There’s Miles – a foreign man, in a foreign town being welcomed as if it were some kind of homecoming. He loved Paris. On his first trip in '49, aged 22, he hung out with Picasso and Sartre. Plenty of ex-pats told him to stay – James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Kenny Clarke – but, despite several visits, he always needed to return to New York – his wife, family, music, car. Unfinished business.
I got my music, I got Frances and my Ferrari -- and our friends, I got everything a man could want -- if it just wasn't for this prejudice crap. It ain't that I'm mad at white people, I just see what I see and I know what's happening. I am going to speak my mind about anything that drags me about this Jim Crow scene. Miles Davis 1962.
