The rock band Miles Davis hated performing with: “We smoked”

Miles Davis always seemed to have a touch-and-go relationship with rock and roll.

The whole point of jazz was to help expand the boundaries of what musicians could do onstage, and while many rock and rollers were willing to do the same, it’s not like Davis was itching to work with anyone who was playing the same goddamn blues licks.

The artists he loved had to be doing a little bit more than entertaining the crowd, but that didn’t mean that he had to enjoy every single artist he played with.

Even as far back as the 1950s, though, Davis was already miles ahead of anything rock and roll had done. Chuck Berry and Little Richard may have been game-changing for their time by shaking people up, but Kind of Blue took the basis of everything from blues to jazz and twisted it on its head. And listening to how he plays on tracks like ‘So What’ or ‘All Blues’, you can tell where a lot of rock artists got their inspiration from.

Because if there was any room for jazz in rock and roll, it was most likely going to come out of the prog genre. Every prog musician is usually on the lookout for new sounds, and while Richard Wright could be quite direct with his Davis worship, like in the chords of ‘Breathe’, Davis was paying more attention to what people like Jimi Hendrix were doing.

Bitches Brew practically feels like the jazz equivalent of Hendrix’s psychedelic experiments, and while Davis never got the chance to jam with the guitar god, there were always inroads to him working with rock bands. He had already asked Paul McCartney about potentially jamming, but when he was booked on a tour with the Steve Miller Band, there was no way that he was going to get shown up by a radio-rocker.

While Miller was so much more than his hits like ‘Fly Like An Eagle’ and ‘The Joker’, Davis was never that much of a fan of working with him on tour. Miller might have been the main draw at most of the shows, but Davis was going to see pigs fly before he even entertained the idea of opening for him. So how did he get out of being an opening act? Simple: he just refused to show up.

According to Davis, he would spend most of his set time waiting to get to the concert, so by the time Miller finished up, he could bring the house down, saying, “I would come late and he would have to go on first, and then when we got there, we smoked the motherfucking place, and everybody dug it.” And when looking at Miller’s pedigree at the time, it’s not like Davis didn’t have a good reason to be pissed off.

‘The Joker’ hadn’t sent him into the stratosphere, so as far as Davis could tell, Miller was another starry-eyed kid looking to get some pointers from a legend. It’s not like the radio-rocker couldn’t make fantastic music, but his sense of jamming was always going to pale in comparison to whatever musical freakout Davis had up his sleeve whenever he took to the stage.

Even if there was bad blood between them for a few years, the fact that Miller still found time to cover Davis’s ‘All Blues’ later in his career is more telling of Davis’s musical power. There are plenty of artists who have carried themselves like they were one of the greatest gifts to the music world, but when looking at Davis’s track record, it’s not like he didn’t have a good reason to think that he was miles above anyone else in his field.