The film revisits the music and memories of Miles Davis – Daily News – Lisbon

Miles Davis is the main character “Miles Ahead”.

How to make a portrait of Miles Davis ( 1926-1991) in a 100 minute film? The question, needless to emphasize it involves a radical challenge. seminal figure in jazz history, Miles left us a heritage of such a rich way of invention and contrasts that any biography stands to be a confession of impotence against the genius of the biography. To interpret and direct the film Miles Ahead (opening today), Don Cheadle chose, of course, one of the less obvious ways -. And loaded results of touching emotions

The film adopts 1957 album title that marked the beginning of collaboration with Gil Evans: their arrangements even gave Miles Ahead a peculiar structure suite , in ten “gaits”, making it an emblematic moment jazz history. Anyway, the Cheadle film begins in the second half of the 70s, a few years after the release of prodigious Bitches Brew (1970), especially cruel time for Miles, away from the public and regular recordings , living in intimacy a dramatic drug addiction

discovered a torn and unstable Miles who, moreover, had seen some of his most daring fusion experiments funk and electronic. – remember the example model of Get up with I t, album released in 1974 – attacked by various prejudices. Cheadle not only avoids any form of sanctification of the character, how you use this where part of the action to recover some strong moments of the past Miles.

The film develops, so through a zigzag by applying some suggestive mounting the projects in the troubled times of the marriage of Miles and Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). Marked by infidelity Miles, and also by a growing drug addiction, this is a musically amazing period in which, among others, he edits the album Sketches of Spain (1960) and Someday My Prince Will Come (1961), this with the very French on the cover. Everything takes place under the auspices of Columbia at a time of many musical seizures, even with a suggestive situation where a wall, appear side by side the covers of Sketches of Spain and The Times They Are a-Changin “, third studio album of Bob Dylan, released in 1964.

Feel the music

not having been easy to implement, the Miles Ahead project illustrates one way something marginal in the current American production. the realization of Cheadle bet in a register which is contrary to the easy consecration as trivially data accumulation “informative.” Even if it is for their emotional rhymes, the film ends even for helping us to feel the density of Miles music, according to a logic that has something paradoxically journalism. in this regard, it will be interesting to note that Dave Braden, the journalist played by Ewan McGregor, is an invented character, plays a key role in how Miles Ahead exposes the contrast between public image and private truth.

Going back in time, we can say that Miles Ahead is as an important moment in cinematic knowledge of Miles Davis, whose compositions are represented in diverse securities (including also as an actor in the Australian film Dingo , Rolf de Heer, released in 1991). It is worth remembering that in your Discover Forreste r (2000), sometimes regarded as an “indirect” approach to life of writer JD Salinger, director Gus Van Sant used several themes from the time of Bitches Brew . Not to forget, of course, one of the titles announced the French New Wave – Weekend in Funicular (1958), Louis Malle – has original soundtrack of Miles Davis

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