Miles & Me

An intimate story of Miles Davis, the man, the musician, and his friendship with the young journalist and poet Quincy Troupe--soon to be a major motion picture.

Poet, activist and journalist Quincy Troupes candid account of his friendship with Miles Davis is a revealing portrait of a great musician and an engrossing chronicle of the authors own artistic and personal growth. Miles and Me describes in intimate detail the sometimes harrowing processes of Daviss spectacular creativity and the joys and travails Daviss passionate and contradictory temperament posed to the two mens friendship. Miles and Me shows how Miles Davis, both as an artist and as a black man, influenced Troupe and whole generations of Americans while forever changing the face of jazz.

In 1985, Spin magazine hired Troupe to do an exclusive two-part interview with the by-then legendary jazz artist Davis. The hour-and-a-half scheduled interview stretched to ten hours. After it was published, Davis was so enamored of Troupe and the interview that he finally relented to a major publishers request that he write his autobiography under the condition that they could get Quincy Troupe to write it. Miles: The Autobiography became an instant bestseller and opened up the entire field of popular music autobiography. Years later, Quincy went back to his notes of his time with Miles that had been so important to them both, and produced this more intimate book, Miles and Me, told from his side of their friendship.

Miles and Me takes us from St. Louis, where both men grew up, to New York, where both men lived, to Malibu where Miles also kept a home. Troupe also takes us through the entire catalogue of Daviss recordings. Troupe calls his friend "irascible, contemptuous, brutally honest, ill-tempered when things didnt go his way, complex, fair-minded, humble, kind, and a son-of-a-bitch." The authors love and appreciation infuses Miles and Me with a rare quality of grace, and at the same time, throughout the book, Troupes observations of his friend are keen, sometimes hilariously funny, and truthful, as he knows Miles would want him to be.