jazz perspectives “sell it black”: race and marketing in miles...

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

This article was downloaded by: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network]On: 22 March 2011Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 932223628]Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Jazz PerspectivesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t741771151

“Sell It Black”: Race and Marketing in Miles Davis's Early Fusion JazzJeremy A. Smith

Online publication date: 16 April 2010

To cite this Article Smith, Jeremy A.(2010) '“Sell It Black”: Race and Marketing in Miles Davis's Early Fusion Jazz', JazzPerspectives, 4: 1, 7 — 33To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17494061003694139URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494061003694139

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial orsystematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug dosesshould be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directlyor indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t741771151

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494061003694139

http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

Jazz PerspectivesVol. 4, No. 1, April 2010, pp. 7–33

ISSN 1749–4060 print/1749–4079 online © 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/17494061003694139

“Sell It Black”: Race and Marketing in Miles Davis’s Early Fusion JazzJeremy A. Smith

Taylor and FrancisRJAZ_A_469935.sgm10.1080/17494061003694139Jazz Perspectives1749-4060 (print)/1749-4079 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis041000000April [email protected] Miles is doing on records and in his live appearances now will certainly be listenedto with interest by serious Rock buyers. Can we plan some small space ads that aim Milesat the Rock audience?

Bruce Lundvall1

All I tell ’em to do is to sell the music black, not to put no white girls on the cover with nopants on and stuff like that. Sell it black.

Miles Davis2

As Steven Pond notes in his groundbreaking 2005 book Head Hunters: The Making ofJazz’s First Platinum Album, “Connections between the music and marketing loom overany discussion of fusion jazz.”3 Pond goes on to clarify that such connections are presentboth explicitly, when writers “obsess … over the market’s influence,” and implicitly,when writers avoid altogether any mention of the market in order to circumvent thestereotype that commercial concerns imply the corruption of an anterior musicalpurity.4 Pond is correct in asserting these as the two dominant perspectives from whichcommercialism in fusion jazz is discussed. Unfortunately, such discussions tend eitherto disregard the necessity of material circulation which a recording’s commodity statusrequires or to conflate a musician’s interests and goals with those of a record company.5

1 Bruce Lundvall, memo to Morris Baumstein, April 1, 1969. The Teo Macero Collection, JPB 00–8, MusicDivision, the New York Public Library, in Box 13, Folder 15.2 Quoted in Stephen Davis, “Miles Davis: An Exclusive Interview,” The Real Paper: Boston’s Weekly Newspaper,March 21, 1973, 13.3 Steven F. Pond, Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album (Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 2005), 18. As the genre-based nomination for this music varies, I adopt Pond’s term “fusion jazz” as themost appropriate and most thoughtful designation thus far proposed. See his discussion in Head Hunters, 10–18.4 Pond, Head Hunters, 27. For examples of jazz musicians attempting to navigate the perceived art/commercedivide prior to the advent of fusion jazz, see Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 273–317; and Iain Anderson, This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, theSixties, and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).5 For examples of this conflation in journalistic and scholarly writing alike, see Stanley Crouch, “Play the RightThing,” The New Republic, February 12, 1990: 30–37; John Litweiler, The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 (NewYork: William Morrow, 1984), 222–225; and Fabian Holt, Genre in Popular Music (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2007), 95. While jazz scholars have been largely hesitant to address the complexities of agency and structureas they relate to music’s commodification and circulation, such concerns have long been prominent within thefield of popular music studies. See, for instance, Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo, Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Here to Pay:The History and Politics of the Music Industry (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1977).

Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 15:38 22 March 2011

8 Sell It Black: Race and Marketing in Miles Davis’s Early Fusion Jazz

With this article, I make distinct what has previously been conflated by consideringthe differences as well as the similarities between Miles Davis’s and Columbia Records’svalues as they relate to marketing during the contested and commonly misrepresentedperiod of early-1970s fusion jazz. I show how the artist’s and the record label’s effortsto sell Davis’s music were part of broader agendas—an aesthetic and cultural nationalistone on Davis’s part, a more general attempt to influence the market on Columbia’s—and how such goals were at times dependent upon, and at other times in conflict with,one another. This article thereby contributes to the ongoing critical re-evaluation offusion jazz while highlighting a key issue for those jazz scholars concerned more broadlywith a recording’s role in the creation of musical meaning.6

Three writers have laid a valuable theoretical groundwork for the current study bydrawing new critical awareness to discussions of commercialism in Miles Davis’s fusionjazz. In his two-part “The Electric Miles” article from 1983, Greg Tate was the firstwriter to call for a revisionist exploration of this music. Tate problematizes theperceived break between Davis’s post-1969 electric jazz and his immediately precedingacoustic music while offering an early example of the value of situating Davis’s fusionjazz in the context of African American popular culture. Importantly, he emphasizesthe ways in which the complexity of the music’s informing discourses—including“racial, social, sexual, psychological, economic, and even musical” concerns—contrib-ute to the music’s cultural value instead of prove its “supposed lack of integrity.”7

Since Tate’s foundational work, two scholars have contributed to an expandedunderstanding of the cultural and musical value of Davis’s fusion jazz. In his 1991article “Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies,” Gary Tomlinsonelucidates some of the broader discourses with which discussions of commercialism infusion jazz have historically been articulated. Tomlinson demonstrates how paradig-matic criticisms of Davis’s fusion jazz (by Stanley Crouch, John Litweiler, MartinWilliams, and Amiri Baraka) rely upon traditionally conservative canonic concerns ofmusical transcendence and formal value as they disparage Davis’s music through arhetoric of “absence” and “transgression.” For Tomlinson, “absence” refers to thismusic’s lack of those formal characteristics prominent in earlier jazz styles, while“transgression” refers to its abandonment of jazz’s various modes of artistic integrity,whether moral, racial, or anti-commercial. In arguing for a revaluation of this music,Tomlinson proposes an aesthetic of dialogics that emphasizes the collaborative impulse

6 For valuable recent studies of fusion jazz, see Stuart Nicholson, Jazz-Rock: A History (New York: Schirmer, 1998);Kevin Fellezs, Between Rock and a Jazz Place: Intercultural Interchange in Fusion Musicking (Ph.D. diss., Universityof California at Santa Cruz, 2004); Pond, Head Hunters; Lawrence A. Wayte, Bitches Brood: The Progeny of MilesDavis’s Bitches Brew and the Sound of Jazz-Rock (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 2007); andKevin Fellezs, “Emergency! Race and Genre in Tony Williams’s Lifetime,” Jazz Perspectives 2 (May 2008): 1–27.For two important studies of the use of recordings in jazz scholarship, see Jed Rasula, “The Media of Memory: TheSeductive Menace of Records in Jazz History,” in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 1995), 134–162; and Gabriel Solis, “‘A Unique Chunk of Jazz Reality’: Authorship, MusicalWork Concepts, and Thelonious Monk’s Live Recordings from the Five Spot, 1958,” Ethnomusicology 48 (Fall2004): 315–347.7 Greg Tate, “The Electric Miles, Parts One and Two [1983],” reprinted in Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk:Essays on Contemporary America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 72.


Jazz Perspectives 9

behind Davis’s music, including its stylistic convergence, racial inclusivity, andinstrumental and timbral expansiveness. Tomlinson thereby offers a productiveapproach to the study of Davis’s early fusion jazz that allows the music to be under-stood not as an abandonment of existing musical conventions but rather as “one of therichest stylistic amalgams in jazz history.”8

In his 2001 article “‘It’s About That Time’: The Response to Miles Davis’s ElectricTurn,” Eric Porter builds upon Tomlinson’s earlier work as a way of situating thehistorical production and critical reception of Davis’s early fusion jazz in the context ofprominent discourses of cultural nationalism from the 1960s and beyond. WhileTomlinson emphasizes musical style and aesthetics in valuing the dialogic and hybridnature of Davis’s early fusion jazz, Porter understands such stylistic evaluations asfunctions of each critic’s broader views of the historical legacy of 1960s-era culturalnationalism. For example, Porter demonstrates how Stanley Crouch has been criticalof this legacy, viewing it as “a breakdown of social vision and a failure of black malecultural authority.” Crouch’s evaluation of Davis’s music results from this broaderunderstanding, with Crouch criticizing fusion jazz as a failure due to its “commercial”rather than “aesthetic” construction of black authenticity. For Crouch, such a movesymbolizes Davis’s abandonment in the late 1960s of the “black cultural value, integ-rity, and autonomy” that jazz could and, from Crouch’s perspective, should representfor African Americans.9 Through this and other examples, Porter draws attention tothe broader cultural and political contexts in which fusion jazz critics were writing inorder to demonstrate one of the reasons behind the music’s accrual of specific politicaland historiographical significance.

