| May. 25th, 2008 @ 11:05 am This birthday post arranged by Gil Evans |
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Current Mood: procrastinatin'
Current Music: Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! on WNYC
Whenever I'd go to Maxwell's or listen to some indie band of the moment (whether on the radio, or on New York Noise, or, increasingly, on TV commercials), I'd hear Evil Uncle Miles' distinctive whisper-rasp in my head, asking, "Didn't we do it good the first time?" He was talking, when the question was originally uttered, about the first wave of Brooks-Brothers-suited jazz neo-classicists, the peers and spawn of young Wynt0n (himself begat by mid-'60s Miles), but it applies equally to more high-profile musics.
WKCR played a couple of cuts from E.S.P. last night, and I was reminded: damn, they did do it good the first time. And Miles himself was around the top of his game, two decades after his stint as a teenage not-quite-phenom with big ears.
The cover of The Musings of Miles, 1955.
It would be another dozen years before he would dress this silly in public again. (And then he would outdo himself with each successive year.) Miles would have been 82 today; alas, he's having another hip-replacement operation in Rock'n'Roll Heaven.
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