In the 1940s, Miles Davis went off to New York City to study music at Julliard. He ended up playing jazz with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie instead, soon playing trumpet behind some of the biggest bandleaders of the era. As a bandleader himself during the 1950s and '60s, his influence led to "cool" jazz and the emergence of the musician as composer and arranger. He recorded many classic albums, including Relaxin' With Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool, and, with compositional help from Bill Evans, Kind of Blue; his 1969 Bitches Brew, merging jazz with rock and free-form improvisation, made the top 40 pop charts. Unlike many trumpeters of his era, Davis relied on tone rather than speed, often using a mute with his horn. He is considered one of the most influential musicians of the past century.
Many sources claim 25 May as Davis's birth date, and some sources list 29 September as his death date.
A jazz trumpeter, composer, and small-band leader, Miles Davis (1926-1991) was in the jazz vanguard for more than two decades. His legend continued to grow even after poor health and diminished creativity removed him from jazz prominence.
Miles Dewey Davis 3rd was born into a well-to-do Alton, Illinois, family on May 25, 1926. His father was a dentist, his mother a woman of leisure: there were two other children, an older sister and a younger brother. In 1928 the family moved to East St. Louis. At the age of 10 Miles began playing trumpet; while still in high school he met and was coached by his earliest idol, the great St. Louis trumpeter Clark Terry.
After fathering two children by a woman friend, Miles in 1944 moved to New York City. He worked for just two weeks in the talent-packed Billy Eckstine Band, then enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music, by day studying classical music and by night interning in jazz's newest idiom, bebop, with the leaders of the movement, notably Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, and Max Roach.
Miles' 1947-1948 stint in a quintet led by bebop genius Charlie Parker gained him a modicum of early fame; a fine trumpeter in the bebop idiom, he nevertheless began to move conceptually away from its orthodoxy. He felt a need to divest his music of bebop's excesses and eccentricities and to restore jazz's more melodic and orchestrated elements. The result was the seminal LP recording Birth of the Cool (1949), played by a medium-sized group, a nonet, featuring, in addition to Miles, baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, and pianist Al Haig. A highly celebrated record date, it gave "birth" to the so-called "cool," or West Coast, jazz school, which was more cerebral, more heavily orchestrated, and generally more disciplined (especially in its shorter solos) than traditional bebop, and it gave Miles a musical identity distinct from Parker and the other beboppers.
In the early 1950s Miles became a heroin addict, and his career came to a near halt for three years, but his ultimately successful fight against the drug habit in 1954 led to his greatest period, the mid-to-late 1950s. During that six-year span he made a series of small group recordings regarded as jazz classics. In 1954, with tenor saxophone titan Sonny Rollins, he made memorable recordings of three Rollins originals - "Airegin," "Doxy," and "Oleo" - as well as two brilliant versions of the Tin Pan Alley standard "But Not for Me." Additionally, in the 1954-1955 period Miles recorded with a number of other jazz giants - tenorist Lucky Thompson, vibist Milt Jackson, and pianist Thelonious Monk.
In 1955 Miles formed his most celebrated group, a remarkably talented quintet (later, a sextet, with the addition of alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley) that featured tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones. Until Coltrane's defection in the 1960s, Miles' band was the single most visible and dominant group in all of jazz. The early 1960s saw a succession of personnel shifts until the band stabilized in 1964 around an excellent new rhythm section of pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams, as well as a new tenor saxophonist, Wayne Shorter. Miles continued to be the greatest attraction (and biggest moneymaker) in all of jazz, but his new band couldn't match the impossibly high standards of its predecessor. Late in the decade his music took a radically new direction. In two 1968 albums, Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro, Miles experimented with rock rhythms and non-traditional instrumentation. For the last two decades of Miles' career his music was increasingly rhythm-and-drone and Miles himself became more of a jazz curiosity than a musician to be taken seriously.
A good part of Davis' fame owed less to his considerable musicianship than to his strange persona. He was notorious in performance for turning his back on audiences, for addressing them inaudibly or not at all, for expressing racial hostility toward whites, for dressing nattily early in his career and outlandishly later, and for projecting (especially in a series of motorcycle ads on television) a voice hoarse to a point of strangulation - all of which contributed to his charismatic mystique. Davis also had many health problems and more than his share of brushes with officialdom (widespread racism and his own racial militancy made the latter inevitable).
