An Audience with Miles
Last year, as I was watching an appearance by Miles Davis on Time Out, a Philadelphia talk show hosted by Bill Boggs, I was surprised to see John Swana, Christian McBride, and Joey DeFrancesco among the young players whom Boggs thought to include in the show. The musicians were students at the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts at the time. The segment begins at about 23:30 with a young trumpeter announced as “Little Miles,” but as you might expect, his nickname earns him no favor with the real Miles. But Swana, who comes on last (30:15) and is clearly the most promising brass player of the group, plays the kinds of changes that the teen-aged Miles was attempting to master forty years earlier.
Following a question from Swana about a new electronic trumpet, Miles asks Boggs to name the rhythm section members. He calls the keyboard player, “Joey DeFranco,” but it’s clearly DeFrancesco, who like McBride was then only 16. Miles was obviously impressed with Joey D, whom he hired the following year for a five-week tour of Europe, and to play on his 1988 release, Amandla. Here in concert footage from the tour’s stop in Warsaw, Joey gets off a nice solo (including a Charlie Parker lick) with his Yamaha keyboard on Miles’s original, “Tutu.”
McBride and Joey D have come to enjoy wide acclaim over the past 25 years, while Swana’s a player much deserving of wider recognition. A commanding hard bop stylist and gifted composer, he began recording for Criss Cross Jazz in 1990, and the numerous albums he’s made for the Dutch jazz label have been staples of Jazz à la Mode ever since. From Swana’s album Philly Gumbo, Volume 2, “Ortlieb’s” is an original named for the club that was a center of Philly jazz when this was recorded in 2004. It features a sextet of Philadelphians including tenor saxophone veterans Bootsie Barnes and Larry McKenna.