Running the VooDoo down: It never got cooler than this.
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His First Ride Was A Horse.
Growing up, Miles Davis spent summers in Noble Lake, Arkansas, where his grandfather gave him his own horse at age seven. Horseback riding, like trumpet improvisation, required skill and sensitivity, physical prowess and keen mental attunement, knowledge acquired through hours of practice and experience. When Davis arrived in New York—at age 18, in September 1944, to pursue his trumpet studies at Juilliard, or so his parents thought—the first thing he did was go looking for Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. The second thing was search for horse stables, which he found on the Upper West Side. “The attendants looked at me strange, I guess because they weren’t used to seeing a black person coming to ride horses,” he later wrote. “But I just figured that was their problem.”
This story originally appeared in Volume 15 of Road & Track.
Miles Davis was a frontiersman. He had influences but no antecedent, followers but no true inheritors. His music opened doors into spaces no one else thought, or dared, to explore. Sometimes it did this with delicate precision, sometimes with stomping freedom, using electronics to map new territory far outside of existing traditions. But once he seized control of his art, he pursued a music without limitations. He didn’t want to play in jazz clubs. He needed bigger spaces, younger audiences, louder sounds. He was restless, changing, aesthetically omnivorous. He shifted his sound. His clothes. He was Dylan before Dylan, Bowie before Bowie. He dared others to keep up.
Lamborghini Miura Davis blasted around New York in his lime-green Miura until one night in 1972, when he crashed hard just off the West Side Highway, severely damaging the car, as well as his legs.
Illustration By Bruce Morser
And one thing linked it all: the life he led, the music he made, the clothes he wore, and the smart—almost perfect—series of cars he drove over the course of his life.
“My motion had to be forward.” These are some of the first words in his autobiography.
So the problem of seeing a Black man on a horse only grew when his art brought real money and he traded up in horsepower. Even when he was famous, people—the police, in particular—looked at him strangely because they weren’t used to seeing a Black man behind the wheel of a Ferrari 275 GTB/4 or a Lamborghini Miura. “By me having a $60,000 yellow Ferrari, being black and living in a beachfront house in Malibu, the police have already stopped me three times,” he told Quincy Troupe in 1985 for an article in Spin. “This happens all the time. They’re always saying they thought I was drunk, that I was weaving all over the place. This happens especially at night on the Pacific Coast Highway.”
There were almost as many such stories as there were cars, and there were a lot of cars. He used the first royalty check from his first album on Columbia, 1957’s ’Round About Midnight, to purchase a blue Mercedes 190SL. The car winked at him, he said, from the showroom floor every time he passed it. And so he made it his. This love, though, was not long lasting, and he soon replaced the Mercedes with a Jaguar XK120. But that romance was also short lived. The Jaguar had too many limitations. He’d bought a home at 312 West 77th Street, and when he turned onto the West Side Highway off of 96th Street, the Jag simply didn’t have the pop he needed.
Dodge convertible Davis and fellow jazz great Sonny Rollins prowled around town in a 1948 Dodge convertible nicknamed the “Blue Demon.”
Illustration By Bruce Morser
And so, in 1958, he bought his first Ferrari. A friend, Allen Eager, had introduced him to Luigi Chinetti’s Ferrari showroom. Eager was a saxophonist who’d played with Charlie Parker. Eager, who was white, taught horseback riding and loved cars so much that in 1961, he took first in the GT division at the 12 Hours of Sebring, driving a Ferrari 250 GT alongside the one and only Denise McCluggage, who had her own friendship with Davis.
At Chinetti’s Ferrari showroom, Davis fell in love. And this was a love that would never fade. He’d spend hours in Chinetti’s place, moving from car to car to see how each felt, discussing the particulars of the engines, watching the mechanics in the garage.
In his performance at the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival, Davis previewed two compositions he would later record for one of his most influential albums, Bitches Brew.
David Redfern/Tom CopiGetty Images
His first Ferrari was white, not red. Buying off the showroom floor was still out of reach, so he spent $8500 (about $88,000 in today’s dollars) on a used one. He did not save this car, or any of the Ferraris or Lamborghinis that followed, for weekend use. He drove it everywhere. For any gig that wasn’t on the West Coast, he would arrive in style. He enjoyed showing off what it could do—or more precisely, what he could do with it—to his passengers. In 1960, he drove the Ferrari down to Philadelphia for a show. While there, he picked up saxophonist Jimmy Heath, a Philly native who also loved cars. The two rode around town, talking about music, Davis complaining that Sonny Stitt—his current sax player—was screwing up on “So What,” the opening cut on Kind of Blue, then just a year into its reign as the best-selling jazz album of all time.