Miles was, in reality, a paradox. Himself the victim of a policeman's clubbing (reportedly, racially-inspired), he had the fairness and courage in the late 1950s to defy Black jazzmen's expectations by filling a piano vacancy with a white player, Bill Evans, but then, by all accounts, often racially taunted him. A physical fitness enthusiast (with his own private gym), he nevertheless ingested vast quantities of drugs (sometimes, but not always, for arthritic pain). Forbiddingly gruff and solitary, he was also capable of acts of generosity toward down-at-heels musicians, both African American and white.
Davis was married three times - to dancer Frances Taylor, singer Betty Mabry, and actress Cicely Tyson; all ended in divorce. He had, in all, three sons, a daughter, and seven grandchildren. He died on September 28, 1991, of pneumonia, respiratory failure, and a stroke.
Davis, in addition to the classic small group recordings of the 1954-1960 period, recorded memorable orchestral works with arranger and long-time friend Gil Evans, most notably Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), and Sketches of Spain (1960). Davis' extended works include scores for Louis Malle's film Elevator to the Gallows (1957) and for the full-length documentary Jack Johnson (1970). Among Davis' best-known shorter compositions are the early "Tune Up," "Milestones," "Miles Ahead," "Blue Haze," and "Four"; from 1958 on his best tunes, such as "So What" and "All Blues," are based on modal scales rather than chords. Early and late, both the compositions and the trumpet playing are trademarked by Davis' hauntingly "blue" sound.
Further Reading
Miles: An Autobiography (1989), written with Quincy Troupe, is inadvertently self-revealing - opinionated, irreverent, egotistical, obscene, abusive, and wrong-headed (e.g., he is almost totally dismissive of his finest work and aggressively defensive of his worst). More balanced is Ian Carr's Miles Davis (1982). The two most rewarding articles are both negative assessments - Whitney Balliett's "Miles" in the New Yorker (December 4, 1989) and Stanley Crouch's "Play the Right Thing" in The New Republic (February 12, 1990), which labels Miles as "the most brilliant sellout in the history of jazz" (for having abandoned his early artistry in favor of jazz-rock fusion). A 1993 biography, Miles Davis: The Man in the Green Shirt, by Richard Williams is little more than a coffeetable book.
Born Miles Dewey Davis III, May 25, 1926, in Alton, IL; died of causes including pneumonia, respiratory failure, and stroke, September 28, 1991, in Santa Monica, CA; son of Miles Davis II (an oral surgeon) and Cleota Davis; married c. 1943 (divorced); married Frances Taylor (a dancer), early 1960s (divorced); married c. 1967 (divorced); married Cicely Tyson (an actress), 1981; children: two sons. Education: Began trumpet study c. 1936; studied at Juilliard School of Music, New York City.
Career
Trumpet player, composer, bandleader, recording artist, and writer. Played with local bands, St. Louis, MO, c. 1941; played with Eddie Randall's Blue Devils, 1943-1944, and Adam Lambert's Six Brown Cats, 1944; performed in New York City clubs; played with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, among others, 1945-1949; made first recordings, 1945; performed with bandleaders Billy Eckstine and Benny Carter; became bandleader, 1948; formed quintet, including John Coltrane and Philly Joe Jones, 1955; performed with numerous artists, including Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Ron Carter, and Hank Mobley; pioneered jazz fusion, late 1960s, with Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and John McLaughlin.
Life's Work
Renowned trumpet player Miles Davis was a great inspiration not only to musicians the world over, but to music scribes and theorists as well; admirers and critics alike have written so much on Davis's place in the history of music that they have amply ensured their occasionally embattled subject's position as a bona fide cultural icon. To some he was a near-mythic maverick who in his more than 40-year career in jazz flamboyantly blazed a trail of musical innovation. To others his often thorny temperament, inveterate substance abuse, and brushes with the law made him an unsavory character at best. Yet Davis is one of the rare figures of contemporary music whose artistic reputation, despite the efforts of some to denigrate it, elevates him to a transcendent status achieved by very few.
Miles Dewey Davis III was born May 25, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, the second of three children in a prosperous family. His mother, Cleota, played the violin and encouraged her son to take up that respectable, classical instrument. Miles would later learn that his genteel mother, whose sartorial splendor he took as a model, was also well versed in the decidedly more homely musical phrases of the blues. Davis's father, an oral surgeon, was the seminal figure in his son's early life, passing on lessons about the importance of financial security and the rewards of studiousness and scholarship.
