Moving Music

There's something running through my mind at the moment, a little more thought than the usual kind of idle thinking.  I am not prepared to go into that just yet, but I thought of something else.  As music was playing in the background, it suddenly became foreground.  It was Miles Davis, one of my earlier idols but who has maintained a hold in my imagination.  In particular and almost without exception (Kind of Blue and Round About Midnight perhaps being the only two), his later period work (called the Electric Period by some, and I guess it is as good a name as any) is what draws my ear back to him.  That, and of course, his stylistic changes and development over the years (up until his death) I have always appreciated even as my own great interest in jazz music and culture has all but disappeared.

I thought of how he refused to be pigeonholed into the same thing that his fans loved him for.  If they were unwilling to follow along, then so be it.  He had to move ahead according to his own dictates, and if others were left behind, then that was how it had to be.  If he didn't change, if he didn't grow, then he'd be dead.

Something else about Miles that I always thought great- how he often played with his back to the audience and that he never made any gratuitous remarks, kowtowing to the audience. He was, if you forgive my French, surely no bullshitter.

change will come and surely it must come

though hell should bar the way