Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in his five-decade career which kept him at the forefront of a number of major stylistic developments in jazz.
Born and raised in Illinois, Davis left his studies at The Juilliard School in New York City and made his professional debut as a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker’s bebop quintet from 1944 to 1948. Shortly after, he recorded the Birth of the Cool sessions for Capitol Records, which were instrumental to the development of cool jazz. In the early 1950s, Davis recorded some of the earliest hard bop music while on Prestige Records but did so haphazardly due to a heroin addiction. After a widely acclaimed comeback performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955, he signed a long-term contract with Columbia Records and recorded the 1957 album ‘Round About Midnight. It was his first work with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers, key members of the sextet he led into the early 1960s. During this period, he alternated between orchestral jazz collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, such as the Spanish music-influenced Sketches of Spain (1960), and band recordings, such as Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959). The latter recording remains one of the most popular jazz albums of all time, having sold over four million copies in the U.S.
Davis made several line-up changes while recording Someday My Prince Will Come (1961), his 1961 Blackhawk concerts, and Seven Steps to Heaven (1963), another mainstream success that introduced bassist Ron Carter, pianist Herbie Hancock, and drummer Tony Williams. After adding saxophonist Wayne Shorter to his new quintet in 1964, Davis led them on a series of more abstract recordings often composed by the band members, helping pioneer the post-bop genre with albums such as E.S.P (1965) and Miles Smiles (1967), before transitioning into his electric period. During the 1970s, he radically experimented with rock, funk, African rhythms, emerging electronic music technology, and an ever-changing line-up of musicians, including keyboardist Joe Zawinul, drummer Al Foster, and guitarist John McLaughlin. This period, beginning with Davis’ 1969 studio album In a Silent Way and concluding with the 1975 concert recording Agharta, was the most controversial in his career, alienating and challenging many in jazz. His million-selling 1970 record Bitches Brew helped spark a resurgence in the genre’s commercial popularity with jazz fusion as the decade progressed.
After a five-year retirement due to poor health, Davis resumed his career in the 1980s, employing younger musicians and pop music sounds on albums such as The Man with the Horn (1981) and Tutu (1986). Critics were generally unreceptive but the decade garnered the trumpeter his highest level of commercial recognition. He performed sold-out concerts worldwide while branching out into visual arts, film, and television work, before his death in 1991 from the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia and respiratory failure. In 2006, Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which recognized him as “one of the key figures in the history of jazz”. Rolling Stone described him as “the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century,” while Gerald Early called him inarguably one of the most influential and innovative musicians of that period.
Born in Alton, IL, Davis was a leading figure in the bebop style of jazz and in combining styles of jazz and rock music. Davis began music lessons after his father gave him a trumpet on his 13th birthday. Two years later, he joined the Musicians’ Union and began playing with a local band on weekends. About this time, he met trumpeter Clark Terry, who helped and encouraged him. In 1944, after graduating from high school, he went to New York City to study classical music at the Julliard School of Music. While there, he also began playing with alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and other pioneers of the new jazz style known as bebop.
In 1945, at the age of 19, he began playing in a combo led by Parker. Earning a contract with Capitol Records, the band went into the studio in January 1949 for the first of three sessions that had a profound influence on the development of the cool jazz style on the West Coast. In February 1957, Capitol finally issued the tracks together on an LP called “Birth of the Cool.” Davis, meanwhile, had moved on to co-leading a band with pianist Tadd Dameron in 1949, but the trumpeter’s progress was impeded by an addiction to heroin that plagued him in the early 1950s.
His performances and recordings became more haphazard, but in January 1951, he began a long series of recordings for the Prestige label that became his main recording outlet for the next several years. He managed to kick his habit by the middle of the decade, and he made a strong impression playing “Round Midnight” at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1955, a performance that led major label Columbia Records to sign him. The prestigious contract allowed him to put together a permanent band, and he organized a quintet that began recording his Columbia debut, “Round About Midnight,” in October. The quintet featured saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones.
He had a remaining five albums on his Prestige contract, however, and over the next year, he was forced to alternate his Columbia sessions with sessions for Prestige to fulfill this previous commitment. The latter resulted in the Prestige albums “The New Miles Davis Quintet,” “Cookin’, Workin’, Relaxin’, and Steamin’,” making Davis’ first quintet one of his better-documented outfits. In 1957, Davis teamed with arranger Gil Evans for his second Columbia LP, “Miles Ahead.” Miles played flugelhorn, the album, released in 1958, was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, intended to honor recordings made before the Grammy Awards were instituted in 1959. In December of that year, Davis returned to Paris, where he added saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to his group, creating the Miles Davis Sextet, which recorded the album “Milestones” in 1958.
That July, Davis again collaborated with Gil Evans and an orchestra on an album of music from “Porgy and Bess.” Back in the sextet, Davis began to experiment, basing his improvisations on scales rather than chord changes. This led to his next band recording, “Kind of Blue,” in 1959, an album that became a landmark in modern jazz and the most popular disc of Davis’ career, eventually selling over two million copies, a phenomenal success for a jazz record. In sessions held in November of that year and March 1960, Davis again followed his pattern of alternating band releases and collaborations with Gil Evans, recording “Sketches of Spain,” containing traditional Spanish music and original compositions in that style. By the time he returned to the studio to make his next band album in March 1961, Coltrane was guest on a couple of tracks of the album, called “Someday My Prince Will Come.” The Davis quintet’s next recording preceded the two-LP set “Miles Davis in Person” (Friday & Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, San Francisco).
In the spring of 1963, “Seven Steps to Heaven” was recorded with an entirely new lineup. The sessions included Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. It was another pop chart entry that earned Grammy nominations for both Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Soloist or Small Group and Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group. By 1964, the final member of the classic Miles Davis Quintet of the 1960s was in place with the addition of saxophonist Wayne Shorter to the team of Davis, Carter, Hancock, and Williams. While continuing to play standards in concert, this unit embarked on a series of albums of original compositions: “Sorcerer,” “Nefertiti,” “Miles in the Sky,” and “Filles de Kilimanjaro.”
But Hancock, along with pianist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin participated on Davis’ next album, “In a Silent Way,” 1969. With his next album, “Bitches Brew,” Davis turned more overtly to a jazz-rock style. He followed it with “Miles Davis at Fillmore East,” “Jack Johnson,” “Live-Evil,” “On the Corner,” and “In Concert,” all in 1971. In October 1972, Davis broke his ankles in a car accident, and became less active, and in 1975, he gave up recording entirely due to illness, undergoing surgery for hip replacement later in the year. Five years passed before he returned to action by recording “The Man with the Horn” in 1980 and going back to touring in 1981. By now, he was an elder statesman of jazz.
Those who supported his eclectic approach had incorporated jazz, and his innovations into the music, at least. He was also a celebrity whose appeal extended far beyond the basic jazz audience. In 1990, Davis performed a leading role as a jazz musician in the Australian motion picture “Dingo” in 1991. His album “Doo-Bop,” 1999, released the year after his death in 1991, was one of the first to fuse jazz with the hip-hop and rap music styles.
Written by Dianne Washington