Adrian Utley of Portishead on Miles Davis
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2018
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
**Visionary jazz musician Miles Davis joins BBC Radio 4 Extra's 100 Club – born 26th May 1926. He died in 1991 aged 65***
Miles Davis - trumpeter, composer, bandleader - is championed by Adrian Utley of Portishead.
"He's always been really important in my life, right from early on when my dad used to play him. It was part of the atmosphere of our house."
From the early years with Charlie Parker and via Kind of Blue to playing in front of 600,000 hippies on the Isle of Wight, Miles Davis was a musician who never stood still. "Always listen for what you can leave out," he used to say.
Portishead's seminal 1990s album Dummy seems to have taken advice from the man. As Adrian Utley explains to presenter Matthew Parris:
"The darkness and the sense of space is the thing that I have assimilated from Miles ... he's in my DNA."
With Richard Williams, author of The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music.
Producer: Miles Warde
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2018.
Transcript
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| 0:31.3 | This is the BBC. Our subject, Miles Davis. Trumpeter, composer, bandleader. |
| 0:52.0 | And creator of music chosen frequently on Desert Island discs by names as diverse as Judy Dench and John Prescott. And we're fortunate to have a real musician here in the studio |
| 0:57.0 | nominating Miles Davis today, one who can claim to have been involved in making some seminal music himself. The band Portishead were behind |
| 1:05.9 | some of the most striking music of the 90s, haunting, intense, sweeping at times. And my guest Adrian Utley was a central part of the trio of |
| 1:16.4 | musicians who made that Portishead sound. Tell us Adrian about Miles Davis and why you've chosen him today. |
| 1:30.0 | Miles Davis and why you've chosen him today. |
| 1:33.7 | Miles Davis for me has always been a really important person in my life. |
| 1:38.3 | I think from really early on when my dad used to play it in the house. He was really into jazz and classical music. |
| 1:46.0 | You could hear it all through the house. I could, yeah, we had a kind of 60s open plan house and when I was a kid. |
| 1:51.0 | It was part of the atmosphere of our house as well as Teddy Wilson and |
| 1:56.2 | Marla and the ferocious |
| 2:15.0 | brilliance of the band actually. |
... |
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