These three articles collectively begin the process of applying greater critical nuanceto the study of commercialism in Davis’s early fusion jazz. In what follows, I contributeto this process by highlighting the continuities and the discontinuities between MilesDavis’s and Columbia Records’s values in the early 1970s on the priority of racialconsiderations in marketing Davis’s music.

Marketing Miles Davis’s Fusion Jazz in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s

The narrative of Miles Davis’s stylistic evolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s bearsconsistency among numerous scholars.10 Upon the dissolution of his “second greatquintet,” Davis revamped his band by incorporating the electric instruments, riff-oriented bass grooves, distortion-heavy guitar timbres, and rock-inspired drumming

8 Gary Tomlinson, “Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies,” in Disciplining Music: Musicologyand Its Canons, eds. Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 79,81–82. 9 Eric Porter, “‘It’s About That Time’: The Response to Miles Davis’s Electric Turn,” in Miles Davis and AmericanCulture, ed. Gerald Early (Saint Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2001), 134, 144–145.10 See, for example, Ian Carr, Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography, rev. ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,1998), 209–292; Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis, vol. 2 (New York: Da Capo, 1998;repr. 1985), 135–232; and John Szwed, So What: The Life of Miles Davis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002),252–303. For more on this era in general, see Paul Tingen, Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis,1967–1991 (New York: Billboard Books, 2001).



prominent among popular soul and rock musicians of the era. Davis, awakened to thevalue of popular culture in part by his then-wife Betty (Mabry) Davis, spent time withJimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone, recruited musicians from Stevie Wonder’sband, and exchanged his Italian suits for psychedelic dress in an overt attempt toborrow from the sound and style of these popular late-1960s musicians.11

At the same time that Davis was making these significant personnel and stylisticchanges, Columbia Records was introducing a new approach to marketing Davis’smusic. Since Davis had first signed with Columbia Records in 1955, the company hadconsistently and aggressively marketed his music almost exclusively to jazz listeners.Beginning in 1967, however, as internal Columbia memos demonstrate, Davis’s recentstylistic evolution helped motivate the company to begin considering how to“broaden” Davis’s audience beyond traditional jazz fans. A part of this discussionincluded the idea of placing advertisements in non-jazz magazines in order to “aimMiles at the Rock audience.”12 Columbia opted to pursue this approach, and oneresulting ad in Rolling Stone—for the 1969 album Filles de Kilimanjaro—begins withthe headline, “You May Like Jazz, and Not Even Know It.” The copy then argues thatFilles shares much in common with the “psychedelic music” that the reader has recentlybeen “buying and digging.” It further points out some of the musicians who arecategorized in the Schwann recording catalog as jazz players (including B.B. King andOtis Redding) in order to complicate the reader’s expectations of what “jazz” might be.Finally, the ad quotes extensively from the positive review Filles received in RollingStone as a way to augment the album’s credibility among rock fans.13

Another Rolling Stone advertisement from 1970 similarly attempts to highlight theways in which Davis’s contemporary music resonates with the more popular music ofthe time. Featuring extensive quotations from positive reviews by rock critics of theBitches Brew album (1970), the ad asks, “Rock critics agree [that] Miles Davis has founda new audience, or is it that Rock has just found Miles Davis?”14 In other Davis ads,Columbia incorporates more subtle allusions to the vocabulary and imagery ofcontemporary popular music. Drawing upon the popularity of album-oriented rockand the notion of concept albums (in which each song is a part of an intentionallyintegrated whole), an ad for Davis’s Bitches Brew describes the album as a “novel

11 See, for instance, Edwin Pouncey, “The Man Who Sold the Underworld,” Wire, July 1997, 29; Szwed, So What,336–337; Joel Selvin and Dave Marsh, Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History (New York: Avon Books, 1998),xvii, 163, 166; and Bill Murphy, “Raging Bullhorn: Miles Davis and A Tribute to Jack Johnson,” The Wire, October2003, 32.12 See memos by Clive Davis, November 22, 1967, and Robert Altshuler, December 4, 1967, Macero Collection, inBox 16, Folder 16; and memo by Bruce Lundvall, April 1, 1969, Macero Collection, in Box 13, Folder 15.13 Advertisement, Rolling Stone, May 31, 1969, 31. Strengthening the link between this album and rock music isthe fact that Filles was the first recording by Davis to feature electric bass and was also among the earliest to includeelectric piano.14 Advertisement, Rolling Stone, June 25, 1970, 23. The connection between Davis and rock music is further rein-forced in many of the liner notes for Davis’s albums from the time, including those for Filles de Kilimanjaro (1969)and Bitches Brew (1970), both of which were written by Rolling Stone co-founder (and consulting editor) RalphGleason. For more on the relationship between rock and jazz journalism at the time, see Matthew Brennan, DownBeats and Rolling Stones: An Historical Comparison of American Jazz and Rock Journalism (Ph.D. diss., Universityof Stirling, 2007).


Jazz Perspectives 11

without words” that features “an incredible journey of pain, joy, sorrow, hate, passion,and love.”15

Columbia recognized that attracting a new audience could result in the alienation ofDavis’s more traditional jazz fans. For a Bitches Brew ad in Down Beat, then, thecompany notes that while Davis’s “audience has grown … there’s always been a solidcore.” It argues that although this new audience would “like to say they’ve been intoMiles for years, most of them can’t.” Highlighting the value of Davis’s traditional jazzfans who would be reading the ad, the copy concludes, “You probably can [say you’vebeen into Miles for years]. And [you] will.”16 Through these and similar advertise-ments, Columbia attempted to make connections between Davis and new, rock-oriented listeners, while taking care to continue reaching out to his more traditionaljazz audience.

At the time, this marketing approach was in line with Columbia’s broader interest inexposing the entirety of its roster to the newly recognized, and predominantly white,youth audience.17 A number of issues motivated Columbia to begin targeting thisparticular market in the late 1960s. In this period, sales of recordings by emerging popand rock artists were radically eclipsing the previously reliable Broadway cast albums,Mitch Miller Sing Along albums, and other “middle-of-the-road” recordings.18 CliveDavis, president of Columbia Records from 1967 until 1973, began looking to theseemerging acts to lift Columbia off of what he described as “the frightening plateau ofmarginal sales profits” that had been plaguing the company since the mid 1960s.19

Clive’s attendance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Music Festival gave him what hedescribed as “a glimpse of a new world,” and this epiphany brought into sharp focusthe future of the music industry and the steps that would be necessary to ensureColumbia’s part in that future.20

The landmark Monterey festival featured over thirty contemporary artists, includingJimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the HoldingCompany, and drew a crowd of over 40,000 attendees for each of its three days. The vastmajority of that audience was young and counterculture-oriented, and was comprised

15 See the following advertisements: Rolling Stone, May 14, 1970, 51; Creem, April 1970, 11; LA Free Press, March13, 1970, 48.16 Advertisement, Down Beat, August 20, 1970, 23.17 Columbia similarly attempted to promote musicians associated with other genres to rock-focused white youth.For example, the company launched a five-month promotional campaign of its classical music library. For aHector Berlioz recording, the campaign included an ad that boasted, “Hector Berlioz Took Dope, and His TripsExploded into Out-of-Sight Sounds.” Quoted in Robert Shelton, “Rock Music Groups Going for Baroque in theNew Eclecticism,” New York Times, September 6, 1968, 37. For information on other record companies’ evolvingapproaches to marketing and advertising at this time, see Frank Kofsky, “The State of Jazz,” The Black Perspectivein Music 5 (Spring 1977): 44–66; Ashley Kahn, The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 2006), 103–105, 211–261; Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues (New York: PenguinBooks, 2004), 95–146; and Stan Cornyn, Exploding: The Highs, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner MusicGroup (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 115–125, 204–210.18 See Clive Davis, with James Willwerth, Clive: Inside the Record Business (New York: William Morrow, 1975), 3;and Gary Marmorstein, The Label: The Story of Columbia Records (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2007), 252.19 Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 5. In this article, I refer to Miles Davis as “Davis” and to Clive Davis as “Clive.”20 See Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 74–77; and Chapple and Garofalo, Rock ’n’ Roll Is Here, 44, 73, 80.



