# No Second Voice *Miles Davis and the Testimony He Gave Against Himself* — Legendary Biographies No. 254 - **Subject:** Miles Dewey Davis III - **Written by:** Isaiah Fontenot - **Shelf:** Music / Jazz - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 230 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Gideon Marsh (ISBN 979-8-90623-643-2) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/254-no-second-voice.html ## About this book The autobiography Miles Davis dictated to Quincy Troupe is the only witness to almost everything contested about him. Simon & Schuster published it in 1989. It won an American Book Award, and he never took a word back. In it he describes his father striking his mother. He describes striking his own wives — at length, without remorse, in the cadence of a man narrating a personnel change. The worst conduct here is not an allegation. It is a deposition, volunteered, in a book with his name on the front. For fifty years that deposition stood alone, because the women in those pages had not spoken. Every standard account was finished before any of them did. Then Frances Taylor Davis sat for a camera, said what had happened in her marriage, and died before the film was released. Betty Davis spoke for herself in a documentary and died five years later. Cicely Tyson published a memoir and was dead two days afterward. Their accounts can now be set beside his. Tyson's is narrower than his own. He accused himself of more than she did. The book is a cross-examination, not a life-and-works: every chapter that reconstructs a session also reconstructs a room. The argument is that he made a music out of subtraction and a self out of the same operation: a teacher told him at thirteen to play without the shake every trumpeter used, and he never put it back. Taking things away was the technique, and it was also how he handled everything that was not music — the reason not given, the musician fired without being told why. At the centre are the five years between 1975 and 1980, when he made no records at all: the only sustained stretch of his adult life in which nothing can be justified by the work, because there was no work. It is not a takedown, and the records are primary evidence throughout. It is not a tribute either, and it declines the sentence that the art buys the conduct a discount. Where the record stops, it says so. ## Contents 1. Alton, and the House on Kansas Avenue 2. Elwood Buchanan Says No Vibrato 3. Fifty-Second Street 4. The Nonet. 1948 5. Paris, May 1949 6. The Habit. 1950-1953 7. Millstadt. 1954 8. Two Operations 9. The Quintet, and the Marathon 10. Gil Evans's Nineteen 11. Thirtieth Street, March 2 and April 22, 1959 12. Birdland, August 25, 1959 13. Frances 14. The Plugged Nickel, December 1965 15. Betty 16. Bitches Brew 17. On the Corner 18. The Silent Years. 1975-1980 19. Cicely 20. The Book. 1989 21. Montreux, and the Centennial ## Questions **Who is No Second Voice about?** Miles Dewey Davis III. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case No Second Voice — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,361 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 71,000 words, 21 chapters, 230 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Isaiah Fontenot came to writing about music sideways, through a cataloguing degree and eight years of processing other people's papers. The habit that came out of it is the one that organises his books: before asking what a thing means, ask who said it, when, and what they stood to gain. He writes about American music as a problem in evidence. His work is preoccupied with the gap between what a life can be shown to have contained and what has merely been repeated about it often enough to sound established, and with the musicians whose worst conduct is attested only by themselves. No Second Voice, on Miles Davis, is a cross-examination of the one document every account of that life has been built on. He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he keeps a shelf of session logs and no opinions he cannot source.