Miles from home

Miles Davis and the movies

Abstract

In the 1988 film Scrooged, Miles Davis briefly joins several other musicians in a delicately hip version of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’. The song was appropriate for a film that takes place on Christmas Eve, but Davis seems out of place performing on a street corner in Manhattan. As the soon-to-be-transformed miser based on Charles Dickens' Scrooge, Bill Murray ridicules the musicians, even shouting, "Great! Rip off the hicks, why dontcha? Did you learn that song yesterday?" With Davis are David Sanborn, Paul Shaffer, and Larry Carlton. The camera reveals a hand-lettered sign in Davis's trumpet case: "Help the starving musicians." Since almost everyone recognizes Davis and his trumpet and probably the three other musicians as well, few are likely to misunderstand the scene in Scrooged. The joke is on the self-involved philistine played by Bill Murray as well as on the extremely successful musicians who, unlike many jazz artists, are certainly not starving. But meanings are not always so clear in the other films in which the trumpet of Miles Davis can be heard.