of individuals who were looking for a new music to articulate their newly-identifiedvalues and lifestyles. As Clive understood them, these youth had come of age in theCold War era where the broadly accepted goals of life included the pursuit of theAmerican dream in the context of an American political exceptionalism which stressedthe value of democracy over the threat of communism. Subsequently disillusioned (inpart by the escalation of the Vietnam War, the perceived widespread social conserva-tism in the U.S., and the growing homogenization of American culture), these youthbegan looking to younger artists and musicians both to represent and to galvanize theircountercultural views.21 While historians and cultural critics have argued for recogniz-ing the diversity of the 1960s youth culture, Columbia found reason to view this groupas a coherent body precisely because of the musical tastes its constituents held incommon. Thus, beginning in the late 1960s, Columbia focused its advertising effortson college-aged, middle-class whites in order to capitalize on the vast sales potentialthey represented. Beyond adding to its artist roster such rock-oriented groups as JanisJoplin and Blood, Sweat & Tears, Columbia targeted this audience in two ways: (1) byinitiating an aggressive expansion of its record retail business into geographic areas thattargeted younger listeners; and (2) by designing advertisements intended to appeal tothe youth sensibilities of the era.22

Columbia’s Retail Expansion

In 1969, Columbia made the unconventional decision to purchase Discount Records,a retail chain that strategically opened stores near college campuses. Columbia’s expe-rience in retail had previously been limited to the Columbia Record Club, a direct-mailbusiness begun in 1955 which offered access to selections from Columbia’s active cata-log on a subscription basis.23 However, due to the decentralized and highly regionalizednature of record sales at the time, it was difficult for Columbia to obtain timely and reli-able information on consumer demographic trends. Discount Records was appealingbecause of its detailed inventory system which allowed the tracking of album sales forspecific demographics. Columbia acknowledged that its decision to purchase Discountwas motivated by a desire “to test new merchandising methods and to collect accurateconsumer buying data, especially from the young people presently enrolled at theuniversity level.”24 In this way, Columbia not only could gain a better understanding

21 See Michael Lydon, Flashbacks: Eyewitness Accounts of the Rock Revolution, 1964–1974 (New York: Routledge,2003), 21–39; Sarah Hill, “When Deep Soul Met the Love Crowd: Otis Redding, Monterey Pop Festival, June 17,1967,” in Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time, ed. Ian Inglis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 28–40; and Philip H. Ennis, The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music (Hanover, NH:Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 283–312.22 See Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, “Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s and’70s,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, eds. Braunstein and Doyle (New York:Routledge, 2002), 10; Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2001), 5–10; and Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 6, 74–76.23 See Chapple and Garofalo, Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Here, 52; and Marmorstein, The Label, 221–222.24 Quoted in “Columbia Records in Record Stores,” Rolling Stone, February 1, 1969, 10.



of which records were and were not selling to its target audience, but it could also ensurethat more of its catalog was consistently available to that audience.25

A key concern for record companies during this era was exposing their product toan interested audience, as local and regional sales strategies had not yet been eclipsedby a more homogenous, national approach to distribution. Instead, album distributionwas notably decentralized, with retail trends targeted toward local markets. Chainrecord stores and national retail outlets had only begun to displace the local “mom andpop” record stores that served as a musical bedrock for the consumption interests ofneighborhoods and cities. Consequently, there was rarely any standardized nationaldistribution strategy for ensuring that a particular recording would be available in allof the target markets at the optimal times. Even if a company were to develop a nationalstrategy for an album’s distribution, that strategy would be contingent upon the will-ingness of thousands of independent, local record stores to order and stock thatalbum.26

Columbia’s promotional staff faced the daunting challenge of navigating among thevarious local radio deejays, club owners, and retail record store owners in an attemptto help “break” a recording in a given region. The ultimate goal for any recording wasits appearance in a national sales chart, such as Billboard or Cash Box, and preferably asa part of the Top 40 list for a given week. This national attention could open up newsales possibilities due to the unique role that rack-jobbers played in the music retailbusiness at the time. As Steven Pond has detailed the process, it was only once a record-ing appeared on a national chart that it would gain the attention of the rack-jobbers,who were responsible for stocking record stands in various department stores andgrocery stores. The rack-jobbers purchased specific recordings from a distributor andstocked those items in space that was leased within retail stores. Since their incomedepended on moving the highest volume of recordings possible within a limitedamount of shelf space, rack-jobbers generally only stocked those fifteen to forty record-ings that were already poised to reach the pinnacle of their commercial success byhaving appeared on a national chart.27

Columbia’s interest in purchasing Discount Records, then, was driven by its searchfor an effective way to circumvent the various difficulties in getting a product into retailoutlets. What was a logical business decision from Columbia’s perspective, however, wasnot met with universal enthusiasm from the public, particularly from the youth audi-ence that Columbia was targeting with the purchase. At a time when many youth under-stood the U.S. to be growing in its impersonal, mechanized efficiency, a hallmark of theyouth culture was promoting the opposite values of individuality and personal freedom.These youth viewed large institutions—whether the government or major corporationssuch as CBS/Columbia—as prominent symbols of the values they were actively reject-ing. Columbia’s ability to purchase at will an entire chain of record stores reinforcedthe public perception of this company as a large corporate entity fundamentally in

25 Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 124.26 See Chapple and Garofalo, Rock ’n’ Roll Is Here, 24–25, 89–92.27 See Pond, Head Hunters, 155–186; and Chapple and Garofalo, Rock ’n’ Roll Is Here, 89–92, 98–102.



opposition to the countercultural values adopted by many youth at the time.28

Nevertheless, Columbia’s acquisition of Discount Records represented a savvy andeffective approach at reaching its target market, and this approach was augmented byColumbia’s advertising strategies at the time.

Advertising in Underground and Mainstream Publications

In the late 1960s, Columbia was faced with the task of utilizing its significant financialresources to purchase advertisements in various youth-oriented publications withoutdisaffecting that audience by appearing overly commercial or corporate. One wayColumbia sought to gain credibility with the youth audience was by appealing to itscountercultural sensibilities through both the content of Columbia advertisements aswell as the political persuasion of the publications in which those advertisementsappeared. With the rise of a distinct youth audience in the 1960s came an increase inthe number of newspapers and periodicals that were intended to cater to the interestsof that audience. Collectively known as the “underground press,” this diverse group ofpublications held in common what Donna Ellis described in 1971 as “their sharedopposition to the American ‘system’ politically, culturally, and economically.” Elliselaborated:

They are essentially local papers … with neither the ability nor apparently theinclination to provide national or international coverage…. They are loosely tied toan underground community sharing cultural forms and leisure activities outside theEstablishment, notably rock music…. And all the papers are concerned in some waywith the “Revolution” or the “Movement.”29

The local and transitory nature of these publications make an exact quantification oftheir number impossible, but the best sources estimate the existence of roughly 500underground newspapers by 1970 with a collective circulation of up to five million eachweek. These publications ranged in size and in frequency of circulation, but mostemphasized the anti-war movement, radical politics, sexual images that challenged thelimits of pornography laws, and festivals and recordings related to rock music.30 AsMorris Baumstein, from Columbia’s advertising department, put it, “The under-ground press is probably the least professional effort in publishing. But they are ahighly logical medium for us. The people who read the papers are the ones who includemusic as essential to their way of life. It’s simply part of their bag.”31

Columbia began placing advertisements in these publications as a way to reach itstarget youth audience. In a 1969 ad in Chicago’s The Seed newspaper, for example,

28 Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 106. See also the commentary on Columbia’s purchase in “Columbia Records inRecord Stores,” 10.29 Donna Lloyd Ellis, “The Underground Press in America: 1955–1970,” Journal of Popular Culture 5 (Summer1971): 102, 105.30 See Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon, 1985),183; and Robert Glessing, The Underground Press in America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1970),6, 10, 92.31 Quoted in Ellis, “Underground Press,” 115.



