Sketches of Miles

By Gary Moskowitz

When we think of Miles Davis, we think of the clean-cut, sharp-suited trumpeter playing those cool, sparse sounds from his canonical early albums, “Kind of Blue” (1959) and “Sketches of Spain” (1960). That’s not the Davis we get in “Miles Ahead”, the new biopic directed by and starring Don Cheadle. It’s the late-1970s and Davis has taken a break from recording; he’s on medication to ease the chronic pain in his hip. He spends a lot of time in pyjamas. The days of suits, short hair and cool, modal jazz are behind him. A Rolling Stone reporter (Ewan McGregor) shows up – he’s keen to write about Davis’s comeback – and it becomes a sort of buddy film, in which McGregor’s reporter helps Davis retrieve a stolen reel of new recordings.

Things are looking up. And yet, Davis is haunted by his “Kind of Blue” past. The film’s non-linear, almost syncopated narrative often cuts back to his early days, when his experimentation with modal jazz – which focuses on scales rather than chords – resulted in a sound that was less cluttered and less fast-paced than bebop, the dominant strand of jazz at the time. It’s the period in which he composed songs with deceptively simple melodies (most notably “So What”) which won over the record-buying public, even the unlikeliest of jazz fans. In one scene, a young cocaine dealer tells Davis that the music from this period is the best stuff, the tunes everybody likes.