Night Beat

by Mikal Gilmore

  Those records were also his final spurt of recording for years. Beset with crippling health problems (including leg injuries and a bone erosion in his hip that has left him slightly stooped), Davis retired into a six-year period of reclusion rumored to be so dark and narcotic, many insiders were convinced that he would never reemerge. When he did—in 1981 with Man with the Horn—several ungracious critics bemoaned his seeming unwillingness to once again move jazz in new directions, and even proclaimed that he had lost much of his tone and phrasing. Yet every subsequent work (the live and good-humored We Want Miles, the blues-steeped Star People, and the protean Decoy) has drawn the intriguing portrait of a resourceful artist who is making his way through resurgent and autumnal periods in the same motion—a man who, for the moment, is more a musician than a harbinger; who has discovered that he can unite and reconcile classical repertoire, blues sensibility, and modern texture with a naked and deep-felt expressiveness. True, Davis may not be speaking in the intriguing harmonic and melodic parlance that James Blood Ulmer or Ronald Shannon Jackson have coined, nor playing in the inspiring blend of traditionalism and avant-gardism that Julius Hemphill, David Murray, Henry Threadgill, and Hamiet Bluiett pursue, but he can still set loose with a straight-ahead yet visionary brand of musical oratory that is simply matchless and, as well, delightfully sly.

  But if much of what Davis has recorded since his return has sounded like a man looking to regain his voice—plus looking to find a fulfilling context in which to apply his regained strength—the 1985 You’re Under Arrest is the place where this artist again makes a stand, one as vital to his own aesthetic as the stands he took with Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew. It’s likely, of course, that with its lovingly straightforward and exacting covers of pop material by Michael Jackson (“Human Nature”), Cyndi Lauper (“Time After Time”), and D-Train (“Something on Your Mind”), the album will strike many jazz diehards as a disheartening commercial surrender. But that would be a depthless reading of what is actually a stirring and complicated work: perhaps Davis’ most cohesive comment in twenty years on the balance between song form and improvisation, between tone and melodic statement, between cool and hot style, as well as his most exhaustingly worked-over music since his landmark orchestral sessions with Gil Evans in the 1950s. It is also simply a beautifully played album: Davis wrings the heart out of “Time After Time” with consummate grace, then turns around and blares into “You’re Under Arrest” (the opening version of which features Sting in a cameo vocal) with the same cutting force that he once brought to Jack Johnson.

  Asked whether he is concerned how this record may affect his already precarious standing with jazz purists, Davis appears to ignore the question, preferring instead to concentrate on the bowl of steaming gumbo before him. We are seated on the sofa in his den—the only spot of furniture not occupied with the trumpeter’s paintings or scholarly tomes on modern art. “I don’t put out records just to satisfy jazz buffs,” he rasps after a while. He nods toward the TV set that is mounted above us. “These sounds coming out on television—these commercials and some of the music on MTV: That stuff sounds better than the jazz artists I’m hearing lately. These young guys, too many of them are so unsure of their own sound that somehow pop music scares them. They miss the point that that’s where a lot of the real innovation—in both songs and rhythms—is coming from.

  “Anyway, why should some jazz fan be upset that I recorded ’Time After Time’? It’s nothing different than what I’ve always done. I mean, they liked it when I did ’Porgy and Bess,’ when I did ’Green Dolphin Street,’ when I did ’Bye-bye Blackbird,’ when I did ’My Funny Valentine’—pop songs, all of them. They also liked it when I did Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson. Now why can’t they like a record that puts all that together, hmm? The point is, if you keep repeating the old styles, then there’s no advancement—nothing happens. Jazz has always drawn on pop songs; it’s no different with today’s pop, as far as drawing on it for interpretation.”

  Still, I note, in the jazz-rock fury of fifteen years earlier, nobody expected to hear Davis ever play a straight-ahead ballad again—particularly with such restrained tone and without melodic variation. What persuaded him to render Lauper’s hit in such a plain-spoken fashion?

