Written and directed by Oliver Kaderbhai, and starring Benjamin Akintuyosi and Jay Phelps, Miles, playing at Southwark Playhouse, is an immersive theatrical experience that thrives on the simplicity of its staging and the outstanding performances, projection, lighting and sound design at its heart.
Miles Davis once said, “Music is an addiction.” Of course, music wasn’t the only addiction in Miles Davis life, with both heroin and cocaine haunting his early musical genius until he got clean before reaching his 30th Birthday. Miles, playing at Southwark Playhouse following a critically acclaimed debut at Edinburgh Fringe, isn’t afraid to explore the darker corners of Davis musical genius. But far from being an addiction drama, it’s a bold, soulful portrait of an artist driven by musical innovation and contradiction in a world where Black artists faced prejudice, oppression, and fear no matter how successful they became.
Born on May 26, 1926, in a racially mixed, middle-class neighbourhood in East St. Louis, Miles was by the age of 12 addicted to music, sound, and performance. However, it wasn’t until 1944 that the sparks of his addiction to music became a roaring fire as he met saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.
Davis said of that meeting, “After I had heard and played with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, and Mr B himself, I knew I had to be in New York, where the action was … I left East St. Louis for New York in early fall 1944. I had to pass my audition to get into Juilliard, and I passed it with flying colours… Dizzy and Bird had told me to look them up if I ever came to the Big Apple. I knew I had learned all I could from playing around St. Louis, knew it was time to move on.”
That fire born in Miles in 1944 would lead to a string of albums during the early 50s, culminating in one of his best-known albums in 1959, Kind of Blue: an album that I would call a true masterpiece of 20th-century music. Ironically, Miles Davis considered it “a failed experiment,” as the resulting recording failed to live up to the concept he had held in mind before the session. However, for me, and so many others, Kind of Blue remains one of the best albums ever made: a work of such harmonic and emotional depth that every listen offers something new. It’s an album that fires individual creativity while sweeping you away from the world around you, wrapping you in the transformative power of music.
Photography by Colin J Smith
Written and directed by Oliver Kaderbhai, and starring Benjamin Akintuyosi and Jay Phelps, Miles is an immersive theatrical experience that thrives on the simplicity of its staging and the outstanding performances, projection, lighting and sound design at its heart. Like the best Jazz, this play blends theatrical and musical beats into a rhythmic melting pot of pure brilliance. Set in a recording studio in New York, Jay Phelps plays a contemporary jazz musician seeking answers as he explores what it takes to create a timeless wonder like Kind of Blue.
As Jay struggles to identify the ingredients of his musical creation, past and present collide as Davis (Akintuyosi) steps onto the stage. Davis challenges Jay to explore how his identity as an artist shapes the notes, and his lived experience brings heart and soul to the sound as he recounts his own early story.
Benjamin Akintuyosi and Jay Phelps lead this 90-minute journey into sound, lived experience, creative freedom, and internal doubt, with performances so full of energy, musicality, and dramatic clout that 90 minutes hardly feels long enough in their sublime company. Add to this some truly exquisite sound design and staging, and Miles becomes an auditory and visual triumph that more than delivers on its dream-like vision and Jazz club atmosphere.
There are, however, limitations to exploring Miles Davis’s life and early career within such a limited timeframe. While the experience of Black musicians in the late ’40s and early ’50s threads through Davis’ words, the play lacks time in fully exploring how prejudice and oppression shaped their artistic confidence and the addiction that haunted many of them. Equally constrained by the runtime is the play’s ability to fully explore how past and present converge through the inherent freedom of Jazz and its ever-evolving nature. These limitations are by no means a distraction from Miles brilliance, but one can’t help but wonder whether there’s even more to be achieved by further developing and extending this bold and brilliant Fringe play. I, for one, would be first in the queue.
Miles is playing at Southwark Playhouse until March 7 – book tickets.
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