Columbia emphasized the ideas of honesty and individualism that were thought to beappealing to countercultural youth. Promoting new records by Tim Hardin and MarkSpoelstra as music so “honest” that “even your best friend may not understand it,”Columbia dedicated these albums to those listeners who purchased records “strictly foryour own head” instead of “to fill a gap in your collection” or to “impress your friendsand neighbors.”32 Other Columbia ads drew upon the vocabulary and values of thepacifist flower children segment of the youth counterculture, such as a 1969 ad inCreem for the Chambers Brothers’ Love, Peace and Happiness. Promising that thisalbum will “make your neighbors more neighborly,” the ad instructs listeners to playthe recording at a high volume during evening parties. Anticipating complaints fromneighbors, the copy advises, “When the drags in your building come rapping on yourdoor, hurling vicious threats of murder and cops, invite them in. Turn them on to love,peace and happiness.”33 Additionally, as Bill Graham’s Fillmore venues in SanFrancisco and New York became symbols for countercultural music in the late 1960s,Columbia strategically drew upon the name’s emerging brand status by starting its own“Fillmore Records” label. Ads for new albums on Fillmore Records boasted that “Fill-more used to be just East and West” but that, with the establishment of this new label,“now it’s everywhere in between.”34 Although Columbia purchased advertisements foralbums by its musicians in a variety of underground publications, it placed an evengreater emphasis on advertising in more mainstream periodicals.35 Its expansive adver-tising in Rolling Stone represented one such attempt to create a significant presence inwhat was emerging as the definitive publication for youth-oriented music in the late1960s. In a two-page, multi-album ad in Rolling Stone from 1968, Columbia featured asemi-circle of five hippies, an African American, and a Native American in full head-dress passing around what appears to be a marijuana cigarette. The ad encouraged thelisteners to “know who your friends are,” to “be together,” and then to “listen.”36 A fewmonths later, Columbia ran another multi-album advertisement that boasted, “TheMan can’t bust our music.” Again featuring a diverse group of youth, this time holdingvarious protest posters, the ad argued that although “the Establishment’s againstadventure,” “the Man can’t stop you from listening” to the ostensibly adventurousalbums that Columbia was currently producing.37

Ads such as these served to distance Columbia from the “Establishment” and tovalidate purchasing Columbia’s albums as a way to join in the anti-establishment youth

32 The Seed 3, no. 9, 1969, 17.33 Creem, February 1970, 14.34 See advertisements for albums by Aum and the Elvin Bishop Group in Creem, January 1970, 8, 26. For more onthe Fillmore venues, see Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2004); and the special edition of Planet Magazine, “A Tribute to the Fillmore,”December 1971.35 In 1969, in fact, Columbia ceased advertising in many underground publications, and the company claimed thisdecision was made because of the apparent lack of benefit to album sales. For responses to this decision, see RollingStone, “Columbia to Stay Above Ground,” July 26, 1969, 10; Clive Davis, “Correspondence, Love Letters, andAdvice,” Rolling Stone, August 23, 1969, 3; and Peck, Uncovering the Sixties, 176.36 Advertisement, Rolling Stone, September 21, 1968, 16–17.37 Advertisement, Rolling Stone, December 7, 1968, 31.



culture of the day. In another 1968 Rolling Stone ad, Columbia made this idea explicitwhen it asked, “If you won’t listen to your parents, the Man or the Establishment …Why should you listen to us?” The copy then listed the underground credentials of tenColumbia artists to demonstrate Columbia’s solidarity with the youth culture and toestablish its credibility with that market.38 Columbia’s marketing strategy, combinedwith its recruitment of youth-oriented musicians and its purchase of DiscountRecords, was ultimately successful, as sales profits increased from roughly five milliondollars per year in the mid 1960s to nearly fifty million per year by the early 1970s.39

Venue Selection as a Marketing Strategy

As noted, Columbia placed advertisements for Miles Davis’s albums in these variousyouth-oriented publications in order to expose his music to the potentially lucrativewhite youth audience. A second aspect of Columbia’s strategy to “aim Miles at the Rockaudience” was to begin to diversify the concert venues in which Davis performed. Upto this time, Davis had historically appeared in the small nightclubs that served as tradi-tional venues for jazz performance. Not only were such clubs doing little to exposeDavis to younger listeners, but in the late 1960s Davis’s audience draw at these venueswas steadily declining—a trend that was in line with the more general decline inaudiences for live jazz at the time.40 In 1969, Clive wrote to Bill Graham to inquire intoscheduling performances for Davis at Graham’s Fillmore venues in order to diversifyDavis’s audience. Graham accepted Clive’s request, and Davis first appeared at theFillmore East on March 6–7, 1970, opening for both Neil Young and the Steve MillerBand. In a follow-up letter, Clive voiced his “delight” that the audience reaction toDavis was “ecstatic,” leaving open the possibility of other similar concerts in thefuture.41 Davis went on to appear at the Fillmore East and West three additional timesthat year, playing on bills with such groups as the Grateful Dead and Laura Nyro.42 Arecording of one of these appearances, the June 17–20 concerts at the Fillmore East, wasreleased in 1970 as Miles Davis at Fillmore. Columbia used this recording as an oppor-tunity to continue its practice of reaching out to the predominantly white youth audi-ence by placing advertisements for the album in Rolling Stone and various undergroundpublications. One ad that highlights the countercultural appeal of the music, presentsthe album as taking listeners beyond the “comfortable music and predictable sounds”that characterize much contemporary popular music and into “a place where theclichés of today’s music don’t exist.”43

38 Advertisement, Rolling Stone, November 9, 1968, 12–13.39 Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 6.40 See bass player Dave Holland’s recollection of his surprise at the small audiences Davis’s band was performingfor in the late 1960s in Paul Tingen, Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967–1991 (New York:Billboard Books, 2001), 82.41 Clive Davis, letters to Bill Graham, November 17, 1969 and April 20, 1970, Macero Collection, in Box 13, Folder 18.42 Those appearances took place at the Fillmore East on June 17–20 and the Fillmore West on April 9–12 andOctober 15–18.43 This advertisement appears in Creem, February 1971, 3; LA Free Press, November 27, 1970, 43; and Rolling Stone,December 2, 1970, 13.



Davis’s Fillmore appearances opened up further possibilities for live performance, ashe then began playing alongside rock groups at large halls and outdoor events, includ-ing the Isle of Wight festival in Great Britain in 1970 and the Hollywood Bowl inCalifornia in 1971. Davis also began performing regularly on college campuses, as heappeared in the early 1970s at the University of Michigan, UCLA, and the University ofMiami, among other institutions.44

Marketing “Black” Music

Although Davis ultimately accepted Columbia’s strategy for introducing his music to abroader youth audience, he also voiced criticisms about some of the strategy’s specificresults. In addition to complaining about the lack of direct remuneration from showsheld at youth-oriented venues, Davis expressed his concern that appearances at suchvenues contributed to what he termed Columbia’s “white” marketing strategies. In 1970,he additionally described these appearances as “good public relations for Columbia”since the company was able to advertise Davis “like they would a white artist.” Davisclarified, “But I don’t want them to sell me like they do a white artist.” In a 1973 interview,he further complained, “They tell me, ‘We want to introduce you to a new audience,’but that audience is always white.… It makes me mad when Columbia says, ‘We wantthese people to hear you.’ I don’t audition for no white man.”45

For Davis, intentionally playing before a predominately white audience was anti-thetical to garnering the respect that he demanded for both himself and his music.Sensitive to the history of minstrelsy and other degrading forms of African Americanentertainment, Davis was eager for his music to be marketed to, and appreciated by,African American listeners instead of whites. He was critical of Columbia’s apathy inreaching out to those listeners, noting, “They don’t even try to go into the blackneighborhoods and sell records.”46 Davis felt that what efforts Columbia did make inthis regard were ineffective due to Columbia’s general cultural deafness toward thepreferences of African Americans. Put simply, Davis maintained that Columbia didnot “know how to sell a black man’s personality.” He further argued, “First thing,the white man thinks all Negroes want to laugh.… I would sell sex (in advertise-ments and commercials) to the black woman from the black man. I would make him

44 For a comprehensive listing of Miles Davis’s concerts, see Peter Losin, “Miles Davis Sessions: 1945–1991,”http://www.plosin.com/milesAhead/Sessions.aspx (accessed June 17, 2008).45 See “Miles Davis: The Prince of Darkness Also Brings Light,” Zygote 1 (August 12, 1970), 35; Hubert Saal, “Milesof Music,” Newsweek, March 23, 1970, 99; Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 261; and Stephen Davis, “Miles Davis: AnExclusive Interview,” 13. For Clive’s response to Davis’s complaints, see Chris Albertson, “The Unmasking ofMiles Davis,” Saturday Review, November 27, 1971, 68–69. Private correspondence offers a more nuanced view ofDavis’s opinion of Columbia’s promotional strategies. See Miles Davis, letter to Clive Davis, January 8, 1970,Macero Collection, in Box 14, Folder 2.46 Stephen Davis, “Miles Davis: An Exclusive Interview,” 13. See also Gregg Hall, “Miles: Today’s Most InfluentialContemporary Musician,” Down Beat, July 18, 1974, 18. Davis was further critical of the general lack of AfricanAmerican musicians on Columbia’s roster. See Hollie I. West, “Black Tune,” The Washington Post, March 13,1969, L1, L9; and “Miles Davis Rips Record Firm for Bias,” Jet, January 7, 1971, 59.



say what any black man says to a black woman.”47 Though it demonstrates hisinsensitivity to female musicians’ contributions to jazz at the time, Davis’s commentmore productively draws attention to a racial and cultural awareness that he felt waslacking within Columbia Records.

