“Take it from there,” Miles implied, lowering his trumpet with
one hand, though not fully tipping the gold glinted bell. Then he
disappeared into the dark. It was as if his horn had pierced and ripped
open the night, that he had illumined and carved shapes out of the
darkness in such a way that the pianist, the drummer and bassist, left alone on the
bandstand, one by one, solo by solo, could follow to rivet and
variously embellish and color the language - the house - that Miles had
temporarily built, indeed, one from which all of us in the audience
could be with, take courage, and sequester some of that fierceness as
our own. To see Miles Davis perform was to hear and see someone put the
fire of a dragon into the sky. That was one winter night in 1968 at the
Both/And, a now long gone jazz club on Divisadero Street, San Francisco.
Stephen Vincent
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
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