Miles Davis

Miles Dewey Davis III was born on May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, and grew up across the Mississippi River in East St. Louis. His family was prosperous by the standards of the time and place: his father, Miles Davis Jr., was a dental surgeon who also owned farmland, and his mother, Cleota Henry Davis, played piano and violin ^[1]. The household's relative comfort gave the young Davis music lessons, good instruments, and an early sense that he did not need to please anyone to survive.

He received his first trumpet around age thirteen and studied with Elwood Buchanan, a local teacher who discouraged the wide vibrato fashionable among trumpeters of the era. Davis later credited that instruction with shaping the clear, vocal, almost vibrato free tone that became his signature ^[2]. By his mid teens he was playing professionally around St. Louis with Eddie Randle's Blue Devils, absorbing the region's strong brass tradition.

A turning point came in 1944, when the Billy Eckstine band passed through St. Louis carrying Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Davis sat in with the group, heard the new bebop language at close range, and decided his future lay in New York. That fall he enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music, though he spent far more time in the clubs of 52nd Street than in the classroom, and he soon left the school to work full time as a musician ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Miles Davis in 1945 would have found a nineteen year old sideman shadowing Charlie Parker through Harlem jam sessions. Davis joined Parker's quintet that year and appeared on many of the saxophonist's landmark bebop recordings for the Savoy and Dial labels, including the November 1945 session that produced Now's the Time ^[2]. He lacked the pyrotechnic speed of Gillespie, so he built a different approach: fewer notes, careful placement in the middle register, and long silences that gave his lines dramatic weight.

In 1948 and 1949 Davis stepped forward as a leader, organizing a nine piece band with arrangers Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, and John Lewis. The nonet's recordings for Capitol, later collected as Birth of the Cool, softened bebop's attack with French horn, tuba, and orchestral voicings, and helped define the cool jazz style that flourished on the West Coast in the 1950s ^[3].

The early 1950s nearly ended his career. Davis developed a heroin addiction that eroded his reliability and reputation, and he spent several years scuffling before quitting the drug in 1954, largely through an isolated withdrawal at his father's farm in Illinois ^[1]. His comeback performance of Round Midnight at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival impressed Columbia Records executive George Avakian, who signed him to the label where he would remain for three decades ^[4].

Any honest list of Miles Davis achievements has to begin with the bands he built. His first great quintet, formed in 1955 with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones, recorded a celebrated run of albums for Prestige and Columbia, including Round About Midnight ^[2]. In parallel he renewed his partnership with Gil Evans on a series of orchestral projects for Columbia: Miles Ahead in 1957, Porgy and Bess in 1958, and Sketches of Spain in 1960, records that framed his trumpet and flugelhorn against rich large ensemble writing ^[3].

In March and April 1959 Davis led a sextet with Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb into Columbia's 30th Street Studio and recorded Kind of Blue. Built on modes and sparse sketches rather than dense chord changes, the album became the most widely admired recording in jazz history and was certified quadruple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, an extraordinary figure for the genre ^[4]. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry in its inaugural 2002 class ^[5].

Davis refused to stop there. His second great quintet of the mid 1960s, with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, stretched harmony and rhythm on albums such as E.S.P. and Nefertiti. Then, at the end of the decade, he plugged in. In a Silent Way in 1969 and Bitches Brew in 1970 fused jazz improvisation with rock rhythms and electric instruments; Bitches Brew won the Grammy Award for best large group jazz performance and sold in numbers few jazz records had reached ^[6]. Over his career Davis won multiple Grammy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990, and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006 ^[7].

Away from the bandstand Davis cultivated an image of elegance and defiance. He drove sports cars, boxed for exercise, dressed in tailored clothing and later flamboyant stage wear, and spoke in a famously hoarse rasp caused by shouting too soon after a 1955 throat operation ^[1]. He was also candid, in his 1989 autobiography written with Quincy Troupe, about the darker threads of his life, including drug use and his violence toward women, admissions that continue to complicate his reputation ^[8].

He married three times. His marriage to dancer Frances Taylor, whose face appears on several of his album covers, lasted from 1958 to 1968; he was married to singer Betty Mabry (Betty Davis) briefly in 1968 and 1969, a relationship that steered him toward the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone; and he married actress Cicely Tyson in 1981, divorcing in 1989 ^[1]. He had four children, including sons Gregory, Miles IV, and Erin, and daughter Cheryl.

Race shaped his public life. In August 1959, outside Birdland in New York, a policeman ordered Davis to move along while he was taking a break from his own engagement; the confrontation ended with Davis beaten and arrested, an incident widely reported at the time and one he cited as evidence of how little his fame protected him ^[8].

By 1975 decades of touring, chronic hip pain from sickle cell related complications, and renewed drug and alcohol problems pushed Davis into retirement. He spent roughly five years out of public view in his Manhattan brownstone, a period he later described bluntly as lost time ^[8].

He returned in 1981 with the album The Man with the Horn and a series of comeback concerts. Through the 1980s he embraced contemporary pop textures, covering Michael Jackson's Human Nature and Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time in concert, and working with producer Marcus Miller on Tutu in 1986, an album that won him another Grammy ^[6]. Critics divided over the electronic sheen of this late work, but audiences filled arenas, and Davis also took up painting and appeared occasionally on television and film.

In July 1991, at the Montreux Jazz Festival, he broke a lifelong rule against revisiting the past and performed the Gil Evans orchestral repertoire with a band conducted by Quincy Jones. Two months later, on September 28, 1991, Davis died at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California, at age 65; his doctors attributed death to pneumonia, respiratory failure, and stroke ^[9]. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Few figures in American music changed direction as often, or as consequentially. A short Miles Davis biography still has to account for at least five distinct styles: bebop apprenticeship, cool jazz, hard bop and modal jazz, the abstract post bop of the 1960s quintet, and electric fusion. Musicians who passed through his bands, among them John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and John McLaughlin, went on to lead much of jazz for the rest of the century ^[2].

The honors kept arriving after his death. Kind of Blue remains a fixture of critics' polls and university syllabuses, and its 1959 modal experiments are standard teaching material in jazz education ^[5]. Davis received a posthumous Grammy Legend consideration through his 1990 Lifetime Achievement Award, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2006 recognized his influence beyond jazz, and Don Cheadle's 2015 film Miles Ahead brought his story to new audiences ^[7].

Among the most repeated Miles Davis facts is that he played with his back partly turned to audiences and left long silences inside his solos. Both habits point to the same idea, one he voiced often: the notes you do not play matter as much as the ones you do. That principle, along with the recordings, is his lasting bequest to musicians in every genre ^[3].