Miles Davis Interview, Rolling Stone 1969

[Mark Stryker]

Amazing Miles Davis interview with Don Demichael in Rolling Stone, 1969. Revealing scene setting, candid, and extended riffs on race, rock, and a bunch of other things. Also, a lot of stuff about, um ... (checks notes) ... Buddy Rich. 

Spoiler: Miles digs him.

Excerpts:
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Miles Davis at leisure is quite different from Miles Davis at work. Gracious, talkative, humorous and warmly human, he is excellent company. When he was at The Plugged Nickel, we spent two afternoons and a night hanging out. The afternoons were spent for the most part in his Volkswagen bus (he still has the Ferrari) driving around the South Side as he talked and answered questions, a unique milieu in which to conduct an interview, it must be admitted. The night was passed at The Plugged Nickel where the Buddy Rich band worked on Miles' night off. That night Miles sat slumped at a table in front of the stand, not saying much but watching Rich like a hawk. (A good portion of the audience watched Miles watching.) Rich has seldom played better, and Miles made occasional knowing comments about what the master drummer was doing.

"Did'cha notice the way he cut into the band there?"

"Hear what that motherfucker did then? Just that little cymbal thing and it swung the whole fucking band." 
...

Before we got there, a car stopped beside us, and a man jumped out. It was Larry Jackson, who had played drums with Miles when both were boys in East St. Louis. He is now president of two Chicago locals of the United Steelworkers, a fact that Miles kidded him about unrelentingly. Rich's name came up, and Jackson said, "Miles always loved Buddy. He used to tell me all the time, 'Play like Buddy.' He always wanted the drummer to play like Buddy Rich."

---

(Miles): 
"Buddy Rich is some different shit, man. How many Buddy Riches you got? You got one Buddy Rich. I'll tell you one thing, if Buddy's got a black audience, he plays different. You just get vibrations from black people that are swingier than from white. That's why when Mike Bloomfield plays before a black audience, his shit's gonna come out black."

His own group's playing for a black audience is not much different.

"There'd be just a slight change," he answered. "We'd just tighten up a little more, y'know. It's an inner thing. It's just like if you're playing basketball and you got five black brothers on the team, they got some inner shit going that you can't get from a white guy. Now, when you get a white guy in, you usually get him for strength or for some sort of shot . . . he's got a good eye or something. But that inner thing and that speed and that slick shit -- you got to have them brothers there because there are things that they do that they did when they were little kids that the white boy don't know about."

Miles had hired the pianist Bill Evans, who is white, for the simplest possible reason: "I liked the way he sounded.

"But he doesn't sound now like he did when he played with us. He sounds white now."

But his ex-drummer, Tony Williams, a black man -- that's another matter. Williams is just possibly Miles' favorite musician. "Tony can swing and play his ass off. Tony Williams is a motherfucker. To me, the way you think about Buddy Rich is the way I think about Tony Williams. I don't think there's a drummer alive can do what Tony Williams can do.

"When I play, I want whatever is going on to be going on. I don't want it to be no . . . well, to say bullshit is too easy an out. I want it to be . . . That's why I like Buddy and I like Tony, because if they do something, they're doing it. They're doing it to finish it, y'know. To end it. You know what I mean? If you were boxing a guy and he kept pressing you and you knew he wasn't gonna lighten up unless you get him off your ass by slipping and sliding, setting him up and feinting him, well, that's what Buddy and Tony are. They play the fucking drums. But they're different. They're the same, but they're different. Tony plays more rhythms and times than Buddy.

"Buddy plays off his snare drum, but Tony can play all over the fucking drums -- but with a sound that matches the chords that you're playing. Buddy doesn't play any fucking chords."

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20090126102156/http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/milesdavis/articles/story/9437639/miles_davis_the_rolling_stone_interview

Edited June 11, 2019 by Mark Stryker

[Gheorghe]

It took me some time to dig Buddy Rich. I was always listening to drummers like Max Roach, Roy Haynes, of course Tony Williams and so on, but after many years I started to hear what Buddy Rich does.

I remember when I first heard the record "Bird ´n Diz" where Norman Granz put Bird and Diz and Monk together with Buddy Rich I thought it´s a musical wrong choice, but now if I listen to it, it makes sense to me.

And wasn´t it Fats Navarro, who on a live performance shouted out Buddy Rich´s name when Rich starts his drum solo?

[Gheorghe]

I´m quite surprised there are not more answers. This is about MILES DAVIS, not about some Mr. Unknown, and really interesting. I never thought Miles would say so much about Buddy Rich......

Edited June 17, 2019 by Gheorghe

[JSngry]

I heard some Lionel Hampton Groove Merchant cut blind at a buddy's house one time. I thought the drummer must have been Tony Williams. It was Buddy Rich.