Miles Davis
A trumpet that played less so more could be heard, and a man who never stood in the same place twice.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
His collaborators ⏳🌊
- FamilyMiles Dewey Davis Jr.
His father, a dentist and landowning farmer, who bought him a trumpet and supported his studies in New York and his time of withdrawal.
- TeacherElwood Buchanan
The high school music teacher who taught him to play a straight, round tone without vibrato, setting the sound he would keep for life.
- InfluenceDizzy Gillespie
The model of bebop trumpet he first heard up close in 1944; realizing he could never keep pace with him drove him instead to find a sound of his own.
- MentorCharlie Parker
The man who put him in his quintet at nineteen and taught him bebop on the bandstand.
- ColleagueGil Evans
The arranger and lifelong friend who worked with him from “Birth of the Cool” to “Sketches of Spain.”
- ColleagueJohn Coltrane
Tenor saxophonist of the first quintet and “Kind of Blue,” whose dense sound was paired with Miles's open space.
I. The boy from East St. Louis · 1926–1944 (age 0–18)
(Alton) He was born in May 1926 in Alton, Illinois. His father, Miles Dewey Davis Jr., was a dentist, and his mother, Cleota Henry Davis, played piano and violin. He had an older sister, Dorothy, and a younger brother, Vernon. The following year the family moved across the river to East St. Louis. They were comfortable enough that his father kept a farm outside town and raised horses, and the pride of the Black middle class ran through the household. Still, in a segregated city there was no escaping discrimination. In his autobiography he later recalled being chased by white people hurling slurs. (Trumpet) When he was about thirteen, his father bought him a trumpet. His parents' marriage was not a happy one, and his mother, he recalled, had wanted her son to learn the violin. His high school music teacher, Elwood Buchanan, taught him to give up vibrato, the tremor that ornaments a note, and to play with a straight, round sound. That tone, stripped of its tremble, became his lifelong signature. Clark Terry, an older trumpeter from the neighborhood, also took him under his wing. (Eckstine) In the summer of 1944, the Billy Eckstine band came to St. Louis. One of its trumpeters fell ill, and the eighteen-year-old sat in for about two weeks; on that bandstand he heard Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker up close for the first time. The band's singer was Sarah Vaughan. That same year his high school sweetheart gave birth to his first daughter. He resolved to follow Parker to New York.
II. Apprentice on 52nd Street · 1944–1949 (age 18–23)
(Juilliard) In the fall of 1944, with tuition and living expenses paid by his father, he entered the Juilliard School in New York. By day he studied classical harmony and theory; by night he made the rounds of the clubs in Harlem and on 52nd Street, looking for Parker. Eventually he ended up rooming with him, and he learned bebop, improvisation over fast tempos and complex harmonies, with his whole body. He left school after little more than a year. He recalled going home to get his father's permission in person. (Parker) In November 1945 he took part in Parker's Savoy sessions, and from 1947 he was the regular trumpeter in Parker's quintet. He could not storm through the high register at blistering speed the way Dizzy could. Instead he chose to stay in the middle register, sparing his notes and leaving space between them. On 52nd Street, Coleman Hawkins hired him and encouraged him. But worn down by Parker's drug-bent life and by pay that never arrived on time, he left the band at the end of 1948. (Cool) Young musicians gathered in the arranger Gil Evans's cramped basement room. With Gerry Mulligan and John Lewis, he put together a nonet that included even French horn and tuba, played the Royal Roost in 1948, and recorded for Capitol in 1949 and 1950. The immediate response was modest, but these recordings were later collected as “Birth of the Cool” and gave a whole movement its name. When he was criticized for hiring the white alto player Lee Konitz, he reportedly answered that as long as a man could play, he didn't care what color he was.
The other road a young trumpeter found in Gil Evans's basement room after leaving Parker's side. Here began a jazz that speaks through timbre and texture rather than speed.
- A nine-piece group of trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, and alto·baritone saxophones, with a rhythm section added. Smaller than a big band and laid over a thick bed of low brass, it sounds soft and shadowed.
