More on my interviews with musicians who worked with Miles: Wallace Roney
As I stated in my prior post, I was a contributing editor at Musician magazine for several years back in the day, and one of my story assignments was to interview musicians who worked with Miles. This was a story that many writers contributed to; it was published in December 1991, three months after Miles died. Below is my interview with Wallace Roney (who died in March 2020: Wallace was a friend from my hometown; a trumpet player to whom Miles bequeathed some of his instruments). Here’s what Wallace said in 1991:
“At the Montreux Festival this summer, I got a chance to hang out with Miles for three days. I was never supposed to play on this concert, but when they rehearsed the [Gil Evans] orchestra, they needed somebody to play Miles’s part. We rehearsed for a couple of hours and then Miles came in. Kenny Garrett was joking that he knew Miles must be coming because his horn was shaking. I heard a voice behind me say, ‘Hey, you sound good as a m*****f***** on that.’ And Miles handed his horn to me. I said, ‘No man, you come up and play it.’ He said, ‘No, act like I’m not here.’ I finished playing, next thing you know he and I were playing together. The next day he gave me more stuff to play. By the time it got to the concert, we were sharing everything. If it wasn’t for Miles, I would have been just listening to this concert.”
“On top of that, we hung. He was telling me everything he could think of about music, like he was trying to cram 45 years of music into three days. I didn’t know he was ill, I didn’t think he was going to die, but maybe he did. Things just spilled out; he talked about Bird, Dizzy, Monk, everything you could think of. He knew how much I love him and he said that’s cool, because that’s the way he loved Dizzy. I’d like to do with Miles’ style what he did with Dizzy’s style. Take it and make something very persona out of it, that would be my best tribute to him.”
Karen Bennett ©️1991, 2023