After a Lengthy Battle, ‘Miles Davis Way’ Is Official

Shirley Zafirau underneath the sign on West 77th Street that will be renamed "Miles Davis Way," in honor of the jazz musician who lived on the Upper West Side block. Ms. Zafirau led the campaign to rename the street.

EMON HASSAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

December 18, 2013By DANIEL KRIEGER

For about 25 years, until the mid-1980s, Miles Davis, the legendary jazz trumpeter who died in 1991, lived in an apartment building at 312 West 77th Street, where he enjoyed a well-established New York City tradition: loitering outside on the stoop, greeting passers-by and chatting with neighbors.
“He interacted with the community on the street,” said, Shirley Zafirau, a neighbor of Davis, who still lives on the block. “He really liked being here.”
Ms. Zafirau believed that Davis’s long tenure on the block deserved to be memorialized and so embarked on a campaign to have the block renamed after him. It was a long process that included numerous phone calls and emails to city officials, many visits to the local community board and the attending of several City Council hearings.
Her effort finally bore fruit when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed a bill on Tuesday officially renaming West 77th Street between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue as “Miles Davis Way.”
Ms. Zafirau first got the notion about five years ago when she was studying to obtain a tour guide license from the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs. She learned that many well-known jazz musicians — Duke Ellington, Chico O’Farrill and John Hicks, among others — had streets named after them. “So I wondered – why isn’t Miles recognized in the same way on this block?” she said, sitting in the garden duplex apartment a few doors away from Davis’s building where she has lived since the 1960s.
The local community board gave her a lukewarm reception, questioning if Davis really lived that long on the block and whether he merited such a distinction. Instead, the board suggested a cultural medallion outside the building from the Historic Landmarks Preservation Center. But Ms. Zafirau believed it to be a somewhat lesser honor because it does not encompass the entire block.
The effort to place a medallion on the building also failed for bureaucratic reasons. But Ms. Zafirau continued to press her case for a street renaming and enlisted a former chairman of the local community board to be her ally and use his connections on the Council. The Council voted last week to approve the renaming.
“It’s a great honor for my uncle,” said Vince Wilburn Jr., a nephew of Davis. “The family is very excited about it.”
Mr. Wilburn, a drummer and music producer who divides his time between Los Angeles and New York, fondly recalled spending summers with his uncle at the brownstone as a child in the 1970s.
“People used to come by all the time,” he said, mentioning jazz legends like Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey and Tony Williams, who rented an apartment in the building, which is where Davis created the music for celebrated albums such as “Kind of Blue” and “Bitches Brew.”
Mr. Wilburn himself joined the rehearsals there and played drums on five Davis albums, including “Man With the Horn.”
“Those were beautiful times,” he said.

First Listen: Thelonious Monk, 'Paris 1969'

Paris 1969, from the late Thelonious Monk, comes out Nov. 26.

Jean-Pierre Leloir/Courtesy of the artist

Fifteen years later, Monk returned to Paris and the Salle Pleyel with his own band in a much different situation. He recorded for the mainstream label Columbia Records, was featured on the cover of Time magazine and generally reaped the public adulation that musicians and insiders had long held for his music. He was an international star, and the concert was televised. It's what you can preview here, before it's released to the public as an audio recording and DVD titled Paris 1969.In the early summer of 1954, Thelonious Monk traveled to Europe for the first time and played the Paris Jazz Festival. He was assigned a local rhythm section which was probably unfamiliar with his music; he was booked into the Salle Pleyel, an enormous 3,000-seat concert hall; he had almost no public profile in France apart from the most hardcore of modern jazz fans; he was nervous and probably drunk; and he followed an enormously popular Dixieland band on stage. Critics in attendance panned him, confused by his unique dissonances and agitated stage behavior. The gig was, as biographer Robin Kelley described it, a disaster.

