No Second Voice

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.