Fathers and Daughters

A portrait of Miles Davis by Basquiat spreads out like rumors of other fathers

Learning as little as possible about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s private life was a conscious decision I made when I realized Warhol seemed to own parts of him like a reformed master does a free slave. From the outside their relationship seems loving with an undercurrent of rivalry that way, also co-dependent, tender, dirty, transactional, unconditional, disastrous, inevitable. And Basquiat’s image once seemed inextricable from those increasingly depleted party and art scenes that used him for life force. I found different idols, slightly less trendy ones who seemed just a fraction freer of their white shadows. One of them was Amiri Baraka. Another was Miles Davis. And I’m serious when I say they were just a fraction freer of their shadow kingdoms. Baraka outran his, stormed the village gates to escape it.

He moved from the Village to Harlem following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, to avoid becoming a bohemian or token of the Beats, and to instigate a movement by piecing together the fragments of the one the state was actively dismantling. Around that same time Miles Davis, in the anthology Three Wishes, (the archive of a guestbook for which jazz benefactress Pannonica de Koenigswarter asked all of the players who frequented her Manhattan penthouse to jot down three of their big or modest dreams), wrote: to be white. He didn’t show it, and maybe he was exaggerating or joking, or maybe he was doing what Jimmy Baldwin, another black demigod hero, did so well— confessing and negating a desire in the same utterance, disturbingly elegant and direct in a world of evasive souls. 

In an elegiac poem for Miles Davis, Amiri wrote, I’m one of your children, you’ve got a bunch of children. I’ve always felt that way about Miles, who I never met, and Amiri, who I knew. I’m one of their children, along with being my father’s daughter. These similarly imposing and complex men helped raise me, from Baraka saying, as I got out of a cab we were sharing uptown one night after a jazz show, don’t ever let anyone break you, to Miles, who I could listen to every day without getting bored because his tone squeezes and reveals parts of me that no other sound can touch. I can listen to him through anything— falling in love, falling out of love, writing, musing, dancing, sitting silently and thinking about all the falling in and out of trances one must do to become oneself. His timbre makes space for indulgence and focus. With his sound he invents a degree of focus so impossible to disrupt it’s almost decadent. Beyond the music, I can look at Miles’s outfits and denounce all of my associates and myself as corny for not being as meticulously adorned, maybe also not as rich, maybe not as rich because not as meticulous and willful about adornment. Personal style is the first way to recognize the kind of greatness that I personally gravitate toward for guidance and it’s helpful that style’s my pillar because so many lack it and try to compensate with earnestness, or practicality, or they hide behind brand names and designers, and I just turn up In a Silent Way and glide on past all that imitation, hunting for style that cannot help itself, for pathological grandness of vision. 

When I glimpsed Miles, minuscule perfect and all alone in his private bullseye, in Basquiat’s King Pleasure exhibition, etched or edged like poem sneaking out of the barrel of a gun, or a post minstrel blues where a pitch like his finally transcends the white man’s parody, or like the reflection of his face in a prism of his own quiet tears, or from the afterlife, returning, more slight and discerning, as an angel of mercy, it felt like finally witnessing Jean-Michel (as his family members called him in the recordings throughout the exhibition) express adoration on his own terms. At last! A figure of his unmediated by those who ‘discovered’ him and their need for a graphic flare they could interpret as in part theirs, or hyper-sensitive to their approval. This was him before all that, in the eyes of those who knew and loved him with or without fame and glamor. These previously-unseen works feel freer of the white shadow/gaze than the famous ones that rappers collect and Beyoncé boasts knocking off the wall of her mansions. 