You'll find Monk in the quartet orientation with which he played for many years; it included long-time saxophonist Charlie Rouse. (Coincidentally, another worthwhile live recording emerged this year of a Thelonious Monk quartet at the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival.) The rhythm section did feature two young musicians new to the band, Berklee student Nate Hygelund (bass) and 17-year-old Paris Wright (drums), though the Thelonious Monk quartet had had about a month on the road to get it together before this particular show. They take on a familiar program of Monk's music, and also make room for their leader to play some stride-inflected Tin Pan Alley tunes alone on stage. This isn't the tap-dancing, elbows-on-the-piano Monk of yore — perhaps a month in Europe ending with eight cities in eight nights will do that to you — but it's Monk doing Monk, swinging intensely through severe rhythmic crevasses.

Listen in particular for what happens in "Nutty." The American master drummer "Philly" Joe Jones had been expatriated in France at the time, and Monk had him come by and sit in for a tune. Now, Paris Wright is a strong player, and was even at 17, but Philly Joe was a legend — you can hear it in the massive applause before a note is even sounded. There's a kind of new communion between the piano and the snare and kick drums; it raises the overall intensity even before the impeccably organized drum solo. It's pretty much a clinic in jazz drumming, and when it wraps up, it's easy to imagine everyone on stage feeling quite pleased with how the moment — and the night as a whole — had unfolded.

What's going on inside the brains of musicians while they improvise?

12SEXPAND

The Link Between Improvisation and DreamingWatching a skilled musician improvise a piece, you almost feel as though he or she is plucking the notes straight from thin air. Fortunately, science has given us a few clues as to what's actually going on inside the brains of musicians who are improvising.

Charles Limb, a professor at Johns Hopkins, and Allen Braun, a researcher from the NIH, decided that, to figure out just what was going on in the brain during musical improvisation, they would need to watch the transition as it happened. Incredibly, they accomplished this by having musicians lie down inside an MRI machine and start laying down some notes. A system which, in itself, presented some significant challenges. Here's how Johns Hopkins' Peabody magazine explains the resulting process:

Admittedly, the logistics were daunting. Limb and Braun needed to figure out how to get a musician to play an instrument containing no magnetic parts while lying inside a cramped MRI tube. They overcame the technical issue with the help of a California engineer who custom designed a miniature, non-magnetic keyboard and a system of mirrors so the player could see the modified keyboard resting on his knees.

Daunting sounds about right. But (once they had fitted up their MRI with their mini, mirrored keyboard and somehow convinced several jazz musicians to lie down inside to run through some pieces) they found something intriguing: When improvising, it appeared as though the "self-censorship" portions of the brain went quiet. The sensory perception areas of the brain and the areas linked to expression, however, both kicked into high gear. In fact, the patterns looked exceptionally similar to the MRI patterns also seen during REM sleep: the dreaming state.

Music Is A Language

When asked about the science behind musical improvisation, Vijay Iyer, a 2013 MacArthur Genius grant recipient who holds both a Grammy nomination as a jazz pianist and a doctorate in the cognitive science of music, suggests that the cognition associated with improvising music is a much more everyday occurrence than we might think.

"It's like asking what happens in the mind when we have a conversation." Iyer tells io9. "We tend to treat [musical] improvisation as this special, abnormal thing. But most of what we do, most of the time is improvisation."

The link between improvising and the kinds of cognition associated with things like a conversation can be even stronger when looked at across musical genres. An MRI study of improvising rappers published in Scientific Reports by Braun and his colleagues at the NIH found that, just like in improvising jazz musicians, inhibitions and self-censorship were both suppressed, while areas dealing with processing language and emotions lit up while freestyling.

The key difference came in how they saw these changes come across. Braun noted to NPR that, in contrast with the jazz musicians, amongst the rappers they saw these changes even more strongly on the left side of the brain in language processing centers and, the more creative the raps, the stronger the correlation appeared.

