Miles Davis

Miles Davis: The Sound of Not Playing

In 1935 a boy in East St. Louis was given a trumpet and a teacher, Elwood Buchanan, who told him to play without vibrato — clear tones, mid-range, no shimmer. Davis later called him "the biggest influence on my life." Fifty-six years later France made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and the culture minister Jack Lang called him the Picasso of jazz. In between, he changed the direction of American music roughly five times, and each time by taking something away.

Alton, East St. Louis, 52nd Street

He was born Miles Dewey Davis III on 26 May 1926 in Alton, Illinois, into money. His father was a dentist, his mother a music teacher and violinist; the family moved to East St. Louis in 1927 and owned a 200-acre estate in Arkansas. By twelve, he said, music had become the most important thing in his life.

In July 1944 he joined Billy Eckstine's band, which contained Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. That September he enrolled at Juilliard and lasted three semesters, dropping out in mid-1945 to play full-time. He then replaced Gillespie in Parker's quintet and served his apprenticeship on 52nd Street, standing next to the fastest musician alive while building a style out of economy.

The Nonet and the Needle

In August 1948 he turned down a place in Duke Ellington's orchestra and instead assembled a nine-piece band with Gerry Mulligan and the arranger Gil Evans, using French horn and tuba — instruments jazz had no use for. The sessions of January and April 1949 for Capitol were later gathered as *Birth of the Cool* (1957), and they redirected a decade of West Coast playing.

Then it nearly ended. After a 1949 trip to Paris he became severely addicted to heroin; he was arrested for possession in Los Angeles in 1950, and by 1953 the addiction was public knowledge through a DownBeat interview. He got clean in Detroit over roughly six months and returned to New York in February 1954 stronger than he had been in years.

The recovery produced a new sound. Signed to Prestige since January 1951, he moved away from bebop's density toward the spacious approach he admired in Ahmad Jamal, and toward the Harmon mute that became his signature. His set at Newport in July 1955 made him a national figure, and George Avakian signed him to Columbia for a $4,000 advance.

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The Quintet and Kind of Blue

The first great quintet — John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones — recorded marathon sessions for Prestige in May and October 1956 that yielded four albums, *Cookin'*, *Relaxin'*, *Workin'* and *Steamin'*. Simultaneously he began a five-album partnership with Gil Evans that produced *Miles Ahead* (1957), *Porgy and Bess* (1959) and *Sketches of Spain* (1960), which drew on Rodrigo and Falla.

*Kind of Blue* was recorded in March and April 1959. Davis planned the music around Bill Evans's piano style; the sextet had not seen three of the compositions before walking into the studio. Influenced by George Russell's modal theories, it replaced chord sequences with scales — fewer instructions, more room. The NEA calls it the all-time biggest-selling jazz album; by 2019 it had passed five million US copies, and Congress declared it a national treasure in 2009.

Birdland, August 1959

That same month, outside Birdland, a policeman named Gerald Kilduff told Davis to move on. Davis said he worked there. He was arrested; a witness saw the officer strike his stomach with a nightstick, and detectives beat him about the head badly enough to require five stitches. He was acquitted of disorderly conduct in January 1960. His own verdict: the incident "changed my whole life and whole attitude again, made me feel bitter and cynical."

The Second Quintet, Then Electricity

By May 1963 he had hired a twenty-three-year-old pianist, Herbie Hancock, and a seventeen-year-old drummer, Tony Williams, who he said made him excited all over again. With Ron Carter and, from 1964, Wayne Shorter, this became his most adventurous group. *E.S.P.* (1965) and *Miles Smiles* (1967) pioneered a post-bop that abandoned chord sequences altogether — "time no changes," rhythm without harmonic instruction.

*In a Silent Way* (February 1969) brought in Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul and John McLaughlin, and the accusations of selling out began immediately. *Bitches Brew* (1970) reached number 35 on the Billboard chart and passed a million copies by 2003; in 1970 he played the Isle of Wight Festival to an estimated 600,000 people, the largest audience of his life. *Get Up with It* (1974) contained "He Loved Him Madly," a thirty-minute elegy for Ellington that fed directly into Brian Eno's ambient music. The live albums that followed — *Agharta*, *Pangaea*, *Dark Magus* — were widely panned, and critics noted his habit of playing with his back to the audience.

The Silence

After the Schaefer Music Festival in September 1975 he stopped. For five years there was nothing. In his autobiography he described his Upper West Side brownstone as a wreck and chronicled the alcohol and cocaine; Tony Williams recalled him being sick by noon. He had a hip replaced in December 1975. Columbia renewed his contract anyway in 1976 and set up a fund to pay him while he produced nothing.

He came back in 1980 with *The Man with the Horn*, badly reviewed and commercially successful. In January 1982 a stroke temporarily paralysed his right hand; Cicely Tyson, whom he had married in November 1981, returned from Africa to care for him, and after three months of acupuncture he recovered. She got him drawing, and he painted for the rest of his life. *Tutu* (1986), made with Marcus Miller, was built from programmed synthesisers, samples and drum loops and won him a Grammy in 1987 — a sixty-year-old jazz musician using the studio tools of the following decade.

Why Miles Is Called a Genius

The institutions have not been shy. The National Endowment for the Arts, which made him a Jazz Master in 1984, calls him "arguably the most influential jazz musician in the post-World War II period," at the forefront of the genre for more than forty years. Britannica ranks him with Armstrong, Ellington and Parker as one of the four pivotal figures in the music's history. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in 2006 as "one of the key figures in the history of jazz."

The specific faculty is twofold. First, subtraction: Buchanan's instruction to drop the vibrato became a lifelong method, and Davis's innovations were nearly all removals — the density of bebop, then chord changes, then harmonic instruction altogether, then the boundary between jazz and everything else. Second, casting. He identified Coltrane, Hancock, Williams at seventeen, Shorter, Zawinul, Corea and McLaughlin before the world had, and built rooms in which they became themselves.

The counter-case is substantial. He was never the most technically gifted trumpeter of his era, and much of what bears his name was collaborative: Gil Evans wrote the arrangements, *Kind of Blue* was planned around Bill Evans's piano style, George Russell supplied the modal theory, and Teo Macero edited the electric records into their released form. The mid-1970s work was dismissed by many critics at the time. And he beat his wife Frances Taylor, which he admitted in print — "every time I hit her, I felt bad." The genius describes the records. It does not extend to the man.

Legacy

He played Montreux on 8 July 1991 with an orchestra under Quincy Jones, performing Gil Evans's arrangements for the first time in three decades. His last live performance was at the Hollywood Bowl on 25 August. He died on 28 September 1991, aged sixty-five, from the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia and respiratory failure.

He had a hand in bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, post-bop and fusion — six movements in one working life — and his influence carried on into rock, funk, classical composition and hip-hop, the last of which he was working toward in *Doo-Bop*, released posthumously in 1992. The trumpet playing was always the least of it. What he really did was keep deciding, every few years, that the thing he had just perfected was finished.