Miles arrives in Malad

My collector’s box set containing all Columbia albums of Miles Davis arrived on Thursday.

And I just finished listening to The Miles Davis/Tadd Dameron Quintet. These were the May 1949 recordings from the ‘Paris Festival International de Jazz’.

Throughout, I was reminded of Miles’ romance with France. How lovingly he wrote about Paris in his biography; about his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso; about his affair with Juliette Gréco.

This music is from the time when Miles first stopped thinking of himself as a ‘black entertainer’. With Sartre and Picasso at his side, he was an ‘artist’ among artists. With Juliette, he was neither black nor white. Existentialism ruled among the intellectuals of Paris then. And at 23, Miles had found himself.

No wonder, on his eventual return to racist America, he underwent a huge depression. He stopped snorting and began shooting himself in the veins. For the next four years, a genius was wasted; looking for the next fix in the alleys of Harlem.

The first time I paid serious attention to bebop was a decade ago when I started listening systematically to the complete recordings of Charlie Parker on Verve. An investment well made.

It was then that I noticed a really intense trumpet improvising on Charlie’s lead. I got curious. The liner notes confirmed my suspicion. It indeed was Miles Davis!

I am not gifted with an ear that can pick out individuals in a jam session. But somehow, I have mostly been able to spot Miles; however economical his blowing might be.

Here is the trick: Whether it was 1949 or 1991, Miles has never been heard to play without meaning every note he blew. He just cannot go through the motions without throwing himself bodily into the music he makes. Ask any professional musician and he will tell you how difficult it is to stay fresh with a song that he has played a hundred times to imperfection. Yet, Miles always played without a wrinkle of weariness.

Once again, this Sunday morning, I felt the nobility of that breath. That breath over golden brass.

Two showstoppers in one day

Here is a very old post that was written but never posted...

I have begun reading The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life. Frankly I was not expecting anything powerful. It is one of those books that you pick up because you are tripping about its subject matter then. (I have just emerged from Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and a consequent rereading of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene).

So when I opened The Way of the Cell, I was foolish to judge before reading, not just the book but its author too. After all, Franklin M Harold is not exactly a household name like Darwin and Dawkins are.

Nevertheless, Harold has stunned me: Twice. That too in the first 10 pages that I have managed so far!

Every now and then we come across books that become difficult to read only because they are so well written. Because they make you stop and wonder so often that you cannot read fast enough.

Consider this showstopper...

‘Like a flame or an eddy, an organism is not an object so much as a process, sustained by the continuous passage through it of both matter and energy.’

Now you see why it is difficult to continue after such poetry, bang in the middle of a lecture on molecular biology.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger coined the word ‘negentropy’ to describe living matter’s habit of flouting the second law of thermodynamics. Even if you are like Harold, someone who has spent years worrying about bioenergetics, it is unlikely that you would think of flames and eddy currents as serious metaphors for life!

The second showstopper is not actually the words of Harold, but those of Hilaire Belloc. The quotation opens chapter 2:

‘The man behind the microscope
Has this advice for you:
Never ask what something Is
Just ask, what does it Do?’

Now this one was a total digression for me.

I design and run Internet products and services for a living. Very often we quibble too much about the position, colour, size or any such quality of a single tiny feature of a Web page. The devil, truly, is in the detail.

So, the next time the team is squinting through a microscope, pondering over a tiny feature of a Web page, the answer will come from a simple question: ‘Just ask, what does it Do?’

I hope the rest of the book is as rewarding as the first 10 pages are.