Listenin’ to the Breeze

“Listen.” So begins Miles: The Autobiography (1989) withan imperative from the master that no right-minded jazz fan would ignore. Love him or hate him, when Miles Davis spoke to us with his horn, welistened, just as we did when the man behind the horn told his life story back in 1989.

“The greatest feeling I ever had in my life—with my clothes on—was when I first hear Diz and Bird together in St. Louis, back in 1944,” he continues. “I was just eighteen years old and had just graduated from Lincoln High School.”

Davis’s story, like those of Diz and Bird, is part of the origin story of jazz in America, one that cannot be retold enough by its progenitors.

“When I heard Diz and Bird in B’s band, I said, ‘What? What is this!?’ Man, that shit was so terrible it was scary.”

It’s a moment of pure jazz injected into the teenage bloodstream of a genius. The rest is music history—and Davis left few stones unturned in the 400-plus pages of densely and richly packed autobiography.

The world of jazz is hyper-competitive, particularly onstage where musicians aim to outplay and out-style one another. It is also a world where the footsteps and shadows of the greats like Bird and Miles are often respected almost to a fault.

This respect is part of the jazz code, a set of unwritten rules. Learning from those who practice them is a revealing glimpse into artistic life. This is the gift of Benson: The Autobiography (2014) by George Benson and Alan Goldsher: engaging stories from a talented guitarist with a mellow voice who seemed always one step behind the giants of jazz.

George Benson recounts his interactions with and feelings about many musicians from his long and remarkable life in music. In one of the book’s more memorable passages, Benson recalls getting a call from Miles asking him to join a recording session. “After I hung up, I stared at the wall for a good long while,” says Benson, “the same question blowing through my head over and over again: What am I going to play on a Miles Davis record?”

Turns out Benson was right: his role in the session ended up little more than a vamp reinforcement. “And to tell the truth,” confesses Benson, “most of what happened that afternoon and evening was well out of my comfort zone.” But Benson made his mark, laying down the guitar track for “Paraphernalia,” a cut from Davis’s 1968 classic album, Miles in the Sky—a track that opened a new chapter in Davis’s musical journey.

Later, Benson recounts getting paired with guitarist John McLaughlin for a gig at Lincoln Center. “I’m sure he [the promoter] was hoping for a guitar gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” says Benson, but both guitarists decided to take it back a notch. Afterwards, Benson wondered about the strange, sitar-sounding effects used by McLaughlin, who replied, “I don’t want people comparing us, so I did something completely different.”

Benson is dismissed by some jazz enthusiasts because of his crossover turn towards popular and mainstream music. If anything, Benson’s original sin as a jazz musician is becoming a household name. He seems to be aware of this as he tells his story in this wonderfully concise and fast-moving autobiography.

Benson rose in popularity in the mid-1970s with the release of his album Breezin’. “After twelve months,” writes Benson, “the album sold over four million copies and was nominated for five Grammy Awards.” “After that, things started changing. Drastically.” But surprisingly, these tales of drastic changes amount to little more than the final thirty-five pages of the book. The fact that Benson devotes only one fifth of the book to the last half of his career, notably the period after he became a household name, is telling. The tension between artistic and commercial success tempers the entirety of his autobiography...