A Musicologist Smiles with Miles

PHOTO BY KALMAN ZABARSKY
Jeremy Yudkin
A Musicologist
Smiles with Miles
CFA PROF TRACES EVOLUTION
OF A NEW JAZZ STYLE
MILES DAVIS, simultaneously mon-
the others would instantly react
to it. They were such incredible
musicians.
“I’ve been looking at videos
from the time, and they play
with their eyes closed. When
they fi nish soloing — and this is
particularly true for Miles and
his saxophonist, Wayne Shorter
— you can see them opening
their eyes and thinking, just for
a nanosecond, where am I?”
Miles Smiles is the second
record from this group, which
also included Herbie Hancock,
Ron Carter, and Tony Williams.
“It captures a very special moment in their careers, in their
togetherness,” says Yudkin.
The tunes “rearrange many of
the generally received ways of
making jazz. Instead of either a
twelve-bar blues or a thirty-twobar song form, for example, they
have odd numbers of measures,
odd sectionalization.” The harmonies, the relationship between
the instrument, the soloing —
all are reimagined, he says.
Post bop was radically new,
and fleeting. “By the end of the
1960s,” Yudkin says, “Miles was
already starting to move in a
different direction, adding electric instruments and moving
into fusion.” BARI WALSH
“It’s intense
and intimate,
and you feel
there’s a new
world there.”
—Jeremy Yudkin,
on Miles Smiles
In May, International Development and Alumni Relations held a farewell
reception for all of BU’s graduating or departing international students,
including those from BU Global and the Center for English Language
and Orientation Programs. Among the many gathering in the School
of Management atrium are (from left) Antonio Cepeda Barragán
(BU Global’08), Marcela Elizondo (BU Global’08), Nobuhiko Ichimiya
(CELOP’08), Cecilia Kane (MET’08), and Livia Fabre (MET’08).
SUMMER 2008
15_Commonwealth.indd 1
B O S TO N I A
PHOTO BY KELLEY TRAVERS
umental and enigmatic, has
been a gristmill for jazz scholars. One of those he has now
drawn into his orbit is Jeremy
Yudkin, a widely curious musicologist whose past research
has run from medieval polyphony to the Beatles, Beethoven,
and Bartók.
In his new book, Miles Davis,
Miles Smiles, and the Invention
of Post Bop (Indiana University
Press, 2007), Yudkin tackles
one of Davis’s most inscrutable
periods, the mid 1960s, when
“the music is very intense and
abstract,” Yudkin says. Jazz
scholarship has largely ignored
the period, he adds.
Miles Smiles, released in 1967,
was the artistic high point in
that stretch of Davis’s career,
according to Yudkin. He had
formed a second group, after
his quintet of the 1950s had
broken up. “The early sixties
were very problematic for him,”
says Yudkin, a College of Fine
Arts associate professor of musicology. “He was ill, both his
parents died, his wife left him.
It took him a long time to fi nd a
new group, but when he did, in
1965, he got very excited about
making music again.”
Unlike other fi gures who
made important contributions
in one jazz style and stayed with
it, like Louis Armstrong, “Miles
was constantly responding to
what was new, and was himself
often personally responsible
for making the change,” Yudkin
says. Davis is credited with
several significant innovations:
the shift from be-bop to cool in
the late 1940s and early 1950s,
the pioneering of a new style in
1959 with the classic recording
Kind of Blue, and the fusion of
rock and jazz in the late 1960s.
Yudkin gives him credit for two
other shifts: the introduction
in the mid 1950s of hard bop,
a “down home, earthy, bluesy,
gritty kind of music,” and the development of the style that characterized his work from 1965 to
1967, later called post bop.
The music is “very serious,
fairly difficult, and incorporates
elements of free improvisation
and a very close interaction
among the players,” Yudkin
says. “Someone would start to
do something in their solo, and
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6/14/08 9:24:37 AM