Miles Davis

Early Life and Career

Born St. Louis, father black dentist, middle-class, comfortable upbringing. Eventually manages to make it to New York and is part of Parker’s group, bebop not best environment, preferred middle register, longer and fewer notes, a restrained timbre and vibrato, and a focus on melody. Changed the rules of jazz 6 times between 1949-69, always changing own style and hiring musicians that pushed him outside of his comfort zone, had the most capacity for change.

1949-1950 (Birth of the Cool, Paris)

After quitting Parker’s band, worked with like-minded musicians who wanted to slow down the pace of bebop, eventually formed his own nonet and recorded The Birth of the Cool, with Gil Evans helping arrange and structure the instrumentation. Miles Davis, his nonet, and this record are largely credited for establishing cool jazz. Before finishing The Birth of the Cool, Miles toured Paris where he experienced such a high level of respect that he became disillusioned with realities of race in the U.S. and became hooked on heroin.

1954 (Beat Addiction, Recordings w/ Prestige, “Walkin’”)

By 1954, Miles had beat his addiction and was ready to show that he could reestablish his status as an innovative and professional musician. He recorded five great sessions Prestige that year with a few other originators of hard bop, and later released “'Walkin’,” an important piece in the emergence of the hard bop movement.

1955 (Newport Jazz Festival, Signs w/ Columbia, First Great Quintet)

In 1955, Miles played Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” at the Newport Jazz Festival to much acclaim, getting him signed to Columbia Records. Around this time he forms his first great quintet, composed of John Coltrane on tenor, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Joe Jones on drums, which was one of the most admired small bands in history and one of the greatest of the hard bop movement. This group’s first appearance was on Miles’s debut album for Columbia, ‘Round About Midnight, but they also endured two marathon sessions that fulfilled Miles’s prestige contract.

1957-1960

With the guidance of his Columbia producer and Gil Evans, Miles Davis creates the orchestral album Miles Ahead, a hit with the public that extended some of the choices of his nonet but with a 19 piece ensemble and interludes between songs. Davis and Evans continued their influential partnership through the albums Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain. These albums helped enlarge the scope of jazz composition, orchestration, big bands, and recording projects.

Around the same time, Miles had disbanded his quintet, traveled to Europe, and produced a film score solely based on modal improv. This inspired him to returned to the states, recruit Cannonball Adderley to a sextet, and further explore the modal devices he had used in the film through the albums Milestones and the especially influential Kind of Blue. Kind of Blue was the best selling jazz record of all time and represented Miles’s full embrace of the modal approach, altering the playing habits of many musicians and aiding in subverting modern jazz cliches.

1963-1967

After members like John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley went to forge their own careers, Miles forms his second great quintet. Miles filled this group with young musicians who could inspire him to take his own approach to avant-garde called postbop, and included Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, Tony Williams on drums, and Wayne Shorter on tenor. This new style utilized modal jazz, harmonic ambiguity, and a looser sense of rhythm, with some pieces encouraging free improvisation. Much of these choices culminated into the album E.S.P., which demonstrated Miles’s more expansive style, a new attitude and complexity, and the way the rhythm section seemed to all solo at the same time.

Fusion

By 1968, Miles had grown tired of the music of his postbop quintet and felt that they were becoming too abstracted. After hearing various rock groups and festivals and partially due to the influence of Sly and the Family Stone, Miles decided that rock offered the simplicity he was looking for. He began to integrate electric instruments into his band, replacing Ron Carter with the electric bassist Dave Holland, putting an electric keyboard in front of Hancock, and introducing two more electric keyboard players, Chick Corea and Zawinul. One of the most dramatic changes and innovations towards jazz-rock fusion came when he recorded In a Silent Way with electric guitarist John McLaughlin. He simply asked McLaughlin to play an E major chord on the title track, and while the other members thought it was a rehearsal, Miles and his producer Teo Macero masterfully recombined their raw material into different tracks. This demonstrated Miles’s increased reliance on post production, which typically helped Miles create a more consistent groove throughout the tracks, granting him the rock simplicity he was looking for. The largest innovation came with Bitches Brew. This album demonstrated the “controlled freedom” that Miles let his group take advantage of, which made the piece dissonant, textured, and paradoxically tight and loose. This album sold 500000 copies in the first year, with many heralding it as the arrival of fusion.