22 April 2024

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Following Miles Davis, metaphor of transformation

Massimo Gagliani

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If there were an indicator for change in music, this would be off the charts if it wanted to measure how many and what changes Miles Davis has made since, at eighteen, he was enlisted, almost by chance, in Bill Eckstine's great jazz orchestra. He was the son of an established dentist in St Louis but he had musical genes on his mother's side and, from an early age, he understood that chasing music would be his life. So he changed his life in the great southern province and transformed it into the beating heart of the 52nd in New York; he met the greats, “Bird” Charlie Parker above all, and gradually learned, evolving his style. He faced loves that were unacceptable for the time, having shared a great passion for the white Juliette Greco, and formed his own band with the greatest of the time, making the musical genre suitable for him migrate towards subtle and rarefied atmospheres.

Once he conceived the best-selling jazz album of all time – “Kind of Blue” – he stopped playing the role of the white-collar jazzman and approached the psychedelic world of the seventies, mixing with other musical genres. Traveling on highways without speed limits allowed himself every kind of abuse and every kind of musical privilege; physically undermined, he survived his own living myth and, as one of his albums states, “In a Silent Way” disappeared from the scene, saying goodbye to this world which, in many ways, he had detested because it was steeped in prejudice and respectability.

Leaving aside the cursed hero but observing the genius, one understands how, in the life of a man, different periods can coexist and that these periods are accompanied by leaps that are not always conceivable in terms of intensity and dimension.

By metaphor, not infrequently, the profession has these drifts: we start from small, dentally speaking, we evolve and we aim for a goal which, often, does not contain the endings we would have expected. Technology often decides for us, it is difficult to remain indifferent to the sirens of novelty; it's easy to brand them as an illusion, giving in to skepticism. Perhaps doubt represents the essence of professionalism, that is, the certainty of being able to find a better or different solution than the one that can be adopted, and then decide with reasoned rigor what the ideal plan is, or the most appropriate scheme.

Appropriate: this is the real term that will have to guide future change. An old theme that progressively re-emerges, changing the social and cultural contexts in which we move, the new medicine (dentistry) slave to evidence will always find a counterpart in the medicine (dentistry) of appropriateness, as they are not in antithesis but sufficiently distinct to deserves clarification.

Evident does not also mean appropriate; on the other hand, nothing can be appropriate if it is not sufficiently evident. But this last evidence is measured with the relativity of contexts, habits and people.

I think this could be the big change we are about to make to deal with every kind of request, from those most intimately connected to the chewing function to the less urgent ones linked to aesthetics. A great figure in our dentistry, Giancarlo Pescarmona, a man who dedicated his life to making all his patients smile appropriately, told me: “Today everyone talks about aesthetics; very important, but aesthetics is the cherry on the cake, it's not the cake!”.

A sincere and professionally attentive attitude which has always been the hallmark of his being a dentist and dentist. An inspirer who knew how to transform his actions in an incessant way not to be the most technologically advanced but to have the best solutions for the issues, revealed or hidden, that the patient brought to his attention. In this continuous transformation we should maintain solid biological principles and great common sense, the only true secrets to always be appropriate.