For Fans of Miles Davis

Kind of Blue is the record everyone tells you to start with, and they are right that it is extraordinary. But it is also the most serene thing Miles Davis ever made, and serenity was not his natural state. Start there, absolutely. Then go forward into Bitches Brew and backward into Milestones, and you will find the musician underneath the monument: restless, sometimes confrontational, always searching for the next thing he had not yet done.

Critics hated On the Corner in 1972. It was too dense, too groove-heavy, too indebted to Sly Stone and James Brown to be taken seriously as jazz. It was also fifty years ahead of its time. Listen to it now alongside any Kendrick Lamar album or a good DJ Shadow record and the lineage is obvious: Miles heard something about how rhythm and texture could replace melody as the organizing principle of a record, and almost nobody noticed.

Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead solves the biopic problem by refusing to be one. Instead of a chronological rise-and-fall, it picks a single strange period (Miles in hermit mode in the late 1970s) and spirals outward from there. The film has his energy: nonlinear, stubborn, more interested in mood than in facts. It is not a documentary and does not pretend to be. That honesty makes it the most truthful Miles Davis film we have.

This is not a metaphor about surface aesthetics. Disco Elysium and late Miles Davis share a structural logic: both prioritize texture over resolution, leave more silence than the genre expects, and treat failure as the interesting condition rather than the thing to be avoided. The game's score, Robert Kurvitz's writing, and the whole rain-grey city of Revachol have a quality Miles would have recognized: the sound of a person who is very good at something, trying to figure out what it means to care about anything.