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Dave Liebman Interview (1/99)
5. Miles
RK: When you look back on your time with Miles, what stands out in your memory?
DL: I'm doing a clinic tomorrow out here in Allentown (Pennsylvania) that's called the Dark Magnus Workshop. And this guy here that runs a school for kids thought it would be great to run something about that period of Miles I was involved in which has gotten a lot of attention nowadays because of re-releases and the rappers and people discovering the early '70s and Miles.
RK: Rappers discovering Bitches Brew?
DL: Well, Bitches Brew and on. Especially the stage I was in was even more chaotic than Bitches Brew. Get Up With It and On the Corner and all that and they're discovering this and seeing it as a harbinger of what they've been doing. Not only rap, but let's say acid jazz and all that. I was just thinking that probably the one thing that I remember most or that I got out of it besides musical things was that Miles couldn't care less. You have to keep in proportion the fact that he did change mid-course from pure jazz to rock-fusion, but he didn't seem to really give a shit about the audience.
RK: At that point, he used to turn his back on the audience.
DL: He really didn't care. I mean, he really played for the musicians. He was a very canny and sly kind of guy, and in the back of his mind, he knew what was gettin' over, and what wasn't. But I got to tell you, my time with him wasn't a very popular period. It wasn't like people were standing, clapping, and cheering. No standing ovations; no encores. I mean, we went on, did our fifty, or hour, or hour-and-ten depending on the night, and walked off and people were mostly like dribbling or dragging out of the place. They were hardly applauding even. The music was a shock.
RK: Some of them must've been resentful.
DL: Well, it was a shock. Some of it was incoherent. Technologically, it wasn't refined. It was loud and raucous. And it was not really organized very tightly, which is probably what the charm of it is now, in a certain way. But in that period, it was very off-putting. I mean, he just kept doing it. Personally, I would've been hard-pressed to keep going out night after night and not let that passive reaction have an effect upon what I would present as an artist. And I must say that was an amazing lesson to me. Of course, he was Miles, with 30 years behind him; he didn't have to care anymore what people thought. But to see somebody go out and just do what he wanted to, regardless of the reaction, was amazing. And it made me think very differently about it. This is Miles Davis, after all. This isn't somebody on my corner. This is Miles Davis who's playing for himself and a few people. And I guess that's one of the kind of ways my vision has been formed.
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