- “Boplicity” was arranged by Gil Evans, but the composer is credited as Cleo Henry, a name taken from Miles's mother. Follow the texture as the instruments move together as a single mass and then split apart.
- Miles's solo stays in the middle register without tremor (vibrato), spinning out a singing line instead of bebop's rapid runs.
- Toward the end of “Moon Dreams,” the pulse all but stops and the wind chords hang like clouds. It is a moment when the arrangement, more than the improvisation, takes center stage.
- Three Capitol sessions, in January·April 1949 and March 1950. The sides first came out scattered across 78 rpm singles, and only in 1957 were they gathered on a single LP and given their present title.
III. Tunnel and return · 1949–1955 (age 23–29)
(Paris) In May 1949 he was invited to the Paris Jazz Festival. There he was treated not as a Black musician but as an artist. He mingled with Jean-Paul Sartre and others and fell in love with the singer Juliette Gréco. But, he recalled, he could not ask her to come back with him, fearing that an interracial marriage would be a burden to her in America. (Heroin) The New York he returned to had not changed, and in his depression he fell into heroin. In 1950 he was arrested in Los Angeles for drug possession and acquitted, but his reputation collapsed and the work dried up. To pay for drugs, he later wrote, he even did things he was not proud of. Bob Weinstock of Prestige kept giving him chances to record, and that became a slender lifeline. At the end of 1953 he went back to his father's farm, shut himself in a room, and endured withdrawal alone. His model, he said, was the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, famous for his self-discipline. (Comeback) “Walkin'” from April 1954 is counted as the record that opened the door to hard bop, a bebop that brought back the gritty earthiness of the blues. It was also around this time that his signature sound took hold: the Harmon mute, a fist-sized metal mute, played right up against the microphone. On Christmas Eve that year he recorded with Thelonious Monk and Milt Jackson. When he played Monk's “'Round Midnight” at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1955, the audience stirred, and George Avakian of Columbia offered him a contract.
A session with Thelonious Monk and Milt Jackson on Christmas Eve of the year he came back from withdrawal. The restrained sound of a trumpeter back on his feet survives side by side with Monk's strange solo.
- A 12-bar blues (a form built on a repeating twelve-bar frame) in F, written by Milt Jackson. At an unhurried medium tempo, the weight of each note comes through.
- During Miles's solo, Monk lays out. Miles reportedly asked him to, and so the trumpet rings through a wide space left to Percy Heath's bass and Kenny Clarke's drums alone.
- Monk's solo builds by twisting, inverting and breaking up a single short motif. In this solo even the rests sound played, and it is often cited as one of the great performances in jazz history.
- Both takes were released. It's a pleasure to compare how the same musicians, on the same day, worked the same tune in different ways.
- It was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, then in Hackensack, New Jersey. The date was December 24, 1954.
IV. The first quintet and a blue light · 1955–1963 (age 29–37)
(Quintet) He formed his first quintet with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. To fulfill what remained of his Prestige contract, he laid down four albums' worth of material in two sessions in 1956. With Columbia's advance and royalties, he became wealthy for the first time on money he had earned himself. In the spring of 1957, while Coltrane was still struggling with drugs, he let him go, then brought him back the following year. (Evans) With Gil Evans he went on making large-ensemble albums. On “Miles Ahead” in 1957, “Porgy and Bess” in 1958 and “Sketches of Spain” in 1960, the trumpet sang like a single voice within the orchestra. In Paris in December 1957, he improvised a score while watching the footage of the film “Elevator to the Gallows.” (Blue) In the spring of 1959 he recorded “Kind of Blue” with a sextet that added Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley. The players went in without rehearsal, with only the brief sketches he handed them. That August, while getting some air outside Birdland, he refused a police order to move along, was clubbed on the head and hauled off covered in blood. The charges were eventually dropped, but the incident hardened his long-standing anger at racism. (Frances) In December 1959 he married the dancer Frances Taylor. She appeared on the cover of the 1961 album “Someday My Prince Will Come.” But he made her give up the stage, and in his autobiography he confessed that his jealousy drove him to hit her. In 1962 his father died.
