Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Miles
:DELIRIUM: and Lauren Reed Productions
Genre: Biographical Drama, Drama
Venue: Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Miles Davis was one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time; Kind of Blue was his quintessential studio album and the best selling album of all time. In this Fringe performance at Summerhall, the renowned jazz trumpeter, Jay Phelps, and debut performer, Benjamin Akintuyosi, tell the story of Davis’ life using Kind of Blue as the pivotal moment.
Review
Sunday evening and TechCube at Summerhall feels like a smoky downtown jazz café. Dark wooden boards are tacked across the back wall and trumpet notes waft across the room from a reel to reel tape recorder. The mellow sounds of Kind of Blue fill the room. A man is lying prone across a table.
The trumpeter enters, the man uncurls himself and steps onto the floor and Miles begins.
Oliver Kaderbhai‘s play uses Davis’ seminal album as the starting point of this exploration of Davis’ life taking us through Miles’ formative years and adult life as well as the making of the album. Davis was raised in a relatively affluent family and had music tuition as a child, going onto the prestigious Juillard to study music. Nonetheless, though a first class citizen, the play tells us, Miles was always treated as a second class citizen as a black man in America. Miles takes us through his years of addiction to heroin and then to alcohol, and his pimping of women. Interspersed with this biographical approach, Kaderbhai gives us the story of how Miles was made and how he chose his musical collaborators.
In his debut performance, Benjamin Akintuyosi plays Miles with his characteristic raspy voice. It is an assured performance that brings Miles to life as a character confident in his music but perhaps in little else. Renowned jazz trumpeter, Jay Phelps, plays the part of a young jazz musician who is trying to find words of wisdom from Miles on how to improve his playing. The answer is always that he has to find it within himself rather than relying on anyone else’s voice.
Kind of Blue was recorded in just two sessions in a studio in New York with a sextet of musicians comprising saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Bill Evans on piano, bassist Paul Chambers and dummer Jimmy Cobb. On this album, Davis departs from his be-bop style giving each musician a set of scales within which they can operate and allowing them more freedom on the melodies. Miles, the play, explores this musical innovation and the musicians that Davis chose to be on the album, with the young musician asking Miles about his choices and Miles elucidating on them. To illustrate this and to show the characters, images of Coltrane, Evans etc are projected onto the back wall.
Alongside the exploration of the making of the album, Miles gives a potted biography of Davis’ troubled life with scenes of him falling into addiction and friends pulling him back from the brink, and scenes where Akintuyosi dances with a series of dresses representing his womanising and pimping. Both biographical and musical aspects are played well by the actors with the rapport between Akintuyoshi and Phelps giving the play cohesion.
It’s an enjoyable hour that passes quickly, with the approach of using vignettes creating more of a mood than a clear picture with rare recordings of Davis and Phelp’s trumpet playing adding musical authenticity. While we learn something about Davis’ life and music, combining the two stories of his life and the making of the album, can be confusing at times and could do with more space. Given the centrality of music to the story and Phelp’s talent, hearing more of his trumpet-playing would have been a bonus.
Nonetheless, this is a good play which recreates a jazz atmosphere of smoke and mirrors with two good central performances and wonderful music.
