MILES’ BOSWELL : Poet Quincy Troupe Will Share His Memories of the Great Mr. Davis

It is indicative of the vitality of the late Miles Davis that his friend and biographer Quincy Troupe often still speaks of him in the present tense. The jazz trumpeter left such a broad legacy and had such momentum in music and in life that it may well take a lifetime for the rest of us just to catch up to him.

“He did so much, but it was never enough for him,” Troupe recalls. “He said to me one day, ‘Quincy, I don’t ever want to be a museum piece under glass.’ To him that meant you were creatively dead. He was always trying to break down some more doors if he could, because he just couldn’t stand still.”

It is that restless spirit that Troupe will discuss Friday evening at Orange Coast College, where he will lecture on Davis’ music, life and creative processes. Troupe, 51, is no stranger to lecturing, having spent 22 years teaching literature, currently at UC San Diego. He has received two American Book Awards, one for “Miles” and another for his poetry, which was the focus of an Emmy-winning segment of Bill Moyers’ PBS series “Power of the Word.”

As did many of Davis’ musical leaps, “Miles” stirred controversy when it was released in 1989. It stands easily with Sidney Bechet’s “Treat It Gentle” and Charles Mingus’ “Beneath the Underdog” as one of the most evocative musical lives committed to paper. Davis speaks so passionately and informedly about music, his and others’, that it can compel a reader to hear it with fresh ears.

But the book is also fearlessly candid about the darker events and occurrences--including drug abuse, wife-beating and racial bitterness--that raged through Davis’ stormy life, and it’s far from pretty.

Troupe met Davis, who died on Sept. 28 at age 65, in 1985 while doing a story on him for Spin magazine. “We hit it off right away,” Troupe remembered recently, on the phone from his home in La Jolla. “I was supposed to have an hour and a half with him according to his publicist, and we ended up spending 10 hours.” Davis then called Troupe and offered additional time: The notoriously taciturn musician talked for another nine hours, and even cooked a meal for his guest.

“So I knew right away something was happening,” Troupe said. “It turned out there were a lot of little things that joined us together, like the first band he had played in in St. Louis was my mother’s cousin’s band. We didn’t know that when we first met.”

Still, even after the home-cooked meal, Troupe was surprised to get a call asking him to work with Davis on his autobiography.

“His music had been important to me since I was 13, had influenced my life on a heavy level for a long time, so it was a tremendous shock and honor for me that he wanted me to do it,” he said.

None of which was lost on Davis. “When I went out to see him, the first thing he said was, ‘Yeah, I got you a gig, didn’t I? A good one.’ And he was laughing,” Troupe recalls.

He said he was given the choice of making “Miles” a biography or an autobiography, and picked the latter because he felt Davis’ voice was essential to the telling of his story.

“That’s why the book starts with the word listen, “ Troupe said. “It’s like an oral history. Language has an attitude and a stance. You know somebody through (his) language. For me the most important thing was to capture the way he spoke and the cadences that he spoke in.”

Troupe spent thousands of hours with Davis, both interviewing him--a process he says Davis grew to despise--and hanging out, listening to music or watching basketball and boxing on TV. Troupe found that Davis’ “tough public persona was basically to keep people away from him, and back off of him. He had some decades where he was essentially crazy from heroin and other addictions. But he was basically a very nice guy, kind of a softie, gentle. He was a fierce person, but I guarantee you can’t find anybody that Miles was good friends with who did not really love him as a person.

“He was hilarious, man, one of the funniest people I ever met. He could tell stories, and he was a great cook. If he liked you, he was generous with his time, energy and spirit. When there was nobody around, his humility was wonderful. He never talked about himself. You walked in his house either in Malibu or Manhattan, you didn’t see any of many awards he had. He had them all in a closet. There weren’t any photographs of him. Except for the trumpet and the piano, you wouldn’t even know you were in his house.”

In forging a friendship with Davis, Troupe was privy to sides of him a writer might not typically see. He said there never was a conflict over whether some of that unguarded information should be kept from the book.

According to Troupe, “When we first started doing the book, I said to him, ‘Miles, I think that it’s important that you have to be truthful in this book, because these people that have listened to your music over all this time and have loved and respected you and put you in a place of honor in their lives, basically put you there because they thought you were a person who told the truth about everything. So now more than ever you have to tell the truth about your life.’ And he agreed to that.”

That Davis allowed the unflattering material to go into “Miles” doesn’t mean that he was always forthcoming with it. Troupe often had to get such material from other sources and then confront Davis with it. A turning point came when Davis’ first wife, Frances Taylor, armed Troupe with some particularly embarrassing anecdotes.

“It really shocked him that I’d know these things,” he said. “I think that’s when he began not to doubt my skill as a detective or an investigative reporter. After that he figured he might as well tell it, and he opened up after that.”

The deal that Davis and Troupe had was that Davis wouldn’t see the book until it was finished, at which point he would have the option of deleting or changing any parts.

“When he finally saw it, he just cracked up,” Troupe said. “He was laughing a lot about it because he liked it a lot. He also was appalled at some of the things I put in there, but what I really respected about Miles was he left it in there. He didn’t cut any of the things that put him in a very bad light, not a thing. Because he knew he’d done them. He called me a bastard a couple of times, but in the end he was really happy he’d done it.”

