For jazz great’s centennial, two adherents of Miles Davis reflect on his legacy

This year marks the centennial of Miles Davis, born May 26 in Alton, Illinois (near St. Louis). Throughout his life, the jazz legend blazed his own trail — so it’s only fitting that Symphony Center’s tribute May 27 features two distinctive interpretations of his legacy. The SCP Jazz double bill features Unlimited Miles, keyboardist John Beasley’s new sextet, and a solo piano set from Gonzalo Rubalcaba. Both of them approach Davis’ legacy from different perspectives.

Beasley has taken on myriad roles throughout his career: composer and conductor for jazz and symphonic orchestras, creating film and television scores and serving as musical director of International Jazz Day, which this year will feature a concert April 30 in Chicago. His new Unlimited Miles re-imagines the trumpeter’s works from the 1940s through his death in 1991. The group is also his way of reconnecting with his own experiences of working in Davis band 37 years ago.

One of the most crucial memories that Beasley has of Davis is his dedication even as his health was declining.

“Miles would would listen to show tapes the night after the concert or the next day and have tweaks for us all,” Beasley said. “Sometimes we’d get called into the principal’s office individually, sometimes together. But it was all done for the benefit of moving the music forward. Then you’d go to his hotel room on a day off, and there’d be canvases on the floor, there’d be his trumpet on the couch, he’d be talking with his valet guy about designing some new show attire. It seemed to be constant art. For a guy who sometimes wasn’t feeling great at that time in his life, he was immersed in art the whole time. That was a big lesson.”

One of Beasley’s other ensembles, the 15-piece MONK’estra, reinterprets the works of Thelonious Monk. For both of these composers, his goal is to balance respect for their vision while also weaving in new ideas. The additional challenge for Unlimited Davis is to condense 40 innovative years of bebop, modal jazz, fusion and funk into a single set. But the man himself gave Beasley ideas on how to go about it.

“I’m putting vibes together,” Beasley said. “And the way I’m doing that is not looking at the show as a chronological retrospective, but almost like a dream. If I go into ‘Sanctuary’ [from 1970] and play it free, it works to go into ‘Fat Time’ [from 1981]. I’m finding ways to weave these things together where it’s more like a dream. Miles would do these things, he would string tunes together during a show, or he’d play a few notes of ‘I Fall In Love Too Easily’ before another tune to tell us we’re going to play this tune. He would have these signals. And we’re going to play like we play now, which Miles would have dug. He wouldn’t have wanted it to be like a museum.”

Growing up in Cuba where American jazz records were officially forbidden, Rubalcaba absorbed Davis’ music through a more circuitous path. After hearing the music through underground networks of collectors and while traveling internationally, Rubalcaba was amazed when he finally saw him perform in 1985 at the Dutch North Sea Jazz Festival. But as he is preparing his new arrangements of Davis’ music, he suspects that the trumpeter may have been attentive toward Cuban culture all along. Rubalcaba mentioned that rhythms echoing the Afro-Cuban faith Santería ran throughout Davis’ recordings.

"Sometimes when I hear the way that he plays solos, the rhythmic distribution he does in his lines, and how he connects one idea to another reminds me of how those singers in Cuba communicate with people in those rituals,” Rubalcaba said. “We don’t have piano and trumpet in those rituals, we have percussion and voices — so we can get lost because the sound influences are different but the rhythmic design is almost exactly the same. When Dizzy Gillespie came to Cuba, he enjoyed those religious rituals a lot. You could see a lot of that information in Dizzy’s music. Miles was always very much into what Dizzy was doing.”

Both Rubalcaba and Beasley mentioned that Davis urged his pianists to consider how former Chicagoan Ahmad Jamal emphasized space in his playing. Rubalcaba also recorded drummer Jack DeJohnette’s “Ahmad the Terrible” with DeJohnette and bassist Ron Carter (both of whom were Davis alumni).

“Ahmad was the kind of pianist could say something in a phrase and after the phrase, there was always a moment of space and that silence was really huge in terms of volume,” Rubalcaba said. “It says as much as the phrase he played before. Not many people are able to have that strength.”

Beasley added, “Right before we went onstage, Miles said, ‘If you can’t comp like Ahmad Jamal, then don’t play.’”

Ultimately, though, these two musicians look at the example that Davis set as an individualist that they have found most encouraging. Rubalcaba said that became even more clear as he worked on how to put his own signature on the music.

“I learned how how Miles became himself, one of the most important things in life, not only in the music,” Rubalcaba said. “To be determined to do that needs a lot — it needs courage, faith, inspiration, discipline, vision and be permanently looking to have your own voice.”