What made Miles Davis so intriguing?
You know you meet special people, creative people like a Duke Ellington. Duke was the Beethoven of jazz or the Bach. Dizzy was the clown and the musical genius. [But] Miles was a profound intense intellectual jazz musician. I call Miles the Picasso of jazz because of the various stages that he went through in his creative career. Just as Picasso went through the blue period and the cubist period and so on, Miles went from [bebop] and he ended up with hip hop, which is so uncharacteristic in my mind, yet he adapted to it and incorporated it [into his playing] . . . He kept changing and changing and changing and improving. He searched for new methods of explaining himself. When you think about all the images of jazz greats that you have captured for posterity, what do you feel? It’s beyond any expectation that I had when I shot the pictures… I was not aware when I was shooting this how relatively important they would be in later years. I was giving an exhibition of my jazz stuff and a li
