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Don Cheadle's "Miles Ahead"

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Miles Ahead, in which the Academy Award winning actor portrays the legendary trumpeter, marks the directorial debut of Don Cheadle, who co-wrote the script.

The independently financed production was shot in Cincinnati. Co-starring with Don Cheadle are Ewan McGregor, Michael Stuhlbarg and Emayatzy Corinealdi. The production capped a nine year journey to the big screen that started with Davis' posthumous induction into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

Rather than encapsulating the entirety of Miles Davis' life, Miles Ahead (previously known as Kill The Trumpet Player) will focus on the five-year span where Davis stopped making music—known as his "silent period"—and his troubled marriage to Frances Taylor Davis. All of this eventually led up to the creation of Davis' 1969 jazz-rock album In a Silent Way which is regarded by music writers as Davis' first fusion recording.



The picture is among a number of recent film endeavors centering on iconic black musicians—all of them revolutionary figures who were considered ahead of their time. One of the most interesting is the Quincy Jones produced Keep On Keepin' On (the Clark Terry story); and, the most successful film thus far, Straight Outta Compton (a biopic about Dr. Dre and the iconic group N.W.A.) connecting best with a wide audience thus far.

During the past 10 years there have been at least five Miles Davis projects in development that included: the George Tillman project (tentatively called Miles); and, the Quincy Troupe project called Miles and Me, that I was presented in October 2011 for project finance purposes. Sadly, because of adverse logistics, it was one of the projects that got away... Miles Davis is an amazing story.

The Quincy Troupe project (which was supported by the French distributor Wild Bunch) was a candid account of Troupe's friendship with Miles Davis that revealed a portrait of a great musician and an intimate study of a unique relationship. As Davis' collaborator on Miles: The Autobiography, Troupe had exceptional access to Miles.

The script went beyond the life portrayed in the autobiography to describe in detail the process of Davis' spectacular creativity and the joys and difficulties his passionate, contradictory temperament posed to their friendship. It showed how Miles Davis, both as a black man and an artist, influenced not only Quincy Troupe but whole generations.

Troupe wrote that Miles Davis was "irascible, contemptuous, brutally honest, ill-tempered when things didn't go his way, complex, fair-minded, humble, kind and a son-of-a-bitch." That script captured and conveyed the power of the musician's presence, the mesmerizing force of his personality, and the restless energy that lay at the root of his creativity. I look forward to the October release of Miles Ahead. And there will no doubt be legions of naysayers who will object to the way the Davis story is told, given the kind of passionate following such artists cultivate.

Miles Davis is a jazz giant, perhaps one of the most important musicians and cultural figures of the 20th Century. I would compare his to Mozart and Beethoven of the classical and romantic eras. Consequently, reducing someone's life like Miles' into a two-hour film, is a huge challenge.

Don Cheadle, who earned an Oscar nod for his portrayal of a noble hero in Hotel Rwanda, arouses and torments in House of Lies, and kicked some serious bad guy ass in Iron Man 3, has now played one of the coolest American musicians ever in Miles Ahead.

Note: Cheadle was approached to give a direct interview for this article; however, regrettably his production schedule and the movie's 10 October release date precluded an interview before the movie's release. However, we were able to source other online quotes from Don about the production of Miles Ahead to supplement and inform this article.

According to Entertainment Weekly, Cheadle pitched Miles Ahead like this: "It's not a biopic, per se. It's a gangster pic. It's a movie that Miles Davis would have wanted to star in. Without throwing history away, we're trying to shuffle it and make it more cubist. The bulk of it takes place in '79, in a period where he actually wasn't playing. But we traverse a lot of his life, but it's not a cradle to grave story."

Hmm...

For those who do not know, Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926-September 28, 1991) was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader and composer. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, together with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion.

In 2006, Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which recognized him as "one of the key figures in the history of jazz."

In 2008, his 1959 album Kind of Blue received its fourth platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), for shipments of at least four million copies in the United States. It is the best selling jazz album of all time.

On December 15, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a symbolic resolution recognizing and commemorating the album Kind of Blue on its 50th anniversary, "honoring the masterpiece and reaffirming jazz as a national treasure."

Davis' career spanned over a half century, and the highlights are many, from his pioneering Birth of the Cool sessions starting in 1949, to his first quintet with John Coltrane in the '50s, his orchestral collaborations with Gil Evans later in the decade, the second great quintet with Herbie Hancock in the '60s, and his electro-funk "Prince of Darkness" phase.

The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll noted "Miles Davis played a crucial and inevitably controversial role in every major development in jazz since the mid-'40s, and no other jazz musician has had so profound an effect on rock. Miles Davis was the most widely recognized jazz musician of his era, an outspoken social critic and an arbiter of style—in attitude and fashion—as well as music."



Cheadle's take on Davis, co-written with Steven Baigelman, leans toward the more conceptual, juxtaposing two periods in the trumpeter's life. "The central story takes place in two days, before he made his comeback (in 1980)," Cheadle says.

The "B story," reflects back to 1956-66, which parallels Davis' relationship with his first wife, dancer Frances Taylor Davis. "She's sort of the one that got away," Cheadle explains, "the love of his life." Zoe Saldana was originally identified to play Frances, but the role ultimately went to Emayatzy Corinealdi (from the Sundance hit The Middle of Nowhere).

Sets and locations in Cincinnati double for Davis' New York Brownstone, the office of Columbia Records executive George Butler, and for performance spaces in the flashback sequences that could make up as much as 40% of the film.

