Throughout, the movie doesn’t so much coördinate voice and music as it plasters voice onto music, as if in fear that too much musical performance heard (and even seen) without interruption for more than ten or a dozen seconds would bore or frustrate viewers who lack a preëxisting ardor for jazz. And the movie’s formulaic approach serves its journalistic aims just as poorly. Yet it’s hard to imagine those who love Davis’s music finding much to love in the treatment of the music in the film-or those who don’t love it yet being inspired by it, either. There’s some significant information in the movie, which emerges from interviews that Nelson has done with a variety of people who knew Davis personally, even intimately, and also with scholars, who bring knowledge and insight. Davis’s music provides pleasure, excitement, surprise, shock, and energy the movie has a rote and dutiful air. It’s made with deference to the encyclopedia-like conventions of popular nonfiction filmmaking, a conventionality that works to the disadvantage of the presentation of Davis’s music, its historical context, and the evocation of the artist’s personality and experiences. Does a movie about a boldly original artist have to be a work of aesthetic audacity in itself? And what’s the difference if it isn’t? Stanley Nelson’s documentary “ Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool,” made for the PBS series “American Masters,” isn’t such a film.
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