Miles Davis, probably the greatest musician of the 20th century, would have played live to, I don’t know, a few million people in his life. He toured the world, he recorded a small pile of brilliant jazz albums that are regarded as seminal works of music history, and he also recorded a large pile of obscure ramblings that didn’t go down in history, but did go down on tape, so they have become little footnotes to history. I’m not going to add up the total hours Miles Davis spent in the studio, but I would presume that, if you wanted to listen to the complete works of Miles Davis back to back (and you wouldn’t, because Miles Davis spent a lot of time in the 1970s taking drugs and experimenting with wah-wah pedals, the results of which are, let’s be honest, rather terrible), but if you wanted to, you could probably listen to Miles Davis for a week or so without any toilet breaks.

The interesting thing about this is that although Miles Davis gave a lifetime of recorded music to the world for our collective listening pleasure, he didn’t like having his photo taken. “If you take my photograph, you take something from me,” is what he used to say.

I didn’t understand this at first, but he’s right.

History is the sum of the things we create and the pieces we leave behind. The more we create, the more we control history. Everyone wants to control history.