For Davis, Columbia’s inability to connect with African American listenersresulted in part from the prevalence of white employees responsible for developingits advertising campaigns. As he put it, “I told Clive … [to hire] a black man whothinks black to sell the music to black people.” This was a part of Davis’s largerdesire, as reporter Hollie West summarized it, “to change the color of record-company marketing techniques from white to at least a light tan.” Davis argued thatthe primary way by which Columbia could reach African American listeners with itsmusic would be to “begin using the black image” in advertisements and on albumcovers. As he put it, “All I tell ’em to do is to sell the music black, not to put nowhite girls on the cover with no pants on and stuff like that. Sell it black.”48 As I willdiscuss below, while Davis had been successfully advocating for the use of AfricanAmericans on his album covers since the recording Some Day My Prince Will Come(1961), it is that advocacy—expressed in terms of selling the music “black”—whichtook on a new significance in the political and cultural context of the late 1960s andearly 1970s. At that time, while Columbia was eager to introduce the entirety of itsroster to the lucrative white youth audience, Davis made it clear that he would notbe fully satisfied until his music began to reach a significant number of AfricanAmerican listeners.

For Davis, this was more than an idle complaint, as he went on to suggest specificsteps that Columbia could take to remedy the situation. According to Hollie West,Davis planned to meet with Columbia’s executives in early 1969 to encourage them tobegin working with select African American promotion and talent agencies.49 The goalof this collaboration would be to improve Columbia’s exposure to African Americansthrough relevant concerts and record promotions. Davis likewise argued for the valuein hosting talent shows at African American colleges in order to locate and support newartists.

Not content to wait for Columbia’s leadership on the matter, Davis personally tookseveral steps to demonstrate his commitment to this issue. First, he began working withan African American owned marketing firm in the late 1960s to generate ideas for howbest to market his music to African Americans. He also offered to play concerts at anypredominantly African American college for free. His attempts to reach AfricanAmerican youth with his music went beyond the college campus, as Davis once tookhalf of his performance fee for a 1971 concert at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hallin New York City and purchased tickets that were to be distributed for free to

47 West, “Black Tune,” L9.48 Michael Watts, “Miles Davis,” in Today’s Sound: A Melody Maker Book, ed. Ray Coleman (London: Hamlyn,1973), 127; West, “Black Tune,” L1; and Stephen Davis, “Miles Davis: An Exclusive Interview,” 12–13.49 West, “Black Tune,” L1.



African American youth in the area.50 Davis thus showed a desire to advocate for AfricanAmericans by: (1) prompting Columbia to demonstrate a greater sensitivity to AfricanAmerican culture in its marketing campaigns; (2) intentionally performing his musicfor African Americans; and (3) arguing for an increased presence of African Americanemployees at Columbia Records. For Davis, utilizing these strategies in conjunctionwith using “the black image” on promotional material would benefit other AfricanAmericans while also ensuring that his records were reaching interested AfricanAmerican listeners. Davis was particularly keen on reaching those youth who were moreprone at the time to purchase music by James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone thanthey were to purchase his own recordings.

The Politics of “Black” Music in the Early 1970s

Davis’s desire that Columbia sell his music “black” resonated with similar statementshe made at the time about how the performance of his music was to be understood as“playing black.” As Davis summarized this view in 1975, “I don’t play rock. Rock is awhite word. And I don’t like the word jazz because jazz is a nigger word that white folksdropped on us. We just play Black. We play what the day recommends.” Davis’sinsistence that his groups were “playing black” is best understood in the context ofbroader cultural nationalist sentiments from the period that had increased in promi-nence since the mid 1960s (though such sentiments had been a constitutive componentof African American political discourse for some time).51

Although the “heroic period” of the Civil Rights Movement (ca. 1954–1965) hasoften been distinguished from the purportedly more militant era of the Black PowerMovement (1965–1975), the tactics and ideologies of the two were as much coexistentas they were chronologically distinct.52 Since at least the 1950s, the African Americanfreedom struggle had been characterized by both non-violent, assimilationist-orientedstrategies and more militant, nationalist-oriented approaches. Throughout thisbroader freedom struggle, racial designation was consistently linked to political

50 Gregg Hall, “Miles,” 19; Albertson, “Unmasking of Miles Davis,” 67. See also Carr, Miles Davis, 226; andChambers, Milestones, vol. 2, 186.51 See Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal ofAmerican History 91 (March 2005): 1233–1263, for an emphasis on the media’s facilitation of the expansion ofvarious black nationalist discourses in the late 1960s.52 This perspective has been chiefly advocated within the growing body of scholarship known as New BlackPower Studies. For an introduction, see “New Black Power Studies,” special issue, ed. V. P. Franklin, Journal ofAfrican American History 92 (Fall 2007); The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black PowerEra, ed. Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006); and “New Black Power Studies,” special issue, ed.Peniel E. Joseph, Black Scholar 31 (Fall 2001). For other book-length contributions, see Timothy B. Tyson,Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 1999); Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South,1940–1980, eds. Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). A responseto this position can be seen in Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire:Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92 (Fall2007): 265–288.



ideology, as debates among African Americans regarding the most appropriate racialdesignation by which to self-identify were articulated with debates over approaches topolitical and social action. In general, the term “Negro” was embraced by those whoadvocated for assimilation and non-violence, while the term “black” came to symbolizemore nationalist, militant approaches.53

While this debate had been present both between and within various civil rightsorganizations for some time, two mid-1960s events in particular contributed to thepopularization of “black” as the racial designation of choice among AfricanAmericans.54 First, in 1966, Stokely Carmichael, the national director of the SouthernNonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), famously popularized the phrase“Black Power” during the Meredith March Against Fear in Mississippi.55 In publiclyrejecting the value of non-violent protest, and in embracing “Black Power” as the mosteffective way to bring about social and political change, Carmichael articulated boththe ideology and the phrase that would publicly define the freedom struggle in the late1960s. Two years later, the notion of “blackness” as a source of pride for AfricanAmericans gained a prominent avenue for its circulation when James Brown releasedthe anthem “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” Lyrically, Brown’s construction of“black and proud” is based on notions of assertive self-reliance (“we demand a chanceto do things for ourselves”) and militant resolve (“we’d rather die on our feet than keepliving on our knees”). Musically, Brown’s vocal delivery—combining half-sungmelody and chanted declamation—hovers over three rhythmically interlocking riffsperformed on bass, guitar, and horns, and a drum groove that combines syncopatedhits with a strong back beat.56 This infectious “black and proud” groove combined withthe song’s aggressive lyrics to grow into an overt political chant, as the designation

53 See, for instance, Lerone Bennett, Jr., “What’s in a Name?: National Controversy Rages Over Proper Name forAmericans of African Descent,” Ebony, November 1967, 46–51; John Leo, “Militants Object to ‘Negro’ Usage,”New York Times, February 26, 1968, 31; Charles V. Hamilton, “How Black Is Black?,” in The Black Revolution: AnEbony Special Issue (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1970), 23–29; Ben L. Martin, “From Negro to Black to AfricanAmerican: The Power of Names and Naming,” Political Science Quarterly 106 (Spring 1991): 83–107; and WilliamVan Deburg, Black Camelot: African American Culture Heroes in Their Times, 1960–1980 (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1997), 220–221.54 In a related fashion, the assassination on April 8, 1968, of Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who had been thenational embodiment of non-violent protest, was arguably the single most important event in motivating AfricanAmerican activists to embrace the political ideology that “blackness” had come to symbolize.55 Although the phrase “Black Power” had previously been used by other African American leaders—such as itstitular invocation in Richard Wright’s Black Power: A Record of Reaction in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harperand Brothers, 1954)—the year 1966 marked the moment when the phrase gained widespread popularity. For moreon Black Power, see Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation inAmerica (New York: Random House, 1967); and Joel Aberbach and Jack Walker, “The Meanings of Black Power:A Comparison of White and Black Interpretations of a Political Slogan,” American Political Science Review 64(June 1970): 367–388.56 For more on Brown’s construction of musical grooves, see Anne Danielsen, Presence and Pleasure: The FunkGrooves of James Brown and Parliament (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006); and David Brackett,Interpreting Popular Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 108–156.



