Miles Davis
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 a roughly five-decade career that kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz.[1]
Miles Davis
Miles Dewey Davis III
May 26, 1926
Alton, Illinois, U.S.
September 28, 1991 (aged 65)
Santa Monica, California, U.S.
- Musician
- bandleader
- composer
- Trumpet
- flugelhorn
- cornet
- piano
- electric organ
- 1944–1975; 1980–1991
Born into an upper-middle-class[2] family in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis, Davis started on the trumpet in his early teens. He left to study at Juilliard in New York City, before dropping out and making 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, he signed a long-term contract with Columbia Records, and recorded the album 'Round About Midnight in 1955.[3] 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).[4] The latter recording remains one of the most popular jazz albums of all time,[5] having sold over five million copies in the U.S.
Davis made several lineup changes while recording Someday My Prince Will Come (1961), his 1961 Blackhawk concerts, and Seven Steps to Heaven (1963), another commercial success that introduced bassist Ron Carter, pianist Herbie Hancock, and drummer Tony Williams.[4] After adding saxophonist Wayne Shorter to his new quintet in 1964,[4] 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),[6] before transitioning into his electric period. During the 1970s, he experimented with rock, funk, African rhythms, emerging electronic music technology, and an ever-changing lineup of musicians, including keyboardist Joe Zawinul, drummer Al Foster, and guitarist John McLaughlin.[7] This period, beginning with Davis's 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.[8] His million-selling 1970 record Bitches Brew helped spark a resurgence in the genre's commercial popularity with jazz fusion as the decade progressed.[9]
After a five-year retirement due to poor health, Davis resumed his career in the 1980s, employing younger musicians and pop sounds on albums such as The Man with the Horn (1981) and Tutu (1986). Critics were often unreceptive but the decade garnered Davis 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.[10] In 2006, Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,[11] which recognized him as "one of the key figures in the history of jazz".[11] 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,"[10] while Gerald Early called him inarguably one of the most influential and innovative musicians of that period.[12]
Views on his earlier work[edit]
Late in his life, from the "electric period" onwards, Davis repeatedly explained his reasons for not wishing to perform his earlier works, such as Birth of the Cool or Kind of Blue. In his view, remaining stylistically static was the wrong option.[209] He commented: "'So What' or Kind of Blue, they were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It's over ... What I used to play with Bill Evans, all those different modes, and substitute chords, we had the energy then and we liked it. But I have no feel for it anymore, it's more like warmed-over turkey."[210] When Shirley Horn insisted in 1990 that Miles reconsider playing the ballads and modal tunes of his Kind of Blue period, he said: "Nah, it hurts my lip."[210] Bill Evans, who played piano on Kind of Blue, said: "I would like to hear more of the consummate melodic master, but I feel that big business and his record company have had a corrupting influence on his material. The rock and pop thing certainly draws a wider audience."[210] Throughout his later career, Davis declined offers to reinstate his 1960s quintet.[140]
Many books and documentaries focus on his work before 1975.[140] According to an article by The Independent, from 1975 onwards a decline in critical praise for Davis's output began to form, with many viewing the era as "worthless": "There is a surprisingly widespread view that, in terms of the merits of his musical output, Davis might as well have died in 1975."[140] In a 1982 interview in DownBeat, Wynton Marsalis said: "They call Miles's stuff jazz. That stuff is not jazz, man. Just because somebody played jazz at one time, that doesn't mean they're still playing it."[140] Despite his contempt for Davis' later work, Marsalis' work is "laden with ironic references to Davis' music of the '60s".[35] Davis did not necessarily disagree; lambasting what he saw as Marsalis's stylistic conservatism, Davis said "Jazz is dead ... it's finito! It's over and there's no point apeing the shit."[211] Writer Stanley Crouch criticized Davis's work from In a Silent Way onwards.[140]
Grammy Awards
Other awards
