Miles' Women (sorry, but the original title was pretty lame -- mod)

Miles Davis' autobiography with Quincy Trope is a great read and Jack Chambers wrote a two part biography that is also worth reading and gets into more detail about his bands and recording sessions.

The Ian Carr biog is not a disgrace. And John Swzed, who wrote a BRILLIANT bk on Sun Ra, published another Miles biog last year - haven't read it, but I'd like to.

Miles made a point of featuring black women on his alb covers from 'Someday My Prince Will Come' onwards.

It's a long time since I read it, Andrew, so I might change my mind if I read it now, but I thought it was quite a bit better than your faint praise suggests. I've never been able to finish his autobiography, the ugliness of the prose style just wore me down.

Ha, James St. James to thread.

There is also a rather po-faced bk called 'Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis 1967-1991' by an English geezer called Paul Tinglin. He makes great play of writing from the perspective of a rock/prog muso rather than a jazzbo, but then treats Teo Macero's splice-dice editing as a sin against 'live'-in-studio performances. The 'analysis' is woefully undercooked and bizarrely drifts off into Buddhist cliche at a moment's notice. But saying all that, it is the ONLY published bk I know of that treats the post-2nd Quartet recs in any kind of depth, and Tinglin's breakdown of the edits (far more than I'd ever thought) that are all over In A Silent Way, Jack Johnson, Live Evil etc is really fascinating, if only for (inadvertently) re-emphasizing just how far-out some of Teo's methods/thinking were. Tinglin has interviewed lots of ppl who've not really been tracked down by previous Miles biographers (Michael Henderson, for starters)and he is v. fair and scrupulous abt those 'difficult' 80s recs. The chapter abt 'On the Corner' - tho' full of more wiffle, and a disdain for disco - goes some way to explaining why that rec is so interesting and out-of-whack even for a 70s Miles alb - it was the one most self-consciously designed to marry Stockhausen and Sly Stone, and once again Macero was the X-Factor/remixer.

The Carr book has the most dirt, I think. A tedious amount of it, in fact. Cocaine abuse just isn't very interesting.

The Szwed bio is decent but slightly disappointing, given how good his Sun Ra book was. There is a brilliant chapter in the middle that's a kind of freeform meditation on Miles' performance of his persona, but the rest is a bit of a clip job. He does give the 70s stuff a very fair shake though, and as a piece of music criticism, as opposed to biography, his book is much better than Carr's (Carr uses a cliched, simplistic West vs. Africa framework to write about Miles' musical evolution and it gets quite annoying).

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