It's Never Too Late: Miles Davis and Modernism

This chapter focuses on Miles Davis’s 1981 performance of ‘My Man’s Gone Now’ from George Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess to explore a range of issues connected to musical meaning and live performance in jazz. It considers why Davis returned to Gershwin’s song after more than twenty years and what his performance contributes to our understanding of his career. It evaluates his claims about being at the vanguard of music and traces his complicated relationship to the past, and particularly to jazz history. It also discusses the wider musical landscape occupied by Davis and Gershwin and asks what the recording can tell us about jazz’s relationship to modernism.