Miles Davis has been my idol for many years, both as a musician and as a person. It still amazes me how profoundly he influenced jazz music and jazzmen. For forty years, Miles Dewey Davis III, composer and musician, remained at the center of the entire African movement in American music - forty years, starting in 1944, when he came to New York from East St. Louis, Illinois, to look for a genius there saxophonist Charlie Parker and enter the most prestigious Juilliard Conservatory.


But Davis and his work influenced more than just jazz music. Among modern European composers and composers from other countries of the world, and among lovers of classical music, he is almost as famous as in the world of jazz. He was the first jazz musician to receive the Danish Zenning Award for outstanding creative achievement in contemporary music. Blues and rock, reggae, spirituals, neoclassical, neoromantic and many other genres all know the music of Miles Davis, and the most receptive of them have been directly influenced by him.

Colleagues in many areas of creativity consider Davis an artist of the highest class. Among my generation it is difficult to find representatives of the creative profession - writers, artists, dancers - who would not know this trumpeter. It is difficult to find those whose work would not be reflected in his music. Sculptors and painters worked to the recording of his study "A Kind of Blues". Dance numbers were created under and on the basis of such plays as "Spanish Sketches" and "Around Midnight". Quite a few typewriters crackled all night to his melodies "Walking" and "Smoke", evoking the aesthetics of loneliness from the dark.

For these and many other reasons, writing about him, interviewing him, getting to know him personally was extremely tempting for me. I still remember that evening in 1960 when I, 25, trying to become a jazz critic and without any references, went to Greenwich Village in New York, where Miles Davis was playing at the Village Vanguard.

I don't remember exactly what band he played with then, but the brilliant John Coltrane was no longer with him. The saxophone player was Hank Mobley, whom I met sometime in Newark. When I went backstage to a large room that still serves as an artistic dressing room, the musicians were sitting in the corners, exchanging fragmentary phrases. Miles Davis I saw in the far corner. After listening to my timid request, he waved it off and sent me away, muttering that he was reluctant to talk to anyone. Offended by his refusal, I snapped. With youthful vehemence, I declared that if I were a famous critic, he would certainly find time to talk to me.