Miles Davis

Miles Dewey Davis III was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer regarded, alongside Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, as one of the four most important and influential musicians in jazz history.¹ Over a career spanning nearly five decades, from his first recordings in 1945 to his final performances in 1991, he stood at the forefront of successive stylistic revolutions in the music, introducing or helping to establish cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, post-bop, and jazz-rock fusion.¹²¹³ He was widely admired for a cool, intimate, luminous tone played without vibrato, and for a restless refusal to repeat himself.¹

Davis was born on May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, into an affluent African American family; his father, Miles Davis II, was a prosperous dental surgeon, and his mother, Cleota Henry Davis, an accomplished musician.¹¹³ The family moved to East St. Louis within a year of his birth, and he grew up in comfortable, middle-class circumstances he would later invoke to rebuke critics who assumed poverty was common to all great jazz artists.¹¹³ His father gave him a trumpet on his thirteenth birthday, and he began lessons with Elwood Buchanan, who told the boy to play without vibrato — advice that shaped his mature sound.¹³¹⁸ By 1941 he was playing professionally with St. Louis-area bands, including Eddie Randle’s Blue Devils.⁵¹⁵

In 1944 Davis moved to New York City to study at the Institute of Musical Art, now the Juilliard School?, though he skipped many classes in favor of jam sessions on 52nd Street with Charlie Parker? and Dizzy Gillespie?.¹¹⁵ He became Parker’s roommate and protégé, playing in his quintet on the 1945 Savoy sessions considered definitive recordings of the bebop? movement, and recorded with Parker frequently between 1945 and 1948.⁵¹ With his father’s blessing, he dropped out of Juilliard in 1945 to pursue jazz full-time, and made his recording debut as a bandleader in 1946.¹¹⁸

Cool jazz and the classic quintets

Rather than emulate the busy, wailing style of Gillespie, Davis explored the trumpet’s middle register with a direct, unornamented melodic style.¹ In 1948 he formed a nonet — including Gerry Mulligan?, Lee Konitz?, and arranger Gil Evans?, with French horn and tuba — whose thickly textured arrangements changed the course of modern jazz and paved the way for the West Coast styles of the 1950s.⁷¹⁵ The dozen tracks the group recorded in 1949–50 for Capitol were later collected as Birth of the Cool (1957).⁷⁹

Davis became addicted to heroin around 1949, a dependence that kept his career in low gear until he quit “cold turkey” and overcame it by 1954.⁵¹³ His improvisation on “’Round Midnight” at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival led Columbia Records? to sign him and allowed him to assemble his first great quintet — pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Philly Joe Jones, and tenor saxophonist John Coltrane?.⁹¹³ To fulfill his remaining obligations to the Prestige label, he cut the sessions released as Cookin’, Workin’, Relaxin’, and Steamin’.⁹²⁰

His collaborations with Gil Evans and a large ensemble produced Miles Ahead (1957), on which he played flugelhorn exclusively, Porgy and Bess (1958), and Sketches of Spain (1960), the last built around the adagio of Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.¹³²⁰ Adding alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley? to form a sextet, he recorded Milestones (1958), whose title track was among his first experiments in modal composition — improvisation based on scales and tone centers rather than frequently changing chords.²¹³

This modal direction culminated in Kind of Blue (1959), recorded in sessions on March 2 and April 6, 1959, with Adderley, Coltrane, pianist Bill Evans?, Chambers, drummer Jimmy Cobb, and pianist Wynton Kelly.²¹³ Often called the most celebrated album in jazz and the best-selling jazz record of all time, it had sold over two million copies.⁹¹⁸ Its tracks include “So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” “Blue in Green,” and “All Blues”.²¹⁰

Miles Davis - So What (Official Video)MilesDavisVEVO

The second quintet and fusion

In 1963 Davis formed a second quintet with bassist Ron Carter?, pianist Herbie Hancock?, and the teenaged drummer Tony Williams?, adding saxophonist Wayne Shorter? in 1964–65.⁵¹⁰ Active through 1968, this group recorded E.S.P. (1965), Miles Smiles (1967), Sorcerer (1967), Nefertiti (1968), Miles in the Sky (1968), and Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968), a body of work credited with defining the loosely bounded subgenre of post-bop.²¹² Author Jeremy Yudkin has argued that Davis was the creator of post-bop, describing the music as freer in form, tempo, and meter, with the band members themselves serving as composers.²

Beginning with Miles in the Sky, the quintet introduced electric instruments and rock rhythms.⁵ In a Silent Way (1969) added guitarist John McLaughlin? and keyboardists Chick Corea? and Joe Zawinul?.⁵¹⁰ Enamored of Jimi Hendrix? and Sly Stone and hoping to form “the world’s baddest rock band,” Davis assembled a large ensemble and let it jam with virtually no instructions, producing Bitches Brew (1970), a two-LP set that sold more than a million copies.³¹⁰ Its success opened record-industry executives’ eyes to the commercial potential of jazz and helped launch the jazz-rock fusion movement.³⁶ Davis was the first jazz artist featured on the cover of Rolling Stone.¹⁸

Musicians from these bands went on to found the leading fusion groups of the 1970s — Shorter and Zawinul formed Weather Report, Corea formed Return to Forever, and McLaughlin and Billy Cobham formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra — spreading Davis’s influence across the decade.¹⁰¹⁸ His infatuation with rock and funk peaked with On the Corner (1972), which deemphasized solos in favor of ensemble funk.⁵¹⁰ A 1972 car crash that broke both his legs began a period of growing reclusiveness, and by 1975 illness and a hip ailment led him to give up recording entirely.⁵⁹

Later career and legacy

With the encouragement of his wife, actress Cicely Tyson?, whom he married in 1981, Davis returned in 1980–81 with the album The Man with the Horn and a resumption of touring.⁵¹⁸ Through the 1980s he pursued increasingly commercial and pop-inflected material, interpreting songs by Michael Jackson? and Cyndi Lauper? on You’re Under Arrest (1985) and recording Tutu (1986), his first for Warner Bros. after ending a roughly 30-year tenure with Columbia.⁵¹⁸ His posthumous album Doo-Bop (1992) was among the first to fuse jazz with hip-hop.⁹

Davis was named an NEA Jazz Master in 1984 and won multiple Grammy Awards over his career.¹⁵¹⁸ He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an honor recognizing how his boundary-pushing work drew rock’s more adventurous listeners without compromise.¹⁰ His legacy extends beyond jazz into rock, funk, classical, and hip-hop, and he remains a major touchstone for generations of trumpeters.¹³¹⁴ He died on September 28, 1991, in Santa Monica, California, of pneumonia, respiratory failure, and a stroke, aged 65.¹²⁰ His memoir, Miles: The Autobiography, was written with poet Quincy Troupe.¹⁷

Official Trailer | Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool | American Masters | PBSPBS