These are records of the artist at home, unbought, and still just as relentless and precise as when everybody hijacked a piece of him. And here comes Miles, the coolest one in the room as usual, but downsized to a head floating in the center of a blank piece of parchment like a wandering party balloon. He’s looking up, audibly, how he would sometimes let his spirit wander on stage when waiting to enter the music horn first with a new phrase, or already playing it in his mind while Herbie Hancock finished a solo. He’s not angrily veering, he’s more aloof, askance, ahead of where he’s standing. The multidimensionality of musicians that charismatic often forces him to communicate in parables or seem withdrawn and morose, but Miles always seemed more determined than withdrawn, like he was doing the alchemy of his next band in his mind while audiences and colleagues waited for him in the past. Basquiat places him in an inescapable spotlight, a desert/heaven, as a ghost partially returning and not interested in haunting anything but his own sound, his own next wave. He appears to be listening intently for a cue that reminds him when to come in with some new notes and ruin everyone’s hope to exceed him. 

A tender and unforgiving witness of how stark and alienating it must have felt to be born so lush and adorned and loving and cruel, the Jean-Michel we meet here interpreting his trumpet king, is one of Miles’s children too. Across reluctant distances that mutual love makes all of us some kind of exclusive dysfunctional family of style-driven souls who refuse to surrender a vision. Someone keeps whispering in our ears, you have a right to love beauty, and we remember that what’s shallow is lack of style, disdain for the many ways beauty invades the soul with the sublime. This portrait of Miles is sublime, accurate, primal, a scream trapped in a stupor, a backlashing snapshot of a father of mine by a brother I was afraid to know before I saw it. He painted and referenced Miles many times throughout his career but this is the reckoning,  the ace in a deck of dupes and swirls that feel a little too jazzy. This rigid snowed-in rendition captures the seed of someone unknowable without a close-up on his seething eyes. It sees the Miles that is too cool hide the fact he wishes to be white from his own ego while everyone else pretends their assimilation is about some other bland wish. Here is Miles who admits who he is in a whisper so eloquent we all want to be that for a day or moment of looking and listening closer.  

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Women aren’t supposed to love jazz music as much as I do, or to idolize its most dangerous archangel, or to recognize how all the hell he raised and leveled protects us from the very versions of ourselves that would fall for him at his worst. Every single Miles Davis note is repentant and mean, with an unforgivable allure that transports you beyond your own temperament and his. And then here he remains, in the center of a blizzard, wound up like a clock and keeping time and refusing any other costume but his own timing, while also too cool to be humiliated by how exposed he is, and how hidden. None of my fathers, native or chosen, are particularly lenient or comforting in traditional paternal ways. I choose the ones who can walk me through horror and wonder unscathed, who are so motivated by beauty they objectify everything to access it. King Pleasure is arranged a bit like a haunted house, like home, like them. You have to wind your way through its labyrinthine consciousness in one direction, with no chance for double takes. And Miles is the crossroads blues— abandoned, grabbing your hand with his lopsided ear as it morphs into his horn or his pawn, to show you something. He’s pensive and disappearing to show you something. 

He glances away in dismay, warning you that you shouldn’t look up to him, that some nights he might have given all that beauty back or traded himself in to become a white man, or to be surrounded by enough whiteness that he could be the light it needs to know itself. And despite the explicit fantasy of betrayal he eternalized in Three Wishes, his children love him with alarming devotion, and wait for him to return. We have a right to love beauty. I have a right to feel jilted by my affinity for sounds and patterns that men want for themselves, and then replenished by it when I see what Jean-Michel saw, that Miles is one of our children now too.

If we get too attached to our idols as they once were, they end up orphans in a haunted gallery waiting for us to grow disenchanted, stuck in a net of projections until we let them disappoint us on purpose so they can go be kids again. Camouflaged in whiteness, all we can do with this image of MD is be grateful we get to witness him reanimated and buried alive in his purgatorial ballad, a bunch of children swearing he’s ours and daring him to deny it. No one plans to have a muse for a father, but this nigga Mona Lisa, looking timid and guileless with mouths for ears and a painter for a god, is mine. All of my fathers were stolen at one point and had to have masks painted on to help steal themselves back, from the stage or from madness, or from a sad wish or bad elegy, or an inability to wish, or three blank wishes washing up to shore in silence. Or daughters who turn each father’s severity into sheepishness by deciding we have a right to love beauty and outdream the thieves who stole our bad men, our best men.