Jazz, jealousy, acrylics and the intimate reverse of Miles Davis paintings

ProtagonistsBy Mario Canal

Cusing Miles Davis (1926-1991) began to paint it was already an aging legend of music. He had changed the history of jazz more than once with albums that are still considered rupturists and had hooked and unwilling of drugs on so many occasions that did not have extra lives to spend. In the eighties he headed the final stretch of the elderly and reluctantly traveled around the world to give concerts to lovers of his music and fetishist of his figure. But suddenly, a new Davis emerged by turning into a brush.

The casual encounter with a neighbor who was a plastic artist, and who would become a lover, did not change the history of music or art, but that of the jazz genius. “It’s like a therapy for me,” said Davis himself of this practice, “and keeps my mind busy with something positive when I’m not playing music.”

Together their canvases remind a rare mejunje of cubism and lyrical abstraction such as Kandisnky, Grafiti and African art. It is inevitable to think of Jean-Michel Basquiat in the face of the images he created, with his impulsive blursschematic figures and loose words scratched on the canvas. Davis was carried away by the color in a mixture of composition and chaos where broken and torsos bodies appear that seem out of a ritual dance. In other pieces, the abstract rhythms of the color planes and the geometric spotsirregular and overlapping. There are those who compare their music and the forms that were embodied in drawings and canvases: both work in overlapping layers that arise by instinct, looking for a certain energy rather than a precise result.

Before throwing himself in such a visceral way against the canvas, his story had been that of a messianic pioneer. Born in 1926 in Illinois, he grew up in a middle class environment that allowed him to study music from a young age. He moved to New York at age 18 to attend the prestigious Juilliard school, which he left to enter the Bebop scene with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Since then his career was defined by A series of unexpected turns: helped create jazz cool with Birth of the Cool (1949), promoted the hard Bop, explored new sonorities with Gil Evans in the fifties and published in 1959 Kind of Bluethe album that many consider the most influential in the history of jazz.

In parallel, his personal life was very turbulent. He married several times, had multiple relationships and suffered for years a strong addiction to heroin, alcohol and barbiturates. According to various sources, it was violent, misogynist and unpredictable. His health deteriorated in several sections of his life and came to retire from the stage for a long period in the seventies. He returned in the eighties with a more pop aesthetic and strident costumes. His voice, damaged by a throat operation, became hoarse and his scarce and cryptic interviews.

Davis’s personal archive is full of Sketches and figures that often scribbled during rehearsals or in hotel rooms. But it was in 1984 when he began to paint more systematically. Installed in New York, it was going through a delicate physical moment and a complex personal stage as a result of its addictions. It was in that context when he met Jo Gelbard, then sculptor, who lived in the same building. “He asked me if I could see my sculptures, I said yes, without thinking about anything weird. Only I understood that nothing was innocent in Miles Davis,” she recalled in an interview. What began as an informal visit to the study of a neighbor, became a romantic and shared work relationship that included from didactic orientations to numerous four -handed pieces. According to Gelbard herself, many more than those who sell the musician’s paintings themselves admit.

Rejected by the art world

During his most active years as a painter, Miles Davis came to expose in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin, but was never accepted by the art world, which did not take him seriously. The barriers were not only aesthetic: there were also racial and gender tensions, according to Gelbard. The alliance between a consecrated African -American musician and a white artist from the New York circuit had aroused many prejudices. Besides, Some galleries refused to show the paintings If they were signed by both because they suggested that the musician’s individual firm would have more market value. According to Gelbard that pressure was clear, but also points out that it was in Europe where Davis’s work was received with greater acceptance.

Davis’s old continent’s response to Davis and his partner was somewhat more positive than in New York, effectively. It is common that in this continent things can be seen without the cultural filters and prejudices of the US. Like Davis, other musicians who visually expressed their creativity had some barracks in the great capitals of Europe, where more or less important exhibitions could be seen. Joni Mitchell and his painting as a method of introspection; Collage and installation sculpture as a form of symbolic decomposition of the drummer Milford Graves; or the raw and very interesting work of the Jamaican Lee “Scratch” Perry.

As for Davis, it may be the least interesting of the aforementioned artists. While it is true that for example in Paris one of his exhibitions had a lot of impact – in France they appointed him Knight of the Arts – his work always advanced the fetishism of his person more than the quality of the canvas. Not that what he did was terrible, but It has more a biographical interest than artistic. According to what was your partner and artistic companion, their paintings are more revealing so they hide than for what is seen in them.

Interval in Green (1988), is a medium format box in which an African figure of schematic red strokes arises on a green background. At chest height there are two somewhat saturated almost geometric forms of which some smoke chips seem to come out, perhaps a melody. Actually, the canvas was made during one of the worst fights between Davis and Gelbard. So much so that years later the artist – who still keeps a small collection of canvases made with the musician – was going to burn the canvas to forget that bad memory when her son stopped her.

If we attend to the stories that Jo does, many of the paintings are a mixture of tension and broncas, increased by the paranoid jealousy of the trumpeter. As Davis’s disease progressed, his painting became darker and more symbolic.

The most loaded painting of all is probably the last one he made, according to Gelbard herself, and of which it is not difficult to find visual records, although it is probably documented in the book Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork of Steve Gutterman. He would have been painted in Rome, a few weeks before his death. Again, there had been an altercation between Davis and his girlfriend, which he accused of bed with all the music band that accompanied him on the tour and recriminated it violently, in public. In that painting, which has no title, they dominate black, white and a red that would remember the blood, according to Jo’s own story, and in the painting a foot appears halfway between the shadow and the light. “He was very weak, but wanted to paint. I accompanied him in every line. After his death I understood that this foot was a way of crossing. A way of saying goodbye without words.”

The painting did not transform the legacy of Miles Davis, but completed it. It was a natural extension of his impulse to explore and perhaps reconcile with yourself. Today those works remain far from the center of the artistic story, but they tell us about a creator who never stopped looking for new artistic ways, even when he had nothing to demonstrate and the only thing he had left to express was a painful mixture of anguish and hope.