Wayne Shorter on How Do You Rehearse The Unknown

LAURA SULLIVAN, HOST:
In case you're just tuning in, this is WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Laura Sullivan. And it's time, now, for music.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "ORBITS")
SULLIVAN: The New York Times went all in when describing Wayne Shorter. The paper said he is generally acknowledged to be jazz's greatest living composer. Starting with his early days jamming with John Coltrane, Shorter seemed to move Zelig-like through some of the most important combos in jazz history, from Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers to the groundbreaking fusion band Weather Report, and, of course, his legendary years with Miles Davis.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "ORBITS")
SULLIVAN: You're listening to a piece he wrote for Miles, called "Orbits." Now approaching is 80th birthday, Wayne Shorter revisits that composition on his latest album, "Without a Net." However, you may have a hard time recognizing it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "ORBITS")
SULLIVAN: I talked to Wayne Shorter earlier this week as he prepared for a show in New York City. He's been an avowed Buddhist for almost 40 years now, and he's pretty Zen about reimagining some of his old work.
WAYNE SHORTER: Nothing is thrown away. Nothing goes away. It's - ice is getting ready to change to water. I used to ask, when I was a kid, where do our words go? And I'm finding out.
SULLIVAN: Where?
SHORTER: They don't stop. They initiate cause and effect.
SULLIVAN: Some people might find it boring to go back and revisit an old song, or to take a song that - especially one like "Orbits," that is so well-known. But for you, it's not boring. It's something else.
SHORTER: No. When you say something's boring, that means you haven't even scratched the surface of something. And boring is a trademark of being arrogant and complacent.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SULLIVAN: I mean, you're leading an incredible band on these sessions. You've been with them for more than a decade now. And, I mean, it seems to me that jazz has a really strong tradition of apprenticeship. You know, you study under great bandleaders, and then you yourself became a great bandleader. What kind of aspects of working with John Coltrane or Art Blakey or Miles Davis that you receive that you are now passing on to young musicians today?
SHORTER: The one thing they had in common was leave the musicians alone. He would say - Miles would say: Leave the musicians alone. Someone would yell out to Tony Williams: The drummer's too loud. And he said - Miles would say: Leave the drummer alone in the microphone.
(LAUGHTER)
SHORTER: With Miles, the six years I was with Miles, we never talked about music. We never had a rehearsal.
SULLIVAN: So let me see if I understand this. Miles Davis and you, Wayne Shorter, some of the greatest musicians of our time, sitting around together for years, but you're not talking about music.
SHORTER: No. We never really talked about - we never talked about music.
SULLIVAN: Wow.
SHORTER: I'm just thinking about that now. It's pretty amazing.
SULLIVAN: How did you know how to play with each other?
SHORTER: You know, what I found out what we're doing? We were actually playing music as we were talking. When we talked on the phone, Miles would say: We're going to record next week. I had a book - a book that I wrote music in - and he would say: Bring the book. When he said bring the book like that, when we got in the studio, there's a point at which we played like that (humming) ta-da-da-da da-da, like that. And it just came out.
And Tony would say: I'm tired of playing ding, ding, di-ding, ding, di-ding, ding, di-ding. And Herbie would say: I don't know what to do with my left hand. So Miles said: Don't play with your left hand anymore on the piano.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SULLIVAN: I'm speaking with composer, bandleader and saxophone player Wayne Shorter. His new album is called "Without a Net." When you perform with the wind ensemble, Imani Winds, on the piece called "Pegasus," I mean, it seems like they are probably, as a wind ensemble, a little more used to the classical structure. I mean, there's not a lot of improv that's going on on stage. Did you have to work with them differently than you would with your regular bandmates?
SHORTER: No. Jazz shouldn't have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that you're required to sound like jazz. For me, the word jazz means, I dare you. And the effort to break out of something is worth more than you getting an A in syncopation. And this music, it's dealing with the unexpected. No one really knows how to deal with the unexpected. How do you rehearse the unknown?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SHORTER: The challenge is you have to be in the moment. Classical guys, they got in the moment too. (Unintelligible) got in the moment. Einstein got in the moment. You're getting in the moment.
(LAUGHTER)
SHORTER: You better. The moment's going to get you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SULLIVAN: The legendary Wayne Shorter. His new album is called "Without a Net." This weekend, you can sample every track at our exclusive first listen. That's on nprmusic.org. Mr. Shorter, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much.
SHORTER: OK.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)