RADIO Roxanne

Miles Davis told everybody the hospital was just a tune-up, nothing major, back soon. He was 65, he had six songs cut with a 25-year-old hip-hop producer from Bed-Stuy, and he said he would be right back.

The album came out the following summer with his name on the front and a Grammy waiting for it. Miles never made it home.

Miles Davis lay back on the couch in his own apartment and put his arm up over his head, the way a man does when his head is hurting. A 25-year-old producer from Brooklyn sat a few feet away with the music running, waiting to hear what he thought.

"Just leave the tape over there," Miles said. "I'm getting kinda tired."

Easy Mo Bee asked him if he was all right and got told not to worry about it. He asked the assistant out in the hall too, and got the same answer, that Miles was a little tired and would get back to him.

Nobody in that apartment said the word sick.

They had six songs finished by then. Miles Davis would never hear what the record became.

It started with a window. Miles had been sitting up in his Manhattan apartment with the windows open, listening to what came up off the street, and what came up off the street in those years was hip-hop.

He decided he wanted to make a record that sounded like that, so he called Russell Simmons and asked him to find some young producers. Reels came in from all over.

One of them belonged to Osten Harvey Jr., 25 years old, out of Bedford-Stuyvesant, raised in the Lafayette Gardens projects and working under the name Easy Mo Bee. He had an SP-1200 drum machine, a rack sampler, and a habit of tuning every sample by hand instead of looping it flat.

Two years later he would build most of Ready to Die for another Brooklyn kid named Biggie Smalls, but in the spring of 1991 almost nobody outside of hip-hop knew his name.

The first meeting was just the two of them, at Miles's place. Miles put the reel on and played the young man's own music back to him.

He stopped it on a track called "True Fresh MCs," which Mo Bee had produced for a rapper still calling himself The Genius, years before the world knew him as GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. Miles liked it, said so more than once, and then pointed at it.

"You do that for me. That right there, you do that for me."

Miles Davis cut his first records in the 1940s standing next to Charlie Parker. Now he was 65 years old in an apartment in Manhattan, asking a kid from Lafayette Gardens to bring him a Wu-Tang beat.

There was a second meeting, and that one was a room full of hopefuls, about half a dozen producers all holding music.

He saved Mo Bee for last. Then he told him he was the one, and that was the job.

They went into Unique Recording Studios in Manhattan. Mo Bee brought his engineer, Eric Lynch, and the two of them worked the way they worked with rappers, which meant stopping after a pass so the artist could hear it back.

Lynch stopped the tape after Miles's first trumpet pass on "The Doo-Bop Song." Miles came down on him hard enough to freeze the room, telling him to bring it back and not do that again.

"Don't stop the tape," he told him. "Let it roll."

That is how the man had made records for more than forty years, and you do not stop him to ask how he is doing.

The only other musician Miles brought in was Deron Johnson on keyboards. Every drum, every sample, every other piece of it, Mo Bee built himself.

He watched Miles ride Deron hard one night over a part he wanted doubled underneath his own line. Mo Bee had never heard musicians talk to each other like that in a studio.

He saw the easy side too. Miles brought his girlfriend down one day and was playful the whole session, in a good mood, having fun with her.

That is one of the last times Mo Bee remembers seeing him like that.

For "Blow," Miles told him he liked the funk in the track, so Mo Bee went straight to the source and cleared a James Brown record for it. That is how those sessions ran, the old man pointing and the young man chasing it down.

Near the end of the work Miles asked him if he wanted to come out on the road, and Mo Bee said what would I even do out there, I have a sampler. Miles pointed at the machine.

"Yeah, your machine, you bring it, come with me."

That summer he went to Europe and stood on a stage in Montreux and in Paris with men he had not played beside in two decades, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul and John McLaughlin. France made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

On August 25 he played the Hollywood Bowl. It was Wayne Shorter's 68th birthday, and Miles slipped a few bars of "Happy Birthday" into one of his solos.

The band played about ninety minutes instead of the three hours people came expecting, and closed on a tune Prince had written for him. Shorter went backstage afterward to say hello.

He had a feeling about it. He told People magazine a couple of months later that Miles was tired, and that he looked like a man going straight to his resting place.

That was the last time Miles Davis played in public.

Five days later he checked into St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, close to his house out there. He told everybody it was nothing.

The liner notes of the album he was in the middle of making set his words down plain. "For a tune up," he said, "just routine, nothing major, I'll be right back."

He suffered a bleed in the brain and slipped into a coma. Gordon Meltzer, Miles's manager, called to tell Mo Bee that Miles was in the hospital, that he was that sick, that they might lose him.

On September 28, 1991, at 10:46 in the morning, Miles Davis died at 65. His physician listed a stroke, respiratory failure and pneumonia.

Mo Bee's own manager, Francesca Sparrow, was the one who called him with that news.

It broke him up, he said. The two of them had built something real by then, and there had been talk about a tour and about what they would do next.

There was no next.

Warner Bros. had six finished songs and no artist, so they went into the vault. What they brought back to a 26-year-old from Bedford-Stuyvesant were two recordings Miles had made in a Los Angeles studio in the fall of 1985, for an album called Rubberband that he walked away from and never put out.

The instruction was plain, take everything off those recordings except the trumpet and build a new song underneath it.

Every other producer in New York was in a room arguing with a living artist. Mo Bee was in a room with a dead man's breath on a six-year-old recording and no way to ask him anything at all.

He could not play him a beat and watch his face change. He could not get hollered at to bring it back and let it roll.

So he set himself one rule and he held to it. He worked those two tracks until they carried the same air as the six they had cut together in the same room, so a person could run the album front to back and never find the place where he was working alone.

Doo-Bop came out on June 30, 1992, nine months after the funeral, nine songs and forty minutes long.

The critics lined up on it. The jazz writers said he had cheapened himself at the end, and plenty of the hip-hop press acted like he had shown up late to something.

It sold around 300,000 copies worldwide anyway. In February 1993 it won the Grammy for Best R&B Instrumental Performance, and not in a jazz category, which Mo Bee noticed and never got a straight answer about.

Miles had been gone sixteen months.

"Fantasy" is track seven. "High Speed Chase" is track four.

Those are the two he never heard. A horn he put down in 1985, rebuilt into songs by a young man working by himself in a room in New York.

Put the record on and play it straight through. You will not be able to find them.

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