to delegate or not to delegate -- 2/01/16

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Today's selection -- from The Miles Davis Quintet by Bob Gluck. Most organizational management styles fall into roughly two camps: those managers that manage very closely, dictating each decision and keeping very close tabs on each detail, and those managers that are more inclined to delegate and give their subordinates freedom and latitude. Miles Davis, perhaps the most revered and successful jazz musician of the twentieth century, fell into the latter camp. His energies were directed at finding the very finest musicians he could possibly find -- in fact a huge number of his band members went on to become legends themselves -- and then giving them the space to explore and create:

"He was at the time a nondirective bandleader. Members of his quintet were given wide latitude to play what they wished. The 'just going places' ethic noted by Corea was pregnant with possibilities, opening tremendous space for unan­ticipated musical creativity. Corea observes that Davis's method was focused on the choice of musicians:

Miles ... was a chemist -- a spiritual chemist -- as far as putting musicians together, because he himself didn't really compose tunes that much, although he developed styles and arrangements but he chose musicians that went together a way that he heard and that he liked. And he went from this piano player to that piano player or from this drummer to that drummer -- he chose these guys so that it went together in a way that he heard it. And I guess that's leadership, you know, it's like the choosing of the way and the treatment of the group.

The 2nd great quintet: Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams

"In a 1969 DownBeat interview with Larry Kart, Corea relates that in their first conversation, Davis told him about how to interpret Shorter's compositions: 'I don't know what else to tell you except that we'll go and play, but whatever you think it is, that's what it is.' Hancock remembers Davis's leadership of the previous quintet in a similar way. He explains in a 1971 DownBeat interview:

"With Miles' band we were all allowed to play what we wanted to play and shaped the music according to the group effort and not to the dictates of Miles, because he really never dictated what he wanted. I try to do the same thing with my group. I think it serves this function that I just mentioned ­-- that everybody feels that they're part of the product, you know, and not just contributing something to somebody else's music. They may be my tunes, but the music belongs to the guys in the band. They make the music -- it's not just my thing."