Thanks for the good word. Appreciate it.

Image 8: Miles Davis, New York City, photographer, Tom Palumbo.

Image 9: Mississippi John Hurt, circa 1950s, Photographer Unknown.

Image 6: Negro boys on Easter morning. Southside, Chicago, Illinois, Lee, Russell, 1903–1986, photographer, 1941 Apr.

Image 7: Jimmy Smith Complete Blue Note Session Feb 1957. Photo Francis Wolff.

Image 4: Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil” session, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, December 24, 1964.

Image 5: Jitterbugging in a juke joint on Saturday evening outside Clarksdale, November 1939 (Marion Post Wolcott, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.).

Images

Image 1: Miles Davis, Hackensack, New Jersey, 1954, photo by Francis Wolff.

Video excerpt: Miles Davis on Black vs White musicians
youtube.com/shorts/mLmMQ...

Image 3: Picking cotton, Hopson Plantation, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi? Wolcott, Marion Post, 1910–1990, 1939 Nov.

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Secondary Sources

Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. NY: Morrow, 1963.

Crouch, Stanley. Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz. NY: Basic Civitas Books, 2006.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. NY: Verso, 1993.
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Primary Sources

CBS News. Miles Davis on Being Black and Gifted. YouTube. Complete interview by Harry Reasoner. 60 Minutes. Accessed May 31, 2025.
www.milesdavis.com/film/60-minu...
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Primary Sources

Davis, Miles, and Quincy Troupe. Miles: The Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.

CBS News. Miles Davis on Being Black and Gifted. YouTube. Excerpted clip from an interview by Harry Reasoner. 60 Minutes. Accessed May 31, 2025.
youtube.com/shorts/mLmMQ...

That’s what Davis was saying. He wasn’t gatekeeping. He was naming a pattern. A rhythm passed down. A sound shaped by centuries. If you’d lived close enough to it, you felt it humming beneath the floor.
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Image: Mississippi John Hurt, circa. 1950s, Photographer Unknown.

When Miles played, he wasn’t just performing. He was remembering. Late nights. Dope sickness. Paris. East St. Louis. Velvet suits. The women who stayed. The ones who left. The sound of a world cracking—and the resolve to keep playing anyway.
8/12

White musicians could learn the chords. They could swing. But many were reaching for something that Black musicians already carried. In that difference—barely a breath long—was inheritance. Not superiority. Not exclusion. Just memory.
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Because blues isn’t just a genre. Jazz isn’t just a style. They’re languages born of survival—of migration, loss, prayer, and defiance. Even those who hadn’t suffered directly had grown up inside the sound. Davis had. He played from the inside.
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That difference, Davis seemed to say, wasn’t about skill. It wasn’t about talent. It was about memory. Not the kind in your head—but the kind in your fingertips. In your hips. In the silence between phrases. Embodied memory. Cultural memory. Black memory.
5/12

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Then he said something quieter, sharper: white musicians played “behind the beat.” Four words. Not a critique, not even a judgment—just a truth. The beat wasn’t just rhythm. It was breath. It was swing. It was something lived, not taught.
4/12

There was power in that refusal. Davis rejected the idea that Black genius required Black pain. He’d heard it all before—that the blues was born in cotton fields and juke joints. He didn’t dismiss it. But he insisted: suffering wasn’t the source. Not always.
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He didn’t posture. Didn’t bristle. He laughed. “No,” he said, “it’s not that cliché.” But in the clipped shrug of that no was already an answer. Davis had been raised in comfort. His father was a dentist. He studied at Juilliard. He hadn’t suffered. And yet—he knew.
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youtube.com/shorts/mLmMQ...