Post-Bopper

On the bandstand, Trumpeter Miles Davis resembles a man who wandered in off the street for a nightcap and decided to stick around for a few licks on a borrowed horn. He will noodle his way through a solo, turn to chat with another player, stroll to a nearby table for a drag on a cigarette. But the relaxed air is deceptive. Davis pays scrupulous attention to the group and individual sounds of his combo, often lies awake nights rehearsing new arrangements in his head.

Back in 1948, when everybody was trying to blow like Diz, Davis' nine-man pickup band was trimming Gillespie's blast-furnace sound to a clean, low Bunsen flame. The eight sides the group cut in 1949 did as much as anything else to usher in small-group "chamber" jazz. They also stuck Trumpeter Davis with an adjective he distrusts--"cool." Last week, uncool as ever, Davis was at Manhattan's Birdland, spinning out the alternately jagged and limber melodic lines that have marked him as the leader of the post-bop generation of blowers.

Fast & Light. Davis, 31, arrived at his stripped, understated style by way of bop. Growing up in East St. Louis, Ill., he learned the trumpet from a local instructor who had played with Bobby Hackett and Hal Baker. " 'Play without any vibrato,' he used to tell us. 'You're gonna get old anyway and start shaking.' That's how I tried to play--fast and light and no vibrato." For a time, when he was in his teens, Miles tried to play like Harry James ("I like to break out all my front teeth"). Then Billy Eckstine's band came through St. Louis, and Miles met Charlie Parker and Gillespie, sat in with them occasionally. He put in a stint at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, broke into the professional big time as trumpeter with Parker's band. He was one of the trumpet powers of bop when he organized his own nine-man combo in 1948 and started experimenting with fresh sounds, aided by Baritone Saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and Arranger Gil Evans. "That sound we got," he says, "came originally from Ellington. Gil loved Duke so much some of it rubbed off."

With a brass section augmented by a French horn and tuba, Davis & Co. (including such rising soloists as Trombonist Kai Winding, Alto Saxophonist Lee Konitz, Pianist John Lewis) worked out a series of subtle, low-toned arrangements --Budo, Jeru, Rouge--that helped turn many young instrumentalists from bop.

Old & New. At Birdland last week, Davis would shove his muted horn into the mike for a sparely ornamented, loosely swinging commentary on All of You, or sigh out a breathy, blues-flavored, open-horn version of Thelonius Monk's 'Round Midnight, or whip through Charlie Parker's Ah-Leu-Cha with the dry, stuttering sound that inspired one observer to compare him to a man walking on eggshells. He is at his best in such a ballad as My Ship, which moves him to serene, spare, lyrical flights.

Although he rarely composes any more, Trumpeter Davis recently sketched some music for a French movie entitled Lift to the Gallows ("about a man who has committed the perfect crime--until he got stuck in an elevator"). In Europe he is perhaps the most widely imitated modern U.S. jazzman. No matter how closely young musicians may listen to him, Davis hates to take a backward look at his work. "You always see how you would have done it different," he says. "If you play good for eight bars, it's enough--for yourself."

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