1964 was an odd in-between year for Jazz legend Miles Davis. His First Great Quintet that had dominated his recordings in the late-’50s had fallen apart after his side-man John Coltrane had successfully struck out on his own in 1960; and his Second Great Quintet that would dominate his recordings in the late-’60s with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock hadn’t yet been finalized. It had already been a half-decade since his all-time best-selling album Kind of Blue topped the charts, but nothing else he’d recorded since then (not even Sketches of Spain) had come close to matching it, at least in sales figures; Jazz itself was in irreversible decline as a popular genre (The Beatles also broke out in 1964), Davis’s prospects were declining with it, and it would still be another half-decade before he would pull-off his radical mid-life reinvention as a Jazz-Rock Fusion artist in the early-’70s. In 1964, Miles Davis was still very much trying to figure out how to move forward with his life.
As was America in general: JFK had only recently been assassinated in November of 1963, which especially saddened Miles Davis, because like many African-Americans of the era he had pinned his hopes for the passage of a Civil Rights Bill on the Kennedy administration. That bill would later get passed after all by Lyndon B. Johnson in July of ’64, but its fate was still very much in doubt in February of that same year (all those Southern segregationists were already gearing up to filibuster), when Miles Davis took the stage on a cold Valentines Day weekend at the Lincoln Center in NYC, as part of a series of NAACP benefit concerts—where he was irritated to learn his band wouldn’t even get paid for it. It was a time of mourning–for John F. Kennedy, for the Civil Rights Act, for Davis’s own doubtful future, for America’s in general, even for just his paycheck that night–so when Miles Davis busted out that old Jazz standard “My Funny Valentine” for the holiday, he performed it as mournfully and forlornly as possible.
He had previously recorded a much more sprightly and straightforward version of the tune with his First Great Quintet in 1956 (on the album Cookin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet), but this time he really slowed it down, stretched it out, kept it all in a minor key, to give his grief full room to express itself. The result was a performance now considered a high-water mark in Miles Davis live recordings, and was released to great acclaim a year later as My Funny Valentine: Miles Davis In Concert in February of ‘65.
But then, “My Funny Valentine”, much like Valentine’s Day in general, was already a deceptively melancholy song to begin with. Lyrically, it concerns a lover describing her beau in decidedly unflattering terms–“Your looks are laughable/un-photographable,” “Is your figure less than Greek/Is your mouth a little weak,” “Are you smart?”–yet always looping back around in the chorus to plead “But don’t change a hair for me/Not if you care for me/Stay little Valentine, stay!” It is a woman singing to her down-in-the-dumps man in the original 1937 Broadway musical the song comes from, but the lyrics are sufficiently gender-neutral that plenty of men (for example Frank Sinatra) have sung it to their female lovers instead. In any case, this is very much a song for hurting your lover as much as wooing them.
Which of course is often the same thing. A Gender & Sexuality professor I knew in grad school once assigned the class an article arguing that if we were all truly committed to a non-violent society, then we should all eschew monogamy, since the sheer scale of intimacy that such relationships entail are emotionally (not to mention physically) penetrative, and thus inherently violent. Therefore, in order to avoid such violence, we should all practice “free love” and mass casual-hookups, the paper’s authors ultimately argued.
This professor went on to argue that, while she thought the authors were right, that also meant they were cowards: monogamist relationships are indeed painful–even masochistic–but that also means they are only for the courageous. CS Lewis once said that to love is to open yourself up to being hurt abominably; we can probably simplify that to say that to love is to be hurt. And not just in Romantic love! Divine love, too, is rooted in the pure love of Christ–yet his ultimate example of said love is the Atonement, “Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink” (D&C 19:18). If even God Himself cannot love without suffering, what of the rest of us?
Saint Valentine in early Catholicism, by the way, was one of the martyrs: imprisoned, tortured, and executed by the state on February 14th, AD 269. It has of course struck numerous moderns over the years as slightly humorous that an ancient festival commemorating the horrific sufferings and death of a Christian martyr is now a day for lovers and romantics. Or perhaps it’s the perfect way to celebrate St. Valentine! The love of God, like all forms of love that take after it, can hurt tortuously and abominably too, as that same Valentinus of Terni also learned that same fateful day in the third century.
Perhaps it is no accident, then, that Valentine’s Day also lands during Black History Month nowadays; it is also a time of both passion and mourning, of suffering and redemption, of both love for your people and grief for all that’s been lost. Hence why it was even more appropriate for Davis to have performed for an NAACP benefit that month. In any case, it’s why “My Funny Valentine” is perhaps at its best when it is also being performed mournfully and passionately, as Miles Davis demonstrated over 60 Valentine’s Days ago and counting.