Paris isn’t just a city of love, it’s a city that lives and breathes one of the most exciting and unpredictable musical styles – jazz, says Tomas Mowlam

And for one of the greatest jazz musicians Paris was a place that felt like home. Miles Davis’ love affair with Paris is being celebrated in the new exhibition at the Musée de la Musique, called We Want Miles – Miles Davis: Jazz Face to Face with Its Legend.

“It follows Miles Davis’ musical and personal journey, from his hometown, East St-Louis, to his retrospective concert at La Villette in Paris, just a few weeks before his death,” according to the exhibition organisers.

It’s the 50th anniversary of Kind of Blue, an album which holds that special status of being a record that really transformed music, influencing not just different genres but art and literature as well.

And what better time to look back at a man called the Picasso of jazz; Miles was at the front of every major innovation in post war jazz from bee-bop, to the birth of cool, large orchestras, then electric and funk. The list goes on.

The exhibition not only features music scores, videos, photos but instruments including seven of Miles’ trumpets.

Paris was a special place for Miles, and he was equally loved and admired by the city. It was the first foreign city Davis ever visited and it was one of the last cities he played in before his death.

In 1949 the 22 year old musician travelled to play the first Paris jazz festival since the end of WWII. He was already a well respected trumpeter at home, but because of his skin he was still a second class citizen in a USA where segregation and prejudice were horribly common.

He came to Paris with Tadd Dameron as part of a quintet, and through Boris Vian, a French writer, poet and trumpeter he met Picasso and Sartre.

It wasn’t just the people that he met that had such impact on the young Miles, it was that in Paris he was treated as an equal: here he fell in love with the white actor and singer Juliette Gréco, something that would have been unthinkable in the USA.

Leaving her and returning to America, where jazz was in commercial decline and his race held him back, led to his four year heroin addiction. He returned to Paris clean in 1956 and kept coming back throughout his career.

France honours artists more than perhaps any other European nation, and in 1989 Miles was given the Grande Médaille de Vermeil by then mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac. Two years later was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour, the highest award in France.

Image Credit: equisitur

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