It was also in his father that Davis saw how the black sensibility was shaped by racism. During his childhood, southern Illinois was blighted by many of the racist trappings that plagued the Deep South, and the Davises, as well-to-do professionals, were viewed by some as "uppity" blacks who had risen above their natural, presumably lowly, station. Davis's father reacted to this attitude by embracing the ideas of black separatist Marcus Garvey, who advocated the return of blacks to Africa on the assumption that they would never achieve complete integration in a country where prejudice and bigotry were cultural cornerstones. Consistent with his intellectual leanings, the senior Davis repudiated the more conciliatory efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Although throughout his career Davis led integrated bands and prided himself on color-blindness in his selection of players, he retained a powerful sense of racial division in America; he frequently lashed out at white music critics who, he felt, had misunderstood or diminished the place of jazz and black artists in the musical landscape.
More interested in sports than melodies as a boy, Davis first began paying attention to music when he was six or seven. He was drawn to a radio program that showcased the records of jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington. And on visits to his grandfather in Arkansas he became fascinated by the soulful church music resonating along the backcountry lanes. "Music is a funny thing when you really come to think about it," Davis wrote in Miles: The Autobiography, "because it's hard to pinpoint where it all began for me. But I think some of it had to have started on that Arkansas road and some on that 'Harlem Rhythms' radio show. When I got into music I went all the way into music; I didn't have no time after that for nothing else."
Davis took music lessons privately and in school from the age of ten. Although his teachers emphasized standard elementary trumpet fare--marches and simple overtures--Davis, when given the opportunity, experimented with improvisation, the signature of modern jazz. In 1943, after having spent his spare time honing his skills and following the acts that came to play in East St. Louis, where his family had moved when he was a small boy, Davis joined Eddie Randall's Blue Devils, a hard-driving dance group that played the arrangements of swing giants like Ellington and Benny Goodman. After a lucrative year for Davis, he joined a New Orleans group, Adam Lambert's Six Brown Cats, which featured then-unknown jazz singer Joe Williams, who would later become a major star. On the heels of gigging in Chicago, Davis grew tired of swing and returned home, where, fortuitously, he happened upon his career's launching pad.
With his reputation growing, Davis went to see Billy Eckstine direct a band boasting the luminaries of contemporary jazz: trumpet players Dizzy Gillespie and Buddy Anderson, saxophonists Charlie "Yardbird" Parker and Gene Ammons, drummer Art Blakey, and Lucky Thompson. One of the trumpeters became ill, and a frantic Gillespie ran up to Davis and asked the young man to sit in with the group. That night and for the following two weeks Davis stood shoulder to shoulder with his idols, watching in awe and trying to replicate the new, spirited sounds of bebop, particularly those emanating from the eloquent horn of Gillespie. "From Gillespie, he learned bebop harmony," New Republic contributor Stanley Crouch wrote in 1990. "He even took from Gillespie an aspect of timbral piquancy that settled beneath the surface of his sound. But Davis rejected the basic nature of Gillespie's tone, which few found as rich or as attractive as the idiomatic achievements of the ... brass vocabulary that had preceded the innovations of bebop. Davis grasped the musical power that comes of having a sound that is itself a musical expression."
With that experience under his belt, Davis felt an urgent need to follow his heroes to the jazz mecca of New York City, with wife--Davis was married at 17--and young son in tow. At his mother's insistence, he enrolled in the prestigious Juilliard School, studying music theory and classical composers by day and by night quenching his thirst for the cutting-edge sounds of musicians like trumpet player Freddie Webster, drummer Max Roach, Gillespie, and Parker. Although he heeded many of the lessons taught him at Juilliard--he would always look to composers Ravel and Rachmaninoff for inspiration--Davis found the school's atmosphere oppressively white and discriminatory. He dropped out, preferring to further his education in the hallowed halls of jazz clubs under the tutelage of professors Gillespie and Parker.
Davis's mid-register, no-vibrato style was featured on a 1945 Parker recording, but the precocious trumpeter's contributions were slammed by critics who said his solos were error-laden and transparently derivative of Gillespie. After extended stays in California, during which Davis befriended legendary bassist Charles Mingus, he organized a nine-piece New York-based ensemble featuring saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and Lee Konitz, with lyrical arrangements by pianist-composer Gil Evans, who would become Davis's longtime collaborator. Recordings of this band, dating from 1949 through 1950, were later released as Birth of the Cool.
