How did Miles Davis feel about Ornette Coleman and his music?

I have read some conflicting interviews regarding Miles Davis' opinion of Ornette Coleman's music. Does anyone have any insights into this? I feel like Coleman's Body Meta is very similar to On The Corner (of course released a few years later) so it seems like they were working towards similar goals in some ways.

I read Davis said On The Corner was influenced by Coleman in his biography. However he also dismissed Coleman's work as a bunch of noise and was ambivalent about free jazz in general. Some of Davis' live shows with Chic Corea went pretty far out however!

 

I wonder if he thought it was an alienation of the good melody. He was not so open to free jazz at first but became the 'king of modernism' later. Oddly enough?

 

Miles said in his book that he thought Coleman was "jiving".

 

Miles Davis was like Keith Richards; he often said stupid things for shock value.

 

Miles said and did a lot of contradictory things in his career. It was typical of him to react with outward suspicion and hostility to whatever the "new thing" was on the jazz scene that called into question its old verities, while privately weighing what he could learn from it. The Second Quintet era is a great example of Miles applying the lessons of music he had questioned in years before.

That said, Miles took a pretty firm line against certain things throughout his career -- the absence of a definite key center, a heavily felt left hand on the piano, extended techniques on horns (especially saxophone), unsteady intonation, a shaky grasp of conventional theory. He was pretty consistent when it came to his dislike for these things, even as his music underwent significant changes. Since Ornette (to him at least) represented several of these things, I'm not surprised he never really warmed to him.

I'm not aware of Miles ever calling Coleman's work "a bunch of noise," but both Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner are reported as having described Coltrane's augmented groups of 1965 (with both Jones and Rashied Ali) that way.

 

My memory is a little hazy on this and I'm sure there's somewhere to check but I seem to recall during a blindfold test he was played a New York Contemporary Five track (a band with Archie Shepp, Don Cherry, John Tchicai in the front line). It was a version of Monk's Crepescule With Nellie and he identified it as "Ornette Coleman effing up the trumpet" and really lambasts Ornette. (It was Don Cherry but made no difference).

If you can find any Miles blindfold tests online, they make for entertaining reading and he was usually played at least one modern track that he would rail against. Then he would turn around and praise those you wouldn't expect: Al Hirt, the 5th Dimension. But it's not surprising when you consider what Maggie states above as the things he valued in music.

Love most of the man's music but found most of his opinions on others' music pretty self-serving

 

From what I remember of the autobiography and various interviews... At the time, he thought Ornette was a poseur, he especially didn’t like the swapping between instruments and complete rejection of jazz theory. Miles later came to appreciate some elements of what Ornette did, since his own On The Corner material used some similar concepts.

 

I heard in some interview with Miles him mention Ornette as someone other than himself that was important in the evolution of jazz.