge Gainsbourg was well-known for his frequent imbibing of Gibsons, an unfussy blend of gin, dry vermouth and pickled-onion garnish, so adept at crafting them, he was allowed free rein of Belgium’s The Hotel Amigo’s bar to mix at his leisure.
The Rat Pack were famed for their long nights knocking back Rusty Nails til the early hours, inspiring one of Dean Martin’s famous quips: “The whole world is drunk and we’re just the cocktail of the moment. Someday soon, the world will wake up, down two aspirin with a glass of tomato juice, and wonder what the hell all the fuss was about.”
The epitome of hip and forever forward-thinking, Davis’ much-loved cocktail was the Rob Roy, a marriage of Scotch whisky, sweet vermouth, and bitters, a classy blend which allegedly would soothe his sore throat after blowing on brass at length after a session recording. A standard in jazz clubs across America in the infancy of Davis’ career, swing pioneer Rob Eldridge had a hit in 1945 with ‘Old Rob Roy’, an ode to the famous cocktail.
Created in 1894 by a bartender in New York City’s Waldorf Hotel in honour of Reginald De Kovan’s namesake operetta premiering at the time, its inspiration goes back to 17th and 18th Century Scottish history concerning the Highland clansman Rob Roy MacGregor.
A Jacobite soldier who fought the English to return Catholic James II to the throne after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ before living as an outlaw, Rob Roy’s folk-heritage associations with valour and fugitive romanticism perhaps struck a chord with the jazz-swingers of the era, indulging in an emergent art-form viewed as subversive and dangerous by the prohibition authorities of the 1920s.
Yes, there is indeed a Bitches Brew cocktail. Created in 2008 in New York’s Please Don’t Tell, one of the many pretend ‘speakeasies’ that propped up at the tail-end of the 2000s; a mix of various rums, egg, and Allspice liqueur, dry-shaked without ice and served in a Coupette glass dusted with grated nutmeg.
