The jazz musician Miles Davis was born one hindred years ago on 26th May 1926 (he died 28th September 1991).
Writing in 2010 the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm noted: My admiration for Miles Davis was based on his records, not on any live performance I heard.
On the face it those unfamiliar with Hobsbawm’s life (see Richard J Evans excellent if perhaps partial biography) may wonder why it matters what a Marxist historian thought of Miles Davis.
The answer was that for ten years from the late 1950s to the 1960s Eric Hobsbawm was the jazz critic of the New Statesman. He wrote under the pseudonym Francis Newton (a Communist jazz player) and published a book of criticism, the Jazz Scene as a Penguin paperback.
Richard J Evans did a better job of bringing to mind what Hobsbawm, when he was Francis Newton, actually thought about Miles Davis.
Newton wrote that Miles Davis was a player of ‘surprisingly narrow technical and emotional range’ and ‘most of his records are not very good’ Miles Away, New Statesman, 21st May 1960.
Later lecturing at Stanford (as a Marxist historian) he explored the jazz clubs of San Francisco and having made the acquaintance of Paul A Baran one of the Editors of the Marxist Monthly Review, he took him to a Miles Davies concert. Richard J Evans notes that Hobsbawm found Baran to be unimpressed.
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