INTRODUCTION

Like it says above, this blog is all about my book Running The Voodoo Down: The Electric Music Of Miles Davis, which is currently scheduled to be published by Backbeat Books in Spring 2005. (I expect to complete the manuscript, and turn it in, in mid-summer.)

Running The Voodoo Down is not a biography. Nor is it a stale recitation of who played on what session on what day. I'm more interested in a theoretical analysis of Miles Davis's music from 1968 (Miles In The Sky) to 1991 (Doo-Bop). Basically, RTVD is intended to be a Miles book the way Crosstown Traffic was a Hendrix book. I'm filtering Miles through a series of screens—racial/political, hip-hop, funk, Hendrix & Sly Stone, the larger world of early-70s fusion, and more besides. I'm talking about who was doing what around him, what that did to his music, and where his influence, viral as it is, has spread/metastasized to since his death.

A few things worth noting: I'm 32. I started listening to Miles Davis in 1985, and my path through his catalog started like this—Kind Of Blue, Bitches Brew, You're Under Arrest, Agharta, On The Corner...and on and on. I've been influenced, on this project and as a writer generally, by Greg Tate, Joe Carducci, Lester Bangs, Charles Shaar Murray, and Gary Giddins. (I've only met two of those guys, though, so don't think the responsibility for anything I write lies with anybody but me.) I like death metal just as much, and often more, than jazz. I hope Running The Voodoo Down, coming as it does from a rock-friendly perspective, to expand the range of permissible analysis vis-a-vis Miles. We'll see. Stay tuned.