“black” became the banner under which an increasing number of African Americanswould rally.57

“Black” Americans embraced a variety of nationalist perspectives, many of whichshared the belief that, as Malcolm X put it in 1964, “Whites can help us but they can’tjoin us. There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity.”58 Thisemphasis on racial exclusivity took forms that were territorial, as for example with thecalls by Floyd McKissick and others for the formation of various “soul cities” through-out the U.S. which were solely intended for African Americans. Other expressions weremore broadly revolutionary, as with the Black Panthers’ advocacy of oppressed minor-ities utilizing any means necessary to rise up against ruling classes. Still others, such asMaulana Karenga’s US organization or Amiri Baraka’s work with the Black Arts Reper-tory Theater and Spirit House, advocated for an approach based on the power ofcultural institutions and representations to galvanize group identity and influencepolitical sentiment.59 These approaches were not necessarily mutually exclusive, asthey were all based on the principles of self-determination, self-reliance, and self-respect. Collectively, they allowed those who self-identified as “black” to embracevarious aspects of black nationalism while strategically uniting under a single racialdesignation.

In 1970, Miles Davis demonstrated an awareness of the symbolic and politicalconnotations of “black.” During an interview on the ways genre affects marketing strat-egies, he noted that “jazz is an Uncle Tom word and pretty soon, just like nobody wantsto be called Negro or colored, nobody wants to be called a jazz musician.” Here, Davisrecognizes the derogatory nature of the racial designations “colored” and “Negro” andgestures toward his awareness of those terms’ lack of popularity among many AfricanAmericans. Moreover, as observed, Davis was intent at the time on describing his musicas “black” music rather than jazz or rock, which he felt were “nigger word[s] that whitefolks dropped on us.” He additionally showed a specific appreciation for James

57 Some African American sociologists at the time developed the concept of the “Negro-to-Black conversion expe-rience” to describe the phenomenon by which individual African Americans learned to formulate a positive racialidentity based on assertiveness, self-reliance, and self-determination. See William S. Hall, William E. Cross, Jr.,and Roy Freedle, “Stages in the Development of Black Awareness: An Exploratory Investigation,” in Black Psychol-ogy, ed. Reginald L. Jones (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 156; William E. Cross, Jr., “The Negro-to-BlackConversion Experience: Toward a Psychology of Black Liberation,” Black World 20 (July 1971): 13–27; and NathanHare, “The Plasma of Thinking Black,” Negro Digest 18 (January 1969): 12–18. See also Van Deburg, BlackCamelot, 69–70.58 Quoted in Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007), 169.59 For more on the various black nationalist ideologies, see William Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The BlackPower Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 132–191; ScotBrown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: NewYork University Press, 2003); and Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).



Brown’s tune “Say It Loud” by borrowing the song’s bass riff for use as a foundationalcomponent of the track “Yesternow” on his 1971 album Jack Johnson.60

Brown’s “Say It Loud” was an anthem of self-reliance and self-determination,encouraging African American listeners to take pride in the perceived unique attributesof their race and culture. This recording was employed along with other culturalexpressions—including dress styles, hair styles, physical features, speech, literature,and visual art—to represent the unique properties of being “black” and to argue that,for perhaps the first time in American history, to be “black” was to be beautiful. As theauthor and cultural critic Hoyt Fuller put it:

After centuries of being told, in a million different ways, that they were not beautiful,and that whiteness of skin, straightness of hair, and aquilineness of features consti-tuted the only measures of beauty, black people have revolted.… [They] are snappingoff the shackles of imitation and are wearing their skin, their hair, and their features“natural” and with pride.61

This reclamation of the right to define standards of beauty extended throughoutAfrican American culture, as Fuller and other critics contributed to the broader BlackArts and Black Aesthetics movements. These movements jointly theorized the valueof African American cultural difference and the empowering importance of embrac-ing those distinctions.62 Such cultural nationalist sentiments were based on the beliefthat uniting a people in identity and purpose through cultural independence was aprecondition for collective political action. While “Say It Loud” was among the mostpopular musical representations of this approach, this movement’s goals wereexpressed by a notably diverse group of musicians and musical genres. In particular,numerous experimental free jazz musicians have been linked historically to the BlackArts movement and to African American cultural nationalism more broadly. Due inpart to the advocacy of Amiri Baraka and other prominent African American intel-lectuals from the time, these musicians, and the various collectives that they formed,achieved a significant level of symbolic prominence in this culture-based project.Musicians’ collectives—including the Association for the Advancement of CreativeMusicians, the Jazz Composers Guild, and the Collective Black Artists—helped theirconstitutive members gain access to economic and aesthetic support that was other-

60 “Miles Davis: The Prince of Darkness Also Brings Light,” 35; Paul Tingen, “The Jack Johnson Sessions,”December 2003, http://www.miles-beyond.com/jackjohnson.htm (accessed February 14, 2009); and Frederick D.Murphy, “Miles Davis: The Monster of Modern Music,” Encore: American and Worldwide News, July 21, 1975, 36.Davis’s advocacy for “blackness” increased further after he added James Mtume to his band in late 1971. Mtumehad been an advocate of the cultural nationalist organization US since 1966, and he regularly sought to proselytizeon its behalf. See Brown, Fighting for US, 131–158.61 Hoyt W. Fuller, “Introduction: Towards a Black Aesthetic,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr.(Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1971), 8.62 See The Black Aesthetic, ed. Gayle; Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writing, ed. MichaelSchwartz (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1989); and The Black Revolution: An Ebony Special Issue (Chicago:Johnson, 1970). For studies that have problematized the main tenets of the Black Arts and Aesthetics Movements,see Houston A. Baker, Jr., “Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of Afro-American Literature [1981],”reprinted in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York UniversityPress, 2000), 179–217; and Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York:New York University Press, 2001), 171–224.



wise lacking in that day. They also regularly sought to utilize community outreachand education to reach a broad segment of African American listeners by bridgingthe gap between their often abrasive aesthetic choices and the popular musical tastesof those target listeners.63

However, while experimental musicians have achieved the most attention in discus-sions of jazz and cultural nationalism, a variety of other jazz musicians and styles,including Miles Davis’s early fusion jazz, contributed to this broader project.64 Davis’sembrace of the politicized language of “blackness” in describing his music, togetherwith his attempts to reach African American listeners and his general advocacy foreconomic empowerment for African Americans in the music business, collectivelyexpressed Black Arts and cultural nationalist impulses. Unlike most experimental jazzmusicians, Davis was able to contribute to this movement outside the structures ofmusicians’ collectives due primarily to his lucrative contract with Columbia Recordsand his relative aesthetic autonomy within the company.65 While his existing economicsupport and musical freedom made identifying with a collective pragmatically redun-dant, Davis shared in the collectives’ general goal of reaching out to African Americanlisteners in order to develop a degree of cultural unity. Moreover, his musical decisionsat the time, as outlined above, demonstrate a willingness to deploy his aesthetic goalsin the service of reaching those listeners. Davis’s desire to reach African Americanlisteners once even compelled him to assert that his own economic security was ulti-mately secondary to his success in connecting with those listeners. As he put it, “Youknow, I make $500,000 in a year, but I would do it for five dollars if my music wouldget to the black people.”66 Admittedly, this may have been more of an exaggeratedrhetorical flourish than a precise statement of intent. However, it does highlight Davis’saspiration to present his music to African American listeners and to position thatpresentation within the broader project of “playing black” and “selling it black.”

