Miles Davis lives

Numa Wire de há treze anos, Brian Eno escreveu estas palavras a propósito de Miles Davis:

When you listen to Miles Davis, how much of what you hear is music, and how much is context? Another way of saying that is, 'What would you be hearing if you didn't know you were listening to Miles Davis?' I think of context as everything that isn't physically contained in the grooves of the record, and in his case that seems quite a lot. It includes your knowledge, first of all, that everyone else says he's great: that must modify the way you hear him. But it also includes a host of other strands: that he was a handsome and imposing man, a member of a romantic minority, that he played with Charlie Parker, that he spans generations, that he underwent various addictions, that he married Cicely Tyson, that he dressed well, that Jean-Luc Godard liked him, that he wore shades and was very cool, that he himself said little about his work, and so on. Surely all that affects how you hear him: I mean, could it possibly have felt the same if he'd been an overweight heating engineer from Oslo? When you listen to music, Aren't you also 'listening' to all the stuff around it, too? How important is that to the experience you' re having, and is it differently important with different musics, different artists?

A observação de Eno é brilhante, mas corre o risco de ser tomada por redutora. Miles Davis é contexto, mas é igualmente texto (começa, aliás, por sê-lo); é significante e significado; é o labirinto e o seu centro. O mito só nasce e cresce porque na sua origem, a alimentá-lo, existe uma obra tão real, tão boa, tão rica, tão vasta e tantas vezes tão inovadora. Miles morreu fez ontem quinze anos. A música e a mitologia perduram.