Miles and Me (2000)

''He was one of the kindest people I ever met and one of the most infuriating a--holes, too,'' Quincy Troupe writes of mercurial jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, whose 1989 autobiography he coauthored. Using refreshingly unscholarly language (''he was a voodoo-hoodoo-shaman-man''), in Miles and Me, poet and literature professor Troupe paints an aptly minimalist portrait of the artist as a man-child in both his musical curiosity and his irrational tantrums. Although it occasionally slips into solipsism (the writer claims of his earlier work, ''For many, the book instantly became a classic''), Miles and Me is more often witheringly honest and deeply perceptive. A must-read for Davis devotees. A-