Jazz by Grella: Leadership Secrets of Miles Davis

First, the good news: the Library of Congress last month added new albums to its National Recording Registry, which preserves the most important and salient examples of American audio culture. One of the new entries is Miles Davis’ monumental, complex, darkly thrilling Bitches Brew. It’s a testament to the brilliance and possibilities of this country that it produced Miles and that he could make one of the most abstract, avant-garde audio documents of the 20th century, and that the album became a popular success. That says a lot of things about music—immediately about the nature of public taste and curiosity, about how “art” and” pop” can just be matters of perspective, and that there’s no such thing as difficult music—and about the business side of culture, what well-compensated people can and cannot imagine (much more of the latter than the former) and how much daring they have (essentially none).

The elevation to the Library of Congress—the second Davis album there after Kind of Blue—comes at an ominous time. The new federal regime is erasing non-white culture from national institutions, from the Department of Defense to the Smithsonian Institute. The Library of Congress is one of the great public resources, will it even last? It is officially the research service for Congress, an institution run by loudmouthed know-nothings and timorous seat warmers, and is the de facto national public library for you and me, taxpayers. In American history, libraries have been a backbone of democracy and you can tell a politician’s commitment to our national principles through how they treat them. If Andrew Cuomo’s campaign has suggested to the New York Public Library that they charge for services, and New Yorkers seem to be inclined to vote for this man who hates us and wants to make our lives worse, then how much time does the Library of Congress have left before its contents are sold off to plutocrats and it’s replaced by the illiterate banalities of AI?

I wrote a book on the album for the 33-1/3 series, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, and so NPR interviewed me—and separately guitarist John McLaughlin, drummer Jack DeJohnette, and writer Ricky Vincent—about all this for their Sounds of America program (the streaming archive is at https://the1a.org/segments/the-sounds-of-america-bitches-brew/). One of the questions I was glad to get (and that was cut out of the final show) was about Miles as a bandleader. I was glad to talk about that because along with being one of the greatest musicians of the recording era, he was one of the most important bandleaders.

The producer asked me what “bandleader” meant, and we talked a little about that elusive quality, a thing you see in results but seems unquantifiable, or with no discernible process. In jazz, the great bandleaders include Miles, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus, musicians who had a vision and realized it by maintaining historically great ensembles across the years. Miles had early training, at the age of nineteen serving as Charlie Parker’s music director, and eventually his longest tenured trumpet player, then organizing his Nonet and helping to create cool jazz three years later.

Consider that an advanced apprenticeship, quickly parlayed into leading two of the finest small groups in jazz history, his first Quintet with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones; then the second with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. Less prominent but equally important were his third, “lost” Quintet with Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, and DeJohnette, then the electric groups heard on the post-Bitches Brew albums like Jack Johnson, On the Corner, and the enthralling live-in-Japan duo of Agharta and Pangaea. These bands covered several distinct styles of playing, with members from widely separate generations and aesthetic inclinations, and the constant was not just Miles and his playing but his leadership: everything from Cookin’, recorded in 1956, to Kind of Blue (1959), to E.S.P. (1965), through Bitches Brew (1969) and Pangaea (1975) sounds like a Miles Davis album because it has the sound he wanted.

Miles spent decades navigating his own changing taste and that of the musicians and the larger country around him, defying the general downward trend in the popularity of jazz in the 1960s, responding to the avant-garde and free jazz, and to the rise of Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix. He always evaluated new ideas, improved them, and kept looking ahead. He never settled for staying in a comfortable place, and, with the second Quintet, hired musicians in no small part because they were leaving him behind and he wanted to pick up what they were doing and then move back ahead. And he never once relinquished his leadership position, nor did he ever have to exert or prove it. He was the guide, and musicians were drawn to that.

Whatever the mysteries of personality that enable this, there are lesson in his results. And they are sorely needed. There are so many books, and so many expensive graduate schools, that claim to teach leadership, it seems that everyone with credentials thinks they are a leader. But it’s not a badge you can put on your LinkedIn page, it’s something you do, you demonstrate, you accomplish. It turns out that when times are easy, anyone can call themselves a leader, and when times are tough, most of them turn out to be bosses, rulers, incapable of doing the job of dog walkers. What are the leadership characteristics Miles shows?

• Be competent: You cannot be a leader unless you have some expertise and knowledge in your chosen task.
• Know thyself: Know what you’re good at, know what you’re weak at, admit to yourself what you don’t know, and embrace learning and curiosity as part of leadership.
• Have an idea: What is it that you want to do?
• Listen: Obvious in music, but you can’t lead people unless you listen to them.
• See talent/think critically: This is a big one, because it takes confidence and self-awareness to see people who are talented, even more so, at the things you do, and it takes critical thinking to see that. It also takes critical thinking to evaluate everything you do, judge your direction and accomplishments, see what can be improved and what should change, and see the effects of your leadership. Thin-skinned, defensive, close-minded narcissists (see below) need not apply.
• Don’t give orders, lead. Don’t be a boss or a ruler, be a leader.

Let’s look at some so-called leaders who should listen to Miles Davis. What have Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries been doing to oppose the regime taking Congressional powers for itself by fiat, using secret police to abduct people and send them to concentration camps and foreign prisons—without trial or charge—deport US citizens who are also toddlers, and let Elon Musk steal your confidential personal information? When asked what he’s doing about this, Jeffries repeats “Our reaction is that Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president in modern American history,” as if he were a news reader and not someone who is paid by taxpayers to serve the needs of constituents. Meanwhile Schumer listens to the voices of an imaginary middle-aged, centrist couple he has created in his mind, and recently touted that “We sent… a very strong letter just the other day asking eight very strong questions.” That’s what you do when the product you order seems to be defective, not when you have the rare powers of a United States Senator.

In a (tiny, grudging) way I feel sorry for them. They are mediocrities, and now that the path of history demands ability, they are lost, foundering. There is a thing in life where, if you don’t exercise and challenge the mind, the way you think eventually gets frozen into set pathways and you simply cannot take in new information or change ideas about anything at all. And if you’ve got a comfortable sinecure, surrounded by yes-men, that’s guaranteed. I don’t think Jeffries’ (who is only 54) and Schumer’s brains have physically deteriorated this way, I think they can’t make the effort to think a different way because they’re not smart, have limited imaginations, and absolutely lack the values that produce the courage to truly care about anyone other than themselves. They are bosses, not leaders. We are plagued with lawyers, CEOs, university administrators, and pundits in positions society calls “leadership” and 2025 is showing just how worthless most of them are. This year, more Miles Davis.

George Grella

George Grella wrote the book on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. He write other stuff too. killyridols.substack.com/