Miles Davis Biography
If any one musician exemplifies the restless creative spirit that has made jazz a vital art form, it’s Miles Davis (1926-1991). During his 50-year career, the trumpet icon was at the center of nearly every major development in jazz, from bebop to cool jazz to fusion. When he first came to prominence, Davis’ trumpet playing was lyrical, melodic and introspective, and his playing maintained its direct emotional appeal through his myriad musical advances. Through a bold series of musical reinventions, Davis consistently pushed himself to conquer new musical territory and question jazz’s accepted boundaries, approaching his innovations with a personal intensity that cemented his status as both an icon and an iconoclast.
The St. Louis-bred son of a dental surgeon and a music teacher, Davis began playing trumpet at 12, and by 16 was playing professionally in and around his hometown. He was still in his teens when he sat in at a St. Louis gig with Billy Eckstine’s big band, which at the time included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Davis reconnected with Gillespie and Parker after moving to New York in 1944 to attend the Juilliard School of Music. He was soon gigging and recording with Parker’s seminal bebop group, and by the following year had abandoned his formal studies to play jazz full-time. He also played with Benny Carter’s and Billy Eckstine’s bands. Davis made his first recordings as a leader in 1947, on a quintet session that included Parker and drummer Max Roach.
In the summer of 1948, Davis organized a nine-piece band, including Roach, John Lewis, Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan, with a six-man horn section that featured such then-unconventional instrumentation such as tuba and French horn. Although the nonet didn’t make much of a public impression at the time, its laid-back style would be an influence on the birth of West Coast cool jazz. In the first half of the ’50s, Davis began to record regularly as a leader, working in a variety of small group settings with such notable sidemen as Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, Milt Jackson, Jackie McLean, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and Horace Silver.
Those sessions enhanced Davis’ growing reputation as a major talent. In 1955, he signed with Columbia Records, a relationship that would yield massive musical dividends over the next four decades. His Columbia debut, ‘Round About Midnight introduced his new quintet, with saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones. For Davis’ second Columbia album Miles Ahead, he played flugelhorn and fronted a big band playing arrangements by Gil Evans, with whom Davis would work extensively in the years to come. Those releases were followed by such memorable efforts as 1957’s Jazz Track, an album of improvised performances recorded for the French film Escalator to the Gallows; and 1958’s Milestones, on which the addition of saxophonist Cannonball Adderley made Davis’ band a sextet.
Working with his sextet, Davis increasingly experimented with modal playing, and that approach was reflected on 1959’s landmark Kind of Blue. With Coltrane and pianist Bill Evans in prominent supporting roles, Kind of Blue became the best-selling album of Davis’ career, and one of the biggest sellers in the history of jazz. Through the late ’50s and early ’60s, Davis alternated albums with his band and more elaborate productions featuring formal compositions and Gil Evans’ orchestral arrangements, often with Davis playing flugelhorn. The latter approach yielded such memorable works as Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain, Quiet Nights and Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall, while his small-group recordings during this period included Someday My Prince Will Come, Seven Steps to Heaven and Miles Davis in Person.
By the end of 1964, the Miles Davis Quintet featured the classic lineup of Davis, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, keyboardist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams. That group recorded a series of albums consisting largely of original compositions by the band members, including, E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro. By Miles in the Sky, the musicians had begun to play electric instruments, and soon the band included such electric players as guitarist John McLaughlin and keyboardists Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul, whose contributions were prominent on In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. The raw electric sound and funk rhythms of those albums won Davis a completely new audience of rock fans and laid the foundations for jazz-fusion, a genre in which such Davis alumni as Corea, Hancock, McLaughlin and Zawinul would become major players. Davis continued his fusion direction on such subsequent efforts as Miles Davis at Fillmore East, A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Live-Evil and On the Corner, all of which followed In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew onto the pop charts.
Illness kept Davis out of the studio and off the stage for much of the second half of the ’70s. He made a much-heralded return to recording with 1980’s The Man With the Horn, and he resumed touring the following year. By then, Davis’ trailblazing innovations, including those that had initially been highly controversial, had been fully integrated into jazz’s fabric, winning the musician status as both an elder jazz statesman and one of America’s most recognizable musical celebrities.
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