Obviously and inevitably a BD romance and maps Ferrandez is no exception there

Therefore, it would have been eighty years on 26 May (date that he himself had indicated in his autobiography, correcting the dictionaries that until then the aged a day)... But as the Lord young man that will have been Barney Wilen, saxophonist who gives him the reply on the soundtrack of the film "Elevator to the gallows" (and who died, he, on May 25, 1996), Miles Davis disappeared 28 September 1991 before his image and his music are altered by the shadows of aging. And these are precisely the images and juvenile Trumpeter music artist "jazzfan", Jacques Ferrandez, has chosen to bring together in a kind of fiction-documentary comparable to the "novels" of jazz that Alain Gerber wrote and illustrated each day for the listeners of France music: both meticulously documented and imaginant of very plausible dialogues.

If the biography of Miles seem to lend themselves particularly well to what is known to make chic, narrative figuration (in other words: comic strip), it certainly is not by chance: two elements, less trivial one is tempted to believe, characterized his life and his face. Its first beauty (worthy of ancient Egypt, according to his lover fan Juliette Gréco they met salle Pleyel in its first Parisian concert: she had twenty-two years and twenty three), beauty that could be quite foreign to a reputation largely exceeding the boundaries of jazz and who, as soon as the first published photos and the last, was romantic and endearing or fascinating imagery. And it is perhaps at this level, at least as much as in the strictly musical area, its place in the music business was not unrelated to the popularity of the rockstars.

Add the fact that, not only among jazz musicians in the African-American population in the years 1930-1940, generally Miles was one of the very few young educated bourgeois. Hence Ferrandez focusing on the early New York trumpeter, when it is torn between his musical classical studies at the Juilliard School, that he pay his dentist father, and his irresistible tropism for his hero, Charlie Parker, Prophet cursed and the new great music bebop. All the more acute dilemma, even and especially for a "young man of good family" such as Miles, American society is as blue-veined cheese by racism.

Unprecedented horizons

Or what he taught at Juilliard, he receives as "tips of whites", concepts that today, it looks like "politically correct", then that "Bird" Parker opened him literally unprecedented horizons and taught him the boldness, freedom off the beaten, as well as a great disrespect for number values that one might have thought established forever.

Obviously and inevitably, a BD "romance" and maps, Ferrandez is no exception there. The story stops on a "historic" Miles Davis father sentence (they had the same name) to his son: "don't be anyone other than yourself." The suite demonstrates the Council paternal across two CDs accompanying the album: with first extracts of unavoidable entitled all "Birth of the Cool", which is also a great act of birth of the trumpeter, almost out of the chrysalis of the official bebop, foment a collection of miniconcertos deliciously chiseled and arranged to showcase a sound that will forever stain the jazzosphère of the 20th century. Beyond that, the tone will prevail (after having played with Parker, Miles will no longer only leader) in the company of all the demigods are the Pantheon of jazz: Horace Silver, Charles Mingus, Jackie McLean (who left us a few weeks ago), not to mention Sonny Rollins, it scrambles today as "the last living legend" and coming to marvel in a well appointed Parisian place : the Olympia, the residence of the gods that the ghost of Miles continues to haunt.