Miles, Manhood and Silence

Duane Deterville

Somewhere along the way Miles Davis became more than a musician for me. He became a walking metaphor for the complexity and paradox of modern black manhood in the western world. A personae which, Avatar like, occupied my world beyond the recordings that he produced. Miles possessed powers that, if perceived with insight, provided me with the guidance to navigate through the complexity of white supremacist western society. He did this by embodying rage, silence, sensitivity and masculinity in one compact ebony frame without allowing the volatile mixture to supernova before our very eyes and ears.

How he did this is the minor miracle that is worthy of emulation. You can’t listen to a tune such as Miles’ 1955 version of Nature Boy, wherein’ he states the lyric to this classic tune with a fragile, vulnerability steeped in a tone more akin to the heat of blue flame than the cool of blue water without being amazed by the ingenious manner in which he balances masculinity and sensitivity. 

Miles made sensitivity masculine by couching it in personae of steely close-mouthed coolness that is as old as the Yoruba people of West Africa. Former Yale professor of African studies Robert Farris Thompson tells us in his classic work Flash of the Spirit that Mystic coolness, called “itutu” or “tutu” in Yoruba, is an African concept that manifests itself innately in African Diasporic cultural expression. To quote

Thompson, “…exhibiting grace under pressure, our appearance and our acts

gradually assume royal power….fully realizing the spark of creative goodness God endowed us with…we find the

confidence to cope with all kinds of situations…This is character. This is mystic coolness.” Miles demonstrates and embodies this aesthetic on recordings from 1949’s the Birth of the Cool to Tutu in 1986.

He used this mystic coolness as a tool to temper his complex sense of rhythm and timing. With Miles the comparison is most often made to Picasso but I’ve always felt that Matisse is a more accurate analogy because of their similar sense of economy. What is left out often times being more important than what is applied, in order to access the imagination of the viewer/listener who is freed to fill in the empty space with what ever is most applicable for them in that moment. Case in point is when Miles omitted the chord sheet to Joe Zawinul’s tune In a Silent Way and with that act effectively re-arranged it into a spare ambient classic. 

This creative act amongst many others taught me the profound power of omission, absence and silence as a strategy. Through his creative modus operandi Miles taught me to listen for strategically placed silences. The ability for the double-edged sword of silence to carve beauty literally from nothingness or deafen with cold absence. The later occurs in white supremacist western society with its negation of black manhood through neglect and abject denial. Miles taught me to pay as much attention to what is not being said, as much as what is being said. As a result he provided me with the creative tool to self re-affirm my manhood in the face of societal silence.