Iain Cameron's Diary
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2003-05-01 - 6:42 a.m.

I am listening to John Renbourn�s Greatest Hits to celebrate Yvonne�s new job. Jolly good it sounds too � wondering what James first impressions of Moscow are.

I have started work on a version of One Too Many Mornings � maybe in D � using the open string plus the A string fretted on the 5th. This kind of home note reinforcement is a Davy Graham idea but you can take it up to Rhys Chatham�s minimalist punk where the whole guitar is tuned to E. I am surprised to find myself doing this kind of picking.

I have been doing a lot of work on Miles in Detroit � quite a few sources on this � but they seem to disagree on whether he was clean or not. There is pretty clear evidence that he got to be friendly with Paul Chambers and Elvin Jones � also with John Lee Hooker. He was a colourful prominent person on the scene � but also an incredibly good looking and romantically dissolute figure. He spins the tale in the biography that he was smitten with Juliette Greco when he visited Paris in 1949 � around the time he recorded the Birth of the Cool. In Paris he seems to have got the taste for hand made clothes and adulation. � birth of the cool indeed.

There is a reminiscence about Miles in Detroit involving Clifford Brown � a trumpeter with an extraordinary technique who began to emerge in the 1950s but who died in a car accident before he could make a really big impression. In the story invo Miles kind of faces down Brown�s technique with a soulful version of My Funny Valentine at the Blue Bird � he takes the stand to deliver just one song with the piano and then walks out into the rain. Exactly the kind of existentialist self dramatisation that a smart young lad might pick up from Exis on the Left Bank.

The choice of song is interesting � Parker warned Miles that there was a young white boy on the West Coast on his tale � Chet Baker � MfV is one of his tunes. Miles typically is in no doubt that when it comes to inventing cool jazz then it was Gil Evans, Lee Konitz who did it in 1949. But Chet was a real package � he sang and he looked great � attributes which keep his stuff selling even today. Miles decides to colonise MfV which he does in spades (whoops). The 1956 5tet recording is compared with Chet Baker�s by the English trumpet player Ian Carr who has quite a lot to say in Miles� favour. Miles then takes the song to new levels of deconstruction and intensity as his second great 5tet assembles in 1963-4. The Lincoln Centre concert is regarded as the exemplar of just how far you can push a standard.

So one has to read the story of Miles cutting Brown with MfV in that frame � he is taking the white boy�s tune and harnessing his own internal drama to make it his personal signature tune � a project which lasts a decade but which certainly gets off to a good start in Detroit.

For a while I have been interested in the link between John Lee Hooker and Miles in the 50s. There is the amazing Hooker-Miles collaboration in 1990 � one of Miles last recordings � which as far as we can tell both really really liked doing. John Lee Hooker has a recollection of Miles in Detroit in John Szwed�s book where it sounds as if he is taking a fairly concerned interest in the young Miles strung out in Detroit. Hooker was already an established musician by this stage � his first record � Boogie Chillun was a hit in 1948.

Miles in in Detroit in late 53/early 54 and then again around September 54. Miles already has his thumbprint on two musical revolutions � the 1945 Charlie Parker 5tet recordings which helped define bebop and the 1949 Capitol recordings which are the birth of the cool. This is an artistic success and a commercial failure. The early 1950s are a time when the NYC scene threatens to run out of energy as the West Coast approach looms large � much of which is developed at the Lighthouse. Even Parker doesn�t know what to do � his case is like that of Jimi Hendrix � defining a genre with vision and technique but then wondering where to go next amid increasing chemical involvement. Parker thinks about studying with Varese but cant get it together.

Miles effectively defines the new direction with his third revolutionary statement recorded between his Detroit visits � Walkin and Blues n Boogie are the tunes un qustion. These recordings pretty much define the new genre of �hard bop� and sound as fresh as a daisy today.

Walkin opens with a really struttin pentatonic riff played in unison by the horns against an offbeat on the drums. This writes the grammar for what becomes the East Coast school � the high point of which is Giant Steps. The genre re-emerges in the 80s and 90s as the neoclassical jazz form eg with Wynton and Branford Marsalis. Much debate about why young tenor players can�t break free from Trane�s shadow.

As luck would have it the anniversary of the recording is Tuesday this week � 29 April 1954 � 49 years ago.

There is a sense in which you can see what happens with Bruce, Bond, Baker, Graham etc in the UK in the early 60s as a British exploration of the hardbop agenda. They are already playing bebop in the late 50s in Soho and then especially under the influence of Mingus and Muddy Waters they graft on the blues. You might even see the literary experiments with poetry and jazz as predisposing them to react well to blues imagery.

Anyway the key point is as follows. We know that when Miles is in Detroit in late 53 early 54 he is getting ideas for compositions � then when he gets back to NYC where the studios are � he invents hardbop. We know he gets friendly with John Lee Hooker in Detroit and we also know he is casting around for new directions � cf the My Funny Valentine story. You will get my drift by now.

Ciaran phoned to say that www.theraceagainsttime.com is up and working. Many thanks to Mark for putting this up as a banner here - go and have a look at it.

Peter Chatterton phoned � he is working with the amazing Michaela � she is from the generation of bright young Communist things who were given the works by Moscow HQ to turn them into the elite of the future. Peter and she doing some event which involves the King of Swaziland and Peter is making up a CD as part of proceedings. He phoned to ask if he could use some Plundafonix and Serious Music as background. Obviously.

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