Miles Davis on YouTube.com
So please do me a favor and read these words in your favorite American young-person accent, “YouTube is gonna last forever!” It has occurred to me that YouTube.com presentations are plentiful here in the kinté space—and the do-no-evil people over at Google can pull the plug on me at any time. But my apocalyptic guess is that it won’t matter when Google pulls the plug and “upgrades” the Internet because that will probably be the end of the “free” and “open” Internet as we know it.
“YouTube is gonna last forever!” So even Miles Davis is on YouTube.com… these crappy, low-res, interviews are a great alternative to the slick, prince-of-darkness portrayal made famous by Ken Burns (fondling the African scarf of narrator Keith David) and that talented 10th Negro Wynton Marsalis. The table below covers my Miles Davis interview picks on YouTube.com:
| [Miles Davis interview, 1982](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHeYG9SNaS0) | Yes, even [Bryant Gumbel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryant_Gumbel) portrays Miles Davis *better* than Ken Burns. Here you can see the level of detail Miles goes to in choosing a fellow musician.
Miles says, “It’s not Jazz anymore.” Just “social music.” |
| [Miles Davis](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMGnOVj8JLU) | “Listen, man. We don’t want to hear any white opinions.”
This is a clip from The Miles Davis Story and explains in more detail why he sent “his woman” into the hotel to confirm is reservation. Ken Burns does not do this in his documentary coverage of Miles Davis and helps those trying to form this prince-of-darkness image. This is also the documentary that set me straight about Miles’ first wife, why he was sent to prison and his estrangement from his son—a son that he disinherited. Not very impressive to me, ladies… |
| [Mile Davis Art](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaX_ujXTwVo) | When Miles laid down the huge tracks like [*Agharta*](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000027DZ/thekintespacec00A/ "Buy this music at Amazon.com"), I could *see colors*—many, *many* shades of purples and blacks. It was no surprise to me that he could “paint” or lay the tableaux.
And, yes, my sisters, I am aware of the woman speaking for Miles Davis who needed to take the time to stress that Miles is not always African with his “art”—like being in some kind of “African phase” is a limitation. Experience informs me that being African is a limitation only when you are trying to sell something in a racialized context. My assumption is that she is trying to sell his paintings—literally or figuratively (and, what is worse, she is quite sincere in acting in his best interests). |
| “[I Remember Miles—Part 1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMWXBEj4HoE)” and “[I Remember Miles—Part 2](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TspkkqLP3Bs)” | “Little Davis you got to play your chords.”
This documentary series has all the trappings of a Black-Owned Business trying to build pyramids with fried chicken bones. That business is TOTOWN RECORDS, written in the philistine all caps that is characteristic of this tyrannical, anachronistic bad taste that I am quite, Quite familiar with… This guy (who is very likely talented in some other field) probably got off the tour bus in Japan and never got back on… However, I would not trade this all-caps documentary with anything coming from the typographically-correct, white-liberal excellence of Ken Burns. This should be a collector’s item because you will never hear Miles talk like this in a “mainstream context.” In stark contrast to the woman speaking in Mile Davis Art, Miles and Dizzy stress the importance of studying music theory and thinking before you play (this is different from thinking while you play). And this is one of the many reasons why YouTube.com will not last forever… |