  Davis’ features soften and his scowl transforms into a faint smile. “Oh man, if I hear a melody I like, I don’t care who plays it. I get that thing up here”—he taps the area between his throat and heart—”that thing you get when you see something you like.” He laughs wickedly. “You know, some art work, a girl, cocaine. . . . Anyway, I got that when I first heard it, because she had the sound for the meaning of the ballad.

  “But you have to treat the song the way it should be interpreted: your way and hers. I just love how Cyndi Lauper sings it. I mean, that woman is the only person who can sing that song right—the only one who really knows what it means. The song is part of her—it’s written for her heart, for her height, for the way she looks, the way she smells. She has imparted her voice and soul to it, and brought something kind of sanctified and churchly to it. Why distract from its meaning by messing around with a lot of variations and stuff?

  “So I don’t do nothing to it: It’s just the sound of my tone and the notes of that song, but they seem to work together in their own right. Still, when I like something, I try to give it to you my own way.” Davis pauses and his eyes grin. “Give it to you with a little black on it. Now, when I play it live, everybody seems to like it that way. I also think people know when they like a melody: A song like this gets people in a mass groove, like a tribe.”

  Miles says he would talk more but he has a rehearsal to catch. Before we break off, he speaks briefly about his planned next album: a live retrospective of his career, recorded with a twenty-piece orchestra, rhythm section, and guitarist John McLaughlin, at his acceptance of the Soning Award in Copenhagen—an honor bestowed previously only on Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, and Igor Stravinsky. We also discuss that this will be his last album for Columbia on this contract, and he allows that he is thinking about switching labels. “Man, they never know what to do with me. You know, they’d rather lean toward Wynton Marsalis or somebody like that. Well, let ’em. I’ll tell ya, I’m not the one who’s afraid of trying something different.”

  Which, of course, is an understatement. If Davis no longer seems to prompt jazz styles or sire new dynasties, it is also clear he no longer needs to. Instead, he has learned to move comfortably between jazz and funk, pop and blues, to assert gentle introspection with the same eloquence and savvy with which he expresses his casual melodic fervor—almost as if he were saying that it is the breadth of expression at this late stage in his career that best defines how he cares to be seen. In other words, maybe jazz’s most mutable and enduring legend simply wants to be accepted now as a player and not a leader—a man who can imbue modern styles with a venerable, unadorned technique. True, that may make him too irreverent for jazz and too seasoned for pop, but mostly it marks him as an American original who, at fifty-nine, is still too young to be denied his vision.

  feargal sharkey: songs of hearts and thieves

  “A Good Heart,” written by Los Angeles’ Maria McKee, of Lone Justice almost-fame, and sung by the U.K.’s Feargal Sharkey, was played repeatedly on U.S. radio in the spring of 1986 (in England, in fact, it became a number 1 hit), and for fair reason. “A Good Heart” is an irresistibly crafted dance track about romantic search that communicates a great surface of good-natured hope, and a great depth of petrified fear. The song is also the opening track for the eponymous solo debut album by Sharkey (once the lead vocalist for Northern Ireland’s most promising late-1970s pop-punk band, the Undertones), and with the singer’s wavery voice intoning the heartening chorus, “A Good Heart” opens the album in the manner of a tremulous invocation: “I know that a real love is quite a price/And a good heart these days is hard to find. . . . /So please be gentle with this heart of mine.”

  But if “A Good H
eart” is a lover’s prayer, the song that immediately follows it, “You Little Thief” (written by Tom Petty’s keyboardist, Benmont Tench), is as bitter a curse as I’ve ever heard in pop—a magnificent statement of pain so wrathful, so intense, so true, chances are you will never hear it on radio. “You little THIEF,” rails Sharkey, “you let me love you/You saw me STUMbling, you saw me FALL/You left me broken/Shattered and blEEEding/But there’s no hard feelings/There’s no feelings/At ALL.”

