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Thursday, May 5, 2016
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS
ARTIST PROFILE
‘Ahead’ a fake
but lively biopic
By MADELEINE GAUDIN
Daily Arts Writer
This spring is starting to feel like
a music biopic-heavy season in the
middle of a music biopic resurgence.
Some, like “Amy,”
have
master-
fully
captured
the torment and
hardship of their
troubled
stars,
while others, like
the forthcoming
“Nina,” have sac-
rificed substance
for controversy.
So, how exactly did star, writer,
director and producer Don Cheadle
(“Flight”) make his storyline stand
out in a genre where sex, drugs and
rock ‘n’ roll (or in this case, jazz) are
the norm? Easy — he made it up.
It’s a risky move. Historical purists
and Miles Davis biography junkies
aren’t going to love it, but for the less
historically inclined, the fiction is a
pleasant departure from a genre that
struggles with filling space between
the music.
What emerges from this blend of
fact and fiction is an idea of Davis —
namely Cheadle’s idea of him. In that
sense, the film is less about Davis as
a person and more about Davis as
a cultural icon. To Cheadle (and I
think to many of his fans) it doesn’t
matter what Davis did on any given
day, but rather what he made and
what that product meant to the mil-
lions of people who listened to and
loved his music.
The exchange of plot points for
deeper significance sounds wonder-
ful, and in “Miles Ahead” it almost
is. But unfortunately Cheadle doesn’t
know how to stop his fantasy version
of Davis from running wild. One of
the film’s standout scenes — a gun-
filled car chase — feels more like an
outtake from Davis’s guest appear-
ance on “Miami Vice” than a scene
in a serious and artistic film about
his life. The scene sucks the romance
out of Cheadle’s impressionistic por-
trayal and leaves it feeling childish
and absurd.
Narratively, the film follows a
familiar strategy of throw-in-a-
journalist-and-a-story-will-emerge.
Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor, “The
Force Awakens”) is a writer at Roll-
ing Stone tasked with writing Davis’s
“comeback story.” While his exis-
tence in the film — much like Jesse
Eisenberg’s in “The End of the Tour”
— is in part a vehicle through which
to ask the questions Davis would
never answer unprompted, it works.
The two have chemistry — so much
chemistry, in fact, that at times the
film seems headed for buddy cop ter-
ritory.
While “Miles Ahead” may not be
the film that solidifies Cheadle as
a master storyteller, it could be the
one that solidifies him as a master
behind the camera. With the help of
editors John Axelrad and Kayla M.
Emter, Cheadle edits the film to the
beat of Davis’s fragmented music.
Flashback’s are cut side by side with
current-narrative progression in a
rhythm that in any other film would
feel jarring. But, when set to Davis’s
music, it feels natural and reminds
the audience why we’re all here:
not because someone named Miles
Davis got in a fight at Columbia
Records one time, but rather because
someone named Miles Davis made
amazing music with enough power
to inspire a filmmaker to dedicate
ten years of his life to immortalizing
him.
So maybe “Miles Ahead” is a pur-
ist’s nightmare, and maybe even for
impressionist fans it dips too far into
cartoon territory; but, love it or hate
it, one has to acknowledge the love
and passion that Cheadle eskews for
his muse every moment he’s in front
of the camera and every moment he’s
behind it.
B
Miles Ahead
Sony Pictures
Classic
State Theatre
Student talks life and
budding music career
Aash Mehta discusses
EDM beginnings in
Ann Arbor.
By AMELIA ZAK
Daily Arts Writer
There’s
the
GarageBand
geek from high school, or the
kid who has been locked in
his dorm room for a couple of
days now, or your old next-
door neighbor who always had
the speakers bumping a little
too loud: what’s their least
common denominator? They’re
characters of an allegory of
our millennial generation who
are most likely spitting out the
following phrase on a regular
basis:
“Hey,
check
out
my
SoundCloud.”
You can’t blame these artists.
You can’t blame them for their
need to self-market, their desire
to get the word out about their
ongoing projects or their drive to
beat out all the others in the fight
for relevance and recognition.