“Miles” was a bestseller and won many favorable reviews as well as the American Book Award. It did have its detractors, though, notably Times jazz critic Leonard Feather, who in his recent obituary piece on Davis said the publication of “Miles” was “the most hurtful event in his declining years.” He further asserted that the book was “trash” and a “farrago of inaccuracies.”

Feather essentially claimed that the street language and negative aspects of the book were Troupe’s creation, not Davis’. Troupe understandably has a different perception.

“I don’t have anything against Leonard; he’s been a great beacon for jazz and all that,” Troupe said. “But he talks about errors (in the book) and all this--though Leonard always makes the error himself of saying Miles’ birthday was May 25 when it’s really May 26--and that Miles didn’t talk like that and Miles didn’t say all them things. Well, he did say them things. We’ve got tapes. We’ve got transcripts. I never saw Leonard Feather when I was out there all those times.

“I’ll tell you a story. Early on in this process Miles said, ‘there are going to be people who are not going to like you because you’re doing this book. Right off the top of my head I can think of two who are going to dislike you because they’ve been asking me to do a book like this for 30 or 40 years. Leonard Feather and (New York Post writer) Lee Jeske aren’t going to like the book no matter what you do.’ And Miles was right about him being very, very bitter that Miles allowed me to do it.

“I know he thought I was an interloper. But that was Miles Davis’ choice. Miles wanted a creative writer--I’m basically a poet--to write his book. He didn’t dislike Leonard, but he didn’t want him to write his book. That’s the kind of guy Miles is. He makes choices and he lives or dies by them.”

(Asked for comment, Feather said Troupe’s assertion that he wanted to write Davis’ autobiography was “an outrageous statement. I never asked Miles Davis to do such a book. I had neither the time nor the interest. The reason I didn’t like (Troupe’s) book,” Feather added, “is that it’s a lousy book.”)

Though Troupe says much of the book is verbatim Davis, he says he did make changes and additions using Davis’ voice. For one thing, Troupe says that despite Feather’s claims, he actually thousands of times deleted Davis’ favorite maternal expletive from the text.

“The creative part for me in terms of dealing with Miles was it was almost like I had to become an actor and be him,” Troupe said. “Miles speaks in fragments, not always in complete sentences, so in some instances I had to kind of anticipate where he’d go with a sentence. But then I’d check it with him.

“There were 150 other people I interviewed as well as him. If (drummer) Max Roach told me a story about Miles, then I’d go check it with Miles and he’d go ‘Oh, yeah, that’s the way it happened.’ Then I’d have to take that story Max Roach told me and put it into Miles’ voice. Because Miles is very impatient. You ask him, ‘Well, how did it happen,’ and he’d say, ‘Max just told you, man. Why do I have to say it over again?’ So I would have to put it into Miles’ voice.”

Troupe says that several hundred pages were cut out of “Miles” by the publishers so they could issue it at a lower price. He hopes to see those missing pages released some day, as they chiefly contained Davis’ in-depth discussions of all of his recordings. There also is talk of “Miles” being made into a film.

Since the publication of the book, Troupe feels he has had two existences, one as Davis’ Boswell (he recently co-produced the seven-part Miles Davis Radio Project series) and his own career as a poet.

“It’s an odd kind of thing,” he says. “Some people don’t know whether to invite me to read my poems or to talk about Miles. Down here we just a had a book party for my new book of poetry called ‘Weather Reports’ (Harlem River Press), where it sold out. But still people came up to me there with ‘Miles’ and wanted to talk about him.

“I accept that. I don’t feel bad about it. I feel honored to have been asked by Miles to do it and privileged to have gotten to know him. I felt this overshadowing was going to happen. There’s nothing you can do about that. I mean, as great as Herbie Hancock might be, he’s always going to be a Miles sideman. Even John Coltrane, all those people. I feel the same has happened to me.”

When speaking on campuses, he finds Davis has no shortage of young fans.

“The reaction I have from students who love Miles Davis is incredible,” he said. “You know, Miles had a young audience, because so many entered his music at ‘Bitch’s Brew.’ It rocked, and they loved it and were turned on by it. A lot of older people who came up with him through be-bop and the cool era and all that stopped at ‘Bitch’s Brew’ and didn’t go farther. But the young people that came in there went back and learned the old stuff and then came forward, all the way to the end.”

It was only Davis’ death that halted his musical growth and change. At the end, Troupe said, Davis was looking to incorporate rap, go-go (Washington D.C.’s hard-edged funk variant), Central African and Haitian music, and possibly some of Troupe’s poetry, into his own generation-spanning style.

“With all the changes he went through, I still describe Miles as a blues personality in elegant clothes,” Troupe said. “Not that he wasn’t sophisticated, but he comes out of east St. Louis, from that same roadhouse funk we heard all our lives. He always had that, but he never stopped pushing the boundaries out.

“He was able to do that because he didn’t compromise what he believed in. He kept trying to move forward in what he was doing in his music. In the future, I think people in the United States will get to know just what a superb and gifted genius and great artist he was. I think they’re just caught up in so many other aspects of his life now. But when they listen and consider what he’s contributed to our lives, they’ll come to the conclusion that he’s the greatest artist that we’ve produced in the last half of this century. Period.”

Who: Quincy Troupe, speaking about Miles Davis.

When: Friday, Dec. 6 at 6 p.m.

Where: Music Building Room 101, Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: San Diego Freeway to Fairview exit; head south to Orange Coast College.

Wherewithal: Admission is free.

Where to call: (714) 432-5725.