Attorney General Holder Attacks 5th Amendment

So why did I think of Miles Davis when I heard what Attorney General, Eric Holder, had to say on ABC’s “This Week?”

Holder said the administration needs to consider at least modifying the public safety exception for reading a suspect his rights to ensure law enforcement can act with flexibility and within constitutional bounds.

It appears an attack on the reading of Miranda Rights to suspects of a serious crime is underway. Ignore the 5th Amendment just a little bit, because this guy is a terror suspect and we want to question him a little differently. Lets not be better people, lets dehumanize ourselves, just like the people who hate us.

Miles Davis experienced freedoms and half freedoms, sadly the half freedoms were in his own country. I always thought Miles Davis was, for a short time, the coolest person on the planet. His look, his stature and above all his music. The freedom in his music, did not reflect the freedom in his life, a trip to Europe set his music free.

Paris is many things: a city of romance; a hotbed of culture, and the inspiration for countless artists, musicians and poets. It’s also a place that, for more than 40 years, had a special relationship with the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. Paris was the first foreign city Davis ever visited, and it was one of the last major cities he played in, shortly before his death on 28 September 1991.

In 1949, a 22-year-old Davis travelled to Paris, as part of a quintet. The band was booked to play at the first Paris international jazz festival since the war ended. In the US, Davis was already a rising star in the jazz world, but while he was highly respected among his peers, in mainstream America he was seen as a second-class citizen.

It was a time when segregation and discrimination were rife, and most US states enforced anti-miscegenation laws. But France was a different story, and nothing could have prepared Davis for the reception he would receive in Paris. “This was my first trip out of the country,” recalled Davis in his autobiography. “It changed the way I looked at things forever … I loved being in Paris and loved the way I was treated. Paris was where I understood that all white people were not the same; that some weren’t prejudiced.”

“Miles often talked about Paris,” says the Australian film director Rolf de Heer, who worked with Davis in Paris in 1990. “The French were in love with Miles and treated him like a god. He liked that because it was a form of respect he didn’t get in his own country.” French jazz pianist René Urtreger adds: “Miles was proud and touched by the fact that in France, jazz was considered to be very important music.”

Parisian cafe society in 1949, was full of love and humanity for all comers, after experiencing the beastly side of humanity since early 1940, they decided which way was best. Miles Davis found his musical freedom in Paris and he took that freedom everywhere with him from then on. The thought of a “Jim Crow” style attack on the 5th Amendment made me think Miles Davis wouldn’t like it.

MILES DAVIS

OH WHY OH WHY DID MILES LOVE PARIS