# Ron Miles: A beautiful spirit on and off the bandstand: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/06/14/ron-miles-a-beautiful-spirit-on-and-off-the-bandstand-video-photos/
- Published: 2023-06-14T00:02:08+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Ron was an American jazz trumpeter, cornetist, and composer. A beautiful, beautiful
spirit on and off the bandstand. When I was on pregnancy bedrest, the only time 
I defied my obstetrician’s orders and gallivanted out of the house was for a Ron
Miles show. Ron’s wife Kari was hilariously reproachful about this decision. “You
came off bedrest for _this_?” she asked me, gesturing toward her husband onstage.“
You have a child to think of now.” In Ron’s family, family always came first.**

I was honored when Ron commissioned me to write the liner essay for his 2017 recording,
I am a man. Researching and writing music-related book narratives has shown me that
over time, the most valuable element in liner essays is _comments from the musicians
themelves_. I believe this so strongly that when I get a request to write a liner
note, I usually convince the musician to write it instead, assisting on the editing
end. Ron, however, insisted that I write this one. Herein you’ll find plenty of 
quotes about the _I Am A Man_ recording from Ron, Bill Frisell, and Jason Moran,
all of whom I interviewed for the essay.

When Ron Miles teaches Jazz Styles to college students, he likes to open the first
day of class with a 1926 quote from Langston Hughes: “We younger Negro artists who
create, now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or
shame . . . We know we are beautiful. And ugly too . . . We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within
ourselves.”

![Bandleader, Composer, And Educator Ron Miles Dies At 58](https://i0.wp.com/www.
udiscovermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Ron-Miles-2.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

It’s a smart way to start, emphasizing jazz’s essential relationship to blackness
and to defiant creativity, the latter of which is sure to resonate with young students.
Ron Miles also likes to discuss this quote with his peers, because he truly believes
that expressing the full complexity of the human condition is the primary work of
every artist at every stage of a career.

“That quote gets at the sense that this music and art in general have to embrace
everything,” Ron says. “To really go as deep as we can, we have to embrace our failings
as well as our success; the beauty of the human condition but also the parts that
aren’t so great, because we’re here, and we have to deal with it.”

So when Bill Frisell, Jason Moran, Thomas Morgan, and Brian Blade arrived at Ron’s
Denver home to rehearse for this album, their big hugs for Ron mattered. The December
snow that hadn’t fallen quite thickly enough to be scenic mattered. The pleasant
studio at the back of the brick house whose modesty left money for his children’s
education mattered. The musicians’ deep moments of active listening during the session
mattered. The seismic upset of the 2016 U.S. presidential election that had come
only a month before mattered. The flattened, calloused pads of musicians’ fingers
and the bulging veins in their hands mattered. The willingness to travel to Denver
and make music with Ron when this record didn’t yet have a home, not knowing what
place it would find in the world, mattered. And their obvious joy in the intimacy
of musical collaboration mattered.

“Love fuels my work the most,” Ron says. “My love for my fellow musicians. My love
for my audience. My love for the tradition that I’m a part of.

As profound as Ron Miles’s relationship to the jazz tradition may be, he’s a rare
musician who’ll admit to having as much of the Bee Gees’ Robin Gibb as Miles Davis
in his trumpet sound. Omnivore musicians proliferate in jazz, but Ron is different.
When he plays pop or country, he doesn’t give them a Pygmalion treatment; he doesn’t
feel the need to make over or reform certain genres as he incorporates them into
his own sound and style. Ron truly welcomes all musical styles without fear or shame.
Unconcerned with coolness and seemingly free of the anxiety of reception, Ron, for
example, carries his mutes in a Scooby-Doo lunch box without any hipster irony; 
he simply delights in the lunch box’s function and graphics, and so he uses it.

This loving embrace of all things great and small, beautiful and ugly—the Non-Hierarchical
Aesthetic Gospel of Ron Miles, if you will—likely is a product of his personal history.
Ron was born in Indianapolis in 1963 and moved to Denver in 1974 at age 11.

“Growing up here,” he says, “it’s not like there’s tons and tons of black folks 
around. So everyone in my family had friends from a lot of different places. One
sister, I’d go into her bedroom and she’d have Teen Beat and Tiger Beat stuff all
over the walls, pictures of Michael Jackson and Sean Cassidy. So I was hearing all
this different music all the time and it just all made sense.”