Critics generally lauded the release but observed a paradox in its effect on the musical scene. "The [group's] laid-back quality and calm, intricate, deep-red arrangements made it the most adventurous small band since the Ellington small bands and some of the Woody Herman ... sides of 1946, yet it helped launch the pale, conservative Goody Two-Shoes music known as West Coast Jazz," Whitney Balliett wrote in the New Yorker. Balliett's opinion notwithstanding, the genesis of West Coast jazz, viewed by many as a direct offshoot of Birth of the Cool, was an early example of Davis's creative and tutorial initiative.
After further triumph in Europe, most notably at the Paris Jazz Festival, Davis fell victim to the work scarcity that plagued his fellow jazzmen. And like many of them, the trumpeter began a descent into drug addiction. He had resisted drugs in the past, dispirited by the tragic toll they had taken on the lives and music of stars such as Parker and Webster. But the prevalence of drugs and a pessimism about his future conspired to overwhelm Davis. "I started to get money from whores to feed and support my habit," Davis wrote in his autobiography. "I started to pimp them, even before I realized that this was what I was doing. I was what I used to call a 'professional junkie.' That's all I lived for. I even chose my jobs according to whether it would be easy for me to cop drugs. I turned into one of the best hustlers because I had to get heroin every day, no matter what I had to do."
For a while Davis was blacklisted by club owners who worried that they might be wasting money on a trumpet player whose musicianship could be affected by drug use. In 1954, as the result of a self-imposed physical discipline that involved Davis's cultivation of boxing skills, he quit drugs and began what some have called his best musical period. His quintet of the time, which featured saxophonist John Coltrane, drummer Philly Joe Jones, bass player Paul Chambers, and pianist Red Garland, was widely considered peerless and produced classic albums such as Milestones and Round About Midnight . "The quintet," according to writer-educator Amiri Baraka, commenting in the New York Times, "combined the fingerpopping urban funk blues of the hard-bop era with a harmonic cushion and Davis's gorgeous melodic invention. It caused a sensation among jazz people." With the addition of saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, a sextet emerged to create an expressive, groundbreaking sound that contained, according to Baraka, "the elements for establishing or redefining ... significant jazz styles that have dominated to one degree or another ... for the last thirty years."
Buoyed by mainstream success, Davis developed considerable flexibility in his musical style. He recorded a celebrated version of American composer George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess and penned the score to French director Louis Malle's film L'Ascenseur pour l'chafaud ("Elevator to the Gallows"). In the early 1960s, as jazz clubs closed and rock and roll threatened to sound the death knell of jazz itself, Davis formed a group that included keyboardist Herbie Hancock and drummer Tony Williams and produced several hard-hitting records that kept afloat the appeal of improvisation. Toward the end of the decade, Davis underwent his most dramatic musical transmutation; inspired by the power of rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix and the funk of rock and R&B acts Sly and the Family Stone and James Brown, Davis electrified jazz, pioneering what would later be called fusion.
Davis's revolutionary 1969 release Bitches Brew, while carving out another marketable niche for jazz players, appalled many jazz purists. "What one actually heard was the still-eloquent Davis trumpet overpowered by a whirlpool of gurgling synthesizers, overamplified rock guitars, and funky drumming better suited to a combo playing a fraternity-house party," Tony Outhwaite sniffed in the National Review. But others saw the incorporation of rock into jazz as another example of Davis's remarkable elasticity and a landmark opportunity for this talent-nurturer to unleash the potential of young players such as keyboardists Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett and bass player Dave Holland. "Critics always like to pigeonhole everybody, put you in a certain place in their heads so they can get to you," Davis wrote in Miles. "When I started changing so fast like that, a lot of critics started putting me down because they didn't understand what I was doing. But critics never did mean much to me, so I just kept on doing what I had been doing, trying to grow as a musician."
Between 1975 and early 1980 Davis did not pick up his horn; illness and recurrent substance abuse kept him away from music. His 1981 comeback album, The Man with the Horn, was panned by critics, who found his playing weak, but subsequent recordings like We Want Miles and Decoy garnered Grammy awards. Although his work during the 1980s was not characterized by the radical innovation people had come to expect of him, Davis continued to launch successful tours and records, still looking beyond the musical cages in which people had always tried to place him; one of his hopes was to collaborate on a record with pop star Prince. But on September 28, 1991, despite his well-publicized hard living, the world was stunned to learn that Davis, suffering from pneumonia, respiratory failure, and the debilitating effects of a stroke, had died.
