Basquiat was, of course, a great jazz fan. Charlie Parker is the Jazz character most often referred to as Basquiat's "hero." But in a 1983 interview in Milan, Lisa Licitra asked Basquiat his favorite music, and he replied “Miles Davis.”

And in the famous mid-1980s interview with Becky Johnson, filmed by Tara Davis, Becky asked him: “Would you ever describe your work?” Basquiat replied: “I never know how to really describe it…. I don’t know how to describe my work. Because it’s not always the same thing. It’s like … asking Miles how does your horn sound?, I don’t think he could really tell you, you know, why he played this at this point in the music, you know, it’s just sort of on automatic most of the time.”

Basquiat grew up listening to Jazz in his father’s house. He told Becky Johnson that “Be-bop is my favorite music, I listen to it all the time, I listen to everything, but I have to say bebop is my favorite.” As described in Jean-Michel Basquiat; A Biography, around 1983 he switched from boxers to Jazz musicians as his Afro-American avatars in his paintings.  Among references from Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday to Charlie Parker and Max Roach he has also referenced Miles Davis in his paintings (as in his painting Discography Two of 1983, based on an earlier "Miles Davis All Stars" recording). But Jazz was not just a theme in his work, or an analogy of his position as a Black painter in the New York art world.  He took the jazz process of borrowing existing themes and creating new work by improvising on top of them to heart in his own art. Elizabeth Hess, reviewing Basquiat’s 1992 Whitney Museum retrospective in the Village Voice, wrote: “As many critics have suggested, the influence of Dubuffet and Twombly are obvious, along with the bravado of Picasso. But the mood is jazz.”

Or as Greg Tate wrote in the Whitney catalog, in words that could also apply to Miles Davis, wrote: “Basquiat was ... a populist postmodernist. He belongs to a black tradition, well established by our musicians, of making work that is heady enough to confound academics and hip enough to capture the attention span of the hip-hop nation.”

In this record, Miles has gone way beyond his be-bop beginnings, in great form with a familiar bunch of innovating younger musicians who would become the future of Jazz. This Miles Davis Quintet CD is the most important release of older Jazz in a long while. Give it a listen, and see why, as Kay Larson said, "Jazz was more than pleasant, syncopated patterns to Basquiat ... it was an analogue of life."