Miles Ahead should not be considered a biopic, but rather a forensic study of the thoughts and motivations behind Davis and his music. "It's like wall-to-wall truth, not wall-to-wall facts," explains Cheadle, who says the script ideas he rejected were too traditional in tone, and too aggressive in scope. "We're much closer to something like historical fiction, where this is a composition of our making, using Miles as our inspiration, our muse, to tell a story from our perspective."

According to a recent article in Daily Variety, at the time of Davis' Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2006, his nephew, Vince Wilburn Jr., a producer on the movie, was asked if a Miles Davis film was in the works. And, as Cheadle recalls now—adding that he didn't know it then—Wilburn had said, " 'Yes, and Don Cheadle's going to play him.'"

Wilburn, who played a role in coaxing the man he calls "Uncle Miles" out of retirement in 1980, confirms the story. "We just knew (Cheadle) would fit," he says, calling the actor's performance "his interpretation; his spin." Adds Erin Davis, the trumpeter's son and also a producer on the feature: "I can say that the direction of the film is going to be what Miles would have liked."

There are many reasons Miles Davis stopped performing and recording in 1974, including serious health issues, creative burnout, continued hostility from critics who refused to embrace his electronic music, and perhaps just an old-fashioned midlife crisis (Davis was about to turn 50 at the time). "Miles had this incredible facility and ability to move to the next thing and the next thing, and not play it safe and not repeat himself," says Cheadle.

Some disagreed with Davis' ability to embrace sometimes extreme change. I can't help but recall a scene from Davis' autobiography of a confrontation between Miles and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis: "All of a sudden I feel this presence coming up on me, this body movement, and I see that the crowd is kind of wanting to cheer or gasp....Then Wynton whispers in my ear—and I'm still trying to play—'They told me to come up here...' I said, 'Man, what the fuck are you doing up here on stage? Get the fuck off the stage!'"

All parties involved in the incident recall Miles stopping the music when Wynton began to play, then refusing to resume until Wynton exited. It was a quick, heated dramatic skirmish, but the story spread. This is an example of Davis' uncanny ability to embrace changing variables and circumstances and to incorporate it into his music. The Marsalis encroachment, brief dialog, silence and resumption of the music could be view as a bridge in the song.

Cheadle says he sought directing counsel from some of the helmers he's worked with, including: Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson, Carl Franklin and George Clooney, who knows what it's like to juggle roles from behind and in front of the camera.

"I knew it on paper; I knew what our schedule was, which was ambitious to say the least," Cheadle says of the 30-day shoot. "But experience is the real kicker when you're on the set. It's like, 'Wow, OK, there's no pause'—and trying to do things that are in some ways diametrically opposed; trying to be immersed in the acting but also have some sort of 10,000-foot perspective."

Cheadle says he neither glossed over nor dwelled on Davis' dissolute lifestyle, including excessive cocaine abuse and certain misogynistic tendencies, which the trumpeter described with blunt candor in his autobiography Miles. "We're dealing with everything," he says. "But it's not the point of that period."



Miles Ahead is truly an independent production. According to Indiegogo's head of film, Marc Hofstatter, the 2,000-plus funders were driven by social media, with Cheadle boasting some 240,000 Twitter followers, and the Miles Davis website claiming almost two million likes on Facebook. Cheadle invested his own money in the production, but wouldn't reveal how much. The rest was covered via independent financing from Bifrost Pictures, with a favorable Ohio tax rebate. IM Global handled foreign pre-sales.

Herbie Hancock's involvement in the film has been described as everything from serving as a consultant to a technical advisor, although he describes his role as non-specific. Whatever original music is being done for the film is from jazz crossover artist Robert Glasper. "The only music I've heard so far is what Robert has done," says Hancock, who was drawn into the project in its very early stages. "It sampled some ideas that Don had discussed with me earlier."

Adds Cheadle: "Robert Glasper is kind of taking point on actually creating the music and playing that music. Herbie is kind of our shepherd and godfather, making sure we don't fall off the beam."

Miles' road to the big screen was not easy. Hollywood producers had been trying to produce a Miles Davis biopic for more than 20 years. After the Davis estate hooked up with Cheadle, it shopped the idea to the studios, but ultimately decided to take the independent route. "I always felt that if we could do it with creative control, where people like Don could see it through in his own vision, we would have a focused direction," Erin Davis says.

Wilburn gets more specific. "Hollywood didn't buy it," he says. "I stopped going to the pitches, because it was too frustrating to try to convince people who Miles Davis was."

For his part, Hancock is confident that Cheadle's take on Davis properly captures the musician's spirit. "It's not a documentary of Miles Davis' life," he says. "It's a story that's got its inspiration from Miles' music—that kind of in-the-moment creative flow that Miles had. The thing I like about that type of approach is that we don't have to worry about people saying, 'Wait a minute, it didn't happen this way.'"

But Boyd, who has read the script, is skeptical. "It seems as though the period of time that they picked—the late '70s—is probably the least significant era of Miles' music," he says. "If this film actually does make it to the screen, there's the likelihood that we won't see any more Miles Davis biopics any time soon. And so the legacy of Miles Davis is resting thus far on this one film, and I don't think based on what I've seen, this film serves the purpose of properly representing what Miles Davis represented to American music and American culture."

Cheadle is more concerned with making a movie that's entertaining than with giving a history lesson. "I don't think the movie can tarnish the legacy," he says. "To me, Miles' legacy is his music."

For its part, the Davis family seems anything but displeased by what has transpired. "I want people to understand how complex he was," Erin Davis says about his expectations of the film, "and I want them to leave the movie wanting to know more."

Cheadle is well aware of the tremendous risks involved. "I know I'm dancing in a minefield on this one," he says, "but I'd own it."

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