In response to those who argued that Davis compromised his musical ideals for the sake of commercial success, John Ephland asserted in Down Beat, "A conservative position on jazz, which allows little or no room for musical dialog ... is a prescription for folk music only, insulated and codified, and one diametrically opposed to Miles' artistic thirst for imagination, possibility, and open sky. Not just a trumpet stylist, Miles the conceptualist and band-leader has changed forever the way we hear music."
Awards
Numerous Grammy awards and Down Beat magazine awards; Sonning Music Award for lifetime achievement, Denmark, 1984.
Works
Selective Discography
Round About Midnight, Columbia, 1956.
Birth of the Cool (recorded 1949-50), Capitol, 1957.
Porgy and Bess, Columbia, 1958.
Sketches of Spain, Columbia, 1960.
Bitches Brew, Columbia, 1969.
We Want Miles, Columbia, 1982.
Decoy, Columbia, 1983.
Also composer of film scores.
Writings
(With Quincy Troupe) Miles: The Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 1989.
Further Reading
Books
Carr, Ian, Miles Davis, Quill, 1984.
Chambers, Jack, Milestones One: The Music and Times of Miles Davis to 1960, Morrow, 1985.
Chambers, Jack, Milestones Two: The Music and Times of Miles Davis Since 1960, Morrow, 1985.
Christgau, Robert, Christgau's Record Guide, Ticknor & Fields, 1981.
Davis, Miles, with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 1989.
Hentoff, Nat, The Jazz Life, Panther Books, 1964.
The Rolling Stone Record Guide, edited by Dave Marsh, Random House, 1979.
What's That Sound?, edited by Ben Fong-Torres, Anchor Books, 1976.
Periodicals
Detroit Free Press, February 16, 1992.
Down Beat, September 29, 1960; April 6, 1967; August 1987; October 1988; November 1988; December 1988; December 1991.
(click to enlarge) Miles Davis, 1969. (credit: Votavafoto from London Daily Express/Pictorial Parade)
(born May 26, 1926, Alton, Ill., U.S. — died Sept. 28, 1991, Santa Monica, Calif.) U.S. trumpeter and bandleader. Davis grew up in East St. Louis, Mo., and began study at the Juilliard School in New York City in 1944. He worked with Charlie Parker (1946 – 48). His early efforts as a bandleader resulted in a series of recordings (1949 – 50) later released as the album Birth of the Cool (1957), in which a relaxed aesthetic replaced the more frenetic bebop with the "cool jazz" of the 1950s. From 1955 Davis's groups framed his spare, lyrical approach in contrast to the dense complexity of saxophonists such as John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter. His dark, brooding tone, logically paced improvisations, and frequent use of the metal mute were major influences on jazz trumpet soloists. The 1959 album Kind of Blue was a pioneering example of modal harmonic jazz. His music became more aggressive during the 1960s, and his use of electronic instruments by the end of the decade (Bitches Brew, 1969) gave rise to the jazz-rock fusion of the 1970s. Davis was one of the most original and influential jazz musicians. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.
Davis, Miles, 1926-91, American jazz musician, b. Alton, Ill. Rising to prominence with the birth of modern jazz in the mid-1940s, when he was a sideman in Charlie Parker's bop quintet, Davis became a dominant force in jazz trumpet. He was influential in the development of "cool" jazz in 1949-50, led numerous outstanding small groups through the 1950s and 60s, and produced a successful blend of jazz and rock music in the 1970s and 80s. Davis's trumpet and flügelhorn styles were warmly lyrical and were marked by a brilliant use of mutes. He made many recordings, which reflect his stylistic changes; Kind of Blue (1959), a landmark of modal jazz, has been a best-seller since it was issued.
Bibliography
See Miles: The Autobiography (1989, with Q. Troupe); biographies by I. Carr (1982), J. Chambers (2 vol., 1983-85), B. McRae (1988), and J. Szwed (2002); Q. Troupe, Miles and Me (2000).
Throughout a professional career lasting 50 years, Miles Davis played the trumpet in a lyrical, introspective, and melodic style, often employing a stemless Harmon mute to make his sound more personal and intimate. But if his approach to his instrument was constant, his approach to jazz was dazzlingly protean. To examine his career is to examine the history of jazz from the mid-'40s to the early '90s, since he was in the thick of almost every important innovation and stylistic development in the music during that period, and he often led the way in those changes, both with his own performances and recordings and by choosing sidemen and collaborators who forged new directions. It can even be argued that jazz stopped evolving when Davis wasn't there to push it forward.