Davis expressed his desire to reach African American listeners in conjunctionwith a growing resentment toward white listeners. This, along with his criticismof Columbia Records, allowed Davis to continue embracing the rebellious personathat he had actively cultivated throughout his career.67 Ironically, in voicing his

63 For more on 1960s-era collectives, see George Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and AmericanExperimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?:African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 191–239; and Ronald Radano, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1993). See also Ruth Feldstein, “‘I Don’t Trust You Anymore’: Nina Simone, Culture, and BlackActivism in the 1960s,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1349–1379; and Lorenzo Thomas,“Ascension: Music and the Black Arts Movement,” in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham:Duke University Press, 1995), 256–274.64 For a valuable counter-narrative that demonstrates more mainstream jazz players’ involvement in the freedomstruggle, see Monson, Freedom Sounds, 152–237.65 According to Melody Maker magazine, in 1970 Davis signed a new three-year contract with Columbia Recordsthat was reportedly worth up to $300,000. See “Jazz News,” Melody Maker, March 21, 1970, 4.66 Michael Watts, “Miles Davis,” 124.67 See, for example, Gerald Early, “The Art of Muscle: Miles Davis as American Knight and American Knave,” inMiles Davis and American Culture, 3–23; and Gerald Early, “Miles Davis, Vince Lombardi, and the Crisis ofMasculinity in Mid-Century America,” Deadalus 131 (Winter 2002): 154–159.



opposition to white listeners and to Columbia Records, this public positioning maywell have made Davis’s music that much more appealing to the counterculturalcrowd that he was ostensibly resistant to. While adopting the politicized rhetoric of“blackness” likely alienated certain white listeners, Ben Sidran and other scholarshave argued that music identified as “black” was popular among white countercul-tural youth in the late 1960s who linked the African American freedom struggle totheir own “antiestablishment cultural orientation.”68 Since, as I argued above, manysuch youth viewed Columbia with suspicion at the time, Davis’s criticism of thecompany may have made his music that much more appealing to the white youthaudience. Thus, “selling it black” may ultimately have benefited Columbia in waysthat Davis himself could not have anticipated by attracting to his music the very audi-ence that Columbia had hoped to target in the first place. Such a possibility helps todemonstrate some of the unintended outcomes of the commodification and repre-sentation of “blackness,” particularly in the highly politicized context of racial politicsin the late 1960s and early 1970s.69

Adding another layer of complexity to this story is the fact that Columbia eventuallybegan responding to the political and aesthetic context in which an appropriate “black-ness” was increasingly a standard for valuing art. Just as Davis insisted that his band was“playing black,” both African American and white listeners from the era additionallydescribed his music in similar terms. In his 1971 review of Davis’s album, A Tribute toJack Johnson, white critic Dave Marsh noted about the music, “It’s about real stuff: life,and blackness.” Another critic in 1970 described Davis’s playing as a “perfect blackribbon of sound.” A more critical review from an African American writer in Jet maga-zine noted, “The second fiddle trumpeter Miles Davis is playing to Johnny-come-latelywhite rock groups in recent concerts where he has fronted a combo that is far fromBlack.” As this latter critic argues, Davis’s combo was “far from Black” in both itsintegrated personnel and in the resulting music.70 While these writers offer differentfinal evaluations, they find agreement in their consistent invocation of “blackness” asthe standard for critical judgment. Although numerous scholars since the 1960s haveattempted to delineate the precise formal characteristics and musical practicesconstitutive of “black” music, playing “black” for Davis and other listeners in the early

68 Ben Sidran, Black Talk (New York: Da Capo, 1971; repr. 1981), 142–147. Eric Porter has similarly argued thatemphasizing “blackness” in advertisements was a way to increase sales among a variety of listeners. See Porter,What Is This Thing, 207, 230–234.69 For more on the historical commodification of blackness, see S. Craig Watkins, “‘Black Is Back, and It’s Boundto Sell!’: Nationalist Desire and the Production of Black Popular Culture,” in Is It Nation Time?: ContemporaryEssays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, ed. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002),189–214.70 Murphy, “Miles Davis: The Monster of Modern Music,” 36; Dave Marsh, “Review of Jack Johnson,” Creem,September 1971, 56; and Dick Hadlock, “Caught in the Act: University of California Jazz Festival,” Down Beat, July23, 1970, 28. Jet review quoted in Leonard Feather, “The Name of the Game,” Down Beat, October 15, 1970, 11.



1970s was as much a discursive formation as it was a musical style.71 This discoursecontributed to Davis’s larger goal of reaching African American listeners in part byawakening Columbia to the specific cultural tastes of those listeners.

In several key respects, Davis’s public complaints against Columbia (as discussedabove) resonated with the content of the “Harvard Report,” a 1972 study thatColumbia Records commissioned for the purpose of better targeting African Americanlisteners.72 While conservative figures estimated that African Americans were respon-sible for just over seven percent of total album sales in the late 1960s, Columbiaacknowledged that it was doing little to promote its music to that audience.73

Motivated in part by the continued success of Motown, Stax, and Atlantic Records inreaching African American listeners, Columbia sought to tap into the sales potentialthat this market represented.

The Harvard Report comprised a nearly fifty-page analysis of the African Americanmusic market along with evaluations of several methods by which Columbia couldsuccessfully gain a significant share of that market. The Report’s primary recommen-dations were for Columbia to create a separate soul music group with its own budget,director, and promotion team. Additionally, after pointing out that many AfricanAmericans in the music industry viewed Columbia as “an ultra-rich, ultra-white giantwhich has for the most part chosen to snub Blacks in the business,” the Report recom-mended several neighborhood-based outreach actions to help improve Columbia’simage. Under Clive’s leadership, Columbia implemented many of the Report’s recom-mendations, including an augmentation of its promotion staff with several AfricanAmericans. In 1971, while the Harvard Report was still being researched, Columbiahad already launched the Philadelphia International Records label to record albumsand singles with the successful production team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.Additionally, in 1972, Columbia worked out a decade-long distribution deal with StaxRecords whereby Columbia gained distribution rights for Stax’s three major labels(Stax, Volt, and Enterprise), thereby giving Columbia even more clout in relation to theAfrican American market.74 These moves demonstrated Columbia’s growing

71 For prominent examples of categorizing black music as a style, see Olly Wilson, “The Heterogeneous SoundIdeal in African American Music,” in New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. JosephineWright (Michigan: Harmonie Park, 1992), 327–338; and Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpret-ing Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 6. For more recent schol-arship that has sought to understand “black” music as “a mutable and geographically and historically contingentprocess,” see Gabriel Solis, “Hearing Monk: History, Memory, and the Making of a ‘Jazz Giant,’” The MusicalQuarterly 86 (Spring 2002), 85; Veit Erlmann, “Communities of Style: Musical Figures of Black Diasporic Iden-tity,” in The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective, ed. Ingrid Monson (New York: Garland, 2000), 83–102; andRonald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).72 For more information on the “Harvard Report,” see David Sanjek, “Tell Me Something I Don’t Already Know:The Harvard Report on Soul Music Revisited,” in Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, ed.Norman Kelley (New York: Akashic, 2002), 63–80.73 This statistic, and the quotations that follow, are drawn directly from a personal copy of the “Harvard Report.”Seven percent equated to $120 million of the nearly $1.7 billion music industry in 1970.74 See Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 145–147; Rob Bowman, Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records (New York:Schirmer, 1997), 277–284; John Jackson, A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2004), 96–99; and Marmorstein, The Label, 458–461.



awareness of the financial value of African American listeners while also beginning toaddress some of Miles Davis’s complaints from the time.

Miles Davis’s Album Covers and Advertisements

For Davis, unlike for Columbia, “playing black” as both political and communal invest-ment remained inseparable from “sell[ing] it black.” Reaching out to African Americanyouth by emphasizing African Americans in advertisements was the most appropriateway to market his music and was the most suitable purpose for which to commodify“blackness.” By the late 1960s, Davis’s continued advocacy for placing AfricanAmericans on his album covers took on new significance in light of its articulation withprominent cultural nationalist concerns.75 Additionally, at that time, Davis not onlyadvocated for continued use of African American images on his album covers, but healso began commissioning drawings to be used as album covers that incorporated bothghetto-inspired scenes of African American social life and African-inspired images reso-nant with the broader cultural nationalist impulse at the time (see Figures 1-4 below).76

Figure 1 Front cover for Jack Johnson (1971).1 Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment.Figure 2 Front cover for On the Corner (1972), by Corky McCoy. Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment.Figure 3 Front Cover for Bitches Brew (1970), by Abdul Mati Klarwein. Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment.Figure 4 Back Cover for Bitches Brew. Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment.

In addition to these album covers, in the early 1970s, Columbia designed variousprint advertisements for Davis’s albums that emphasized images of AfricanAmericans.77 One advertisement, in particular, for A Tribute to Jack Johnson, epito-mizes this approach. While Columbia chose to place this ad in a variety of publications,one of its more notable choices was Essence magazine, which was among the leadingpublications read by African Americans.78 As Figure 5 demonstrates, the ad is charac-terized by both the visual and linguistic prominence of the body—visually throughDavis’s full-body profile that dominates the ad, and linguistically through the use of theword “body,” which appears nine times in the text of the ad.79

Figure 5 Advertisement for A Tribute to Jack Johnson.

