The TV shows that Miles Davis could never play: “I can’t be associated with that”
A genius, he may well have been, but that doesn’t mean that Miles Davis was ever an easy person to work alongside by any means.
In actual fact, many of the accounts that people have of encountering him, whether or not in a professional environment or simply by chance, will tell you that he was almost deliberately brutish in his approach, and that he genuinely revelled in being the boss of people. To put it in more blunt terms, you simply didn’t fuck around with someone like Davis, or you’d feel the consequences in an instant.
Of course, this ended up producing fantastic results from the people who did work with him, evidently afraid to put a foot wrong in his presence, but he was also so impatient with some of his collaborators that if they couldn’t get on board with him, they’d be shown the exit. Davis was a highly revered and respected trumpet player, arranger and bandleader, and he liked it that way, given that nobody could challenge his authority in this position.
However, this also affected his relationships with others adjacent to the music industry, and while there’s sometimes a benefit to being stubborn and stuck in your ways, refusing to budge from a position that could end up being detrimental to your overall image is the other extreme that Davis often found himself veering towards.
Given that Davis was hugely popular in the world of jazz throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, a time when television shows featuring popular music were becoming more popular, you would think that plenty of opportunities to record sessions for such programs would have been snatched up. However, Davis didn’t think too much of the general audience who were engaging with them, nor did he approve of the people hosting them, who kept making demands of him that he was simply uninterested in following.
“I can’t be on none of those television shows,” Davis angrily attested in a 1969 interview with Rolling Stone. “I’d have to tell Johnny Carson, ‘You’re a sad motherfucker.’ That’s the only way I could put it. If I did that, right away they’d be telling me, you’re cursing. But that’s the only way I can say it.”
It wasn’t just Carson who was on the receiving end of Davis’ acid tongue, either. “I was supposed to be on Steve Allen’s show,” he went on to explain, “And I sent him a telegram telling him he was too white, his secretary was too white, his audience was too white. And he wanted me to play for scale!”
As if Davis hadn’t made his position crystal clear, he ended his tirade against music programming on television by firmly distancing himself from everyone associated. “I can’t be standing up there before all those white broads,” he furiously declared. “All of them got maids. I can’t be associated with that kind of shit. I got a maid myself. See, whatever they do, they’re trying to get those middle-aged white bitches to watch it.”
Vehemently against the idea of toning down his personality or changing for anyone’s benefit but his own, you’ve got to respect the degree that Davis would go to just to get his own way, even if seeing Carson have to try and remain calm and professional as he wrangled with Davis would undoubtedly have been a treat for viewers.
