WHEN AN ARTIST DIES, WHO KEEPS THE LEGACY GOING? SCAREY STORIES ABOUND CONCERNING THE WAY THAT MUSIC AND IMAGES OF ARTISTS FROM ELVIS TO HENDRIX HAD BEEN HANDLED. LIKE ANY DUTIFUL OFFSPRING OF A PRINCE, ERIN DAVIS (ALONG WITH HIS COUSIN AND SISTER) ARE FOCUSED ON KEEPING THE INTEGRITY OF MILES DAVIS’ MUSICAL LEGACY INTACT AND LEGITIMATE. TOGETHER WITH THE VARIOUS LABELS THAT DAVIS WAS ASSOCIATED WITH DURING HIS LONG TENURE, DAVIS TRIES SATISFY HIS FANS OF EACH GENERATION WITH A PRESENTATIONOF HIS MATERIAL THAT IS CONSISTANT WITH HIS ARTISTRY. AS AN ADDED BONUS, THE DAVIS FAMILY IS INTENT ON ‘FILLING THE GAPS’ OF THE MASTER TRUMPETER’S CAREER BY ISSUING PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED RECORDINGS FROM CONCERTS WITH VARIOUS DAVIS BAND INCARNATIONS. THE ‘BOOTLEG SERIES’ STARTED WITH AN ILLUMINATING COLLECTION OF SONIC AND VISUAL TREATS FROM DAVIS ‘SECOND’ QUINTET WITH HANCOCK, CARTER, SHORTER AND WILLIAMS. JUST RELEASED IS A SECOND VOLUME WITH SOME STARTINGLY EXCITING MUSIC WITH DAVIS FRONTING A BAND THAT NEVER ENTERED THE SESSION BEFORE; A 1969 GROUP OF CONCERTS WITH SHORTER, HOLLAND, COREA AND DEJOHNETTE
WE CAUGHT UP WITH MILES DAVIS’ SON, ERIN, WHO HELPED US BRIDGE A FEW MUSICAL AND PERSONAL GAPS WITH THE ENIGMATIC MASTER.
WHEN YOU GREW UP, DID YOU FEEL LIKE YOUR FRIENDS LIKED YOU FOR WHO YOU WERE, OR BECAUSE YOU HAD A FAMOUS DAD?
I grew up in New York, and then moved out to Malibu for High School with my dad. No one really knew who my dad was anyway, so I didn’t have to worry about that. I had a lot of friends that were like that. When I went to Malibu High, I had friends that were actor’s sons and stuff like that. Like Sammy Hagar’s son, and Gary Busey’s son. So different sons and kids who were child actors on their own anyway. So, we were all just friends. I don’t think that anybody purposely liked me because of that.
WHEN DID IT DAWN ON YOUR THAT YOUR DAD WAS AN IMPORTANT AND POPULAR MUSICIAN?
That actually dawned on me early. I went to a show in Vermont when I was young, and I noticed that there were a lot of people there! They really dug the music there, and they loved it. Then, when he made his so to speak “comeback” there was a show that he played with Diana Ross at Giant Stadium, and I thought “Wow. This is cool!” There was another show where he played somewhere in New York. I can’t remember specifically where. Again, I noticed that a lot of people were coming to his shows and they were liking it a lot. Also, my mom had a huge collection of records that he gave her, so I knew that he must have made a lot of music.
I was really into music anyway, being an MTV kid, and I had my own record collection when I was young with records and tapes. He made a ton of records at the time, and he would send me stuff from Columbia. He’d tell them to send me a bunch of his new stuff.
I could tell that he was really cool, but it wasn’t like over the top, in your face kind of cool.
WHEN WERE YOU ABLE TO OBJECTIVELY LOOK AT HIS MUSIC AND FIGURE OUT IF YOU LIKED IT OR NOT?
I always like it. I’d go to his rehearsals sometimes. I met Gil Evans and Marcus Miller when he was with the band. Gil just came to the rehearsal to check it out and to give Miles some notes, just to collaborate on what was going on. It wasn’t rock and roll, but I still liked it.
He started taking me on the road every summer, starting when I was 14. I really liked it; it was the best time of my life. Very exciting for those 5 years. The music was really good, and the guys were good to me. But, the thing is, I never, and we never really listened to any of his older stuff. It was always just what he was doing at the time. He obviously knew we had his older records, but he would never play them. He never wanted to. He’d NEVER listen to them. He didn’t like it when they played it on the radio; he wanted them to play his new stuff. It wasn’t until he passed away that I started getting into his older stuff.
