Some Random Thoughts on Miles Davis and Socrates

In 1956, Miles Davis recorded four albums worth of music within two days in order to fulfill his contract obligation to the jazz label Prestige.  These albums are now revered as classics and the embodiment of that time period’s style and approach to Bebop. What made this recording session unique is that Davis sought to recreate a live performance by choosing “not” to fix certain errors, and in many cases, recording just one take of a song.  This decision by Davis represents more than a mere commercial gimmick to sell albums, and it certainly was not an act of carelessness with regard to his music. On the contrary, it shows that in Davis’s own way he was keenly aware of the implications of recording technology and its relationship to the music. There was awareness that the “truth” of his art was being filtered and altered through its mode of transaction and an acceptance that the reality of a live performance, and one that is recorded, were indeed distinct. Davis’s solution to this problem was to go against the grain of common recording practice, which seeks to create a “perfect” take, and allow those few minuscule errors to remain.

For Davis, this was a way to give his audience the feeling that they were at a live performance. However, there are some philosophical considerations here. This is a case of purposefully allowing imperfection within art to serve as a means of authentication and validation. It is as if the imperfection reminds us of the humanness that is on the other end of an artistic exchange, and counters the potential dehumanizing ramifications of technology. Socrates would have defended Davis' decision wholeheartedly. Plato reports that Socrates had a great deal of suspicion of the written word for its unknown power to alter the meaning of messages and its inherent flaw of one-way communication. True dialogue calls for ideas to be exchanged both ways. This exchange of course relied on another human being. The evolution of the written word was the first technology to actually make it possible to separate this “other human” from the direct oral transmission of ideas. This newly-created distance between the author and reader evokes the fear that our ideas may somehow be corrupted during that transaction.

This argument from Socrates is still relevant today.  It is well known that the interaction between artist and audience is a vital part of the performance itself. The platform of recorded music allows for the retention of that interaction on some level (i.e., recorded live concerts), so the question arises as to how this distance can be negotiated through other realms of communication. For as many ways in which technology has widened that distance, it has shortened it as well, considering the possibilities of interaction allowed through blogs, websites, etc. Even hip hop, a genre of music based primarily on technology, one which prizes the inventive use of samples from other songs within the creation of a new one, is now in the business of contemplating boundaries and authenticity; just listen to Jay-Z’s song “Death of Auto-Tune.” The important question to consider then is how to make decisions about legitimacy when the criteria are in constant evolution. In short, this search for authenticity is improvisation, and like Miles Davis during those two days in the studio, our task may be to continue exploring our own artistry in the search for authenticity.