Davis was the son of a dental surgeon, Dr. Miles Dewey Davis, Jr., and a music teacher, Cleota Mae (Henry) Davis, and thus grew up in the black middle class of east St. Louis after the family moved there shortly after his birth. He became interested in music during his childhood and by the age of 12 began taking trumpet lessons. While still in high school, he started to get jobs playing in local bars and at 16 was playing gigs out of town on weekends. At 17, he joined Eddie Randle's Blue Devils, a territory band based in St. Louis. He enjoyed a personal apotheosis in 1944, just after graduating from high school, when he saw and was allowed to sit in with Billy Eckstine's big band, who was playing in St. Louis. The band featured trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and saxophonist Charlie Parker, the architects of the emerging bebop style of jazz, which was characterized by fast, inventive soloing and dynamic rhythm variations. It is striking that Davis fell so completely under Gillespie and Parker's spell, since his own slower and less flashy style never really compared to theirs. But bebop was the new sound of the day, and the young trumpeter was bound to follow it. He did so by leaving the Midwest to attend the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (renamed Juilliard) in September 1944. Shortly after his arrival in Manhattan, he was playing in clubs with Parker, and by 1945 he had abandoned his academic studies for a full-time career as a jazz musician, initially joining Benny Carter's band and making his first recordings as a sideman. He played with Eckstine in 1946-1947 and was a member of Parker's group in 1947-1948, making his recording debut as a leader on a 1947 session that featured Parker, pianist John Lewis, bassist Nelson Boyd, and drummer Max Roach. This was an isolated date, however, and Davis spent most of his time playing and recording behind Parker. But in the summer of 1948, he organized a nine-piece band with an unusual horn section. In addition to himself, it featured an alto saxophone, a baritone saxophone, a trombone, a French horn, and a tuba. This nonet, employing arrangements by Gil Evans and others, played for two weeks at the Royal Roost in New York in September. Earning a contract with Capitol Records, the band went into the studio in January 1949 for the first of three sessions which produced 12 tracks that attracted little attention at first. The band's relaxed sound, however, affected the musicians who played it, among them Kai Winding, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, J.J. Johnson, and Kenny Clarke, and it 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, and the group took him out of the country for an appearance at the Paris Jazz Festival in May. But the trumpeter's progress was impeded by an addiction to heroin that plagued him in the early '50s. 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 the major label Columbia Records to sign him. The prestigious contract allowed him to put together a permanent band, and he organized a quintet featuring saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones who began recording his Columbia debut, 'Round About Midnight, in October. As it happened, however, he had a remaining five albums on his Prestige contract, 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 May 1957, just three months after Capitol released the Birth of the Cool LP, Davis again teamed with arranger Gil Evans for his second Columbia LP, Miles Ahead. Playing flügelhorn, Davis fronted a big band on music that extended the Birth of the Cool concept and even had classical overtones. Released in 1958, the album was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, intended to honor recordings made before the Grammy Awards were instituted in 1959. In December 1957, Davis returned to Paris, where he improvised the background music for the film L'Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud (Escalator to the Gallows). Jazz Track, an album containing this music, earned him a 1960 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance, Solo, or Small Group. He added saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to his group, creating the Miles Davis Sextet, who recorded the album Milestones in April 1958. Shortly after this recording, Red Garland was replaced on piano by Bill Evans and Jimmy Cobb took over for Philly Joe Jones on drums. In 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 with modal playing, basing his improvisations on scales rather than chord changes. This led to his next band recording, Kind of Blue, in March and April 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 1959 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. The album earned Davis and Evans Grammy nominations in 1960 for Best Jazz Performance, Large Group, and Best Jazz Composition, More Than 5 minutes; they won in the latter category.