  Of course, that last claim isn’t exactly true: There’s so much lyrical and musical temper in this song, and in Sharkey’s vocal delivery of it, that it is almost too overpowering to hear. Instantly, you are reminded of the most deep-felt moments in the music of Rod Stewart and Bryan Ferry—two singers who, like Sharkey, once sang so forcefully, so nakedly, that they could redeem any conceit or frivolity—and instantly you realize just how inadequately their best music compares to what this Irish aspirant manages to achieve here, by only half-trying. In part, that’s because Sharkey isn’t weighed down by any of the self-defeating irony or preening hubris that have always been part and parcel of Stewart’s and Ferry’s acts. Instead, Sharkey just sings as if the art of these songs resides in the meaning of their words, and not in the histrionics of the performer. The result is one of the most genuinely emotive, intoxicating vocal triumphs of 1986.

  marianne faithfull: trouble in mind

  I have never heard blues sung in the manner of “Trouble in Mind,” the performance that opens the soundtrack to the 1986 movie of the same name. It is more like a painting of the blues—or some kind of stripped-down study of the music’s elements—than a true enactment of the form. And yet it’s as definitive an example of what blues might do in these modern times as you’d hope to find.

  The song opens with an ethereal, harplike synthesizer sweep—not much more than an exercise in texture—played by arranger Mark Isham. Then Isham dresses up the moment a little: some muted trumpet (suggestive of Miles Davis’ on In a Silent Way), a few moody piano arpeggios—all the elements weaving together at a snail’s pace, congealing into a cool-to-the-touch, high-tech consonance. Then a voice enters, stating its lament as directly, as simply, as brokenly as possible: “Trouble in MIND, that’s true/I have AL-MOST lost my mind/Life ain’t worth livin’/Sometimes I feel like dyin’.” The voice belongs to Marianne Faithfull, and she imparts immediately, in her frayed matter-of-fact manner, that she understands firsthand the experience behind the words: She lifts the song from blues cliché to blues apotheosis. What is remarkable, though, is how she does this without indulging for a moment in the sort of growly vocalese that many singers pass off for feeling. In fact, Faithfull does it simply by adhering to a literal, unembellished reading of blues melody. But behind that artlessness, the song’s meanings inform her tone—they even inform the silences between notes—and that tone alone nails the listener, holding one’s ear to an extraordinary performance. Not much more happens in the song, but not much more needs to. The directness of the vocal and the stillness of the arrangement virtually sound like a portrait of emotional inertia—and of course, that’s the way they’re supposed to sound.

  Before Trouble in Mind’s soundtrack ends, there is one more unforgettable moment: Faithfull and Isham’s rendition of Kris Kristofferson’s “The Hawk (El Gavilan).” At the outset, a lone synthesizer delineates a melodic motif, a trumpet dips between the spaces of the strain, and Faithfull takes on the lyric in the same unvarnished manner as the earlier song. “Got to make your own rules, child,” she sings, “Got to break your own chains/The dreams that possess you/Can blossom and bless you/Or run you insane.” The textures move a bit more here, and there’s a more gradual undertow to the arrangement—an undertow as gentle and sure as the momentum that carries life to death. Couple the music’s steady, calm flow with the lyric’s images of loss and flight and yearning, and you have a performance that manages to sound both resigned and unyielding at once. Which is to say, Kristofferson-Isham-Faithfull’s “The Hawk” may be pretty-faced, high-tech pop, but at the recording’s heart, it is a spawn of the blues. Its resonance is beyond trend: It is ageless.

  stan ridgway’s wrong people

  As leader of the Wall of Voodoo, Stan Ridgway was nearly despicable: He didn’t so much reduce hard-boiled cynicism to a cliché as he reduced it to a sneering inflection—which might have been a kick if the attacks hadn’t all been delivered in a slurring monotone. In other words, Wall of Voodoo’s gambit was a mean-minded, dead-ended one, and apparently even Ridgway realized this, for just as the band reached an audience large enough worth insulting, the singer “fired himself” from the enterprise. The joke, it seems, was up.

