Miles Davis and the Summer of ‘59

Luis Dias

Life was looking good for American jazz trumpeter, bandleader and composer Miles Davis (1926-1991) in August 1959.

His fortunes had skyrocketed after performing at the second annual Newport Jazz Festival in 1955, with a Columbia label recording contract close on its heels. His Miles Davis quintet, formed in 1955, and increased to a sextet in 1958, was making waves with each new album. And in earlier 1959, Davis recorded what many critics consider his greatest album, ‘Kind of Blue’. It remains the bestselling jazz album of all time.

But on August 25, an incident quite literally brought him down. Davis was taking a break from a recording session at the iconic Birdland nightclub in New York City for the US Armed Services. He had just escorted a white lady friend to the street, hailed her a cab and was having a smoke outside to unwind when a rookie cop Gerald Kilduff (white, of course, but it bears mentioning) told him to “move on”. Davis explained he was working at the club, and even indicated his name and picture on its marquee, to no avail. Things escalated quickly, with more police officers arriving on the scene. Witnesses say Kilduff punched Davis in the stomach with a nightstick without provocation, and that the cop was drunk, with the smell of liquor on his breath.Another officer approached Davis from behind and beat him in the head with a “billy club” (a police truncheon. I had to look that up). Davis was arrested on the charge of ‘felonious assault’ on an officer, then taken to a hospital where he received five stitches to his scalp, and later released on a $525 bail (US$4,605 in 2019 dollars). He was also stripped off his cabaret card, depriving him of the right to perform.

Many sections of the press faithfully reproduced the police version of the incident as fact, but the New York Amsterdam News carried a front-page story headlined ‘Witnesses say “It was Police Brutality”’ with a picture of trumpet-clutching Davis captioned ‘Cop Victim’ and a large headline ‘Miles Davis’ own story: “They beat on my head like a tom-tom.”’

Eventually, in January 1960, Davis was acquitted of disorderly conduct and third-degree assault.

Gerald Early in his book ‘Miles Davis and American Culture’ quotes Davis as saying later the incident “changed my whole life and whole attitude again, made me feel bitter and cynical again when I was starting to feel good about the things that had changed in this country”.

In the biography ‘Miles Davis’ by Brian Morton, a whole chapter ‘You’re under Arrest’ is devoted to his run-ins with the law, in which this incident is graphically recounted. Davis had his flaws, with domestic violence and drug abuse, but Morton also writes that Davis was “no stranger to racial prejudice”, in milder form in his student years at Juilliard, but more obvious over time. As Morton puts it, “the sight of an exotically dressed black man in a red Ferrari still seemed to inspire unreasoning resentment”. Davis and his wife Frances in interviews said they would frequently get pulled over, to investigate whether he, a black man, “had stolen his master’s car”. “It’s not nice to be going around, you know, every day, thinking that sh**.” Wife Frances recalled how he would send her to the reception desk of a hotel when checking in, because he couldn’t deal with the real possibility that he might be turned down on account of his race and colour.

Fellow jazz trumpeter and colleague Dizzy Gillespie when interviewed about Davis’ 1959 arrest, said, years later: “Our country hasn’t overcome that hurdle…yet, of being racist. I don’t care how big you get. There’s always a possibility of this showing its ugly head, this dragon with steam coming out of its nose, this racism.”

This incident from over sixty years ago is circulating on social media in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, who died after a white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed face down in the street last month and the widespread protests and unrest that followed, in the US and beyond, from the UK and Paris to New Zealand.

Comparisons were drawn with Rodney King, also a victim of police brutality in the US, in 1992, and lists drawn up of police brutality going back to the 1960s Civil Rights movement. What, if anything, has changed?

In India, police brutality is so rife that it is almost ‘normalised’. One only has to look at recent instances during this coronavirus lockdown of police excesses on poor starving people in search of food, and migrants trying to walk home, hundreds of kilometres away.

Sidharth Bhatia, founding editor of The Wire, recently wrote an op-ed ‘Why Indians Don’t Come Out on the Streets Against Regular Police Brutality’. He refers to how police ‘encounter’ killings are even applauded by the middle classes and media, and the gulf between the middle and poor classes in their experience of the police. But he shies away from talking about casteism, although he does mention the police violence against Muslims.

Sometimes overseas observations can be extrapolated to our situation. An article in The Spectator (US) ‘Even in a riot, the races aren’t equal’ by Dominic Green makes these two sobering points: “The sad truth is that black people could riot every summer in every city and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to the rest of the country. The American juggernaut would, as it has done for centuries, roll right over them and send them the bill.”

And this one: “The simple fact is that this nation was founded by white property-holders. Many were slave-holders, and the rest more concerned about import duties and preserving a common front against the colonial power than about the humanity of Africans.”

Substitute ‘black’ with Dalits and oppressed minorities and tribals, and ‘white’ with dominant castes, and these are very true here as well.

Another op-ed on Scroll by Mauktik Kulkarni, ‘My caste privilege in India blinded me to the reality of racism in the US’ joins these dots very chillingly.

A disturbing link connecting police brutality in the US, Palestine and India is the role of the Israel military in the training of police. US activists are concerned that training of US police with Israeli military invites civil rights violations, police brutality and murder of innocent citizens, as happens routinely in Israel-occupied territories. Durham (North Carolina) recently became the first US city to ban police training with Israeli military, giving cause for hope in reversing the trend.

But since 2018, Indian Police Services officers have been visiting Israel as part of their training programme to learn techniques and best practices in ‘counter-insurgency’, ‘managing low-intensity warfare’ and ‘use of technology in policing and countering terror’. If these terms sound to you like euphemisms for lowering the threshold for police brutality of vulnerable minorities, surveillance and invasion of privacy even further here, then you should be as worried as I am.