Guitarist Pete Cosey’s first rehearsal with Miles Davis took place in a Portland hotel room in 1973. Davis would play a bit of a recording of the band’s performance the night before in Calgary, and Cosey would listen enough to get the gist of it, ask Davis what key it was in, and then move on to the next part. Cosey had only met Davis briefly before joining the band, and as the men listened to the tape, they made small talk, began to know one another. At one point the conversation turned to food. The legendary trumpeter insisted that fish was all he ate, and it just so happened that Cosey was fresh off the plane from Chicago with a batch of red snapper and perch sandwiches he’d prepared a day earlier. Cosey scampered off to his room to get some for Davis, who took a bite and then asked what he was eating.
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In hindsight, it seems Davis approached his food much the same way he did his music: no matter how anyone criticized or pigeonholed his work, he followed his own gut. While his classic recordings with Charlie Parker and the quintets he led stand as some of the most enduring and influential jazz ever recorded, by the early 70s Davis had busted the music wide open with his lean and gritty fusion of jazz improvisation and hard-rock rhythms–much to the dismay of the head-scratching jazz establishment and reactionary critics. Last month Columbia reissued five double CDs of live recordings made by Davis and his band between 1970 and 1974, and they demonstrate just how prophetic his vision was. More than two decades later his nonchalant scrambling of styles, his sophisticated rhythmic ideas, and his surging, nonlinear structures–once considered radically extreme–are commonplace in electronica, experimental jazz, and rock. Prior to the six-year hiatus Davis began in 1975, the band he was leading may have expressed the pure rhythmic joy and dazzling ebb-and-flow dynamics of his music better than any other, and one of that group’s crucial components was Pete Cosey.
“My music has always been all-inclusive,” says Cosey. “That’s what my father taught me.” Antonio Maceo Cosey was a versatile musician who worked with popular Chicago bandleader Red Saunders and wrote the Louis Jordan hit “The Ration Blues” with Cosey’s mother, Collenane. Cosey was born in Chicago, but when he was a teenager his family moved to Phoenix, which he hated. “I always tell people I ‘did’ ten years out there,” he says.
Cosey says he hopes to work with Gibbs again this year, and that a recording he made with trumpeter Billy Brimfield, saxophonist Carter Jefferson, and drummer Doni Hagen early this decade will see release soon. But though Hagen’s current illness and Jefferson’s death seem to have affected him deeply, hampering his efforts to put together a suitable working group, he appears unfazed by the reduced pace of his career. “I just go and woodshed,” he says with a determined nod. “I disappear from the scene and come back with different stuff.”