The music industry is saturated
with original artists right now,
recording and producing tracks
in the comfort of their own
computers and sending them
into the Internet’s universe. So
with much of the same thing and
so many options to choose from,
it’s easy to doubt, and it’s even
easier to become immediately
overwhelmed.
Aash Mehta, a graduating
senior at the University of
Michigan, had to make the best
of poor industry conditions. It
began in high school, following
the voice changes of puberty,
when Mehta decided that the
sappy acoustic guitar (and such)
weren’t completely for him.
He decided, instead, to take on
something that had turned him
on for so long: electronic music.
Mehta spent high school in
India, where an excess of actual
musical variety exists. Holding
residence in a cultural epicenter
like India gave him an early
understanding of world music:
K-pop,
German
electronic
and pop and a host of others
that many must search much
harder and longer for. So with
a little more cultural depth
and a lot to pull from, Mehta
downloaded “anything free from
the Internet” and took a stab at
electronic music.
“When I began I put a lot of
mixes up on my SoundCloud.
I would just plug into my
computer, DJ live and then put
up those mixes. A lot of people
nowadays don’t always do that,
but I’ve always preferred to do it
live. I spent hours out of the day
on YouTube, trying to learn new
techniques and such, but the
problem is, you can have a mind
for how you want it to sound
like, but for the longest time you
won’t have the ability to put it on
paper or on a computer. I had to
work at it and get better in order
to create what I actually wanted
or thought that I wanted.”
So
in
January
of
2015,
after having learned a lot and
practiced more, Mehta purged
his
SoundCloud
of
all
its
previous content. He erased his
past mixes and projects for the
Internet to never know. With an
appreciation for genre-bending,
Mehta started in on something
different. He started in on
something a little more fun, a
little more different and a little
closer to the artist he wanted to
be.
“Where some kids in my class
are saying: ‘Oh, I made this app!’
I’m sitting there saying, ‘Oh,
hey I made this sick beat!’ I’m
not doing Computer Science, my
major, after college. I’ll probably
move to Los Angeles, get a part-
time job and pursue my music
career on a basically full-time
basis. I do think of it analytically,
like I do think that there is some
mathematical wave to it all, and
you kind of need that with beat
matching” Mehta said.
“My remix to White Lies by
Odesza was something that got
me a lot of recognition, and I
think that that was the first
track where I thought: ‘I’m
going to do my own thing with
this song, even if people don’t
like it,” and then I sent it out to
a couple of blogs— a whole long
list of them — and that got a ton
of plays and listens,” Mehta said.
Mehta has been able to tap
into the electronic music scene
of Detroit as well. The interna-
tionally-renowned
electronic
artist
Elephante
recognized
Mehta not long ago in a connect-
ing moment not uncommon for
electronic musicians.
“I opened for Elephante’s
show in Detroit, and he played
his unreleased single during his
set. After he gave permission I
remixed it, sent it to him and got
his approval,” explained Mehta.
“And now I’ll be putting it out
at the end of May. It’s cool that
people are getting to know what
my sound is like and then getting
their approval on it at the same
time. It’s an awesome process,
and I’ll be having a lot of content
coming out as it all happens.”
There is something precious
to Mehta’s beats, something
genuine and organic that would,
from an objective perspective,
appear out of place among the
masses. Writing his own lyrics,
matching manufactured tones
and sounds to the intangibles
— it’s a medicinal, provoking
process. It’s collecting what
you know, and have known, and
growing upon what you then
want to create on your own.
“Most people think that a lot
of my sounds are instrumenta-
tions or beats that I have made,
but a lot of them are vocal drops
that I have messed with on my
computer to make them sound so
weirdly different,” said Mehta.
Mehta is working towards
something
in
Los
Angeles,
where the recording artists and
producers range in variety, style
and power. With a job to pay the
bills on the side, the University
graduate is taking his talents
to the West Coast in search of
something a little bigger, a little
more. Mehta is standing among
the army of millennial musi-
cians, those that must fight
amongst the battlefields of the
unending Internet for relevance
and recognition. But he’s got it:
with the connections and almost
one million hits on SoundCloud,
Mehta is onto something. He’s
using a popular platform to work
for himself, as most innovators
must and do.
SONY PICTURES CLASSIC
You’re making things up again, Don.
FILM REVIEW