I started with Kind of Blue, like everybody else. But then they started releasing these big box sets. They had Miles and Gil, Bitches Brew, Miles and Coltrane. So, I started picking it up pretty fast. And then I also started working out what goes where with the Prestige stuff, the Blue Note/Capitol stuff and then all of the Sony stuff. I was around for the end of the Columbia era and the entire Warner Brothers era. I’ve looked at everything from the estate perspective, so it’s been a real treat going back through all of this stuff.
Vince (Wilburn Jr) my cousin and I have tried to figure out what went through his head during all of these great recordings, and we’ve come to the conclusion that he was always the same as he was older as when he made his early records, but he was at a different stage musically. He was still at the same thought process musically and the same creative process. That is kind of reflected throughout the catalogue.
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WHEN YOU LISTENED TO HIS OLD MUSIC FOR THE FIRST TIME, DID YOU WISH YOU HAD HIM THERE TO ANSWER QUESTIONS THAT WOULD COME INTO YOUR MIND?
Actually, it was the music that filled in the blanks! Even though we didn’t listen to it together, he would talk about it. Stuff about Bird, Max Roach and Dizzy. Trane, Wayne and Herbie. Some of those guys were still around. I met them and we were actually on the road together sometimes with them and their own respective groups. Jack DeJohnette…John McLaughlin was out on the road with us. I don’t remember meeting Dave Holland until later. I’d meet all these guys like Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, and then I go back and listen to the albums to fill in the blanks, especially with his quintet with Wayne and Herbie and Tony Williams. It was great to go and hear them as young men in their 20s. It was a great for me to finally learn so much about these guys that I had met.
WHAT ARE THE THINGS ABOUT MILES THAT MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW ABOUT HIM?
I think people believe that his persona is based largely on his stage presence, and what you read in the newspapers. That leaves a big gap of everyday life. In everyday life he was a great dad to be around. He was definitely different than everyone else’s dad. He was definitely a different type of person. But, he would love to paint, and so we would get him paints and supplies. We would watch boxing and he would teach me all about boxing. He loved to cook, so he would give me this huge list of food to get at the store. I wouldn’t know what it was. It wouldn’t make sense until he put it all together. He loved cooking. He was a great cook.
DID MILES HAVE ANY MAJOR OR HIDDEN RELIGIOUS OR PHILOSOPHICAL BELIEFS? ANY BOOKS HE READ ABOUT THESE THINGS?
We never got too far into that. I know he respected peoples preferences. That really didn’ t matter to him. What mattered to him was “could he play.”
WHAT DID HE TRY TO TEACH YOU ABOUT LIFE?
He would talk to me about girls. He didn’t’ think I had to be a musician. He told me, “You don’t have to do that. “ He thought it would be cool if I became an architect or something like that, but I told him “No, No No; I want to be a musician.” But, for him, being a musician was such a serious thing when he was young, (around 13 he was already dead serious about it), he probably thought “I don’t think Erin is quite as serious about it as I am. I can see that he loves it, but he doesn’t seem to necessarily go about it in the way that I believes that he has to.” He believed that you had to dedicate yourself to it every day.
And for me, I just taught myself how to play drums, and I picked up guitar and bass and a very basic level. I also liked engineering. We used to make four track stuff at home-sketches of ideas that he would take to the band. We had a lot good times together. I learned a lot during the time I lived with him and being on the road with him.
AFTER HE DIED HOW WAS THE ESTATE DEALT WITH? IS THAT WHEN YOU STARTED MILES DAVIS ENTERPRISES?
That’s business stuff. When he passed away, we had someone execute the estate, and then we decided to take it over ourselves, and that’s what we’ve been doing for the last few years. It’s been going great; we have a great team. We have a general manager, Darryl Porter, we have Rodney McCowan, our publicist Karen Sundell. So, me, my cousin Vince Wilburn and my sister Cheryl Davis run the estate together.
WAS THAT IN HIS WILL FOR YOU TO DO THIS, OR DID YOU COME UP WITH THIS YOURSELVES?
I don’t want to go too far into the will. But, we were charged with the responsibility of the estate, so we decided to do what we thought that he would do, and take everything forward. We have a really good relationship with Sony and Warner Brothers and Concord, who owns the Prestige stuff. Because of our good relationship with Sony, we try to put out things faithfully, like the new Bootleg Volume 2 that just came out. We want people to hear stuff that they haven’t heard before.
WHO MAKES THE SELECTION ON THESE TYPES OF RELEASES?