The Monk tune that had won him the Columbia contract at Newport, rerecorded with his first quintet. It opens the comeback player's first major-label album.
- Miles whispers Monk's melody through the Harmon mute (a metal mute fitted into the bell of the trumpet), held close to the microphone. He barely ornaments the notes, shaping expression through length and silence alone.
- When the melody ends, a short, forceful fanfare bursts out and leads straight into Coltrane's solo. Borrowed from Dizzy Gillespie's arrangement, this interlude gives the slow ballad a dramatic contour.
- Paul Chambers's bass and Philly Joe Jones's brushes (a technique of sweeping the drums with wire brushes) lie low, forming a backdrop like the still air of midnight.
- Recorded on September 10, 1956, at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York. It appeared on the album “'Round About Midnight.”
Counted as the best-selling jazz album ever, it is a record made by handing the players only brief sketches and catching their first responses. That summer, just after the album came out, he was beaten by police outside Birdland.
- “So What” opens with Paul Chambers’s bass tossing out a short phrase like a question, and the piano and horns answer with a two-note chord.
- Instead of a chord progression, the piece plays at length over a single scale (modal jazz). It is a 32-bar AABA form: 16 bars on a D scale, 8 bars on a scale a half step higher, and 8 bars back on D.
- Miles’s solo sets down a few notes sparsely, leaving space, while Coltrane, following him, pours out notes in dense torrents. Cannonball Adderley adds the earthy savor of the blues, and the three men’s temperaments divide sharply within a single tune.
- Bill Evans’s piano opens the door on “Blue in Green.” In his liner notes he likened the session to a Japanese brush painting, in which a stroke, once drawn, can never be corrected.
- It was recorded on March 2 and April 22, 1959, at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio. Most of the tunes were issued as the first complete take, and only on “Freddie Freeloader” did Wynton Kelly take the piano chair.
V. The electric years · 1964–1975 (age 38–49)
(Quintet) Early in 1964 he lost his mother. That fall Wayne Shorter joined, and with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and the eighteen-year-old drummer Tony Williams, the second quintet was complete. He entrusted the composing to his young sidemen and moved toward an open style of playing that set aside fixed chord progressions and held on only to the beat. Hip pain led to surgery in 1965, and that same year Frances left home. (Rock) In 1968 he married Betty Mabry, a twenty-three-year-old singer. She played him Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, drawing him toward rock and funk, and she appeared on the cover of Filles de Kilimanjaro. The marriage ended the following year, but the direction never reversed. In 1969, on In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, he brought in electric instruments and rock rhythms, and producer Teo Macero shaped the pieces by cutting and splicing the tape. In 1970 he stood before rock audiences at the Fillmore. When Duke Ellington died in 1974, he honored him with “He Loved Him Madly,” a piece more than 30 minutes long. (Silence) In 1972 a car accident broke both his ankles. Hip pain, painkillers, and cocaine piled on top of one another. On the Corner, from the same year, was shunned by critics. His February 1975 concerts in Osaka survived as Agharta and Pangaea, and he kept touring until summer, then vanished from the stage after a September show in New York’s Central Park.
In the years when he lost his mother and his marriage was falling apart, he handed the tunes and the direction to young sidemen in their twenties and early thirties. This is the album on which the second quintet ran most freely.
- Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” is a 24-bar minor blues counted in six beats to the bar. Tony Williams’s drums split the beat now in threes, now in twos, so that it seems to sway and surge.
- In the solos there are many passages that set aside the fixed chord progression and keep only the pulse and the flow. The band members called this approach “time, no changes.”
- Rather than filling out the harmony, Herbie Hancock jabs chords in here and there, and at times drops out entirely. Through that open space, the walking line of Ron Carter’s bass comes through clearly.
