Billy Boy. Miles Davis. 1958. Columbia.

Nick Cave called him “the black unicorn,” a description that explains his mythic stature. His name evokes the image of an American jazz revolutionary who made Cool an ethos. He was pimp and genius, junkie and boxer, beatifically handsome, and his speaking voice is what the devil tempting Jesus on the mountain with the spoils of earthly glory must have sounded like. But for Billy Boy, recorded for the LP Milestones, his second record for Columbia after he had been signed by legendary record label and production pioneer George Avakian, Miles Davis reduced his sextet to a percussive trio. Red Garland, piano, Philly Joe Jones, drums, and Paul Chambers, double bass, all swing with a bop relentlessness that had already become stylistically passé for Davis. His absence from the record confirms this. For Milestones he’d assembled a group of artists who were each in a period of artistic transitioning. Like an antenna he instinctively understood the value of the energy this gave them, and how it would function musically to help form a singular vision. Garland would soon end his working partnership with Davis, and the heat of his performance is a blistering restatement of how he and the original Davis quintet had redefined hard bop with the famous May and October studio sessions of 1956. Jones shares the foreground of the record’s production mix with Garland, and their explosive duet, augmented on the bottom by Chambers, who switches from pizzicato to arco and back again to pizzicato, creates a dialogue that encapsulates an essence of American jazz that Davis, in his forthcoming storied career with Columbia, would soon begin to radicalize. What is implicit in the music of every serious jazz artist is the understanding that this music, America’s premiere post-emancipation musical art form, has put, like field hollers, Negro spirituals, and the blues before it, and rock and roll after it, flesh on the bone of the Jeffersonian contention about self-evident truths and the equality of man. Born in Congo Square and in the whorehouses of the Storyville district of New Orleans, jazz is now a revered American institution held sacred by those who seek to demystify its criminal providence in order to present it as a cultural trophy to middle class sensibilities. Billy Boy returns us to the real time complexity of its human intelligence.

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