The shows Miles Davis refused to play for years: “I ain’t going down there”
Miles Davis was a true individual, not just in the way that he played – conjuring up a lifetime of emotion from the humble trumpet – but also in how he consistently lived life on his own terms, refusing to change himself for the benefit of the industry or popular society.
Jazz has never been merely another musical genre filling out the landscape. Going right back to its first emergence onto the mainstream, jazz has been both a religion and a means of revolution. After all, its endlessly emotive quality was built upon the output of Black voices during a time of intense and unavoidable oppression. Throughout his illustrious career, Davis was never one to shy away from that oppression.
On the contrary, in fact, prejudice and discrimination were key driving factors in Davis’ craft. “If I hadn’t met that prejudice,” he once declared in an interview with Playboy, “I probably wouldn’t have had as much drive in my work. I have thought about that a lot. I have thought that prejudice and curiosity have been responsible for what I have done in music.”
Davis certainly wasn’t the only jazz artist of the mid-20th century using their art as a means of fighting for civil rights and drawing global attention to the horrific racism still prevalent in all levels of American society, but he was among the most consistent, impassioned, and unavoidable musical voices of that period. It is no surprise, then, that his moral and artistic code was always influenced by the discrimination he faced as a Black artist.
Rather than giving in to the racist status quo of the United States at that time, Davis fought back both within and outside of his musical output. For instance, while other artists would be keen to perform at any venue across the country – provided the price was right – Davis outright refused to perform in the south, as a means of protesting against the widespread racism which still permeates the southern states to this very day.
Speaking in that same 1962 interview with Playboy, Davis revealed his policy on performing in those states, sharing, “I won’t take a booking nowhere in the south. I told you I just can’t stand Jim Crow, so I ain’t going down there in it.”
He added, “There’s enough of it here in the North, but at least you have the support of some laws.”
From the days when plantations stretched across the southern states, the south has always been linked to abhorrent racism and discrimination, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s was certainly no different. The Ku Klux Klan still had strongholds in the south, and neither lynchings nor police brutality against Black citizens were particularly uncommon during that era.
Countless artists aimed to draw attention to the state of things, with Nina Simone penning ‘Mississippi Goddam’ only a few years after Davis gave that interview, but the trumpeter’s complete refusal to go to the south was just as powerful a message. Here was one of the greatest artists that US soil has ever produced, and there is a vast swathe of the nation that he simply does not feel safe visiting; what’s more, he made audiences across the world well aware of that fact.
Not only does it reflect the intensity and widespread nature of racism in the American south at that time, but it also speaks to Davis’ immovable moral code, which always set him apart from the rest of the jazz movement as a true and unwavering individual.
