A young Miles Davis at rest during a recording session—a rare sight in a frenetic career that dominated jazz for over four decades, from the late 1940s to the late 1980s.
Miles Davis, more than any other musician, was integral to the most significant stylistic changes in jazz during the second half of the 20th century. These movements included lyrical minimalism, or “cool jazz,” in the 1950s, “modal jazz” in the early 1960s, which featured improvising on a series of scales instead of chords, and jazz rock or “fusion” in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Miles Dewey Davis III was born on May 26, 1926, and grew up in an African-American area of East St. Louis, Illinois. His father was a successful dentist and his mother played the violin. Davis was given his first trumpet before he was nine and took lessons until he graduated from high school. As a teenager, he also played with Eddie Randall’s rhythm-and-blues band touring Illinois and Missouri, and when Billy Eckstine’s group performed in St. Louis, Davis was introduced to the new stars of jazz, Dizzy GILLESPIE and Charlie PARKER.
Davis moved to New York in 1944 to attend the Juilliard School of Music, but also played in jazz clubs. This gave him the opportunity to perform alongside many of the top bebop musicians, particularly Parker. He appeared mostly with Parker’s quintet until late 1948, when he formed his own group—a nine-piece band that included Gerry MULLIGAN and Lee KONITZ. The aim of the group was to emulate the richness of an orchestra by using a wide range of instruments. Although the group lasted only a year, a few numbers were recorded and later released by Capitol Records as The Birth of the Cool. The seminal album of cool jazz, it pioneered a slower, more elegant style that was made up of drifting solos and ethereal melodic lines backed up by the sound of the tuba and French horn.
Davis enjoyed increasing recognition in the late 1940s for his musical talent. However, from 1949 until 1953, and with the exception of a few sessions alongside Sonny ROLLINS and Art BLAKEY, he performed only rarely while he fought an addiction to heroin. By 1954 he appeared to have made a recovery. The following year he formed a quintet, the first of many bands organised by Davis over the next 30 years, each one highly creative and remarkable. The quintet was made up of Paul Chambers, Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones, and John COLTRANE, and together they recorded six albums within a year.
A young Miles Davis at rest during a recording session—a rare sight in a frenetic career that dominated jazz for over four decades, from the late 1940s to the late 1980s.
This frenzy of extraordinary work continued into the late 1950s when Davis, at the head of several different groups, recorded a string of important albums that included Miles Ahead, Milestones, Porgy and Bess, Kind of Blue, and Sketches of Spain. Gil Evans collaborated with Davis on the lyrical Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain, while pianist Bill EVANS and saxophonists Cannonball ADDERLEY and Coltrane joined in on Kind of Blue—arguably the most famous jazz album of all time—which gave birth to another new sound, modal jazz.
Modal jazz uses modal—rather than major or minor—scales to determine the melody and harmony of a piece. But it was more than this new approach that proved so influential. It was also Davis’s synthesis of ensembles and soloists (along with Gil Evans’s orchestration), and his own innovative techniques for the trumpet, that made his groups so dominant in the late 1950s. In the mid-1950s, he began using a metal Harmon mute in his trumpet and played it close to the microphone. This produced a sound that was muffled in the middle range but crisp for high notes. He also introduced the flugelhorn to jazz, so that by the 1960s the Harmon mute and flugelhorn were commonplace.
From 1963 to 1967, Davis led a quintet with a rhythm section of Tony WILLIAMS on drums, Ron Carter on bass, and Herbie HANCOCK on piano. This group was notable for playing both very slow, sparse ballads (Davis’s playing on slow tunes was famously characterised as “a man walking on eggshells”) and also other numbers at ferociously fast tempos, where the technical brilliance of the rhythm section could be featured. The quintet recorded some of the finest live albums of jazz to date, including My Funny Valentine and Four and More (later brought together under the title The Complete Concert). Most of the music from this period was a radical reworking of standard tunes, but it was ESP (1965)—in which tenor saxophonist Wayne SHORTER also featured—that proved the most influential. This album, which all the members of the quintet helped to compose, hinted at the beginning of two new movements: abstraction and jazz rock.
Abstraction, or “time—no changes” as it was sometimes called, was a form of improvisation that would happen in regular time, but without a planned harmony. For example, after the group played the opening theme, the soloist, pianist, and bassist could play any notes or chords they desired. Although this new style became popular with musicians—and the quintet pushed the boundaries further with Miles Smiles (1966)—Davis was focusing on longer pieces that had elements of rock.
The ensemble expanded in the late 1960s to include among others, Chick COREA on keyboards, Dave Holland on bass, and John MCLAUGHLIN on guitar. In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew (both 1969) were the most influential albums from this enlarged group, fusing rock drum rhythms with keyboard and guitar. Jazz rock, or “fusion,” was not merely important musically. It also helped to revive the declining financial state of jazz within the recording industry in the late 1960s. Many audiences felt that jazz had become too abstract and difficult, but fusion presented something closer to popular rock’n’roll than out-of-date rhythm and blues.
Davis had maintained a gruelling schedule since the early 1960s and it began to take its toll in the mid-1970s. From 1975 until 1980, he suffered a series of health problems that kept him from performing, but in 1981 he began touring again with yet another new band. Although he had been away for five years, it did not take him long to regain his peerless form.
In the 1980s, he spent much of his time recording, but it was in front of an audience where he truly sparkled. Twice each year he toured the U.S. and Europe, commanding large crowds everywhere.
Davis received numerous awards toward the end of his exceptional career, including the U.S. Sonning Award in recognition of a lifetime of achievement in music, the first time a non-classical musician was given such an honour. He continued performing right up to the end, dying on September 28, 1991, only a few weeks after his final concert at the Hollywood Bowl.
Joseph Goldberg
SEE ALSO:
BEBOP; COOL JAZZ; JAZZ; JAZZ ROCK; MODAL JAZZ.
FURTHER READING
Carr, Ian. Miles Davis: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1982);
Chambers, Jack. Milestones I & II The Music and Times of Miles Davis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985);
Davis, Miles, with Quincy Troupe. Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989);
Williams, Richard. Miles Davis: the Man in the Green Shirt (London: Bloomsbury, 1993).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Amandla; Birth of the Cool; Bitches Brew; ESP; In a Silent Way; Kind of Blue; Miles Ahead; Miles in Antibes; Miles Smiles; Milestones; Porgy and Bess; Sketches of Spain.