“I was showing him how fast the car ran on Broad Street, where the speed limit is about twenty-five miles an hour,” Davis remembered in his autobiography. “I told Jimmy this car could make all the lights before they turned red or yellow. So I gear down and the car is moving at fifty-five miles an hour before he could blink, right? His eyes were bulging out of his head and we’re making all the motherfucking lights. The car is moving so fast and low it’s just whistling. We’re going real fast and run up on a light that changes and I got to hit my brakes, right? But I know what I got, and I know the brakes are going to hold and we’re going to stop on a motherfucking dime. So I gear down from about sixty miles an hour and stop on a dime . . . like I knew it would, and Jimmy just couldn’t believe it.” Next to them were two cops, who rousted them looking for drugs (the two musicians had pursued both music and heroin together in the past; Heath was on parole, and Davis was six years past his habit, though cocaine was part of his life). The cops found nothing, but as always, Davis was a Black man with power, style, and speed to spare, and they were there. “Man, it was a drag.”
Ferrari 275 GTB/4 It’s worth only a fraction of the vaunted 250 GTO, but the 275 GTB/4 is even more beautiful. A later owner of Davis’s 275 chopped off its roof to make it look like a NART Spyder.
Illustration By Bruce Morser
TheFerrari 275 was one of a handful that Davis owned—there was a 308 and a Testarossa in his collection, along with his first car, a 1948 Dodge convertible that Sonny Rollins nicknamed the “Blue Demon.” They used to roll around town copping heroin in it, but soon enough the dope meant that car was repossessed.
The propulsion he found so captivating in cars—the feeling of moving forward—turned to his music. In the mid-Fifties, after a decade of playing that included the landmark Birth of the Cool sessions, Davis began playing with a mute, cultivating a whole new mystique of quiet, stealthy precision.
“In a time when the trumpet player symbolized a certain kind of modern man—a high, loud, and virile player, technically proficient, a master of this piece of instrumental machinery—Miles played soft and low, turning the trumpet into an organic extension of himself, hitting wrong notes along the way as though to remind the audience that it was a human performance and not a didactic essay on modernism,” wrote John Szwed in the biography So What: The Life of Miles Davis.
Playing with a mute allowed him to push his horn right up to the microphone when recording, which created a new level of intimacy. It also created a great sense of anticipation around his every pause. “He sensed that a mike could be used like a close-up lens in motion pictures, focusing and amplifying small gestures and emotions,” Szwed wrote. “When people play with mutes, everything sounds relaxed,” the pianist, arranger, composer, and Davis confidant Gil Evans said. “But with Miles there’s an extraordinary tension.”
Davis began using a trumpet mute in the mid-Fifties, and it became a fundamental part of his sound for the remainder of his career.
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Davis kicked heroin and became serious about boxing around the same time, in 1954. He said it was the example of middleweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson—a glamorous ladies man when on the town and a no-smiling champion in the ring—that helped him do it. Davis became friends with Sugar Ray, watching him train and hanging out at the bar Robinson owned on Seventh Avenue and 123rd Street in Harlem. Like Davis, Robinson was an immense car fan, famously buying a 1950 Cadillac and having it painted a shade of pink to match a tie he liked. When around 1960 Davis bought the building at 312 West 77th Street in Manhattan, a five-story former Russian Orthodox church, he put a music room and a gym in the basement. There he’d begin his days jumping rope, doing bag work, and using a rowing machine. “You have to have rhythm and good time to do both,” he said, comparing boxing to music. “Doing exercise makes you think clear and your blood circulate. It makes you think stronger, feel stronger, and you can play whatever instrument you play with greater strength, whether it’s right or wrong.” Boxing, he said, was “like practicing a musical instrument; you have to keep practicing, over and over again.”
He saw in boxing the flow state—that feeling of energized, focused immersion that can transform or slow time, leaving more room to engage both intellect and instinct, or bringing a sense of ease and play to split-second reactions. The flow state—the hyperfocus that race-car drivers also search for—provides common ground in horseback riding, fast cars, boxing, and musical improvisation.
Ferrari Testarossa Davis really embraced the Eighties. He owned a cheese-grater Testarossa and appeared, in the role of a pimp, on the era’s quintessential television program, Miami Vice.
On the night of August 18, 1969, Davis and some of his band ran through a tune or two at his home and then sat watching fight films. The next day they began the recording sessions for a new album project. It was known at first as Listen to This, but as it grew in size and scope from a single to a double album, it acquired a new title: Bitches Brew.
More than a decade before, Davis saw Les Ballets Africains from Guinea, and he was electrified by the way the drummers layered polyrhythms that both drove and reacted to the dancers’ movements. “I didn’t want to copy that, but I got a concept from it,” he remembered. Throughout the Sixties, he shifted his music away from the melodic and toward the rhythmic, particularly once 17-year-old drummer Tony Williams (“one of the baddest motherfuckers who had ever played a set of drums”) joined his band in 1963. Williams played polyrhythms all the time, and he played on top of the beat, just ahead of it, giving everything an edge. On the title track of 1968’s Nefertiti, Davis told the band that the horns would play saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s melody, not solo, freeing the rhythm section—Williams, pianist Herbie Hancock, and bassist Ron Carter—to explore in any direction. It was subtly revolutionary; without changing the instrumentation or volume of his group in any way, Davis completely inverted jazz.
