Will I love Miles?

This book beautifully, soulfully and informatively documents the life of one of America's greatest artists. I reveled in its pages, marvelling at the inner workings of the man and at the fascinating life he led for decades at the forefront of American music.

At various times tragic, hilarious, enlightening, scary, off-putting and inspiring, he couldn't have made it more like his own music if he'd tried. I never met Miles, but this particular book has the ring of veracity about it—at times, brutally so—and the countless stories of virtually every notable musician in Jazz and beyond… show more.

Mile Davis is unflinching in this memoir, written with the great poet Quincy Troupe, detailing his drug addiction and the foul racism that undergirded too much of his life.

What I find most compelling is his in-depth discussion of music and musical legends who were his bandmates, notably Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk.

This is a mandatory reading for all fans of the golden era of jazz. 

Miles Davis is one of the two or three ultimate masters of modern music, both as a performer and composer, and although there are excellent books about him (John Szwed’s comes to mind), this is the bedrock source. Troupe got him to look at himself with a wider view than most musicians ever communicate (verbally), and Miles dug deep to get to the stories of his life. And it is without a doubt the greatest example of all the possible grammatical uses of the word “motherfucker” ever written.

Scabrous, scathing, hilarious, penetrating — all adjectives that can be applied to Miles (1926- 1991) himself, and also to his American Book Award-winning 1990 memoir, which is marked not only by Davis’s profound wisdom about the music he helped revolutionize in the mid 20th Century and his strong opinions about the multitude of jazz figures he encountered in every era from the 1940s to the 80s, but also by the repeated use (sometimes several times per page) of a certain lively, all-purpose twelve-letter expletive. The book’s detractors claim the book is more Quincy Troupe than Miles, but I can attest,… show more.