There’s an absolute zinger of a joke currently circulating around the London jazz scene. Miles Davis is being celebrated with a new biopic! And anything that spreads the message about jazz is undoubtedly a good thing. But – and now the punch-line – what a pity the film bogs itself down; all that sober analysis of Miles’s evolving concepts of harmony and musical structure diminishes what could otherwise have been a sure-fire commercial hit.
In reality, Miles Ahead, directed by and starring Don Cheadle, is centred around a period in Miles Davis’s life between 1975 and 1979 when he was making precisely no music at all and instead spending his time binging on drugs, drink and recreational sex. Ewan McGregor’s character, a fictionalised Lester Bangs-meets-Robert Palmer composite, is a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine who turns up at Davis’s Upper West Side townhouse to find out how retirement is treating this revered musician who hasn’t released an album since 1976, when the open-ended improvisation and ferocious funk grooves of his Pangaea tanked in record stores the world over.
What had happened exactly to this once unimpeachable architect of supreme jazz masterworks like Kind of Blue, Porgy and Bess and Bitches Brew, apparently constructed without breaking sweat? But Davis takes an instant dislike to this impertinent pen pusher and whacks him full in the mouth – the message subliminally implanted from the get-go that you fuck with Miles at your peril.
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