Miles Davis comes back to life through an encounter with current trumpeter Jay Phelps in this play that inventively mixes live music, biography, history, even musicology, to illuminate the storied if rarely likeable jazz musician and his 1959 masterpiece, the album “Kind of Blue.” Written and directed by Oliver Kaderbhai as a two-hander, “Miles” is often fascinating – sometimes too much so; there’s a lot to absorb in an hour.
Jay Phelps portrays himself (or at least a trumpeter of the same name and similar biography) who is so eager to figure out what makes “Kind of Blue” so great that he visits a library archives to listen to the old reel-to-reel tapes.
There he encounters Miles the man himself. It’s an efficient and flexible premise, allowing Jay to interrogate Miles about his life, and discuss (occasionally debate) his musical choices –on the particular album but also in general – sometimes reaching a daunting technical level, one musician to another. Their interaction also offers a glimpse into Miles’ difficult personality: He does not ingratiate himself with Jay; he starts by criticizing his trumpet playing, and insists on calling him David, even after Jay corrects him.
Miles is portrayed by Benjamin Akintuyosi, who nails the musician’s terminal cool and his raspy whisper of a voice (the result of surgery on his larynx when he was thirty, as we eventually learn.) He expresses Miles’ moments of anguish with a convincing physicality. For his part, Jay Phelps does a persuasive job playing himself – and an even better job playing the trumpet.
Both performers are also called upon to portray multiple other characters. We meet Miles’ relatively affluent family; his father, a dentist, teaches him how to box, implicitly to deal with the ever-looming racist threats first in Arkansas and then in and around East St. Louis, Illinois. We meet his first trumpet teacher, Elwood Buchanan, who threatens to rap his knuckles with a ruler unless he stops playing “all of that Harry James stuff,” meaning vibrato; this is how he learns to favor clean solid notes. We meet his famous mentors and collaborators, Clark Terry, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie – both in the flesh, and in brief documentary footage projected on the wall. The wall is not blank, so the projections come out muddy. One can say the same about some of the scenes with these suddenly appearing characters, whose identities are not always immediately clear.
In these scenes and in Miles’ monologues (some taken verbatim from his 1990 autobiography), we learn some intriguing but also some disturbing details — how Davis studied at Juilliard, and had both a grounding and an obsession with classical music (Debussy, Stravinsky); how he became a heroin addict; how he treated women abusively. His actual pimping is reduced to a single, almost throwaway line.
In a note in the program, Kaderbhai who is artistic director of :DELIRIUM, writes: “This is the first version of this show. It has huge potential to grow and expand into a large scale production. We need your help to get there…”
I agree. My advice: More trumpet playing. Fewer, or more carefully delineated, characters. Consider structuring the play to align much more clearly and directly with the five songs of the album.
Miles was, as Kaderbhai concedes, a complex and contrary man. But, on the evidence of “Miles,” he was also an artist with something to say. “Choosing creativity is what separated us from the animals,” Miles says at one point in the play. “Now those motherfuckers can create, don’t get me wrong — spiders web or a chameleon skin .. But they create to survive. I create to connect.”
“Miles” is running through August 25 at Summerhall, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Photos by Colin J Smith