The copy begins by stating the rationale for including Davis’s photograph (“allyou see is his body because all you hear [on the recording] is his body”), arguingthat the prominence of Davis’s body in the advertisement is in direct proportion tothe prominence of his body in the sounds heard on the album. The ad then quotesDavis as stating his visceral reliance on his body for determining the musical integ-rity of what he plays (“my body rejects things I don’t like”). After establishing

75 As mentioned earlier, a photograph of Francis Davis, his wife at the time, first appeared on the cover of thealbum Some Day My Prince Will Come (1961). This practice continued, for example, when Francis Davis appearedon the cover of E.S.P. (1965) and when Cicely Tyson appeared on the cover of Sorcerer (1967).76 In the late 1960s, Columbia similarly began using images of other African American artists on its roster foralbum covers and advertisements. See, for example, advertisements for Taj Mahal (advertisement, Rolling Stone,November 15, 1969, 19) and the Last Poets (advertisement, Rolling Stone, April 30, 1970, back cover). For moreon jazz album covers, see Carissa Kowalski Dougherty, “The Coloring of Jazz: Race and Record Cover Design inAmerican Jazz, 1950–1970,” Design Issues 23 (Winter 2007): 47–60; and Robert G. O’Meally, “Jazz Albums as Art:Some Reflections,” International Review of African American Art 14 (1997): 38–47.77 As, for example, the Davis advertisements in Rolling Stone and Down Beat discussed above.78 The ad appeared in no fewer than the following six publications: Down Beat, April 29, 1971, 21; Rolling Stone,April 15, 1971, 47; Essence, May 1971, 79; The Village Voice, April 15, 1971, 41; LA Free Press, April 16, 1971, 27;and Creem, June 1971, 21. The same ad appeared again in the LA Free Press, April 23, 1971, 11.79 For more on the discursive uses of the body in African American music, see Susan McClary and Robert Walser,“Theorizing the Body in African-American Music,” Black Music Research Journal 14 (Spring 1994): 75–84.



Davis’s body as the focus of the ad, the copy connects Davis’s use of his body inmusical activities with Jack Johnson’s use of his body in professional boxing (“Miles’new album is named after a guy who also knew how to use his body: JackJohnson”). This advertisement thus represents an extreme example of Columbiaemphasizing Miles Davis’s body as a way to accommodate his desire that thecompany sell his music “black.”

Figure 1 Front cover for Jack Johnson (1971).† Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment.

† The Jack Johnson album is unique among Davis’s albums in that it featured two different covers; one for thealbum’s initial release in February 1971 and a different cover for its reprinting later in the year. In an attempt tolink the album to the Academy Award-nominated film documentary for which it initially served as the soundtrack,the initial cover featured a drawing of former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson in a yellow 1920s-eraluxury convertible. When the documentary failed to win an Academy Award, and when the album was released toslow initial sales, Columbia replaced the cover with the one above.



The diverse readers who encountered the ad in its various settings would have likelyread it in any number of ways. In particular, two interpretations seem probable giventhe state of racial and cultural politics at the time. Both interpretations emphasize theprominence of Davis’s body in the ad, but they read that prominence in oppositionalways. For one, Davis’s poised stance—which is evocative of both a boxer’s gracefulnessin the ring as well as of Davis’s question-mark posture when playing trumpet—couldhave been read as a visual symbol of racial pride in this moment of “black is beautiful”cultural nationalism. Alternatively, the visual emphasis on Davis’s body could havebeen interpreted as contributing to the longstanding practice of visual objectificationin the U.S. of African American bodies.80

80 This issue had garnered prominent theoretical attention in the U.S. with the 1967 publication of the Englishtranslation of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which included his influential notion of “epidermalization.”See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (New York: Grove, 1952; repr. 1967), 11.

Figure 2 Front cover for On the Corner (1972), by Corky McCoy. Courtesy of Sony MusicEntertainment.



Regardless of its interpretation, this Jack Johnson advertisement contributed toColumbia’s attempt in the early 1970s to promote Davis’s music to African Americanlisteners. While this demonstrates in part Columbia’s recognition of the sales potentialthat African Americans represented, the company’s primary concern at the timeremained the desire to reach the more expansive and more lucrative white youthaudience.81 For example, although Columbia purchased significant advertising spacein the first half of 1971 for the Jack Johnson album, it was already doing more at the time

81 Admittedly, though, Columbia’s interest in retaining Davis on its roster was as much for cultural prestige as forpotential profits from record sales. Although Columbia strove to market Davis as effectively as it could in order tomaximize album sales, it recognized that Davis’s primary value to the company was not in generating profitablealbums. In fact, according to Clive, Davis never fully recouped the advances that Columbia gave him. Instead, thecompany placed Davis in a category with classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Both artists were kept on Columbia’sroster because the resulting monetary loss “was more than offset by the musical contribution and accompanyingprestige.” Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 236, 260–263.

Figure 3 Front Cover for Bitches Brew (1970), by Abdul Mati Klarwein. Courtesy of SonyMusic Entertainment.



to promote Miles Davis at Fillmore, which had been released in late 1970. Presumably,Columbia sought to draw attention to the name recognition among counterculturalyouth that would come from the use of “Fillmore” in the album title, as the companyhad done with the creation of its Fillmore Records label. Guitarist Robert Quinesupports this idea, recalling:

I remember listening to the so-called hip FM stations at the time going on and on withthis jive hippie rhetoric about, “Put on your black light, toke up and listen to Miles atthe Fillmore, man.” They kept repeating Fillmore, Fillmore, Fillmore overtly as a sell-ing point. Whereas, Jack Johnson—a far superior album that would’ve connectedmuch better with the audience they were actually going after, was completelyignored.82

82 Quoted in Bill Milkowski, “Miles’ Rock Manifesto,” in the accompanying booklet to The Complete Jack JohnsonSessions (Columbia/Legacy 86359, 2003), 57. See also Bill Murphy, “Raging Bullhorn,” 32; and Marsh, Sly and theFamily Stone, 56.

Figure 4 Back Cover for Bitches Brew. Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment.



Figure 5 Advertisement for A Tribute to Jack Johnson.



Columbia ultimately emphasized those marketing strategies that were likely to generatethe most income for the company. By contrast, in the early 1970s, Davis consistentlyadvocated that his music be marketed to African American youth, irrespective of thatmarket’s sales potential. In some cases, as with the multivalent ad for Jack Johnson,Columbia could address both concerns with the same material. In moments of conflict,however, Columbia adopted the profit-first mentality that was essential for its ongoingfinancial success.

Conclusion

Although commercial concerns undoubtedly form a constitutive structural compo-nent of any recording’s existence, the diverse motives of all parties involved in musicand commerce rarely result in a single or uniform perspective on the relationshipbetween music and marketing. As this article has demonstrated, Davis’s public state-ments regarding his marketing priorities in the early 1970s were sometimes consistentwith but often tactically in opposition to Columbia’s stated desires at the time. Studiesthat assume the uniform applicability of commercial representation do little to drawattention to instances of competing agency within such a relationship. Additionally,studies that assume the mutual exclusivity of commercial and political realms fail toacknowledge the ways in which negotiating the two are a constitutive part of what itmeans to be a professional musician. Instead, jazz scholarship would benefit fromgreater sensitivity to the complexities of the sometimes overlapping but just as oftenoppositional interests between musicians and record companies, as they relate both tofusion jazz and to jazz more broadly. More importantly, if jazz scholars can acceptmusic’s material circulation as a necessary aspect of a recording’s social life, thenmarketing can be understood not as a corrupting force but rather as an influence onjazz’s dissemination. From this perspective, marketing and commerce emerge not asthreats to the music’s integrity but instead as structural contributions to the largerprocess of creating musical meaning in both individual lives and broader interpretivecommunities.

Abstract

Although, as Steven Pond argues, “connections between the music and marketingloom over any discussion of fusion jazz,” those discussions often rely on either assum-ing or dismissing the idea that commercial concerns imply the corruption of an ante-rior musical purity. Such discussions not only disregard the necessity of materialcirculation which a recording’s commodity status requires, but they also regularlyconflate a musician’s interests and goals with those of a record company. With thisarticle, I make distinct what has previously been conflated by considering both thedifferences and the similarities between Miles Davis’s and Columbia Records’s valuesin relation to marketing during the contested and commonly misrepresented period ofearly-1970s fusion jazz. I emphasize that while Columbia’s primary concern was inreaching what it recognized to be an expansive and lucrative white youth audience,



Davis would not be satisfied until Columbia began selling his music “black” in orderfor his recordings to reach a significant number of African American listeners. Thisarticle thereby contributes to an ongoing critical reevaluation of fusion jazz while high-lighting a key issue for those jazz scholars concerned more broadly with a recording’srole in the creation of musical meaning.


jazz perspectives “sell it black”: race and marketing in miles...

Documents