MILES TO GO

Through anecdotes and personal recollections, narrator Patrick Lawlor presents Chris Murphy's remembrances of jazz great Miles Davis. Lawlor's voice is friendly and inviting, sounding as excited and delighted as if he were Murphy, getting the chance to go on the adventure of a lifetime, as techie, roadie, and personal assistant to the trumpeter. As a white man allowed into the mercurial Davis's inner circle, Murphy's view presents a more humane, less intimidating vision of Davis, very personal and perhaps somewhat skewed (if other accounts are to be believed), but never dull. While Lawlor's narration makes Davis seem a bit too ingenuous, he reveals a man who was openhearted and generous as well as depressive and unpredictable, a man who had "something unearthly about him." S.J.H. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine [Published: JUN/ JUL 07]