- The rhythm section picks up on what the soloist says and instantly shifts its intensity and density. The five players trading lines as if in conversation (interplay) is the heart of this album.
- It was recorded on October 24 and 25, 1966, at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio.
It is what came of the sounds of Hendrix and Sly Stone, which Betty Mabry had played for him, meeting the grammar of jazz. It became his first gold record and opened the door to the blending of jazz and rock (fusion).
- Two drummers, two bassists (double bass and electric bass), three electric pianos, plus bass clarinet and electric guitar all layer together, giving the sound a density unlike any earlier Miles record.
- In each piece a single short repeated bass figure (riff) runs on at length, and improvisation piles up on top of it. Rather than changing harmonies, the music digs deep into the same groove (the flow of rhythm that makes the body move).
- During the sessions Miles directed the playing with hand gestures and a few words. What the tape preserved were long improvisations left less to the written page than to the responses of the moment.
- Producer Teo Macero shaped the pieces by cutting and splicing the tape and repeating certain sections. The echo effect on the trumpet in the title track was also added after recording.
- It was recorded at Columbia’s New York studio from August 19 to 21, 1969, and released the following year.
VI. Silence and the final stage · 1975–1991 (age 49–65)
(Seclusion) From 1975, for a little over five years, he shut himself up in his Manhattan home and barely touched the trumpet. Columbia kept him under contract and released recordings from the vault. In his autobiography he wrote candidly of this period as a time when body and mind collapsed together. His old friend, the actress Cicely Tyson, came to him and helped him quit drugs and look after his health. (Comeback) In 1981 he returned with The Man with the Horn, and that November he married Tyson. The following year a stroke left his right hand unresponsive for a while; he rehabilitated by painting, and painting became another vocation of his later years. He bewildered longtime fans by adding Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” and Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” to his repertoire. In 1985, after grievances over royalties and treatment, he left Columbia, his home for 30 years, for Warner Bros., and the following year he made Tutu with Marcus Miller. (Montreux) In 1988 he and Tyson divorced. The next year he published an autobiography written with the poet Quincy Troupe. In July 1991 at Montreux, under Quincy Jones’s direction, he played once more the old arrangements of Gil Evans, who had died three years earlier. For a man who never repeated his past, it was a rare thing. On September 28, at a hospital in Santa Monica, California, he died at 65 of a stroke, pneumonia, and respiratory failure. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, not far from Duke Ellington.
It is his first album for Warner Bros., after leaving Columbia, his home for 30 years. Back after a stroke, the 60-year-old trumpeter stood atop the newest of machine sounds.
- Marcus Miller played and programmed most of the bass, synthesizers, and drum machines himself. Miles then layered his trumpet over the finished backing (overdubbing).
- Alternating long, drawn-out notes and short cries through a Harmon mute, he deliberately leaves empty spaces amid the dense electronic sound. It is his old way exactly: playing less so as to sound larger.
- The title is a dedication to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who stood against South Africa’s policy of apartheid. His lifelong anger at racism is carried in the title.
- The producers were Tommy LiPuma and Marcus Miller, and Miles won the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist, for this album.
Lesser-known stories
Jazz history is full of players who grew up in poverty, but he was the opposite. His grandfather was a landowner with property in Arkansas, and his father was a dentist and a farm owner. In his early New York days he lived on money his father sent. Biographers note that this background was often obscured because he liked to show off a street way of talking and a rough manner. The composer of “Boplicity,” on Birth of the Cool, is registered as Cleo Henry — a pseudonym borrowed from the name of his mother, Cleota Henry. He never explained in detail why he used the name, and since the record credits alone made it hard to tell that it was Miles himself, the fact long survived only as a footnote. His hoarse voice was not something he was born with. In his autobiography he recalled that in the mid-1950s, after surgery to remove nodes from his vocal cords, he damaged his throat by raising his voice at a record-industry man during the period when he was supposed to avoid speaking. That raspy whisper came to be seen as a kind of emblem, but it was in truth the scar of an accident. For more than 30 years, the three tunes on side one of Kind of Blue sounded slightly faster and higher than they really were. One of the tape machines had run at a minutely wrong speed during recording, and this was confirmed and corrected only in reissue work in the 1990s. The best-selling jazz album, in other words, went unheard in its true sound for a very long time.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Bebop
(Meaning) Bebop is said to take its name directly from the sounds players made when humming fast, choppy phrases. It is closer to a word that imitates a sound than to a word with a meaning. (In jazz) A jazz style created in 1940s New York by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and others. Instead of big-band music made for dancing, small bands raced at very fast tempos over complex harmonies, competing in their skill at improvisation. Like switching from single jumps to double-unders on a jump rope, it packs far more notes, far faster, into the same song frame.
