Sartre said to Miles, „Why don’t you and Juliette get married?“ Miles said, „Because I love her too much to make her unhappy.“ It wasn’t a matter of him being unfaithful or behaving like a Don Juan; it was simply a question of colour. If he’d taken me back to America with him, I would have been called names.
Years later at the Waldorf in New York, where I had a very nice suite, I invited Miles to dinner. The face of the maitre d’hotel when he came in was indescribable. After two hours, the food was more or less thrown in our faces. The meal was long and painful, and then he left.
At four o’clock in the morning I got a call from Miles, who was in tears. „I couldn’t come by myself,“ he said. „I don’t ever want to see you again here, in a country where this kind of relationship is impossible.“ I suddenly understood that I’d made a terrible mistake, from which came a strange feeling of humiliation that I’ll never forget. In America his colour was made blatantly obvious to me, whereas in Paris I didn’t even notice that he was black.
Den ganzen Artikel gibt’s hier:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2006/may/25/jazz
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #164: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv, 10.6., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba