Miles Davis Has Family in Java
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli was a bit of a storyteller and liked to claim among other things that he was a descendent of St. Francis of Assisi. He was the most subtle and refined of pianists, with incredible timbral control; as a Debussy player he was peerless. Miles Davis was a big fan of his - in his book he talks about how he was listening to a lot of Michelangeli’s recordings around the time he made Kind of Blue.
Piotr Anderszewski has this to say about Michelangeli:
“He didn’t like performing. But he didn’t like recordings either. He didn’t give interviews, he didn’t write books. He’s a ghost, actually.”
Debussy was one of the first European composers to make extensive use of whole-tone and pentatonic scales. Apparently he heard a Javanese Gamelan outfit at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition and flipped out. Can you blame him?