Cool jazz
(Meaning) Cool means chilly, or calm and composed, in English. The style was called this because its sound was restrained and composed compared with the hard-driving heat of bebop. (In jazz) A style that spread from the late 1940s into the 1950s, reducing vibrato, the trembling of a note, and prizing soft tone colors and well-crafted arrangements. Miles’s nonet recordings, Birth of the Cool, are counted as its starting point. It is rather like a field day cheer: when, instead of everyone shouting, people sing in low voices in harmony, the ear is drawn all the more. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech, calling someone cool means they are stylish, or that they hold no grudges.
Modal jazz
(Meaning) Modal comes from mode, the word for a seonbeop (旋法, 'melody method'). A seonbeop is a method (法) of making melody (旋), that is, the rule for which notes one chooses to use. Its Latin root, modus, means manner or measure. (In jazz) Instead of chords changing every few beats, it is a way of playing that holds onto a single scale for a long stretch and freely spins melody within it. On “Kind of Blue,” “So What” stays on the same scale for sixteen bars. It is like an art class where, instead of coloring in a set sketch, you are handed only shades of blue and told to paint as you please. The materials shrink, but the freedom within them grows. (Elsewhere) In games, a mode is a way of playing, such as easy·hard; in machines, it is a way of operating.
Harmon mute
(Meaning) Harmon is the name of the company that made this mute, and mute means to deaden a sound. (In jazz) A metal mute fitted into the bell of a trumpet. Played with its center stem pulled out, it gives a sound that is small and thin yet edged with a sharp, whispering grain. Miles made a sound all his own by playing a stemless Harmon mute pressed close to the microphone. It is like whispering softly into a friend's ear in a noisy classroom, where the words somehow come through all the more clearly. (Elsewhere) Mute refers to the mute button on a television or mobile phone.
Rhythm section
(In jazz) The group of instruments, such as piano, bass and drums (sometimes guitar), that lays down the groundwork of beat and harmony. When a trumpet or saxophone takes a solo, they firm up the ground from behind, and sometimes respond to the soloist as if trading brief remarks. It is like the defenders and midfielders in soccer who back up the strikers so they can run freely. A solo shines only with a good rhythm section behind it.
Fusion
(Meaning) Fusion means melting things together into one. It comes from the Latin fundere, meaning to pour or to melt. (In jazz) From the late 1960s on, it refers to music that blended rock and funk rhythms, electric guitar and electric piano into jazz. Miles's “Bitches Brew” is counted as the album that opened that door. Just as melting cheese into tteokbokki yields a new flavor that is neither one nor the other, different genres mix and become a new sound. (Elsewhere) In cooking it means fusion cuisine, which mixes the foods of different countries; in science, nuclear fusion, in which atomic nuclei combine.
Chorus
(Meaning) Chorus comes from choros, the band that sang and danced together in ancient Greek theater. (In jazz) One full pass through a tune's form from beginning to end. In a 12-bar blues, 12 bars make one chorus; if a soloist plays three choruses, they go around that frame three times. It is like running laps on a school track: the track's shape stays the same, but you can change how you run each lap. (Elsewhere) In everyday use it means a choir or the refrain of a song.