When Ron discovered his affinity and talent for jazz as a teenager, he left pop 
behind for a time. After earning a music degree at the University of Denver in 1985,
he studied the trumpet at the Manhattan School Of Music while taking private lessons
from legends like Lester Bowie and Ornette Coleman. His New York stretch coincided
with jazz’s 1980s conservative turn, when young musicians were expected to side 
stylistically and philosophically with either “tradition” or the avant-garde. Ron
identified with the progressive faction, and felt most comfortable within it.

After a year in New York City, Ron moved back to Denver and took a teaching job 
at Metropolitan State University. Having immersed himself in avant-garde jazz, he
had to become familiar with the music’s early traditions to teach jazz history, 
going deep into the work of Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington. His realization
that early jazz styles were themselves avant-garde for their time radically challenged
then-prevailing categorizations in jazz. My theory: This shake-up of known categories
so profoundly affected Ron that it somehow made him receptive to all music, including
the pop and roots styles that he’d heard everywhere in his Denver youth. After this
awakening, the Partridge Family and Hank Williams, Burt Bacharach and Prince, were
All God’s Children in Ron’s musical cosmos.

“When you get into playing music,” Ron says, “that’s where the lines can come down:
jazz is this, jazz is not that. If you’re lucky you have a chance to rediscover 
what and who you really are and become comfortable with that. Once I really admitted
who I was and what I liked, music just opened up for me.”

![](https://i0.wp.com/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456%2Cc_limit%2Cf_auto%2Cq_auto%
3Agood%2Cfl_progressive%3Asteep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%
2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F91fbbcde-5b61-459d-b65c-25cd5491752a_1240x744.webp?resize=640%
2C384&ssl=1)

That openness has made for albums so beautifully personal that calling them “luminous”
or “original” feels like shooting paintball splatters at a sunset. Ron’s tunes gently
apply compositional sophistication to pop and roots musics, with his lyricism connecting
any and all stylistic strands.

In Ron’s home state of Colorado, you can walk along a foothill ridge and look down
on one side to a river feeding a lush green valley, and on the other side to a desert
sculpture garden of curious rust-colored rock formations. I hear Ron’s melodies 
as the high ridges of his music, melodies as backbone and nerve center for his rootsy
sounds on one hand and knotty abstractions on the other. Ron’s commitment to lyricism
gives him and us a clear and defining perspective on his musical surroundings. His
tunefulness keeps his music honest.

“So much contemporary music has a certain intentional difficulty,” Ron says. “Some
musicians call it ‘mo-jazz,’ the music with assertively modern stuff like shifting
meters. I just write songs, not meters. I write notes and chords, and then I figure
out, ‘shoot, that is bar 7 and then bar 4.’ Things can be tricky to play, and that’s
fine, but you always want musicians to feel like your song is worthy of the effort.”

“It’s impossible and unnecessary to separate spirituality and politics, and art 
and politics,” Ron says. “Because we’re in the world that we’re in. From the beginnings
of this music, particularly black American music, a sense of triumph over adversity
has always been a central part.” For Ron, being in the jazz tradition means making
music that speaks to his time. Not necessarily always topical, but relevant. “We’re
in some trying times right now, that’s for sure,” he says, referring to America’s
political landscape in 2017. “But we’ve seen this before. Culturally, black folks
have had to do this over and over again, fighting injustice and finding a positive
solution.”

In 1968, a malfunctioning garbage truck crushed and killed two workers in Memphis.
With this accident, the ongoing frustrations of black employees over their neglect
and abuse flared into righteous outrage. Sanitation workers took to the streets 
with “I AM A MAN” signs, asserting the fundamental dignity and humanity of workers
of every profession. Today, “I Am A Man” carries that specific civil rights history
for Ron but has also taken on broader significance. “It’s a claim that we are of
a human body,” he says, “a human person, and there are all kinds of ways that we
express ourselves.”

![Concert to honor departed Roadrunner and jazz great Ron Miles - MSU Denver](https://
i0.wp.com/www.msudenver.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/MLK_BREAKFAST_190118_JA-67.
jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

### _Related_