Miles Davis

Miles Davis, in full Miles Dewey Davis III, (born May 26,

1926, Alton, Illinois, U.S.—died September 28, 1991, Santa
Monica, California), American jazz musician, a great trumpeter
who as a bandleader and composer was one of the major
influences on the art from the late 1940s.

Starting Out

Davis grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois, where his father was a
prosperous dental surgeon. (In later years he often spoke of his
comfortable upbringing, sometimes to rebuke critics who assumed
that a background of poverty and suffering was common to all
great jazz artists.) He began studying trumpet in his early teens;
fortuitously, in light of his later stylistic development, his first
teacher advised him to play without vibrato. Davis played with jazz
bands in the St. Louis area before moving to New York City in
1944 to study at the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard
School)—although he skipped many classes and instead was
schooled through jam sessions with masters such as Dizzy
Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Davis and Parker recorded together
often during the years 1945–48.

Davis’s early playing was sometimes tentative and not always fully
in tune, but his unique, intimate tone and his fertile musical
imagination outweighed his technical shortcomings. By the early
1950s Davis had turned his limitations into considerable assets.
Rather than emulate the busy, wailing style of such bebop pioneers
as Gillespie, Davis explored the trumpet’s middle register,
experimenting with harmonies and rhythms and varying the
phrasing of his improvisations. With the occasional exception of
multinote flurries, his melodic style was direct and unornamented,
based on quarter notes and rich with inflections. The deliberation,
pacing, and lyricism in his improvisations are striking.
Cool Jazz And Modal Jazz

In the summer of 1948, Davis formed a nonet that included the

renowned jazz artists Gerry Mulligan, J.J. Johnson, Kenny Clarke,
and Lee Konitz, as well as players on French horn and tuba,
instruments rarely heard in a jazz context. Mulligan, Gil Evans,
and pianist John Lewis did most of the band’s arrangements,
which juxtaposed the flexible, improvisatory nature of bebop with
a thickly textured orchestral sound. The group was short-lived but
during its brief history recorded a dozen tracks that were originally
released as singles (1949–50). These recordings changed the
course of modern jazz and paved the way for the West Coast styles
of the 1950s. The tracks were later collected in the album Birth of
the Cool (1957).
 Miles Davis

Miles Davis.

Everett Collection Historical/Alamy

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During the early 1950s Davis struggled with a drug addiction that

affected his playing, yet he still managed to record albums that
rank among his best, including several with such jazz notables
as Sonny Rollins, Milt Jackson, and Thelonious Monk. In 1954,
having overcome the addiction, Davis embarked on a two-decade
period during which he was considered the most innovative
musician in jazz. He formed classic small groups in the 1950s that
featured saxophone legends John Coltrane and Cannonball
Adderley, pianists Red Garland and Bill Evans, bassist Paul
Chambers, and drummers “Philly” Joe Jones and Jimmy Cobb.
Davis’s albums recorded during this era, including ’Round About
Midnight (1956), Workin’ (1956), Steamin’ (1956), Relaxin’ (1956),
and Milestones (1958), affected the work of numerous other
artists. He capped this period of his career with Kind of
Blue (1959), perhaps the most celebrated album in the history of
jazz. A mellow, relaxed collection, the album includes the finest
recorded examples of modal jazz, a style in which improvisations
are based upon sparse chords and nonstandard scales rather than
on complex, frequently changing chords. The modal style lends
itself to solos that are focused on melody; this accessible quality
ensured Kind of Blue’s popularity with jazz fans.

Released concurrently with the small-group recordings, Davis’s

albums with pieces arranged and conducted by Gil Evans—Miles
Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), and Sketches of
Spain (1960)—were also monuments of the genre. The Davis-
Evans collaborations were marked by complex arrangements, a
near-equal emphasis on orchestra and soloist, and some of Davis’s
most soulful and emotionally powerful playing. Davis and Evans
occasionally collaborated in later years, but never again so
memorably as on these three masterful albums.
Free Jazz And Fusion

The early 1960s were transitional, less-innovative years for Davis,

although his music and his playing remained top-calibre. He
began forming another soon-to-be-classic small group in late 1962
with bassist Ron Carter, pianist Herbie Hancock, and teenage
drummer Tony Williams; tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter joined
the lineup in 1964. Davis’s new quintet was characterized by a
light, free sound and a repertoire that extended from the blues to
avant-garde and free jazz. Compared with the innovations of other
modern jazz groups of the 1960s, the Davis quintet’s
experimentations in polyrhythm and polytonality were more
subtle but equally daring. Live at the Plugged
Nickel (1965), E.S.P. (1965), Miles Smiles (1966),
and Nefertiti (1967) were among the quintet’s timeless, influential
recordings. About the time of Miles in the Sky and Filles de
Kilimanjaro (both 1968), Davis began experimenting with
electronic instruments. With other musicians, including
keyboardists Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul and guitarist John
McLaughlin, Davis cut In a Silent Way (1969), regarded as
the seminal album of the jazz fusion movement. It was considered
by purists to be Davis’s last true jazz album.

Davis won new fans and alienated old ones with the release
of Bitches Brew (1969), an album on which he fully embraced the
rhythms, electronic instrumentation, and studio effects of rock
music. A cacophonous kaleidoscope of layered sounds, rhythms,
and textures, the album’s influence was heard in such 1970s fusion
groups as Weather Report and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever.
Davis continued in this style for a few years, with the album Live-
Evil (1970) and the film soundtrack A Tribute to Jack
Johnson (1970) being particular highlights.
Legacy

Davis was injured in an auto accident in 1972, curtailing his

activities, then retired from 1975 through 1980. When he returned
to public notice with The Man with the Horn (1981), critics felt
that Davis’s erratic playing showed the effects of his five-year
layoff, but he steadily regained his powers during the next few
years. He dabbled in a variety of musical styles throughout the
1980s, concentrating mostly on jazz-rock dance music, but there
were also notable experiments in other styles, such as a return to
his blues roots (Star People, 1982) and a set of Gil Evans-
influenced orchestral numbers (Music from Siesta, 1987). Davis
won several Grammy Awards during this period for such albums
as We Want Miles (1982), Tutu (1986), and Aura (1989). One of
the most-memorable events of Davis’s later years occurred at
the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1991, when he joined with an
orchestra conducted by Quincy Jones to perform some of the
classic Gil Evans arrangements of the late 1950s. Davis died less
than three months later. His final album, Doo-Bop (1992), was
released posthumously.

Although critics dismissed much of the music Davis released

after Bitches Brew, his excursions helped keep jazz popular with
mainstream audiences. In later years he ignored the critics, and he
defied convention by wandering around the stage, often playing
with his back to the audience. In his much-praised and revealing
autobiography, Miles (1989; with Quincy Troupe), he wrote
frankly of his hedonistic past and of the racism he saw in the
music industry. Along with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington,
and Charlie Parker, Davis is regarded as one of the four most
important and influential musicians in jazz history, as well as the
music’s most eclectic practitioner.