We and Sony together. They have ideas of what they want to do, and we talk it over. We’re usually in agreement, so it’s a great working relationship. It’s like a symbiotic thing. We want to put out stuff that nobody’s heard, so we look things for these concerts that they came to us with. These great European concerts that people have maybe made a bad bootleg copy of. Well, we go right to the source; we go to the government, as the government recorded all of the concerts back then. They have everything archived, so you just have to kind of deal with that government and their archive system, and there you go!
The first (bootleg) was a mindblower. That quintet was unbelievable. This latest one is from what we’re calling the “The Lost Quintet.” It’s of Miles, Wayne, Dave Holland, Chick Corea and Jack DeJohnette, and they never really did anything in the studio together in that exact lineup. This stuff is unbelievable. There are two concerts from Antibes, and one from Stockholm and then there’s a dvd from Berlin. All from 1969.
WHAT HITS YOU ABOUT IT?
You can see what happened since “The Second Quintet” with Herbie, Wayne, Tony Williams and Ron Carter. He was evolving he music some more. There are some older tunes like “Milestones” “Footprints” and “’Round Midnight,” but they are evolving into what was going to be happening in the Bitches Brew thing which was next.
EVERYTHING WAS A TRANSITION PERIOD
That’s kind of a good thing. It’s very hard to replicate something, and that’s the great thing about him. He just loved to keep trying something different. Trying to achieve whatever sound that was in his head usually required some kind of musical transition of some kind. Always something different.
LAST YEAR AT THE BOWL, THEY HAD THAT TRIBUTE TO MILES DAVIS WITH THE 3 CONCERTS AND THE COMMEMORATIVE STAMP. DID YOU REPRESENT MILES AT THAT PRESENTATION?
My sister, cousin Vince and I were there on hand to represent the family. We were also there in New York when the stamp actually came out. But we were trying to get him a stamp for a long time, until the Post Office came to us with the idea of doing a dual release with the Post in France, along with an Edit Piaf stamp That’s why they are on the sheet together, and you can get the Edith Piaf stamp here in the states. So, you also can get the stamp of Miles in France as well. We had celebrations in New York. The one at the Bowl was great, and we did one in Chicago too.
DO YOU CONTROL THE RIGHTS TO MILE’S IMAGE, OR DOES THAT BELONG TO SOMEONE ELSE LIKE SONY ?
No, we do that; Sony owns its own archival photographs, but we control the licensing of his music and image as well. It entails a lot of things-what is the (image and music) for? What is its duration? And is it for profit? For a non profit?
You have to be a little vigilant at time to protect his stuff. There are always going to be bootlegs and stuff. It’s hard to police all of it, but we try to do the best we can with the resources that we have. We like to make him available to any project that seems like a good fight.
I love the way that Sony in particular is handling their catalogue. They treat it really special. Warner Brothers went through some changes with their catalogue department, but they’ve done pretty well, along with Concord.
DO YOU HAVE A JOB OUTSIDE OF REPRESENTING MILES DAVIS, OR iS THIS YOUR SOLO GIG?
I also do my own music. I’ve done a couple of movie scores. I also manage some people; a trumpet player named Gabriel Johnson under my own company called Davis Artists Group. I also manage a band called The Reflections here in LA.
We all treat the estate as our priority. Vince produces music for other artists, and he also has his own quartet. He played at the Bowl last summer; he put together the Electric Miles, he was the drummer. It was also nice to see Jimmy Cobb play with the Kind of Blue Band.
WHAT WAS THE HEADPHONES DEAL
That was with Monster Cable, to license the image of Miles. They created these 2 sets of great ear buds for personal music enjoyment. They were very high end. They called them head phones. The second ones were called “The Trumpet” as they were designed to replicate a trumpet, the part that goes in our ear, like a bell, and the parts like the valves were like the mute, and controls.
HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK IS STILL UP IN THE ATTIC TO REISSUE?
We keep all that close to the vest! I’m not to give you a specific number; that would spoil everything!!
WHEN YOU THINK OF MILES’ LEGACY, WHAT’S THE BIGGEST THING YOU WANT TO CONVEY ABOUT IT?
It’s an honor to do it. There’s so much music that he put out. It’s just prolific. We try to treat it the way that he would want it treated. Even though he never looked back on his music, he knew people wanted to hear it. So, we try to get it to them. We want people who are interested in the history of American music to hear it.
LIKE HIS FATHER, ERIN DAVIS LEAVES THE CROWD WANTING MORE. STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT ADDITION TO YOUR ENDLESS QUEST OF THE ENDLESS MILES.