A Six-hour series highlighting the life, career and influence of jazz legend, Miles Davis.
HOUR #2—”NEW YORK TO PARIS AND BACK (1946-1956)
Hour features interviews segments with critics Ira
Gitler, Martin Williams, Clayton Riley, Stanley Crouch, writer Ishmael Reed, drummers Roy Porter and Art Taylor, trumpeter Art Farmer, pianists Walter Davis, JR. and Walter Bishop, Jr., saxophonist and musicologist Andrew White, saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis and many others.
In this hour we follow Miles to New York where he studies composition at the Julliard School and Bebop at the feet of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. We see him joining Charlie Parker’s quintet, meeting arranger Gil Evans and the formation of Miles’ own “Birth of the Cool” nonet with baritone saxist Gerry Mulligan. We then follow Miles’ formative trip to Europe with Tadd Dameron’s band and his return to America only to become ensnared in the heroin epidemic that decimates the ranks of jazz in the Forties and Fifties. Miles emerges from his addiction in 1955 with a major label record contract and the most talked about band in the music.
The hour features theme collages, “Miles as musical stylist”, “Heroin and the jazz scene”, “Miles and Monk”, “Miles as Black role model”, and musical demonstrations by Roy Porter and Andrew White.