  Maybe so, but the hard work had just begun. In 1986, two years after checking out, Stan Ridgway checked back in with The Big Heat (I.R.S.), and damn if it wasn’t among the best L.A.-founded albums of that year. Perhaps what made The Big Heat work so well is that, instead of viewing his characters from the outside and laughing at their uneasiness and their seeming dispensability, Ridgway now crawled inside their skin—and discovered that it’s actually kind of an intriguing place to be, a place that lends itself to hauntingly, rollickingly effective storytelling. In any event, instead of sneering, Ridgway now shudders a bit as he relates the accounts of people in flight—people running from or chasing after murder and deception, people who seem horrified and enthralled by their own admissions, people who have been forgotten but sure won’t leave life that way. They are, in fact, California characters like those in the works of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson (mean and damned), or of Kim Nunn, Robert Siodmak, or Fritz Lang (rugged and redeemed). Either way, they are people you give a full hearing to—and as a result, The Big Heat also demands no less than a full hearing.

  In The Big Heat, the wrong people—hateful, bored, lost, hurting, dangerous people—not only are given a voice, but, here and there, are given a shot at victory. Somehow, it’s an exhilarating victory. “You gotta watch the ones who keep their hands clean,” sings Stan Ridgway in the title song. On The Big Heat, the artist gets his hands dirtier than ever. Hence, he’s maybe, just maybe, worth our trust. One thing’s for certain: There are few artists who can be so scary and unaffected at the same time as Stan Ridgway.

  sinéad o’connor’s songs of experience

  “Can we shut out the lights?” asks Sinéad O’Connor, in a soft voice.

  It is a cold and blustery late February 1990 night in the center of London, and O’Connor—a twenty-three-year-old, bantam-sized Irish-born woman, with round, doleful eyes and a quarter-inch crewcut—is perched on a stool in a BBC Radio sound studio, holding an acoustic guitar, and looking a little uneasy. She has come here to perform some songs from her newly released second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. And for reasons of her own, she feels like singing these songs in the dark tonight. After the lights dim, the room falls quiet, and O’Connor begins strumming the hushed opening chords to “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance”—the account of a young woman who has been brought to the edge of her deepest-held hopes and dreams, and then deserted by the one person she needed and trusted most. It is one of O’Connor’s most powerful and affecting songs, and for good reason: Not so long ago, she more or less endured the experience that she is singing about, and it transformed her life.

  Tonight, she seems to be singing the song as if she were composing its painful recollections and caustic indictments on the spot. In a voice that veers between hesitation and accusation, O’Connor sings with a biting precision about the moment she realized that the man she loved and trusted no longer cared for her need or faith in him—it was in the instant that she recognized he would no longer hold on to her hand as a plane would lift off—and she rues all the abandonment and betrayal that her expectation has left her with. And then, just when the music should surge into the crashing chords and snarling yowls that frame the song’s bitter kiss-off, O’Connor halts the performance abruptly, and for several long seconds, there is only silence from the
dark booth. “I need to practice that one a bit,” she says finally, in a shaky tone. “I need to calm down.”

  A minute later O’Connor resumes the song, and this time she leans harder into the performance. It is an exceptional thing to witness. Somewhere in that darkened booth, a young woman with an almost supernatural voice—a voice that can convey rage, longing, shock, and sorrow, all in the same breath—is both chasing down, and being chased by, some difficult private memories, and it seems less like a pop performance than an act of necessary release. It is also a timeless ritual: Pop and jazz and blues singers have been sitting in darkened recording booths turning private pains into public divulgence for generations now. But many of the best of those singers—from Billie Holiday to John Lennon—were, in one way or another, ravaged by that darkness. If Sinéad O’Connor has her way, she is going to howl at that darkness until there are no more bitter truths that it can hold.