And then he began to change the instrumentation and volume of his group, composing and recording with a Fender Rhodes electric piano and adding electric bass and guitar into the mix.
Probably the only time Davis went slowly in a car was when he was not behind the wheel.
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“I was beginning to listen to a lot of James Brown,” he remembered. He was also beginning to see the woman who would become his second wife, Betty Mabry, whose impact on him was immense. She was a model, a singer, and a songwriter. She introduced him to Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix—not just to their music, but to Stone and Hendrix themselves—and he began to shop where Hendrix shopped, trading custom-made Italian suits for African dashikis. Mabry appears on the cover of Davis’s Filles de Kilimanjaro; the final cut, “Mademoiselle Mabry,” recorded in September 1968, was based on Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary.”
“I wanted to make the sound more like rock,” Davis said of his next album, In a Silent Way, released in 1969. It was possible to miss this intention. The music was—as the title indicated—contemplative, a combination of psychedelia’s exploration of inner space and James Brown’s rhythm innovations. But with Bitches Brew, there was no mistaking the intention. For one thing, the guitarist John McLaughlin, who played with a delicate touch on In a Silent Way, was unleashed here, delivering sharp rhythm chords and solo excursions at the edge of feedback, sometimes slipping over that edge, his guitar matching the aggressive power of Davis’s trumpet blasts. This music wasn’t for contemplation. This was music for conjuring, recalling nothing so much as Davis’s walks through the Arkansas darkness when he was six years old. “That blues, church, back-road funk kind of thing,” he remembered in his autobiography. He’d heard the calls of ghosts in the trees mingling with the unmistakable heavy breathing of sex. Only now he was in command of the mystery, not subject to it.
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Davis thickened his sound with two drummers, two bass players, three keyboardists on electric piano, two percussionists, two reed players, and guitar. He put the drummers next to each other and arranged the musicians in a semicircle around them, with himself in the middle. And he conducted the music, gesturing with his hands or a look. “There were grunts, glances, smiles and no smiles,” said keyboardist Chick Corea. “Miles communicated, but not on a logical or analytical level.”
Some of the musicians had rehearsed this music, but not all. The element of the unknown was crucial here, with the musicians working from what Davis called musical sketches—simple chords—and given general instructions about tone color, nothing more. There were no set structures, no verses or choruses. The music lived in the moment, and the musicians later said they had no real sense of the final production. In part this was because Davis and his producer, Teo Macero, used the studio itself to process the sound and edit takes. But really it was because there had never been music like this before.
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Bitches Brew was released in March 1970. The next month found Davis at San Francisco’s Fillmore West, opening for the Grateful Dead; in June, he was at the Fillmore East in Manhattan. Both were recorded for live albums. In August, a year after the Bitches Brew sessions, Davis played in Tanglewood, alongside Santana.
Davis drove there in a Lamborghini and arrived late, annoying the famously volatile promoter, Bill Graham. “The concert was outdoors—there was a dirt road,” Davis remembered. “I drove down that with all this dust flying everywhere. I pulled up in this cloud of dust and Bill was there waiting for me. When I got out I had on this full-length animal-skin coat. Bill’s looking at me like he wants to get mad, right? So I say to him, ‘What is it, Bill? You were waiting for somebody else to get out of that car?’ And that just cracked him up.”
Bitches Brew opened a door. In the studio and on the road, Davis would realize better versions of this sound—particularly on Jack Johnson, his 1971 tribute to the man who, in 1908, had become the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion. Davis pursued this sound relentlessly for five years, until his withdrawal from public life in 1975. It was music that seemed to have purpose but not structure, rhythm but not melody. Some misheard it as Davis trying to keep up. “I don’t play rock, I play black,” he said, and to some extent this music was the realization of the concept that came to him watching Les Ballets Africains years before. It had no clear beginnings or endings (“I never end songs,” he said; “they just keep going on”), just endless rhythm vamps supporting horns, keyboardists, and guitarists, an epic extension of all the Afro-futurist ideals that Hendrix didn’t live long enough to enact.
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It was demanding of both the musicians and the audience, and the way it erased boundaries—between jazz and rock, the past and the future—took its toll. In 1975, Davis was burned out, his body ravaged by sickle cell anemia, operations to relieve resulting joint pain, and alcohol and drugs. He disappeared into his Upper West Side home, lost in a haze of cocaine, heroin, and Heineken.
When he returned, in 1981, his new album, The Man with the Horn, was preceded by a four-night stand in Boston. It was a celebration, and he announced his return by showing up each night in style. “I had bought a brand-new, canary-yellow 308 GTSi Ferrari sports coupe, with a targa top,” he remembered. “The rest of the band had flown up to the gig, but I wanted everyone to see me arriving to work in my new Ferrari. I wanted them to know that I was really back, even if I was only staying right across the street from the club and could have just walked across the street every night. A little show biz don’t hurt sometimes.”
Keyword: Miles Davis Was a Secret Car Enthusiast Superhero