By the time Davis returned to the studio to make his next band album in March 1961, Adderley had departed, Wynton Kelly had replaced Bill Evans at the piano, and John Coltrane had left to begin his successful solo career, being replaced by saxophonist Hank Mobley (following the brief tenure of Sonny Stitt). Nevertheless, Coltrane guested on a couple of tracks of the album, called Someday My Prince Will Come. The record made the pop charts in March 1962, but it was preceded into the bestseller lists by the Davis quintet's next recording, the two-LP set Miles Davis in Person (Friday & Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, San Francisco), recorded in April. The following month, Davis recorded another live show, as he and his band were joined by an orchestra led by Gil Evans at Carnegie Hall in May. The resulting Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall was his third LP to reach the pop charts, and it earned Davis and Evans a 1962 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Large Group, Instrumental. Davis and Evans teamed up again in 1962 for what became their final collaboration, Quiet Nights. The album was not issued until 1964, when it reached the charts and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group or Soloist with Large Group. In 1996, Columbia Records released a six-CD box set, Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, that won the Grammy for Best Historical Album. Quiet Nights was preceded into the marketplace by Davis' next band effort, Seven Steps to Heaven, recorded in the spring of 1963 with an entirely new lineup consisting of saxophonist George Coleman, pianist Victor Feldman, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Frank Butler. During the sessions, Feldman was replaced by Herbie Hancock and Butler by Tony Williams. The album found Davis making a transition to his next great group, of which Carter, Hancock, and Williams would be members. It was another pop chart entry that earned 1963 Grammy nominations for both Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Soloist or Small Group and Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group. The quintet followed with two live albums, Miles Davis in Europe, recorded in July 1963, which made the pop charts and earned a 1964 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group, and My Funny Valentine, recorded in February 1964 and released in 1965, when it reached the pop charts. By September 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 contributed by the band members, starting in January 1965 with E.S.P., followed by Miles Smiles (1967 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group [7 or Fewer]), Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky (1968 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist with Small Group), and Filles de Kilimanjaro. By the time of Miles in the Sky, the group had begun to turn to electric instruments, presaging Davis' next stylistic turn. By the final sessions for Filles de Kilimanjaro in September 1968, Hancock had been replaced by Chick Corea and Carter by Dave Holland. But Hancock, along with pianist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin, participated on Davis' next album, In a Silent Way (1969), which returned the trumpeter to the pop charts for the first time in four years and earned him another small-group jazz performance Grammy nomination. With his next album, Bitches Brew, Davis turned more overtly to a jazz-rock style. Though certainly not conventional rock music, Davis' electrified sound attracted a young, non-jazz audience while putting off traditional jazz fans. Bitches Brew, released in March 1970, reached the pop Top 40 and became Davis' first album to be certified gold. It also earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Arrangement and won the Grammy for large-group jazz performance. He followed it with such similar efforts as Miles Davis at Fillmore East (1971 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Group), A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Live-Evil, On the Corner, and In Concert, all of which reached the pop charts. Meanwhile, Davis' former sidemen became his disciples in a series of fusion groups: Corea formed Return to Forever, Shorter and Zawinul led Weather Report, and McLaughlin and former Davis drummer Billy Cobham organized the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Starting in October 1972, when he broke his ankles in a car accident, Davis became less active in the early '70s, 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, and his innovations had been incorporated into the music, at least by those who supported his eclectic approach. He was also a celebrity whose appeal extended far beyond the basic jazz audience. He performed on the worldwide jazz festival circuit and recorded a series of albums that made the pop charts, including We Want Miles (1982 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist), Star People, Decoy, and You're Under Arrest. In 1986, after 30 years with Columbia, he switched to Warner Bros. Records and released Tutu, which won him his fourth Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance. Aura, an album he had recorded in 1984, was released by Columbia in 1989 and brought him his fifth Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Soloist (on a Jazz Recording). Davis surprised jazz fans when, on July 8, 1991, he joined an orchestra led by Quincy Jones at the Montreux Jazz Festival to perform some of the arrangements written for him in the late '50s by Gil Evans; he had never previously looked back at an aspect of his career. He died of pneumonia, respiratory failure, and a stroke within months. Doo-Bop, his last studio album, appeared in 1992. It was a collaboration with rapper Easy Mo Bee, and it won a Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Instrumental Performance, with the track "Fantasy" nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo. Released in 1993, Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux won Davis his seventh Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance.
Miles Davis took an all-inclusive, constantly restless approach to jazz that had begun to fall out of favor by the time of his death, even as it earned him controversy during his lifetime. It was hard to recognize the bebop acolyte of Charlie Parker in the flamboyantly dressed leader with the hair extensions who seemed to keep one foot on a wah-wah pedal and one hand on an electric keyboard in his later years. But he did much to popularize jazz, reversing the trend away from commercial appeal that bebop began. And whatever the fripperies and explorations, he retained an ability to play moving solos that endeared him to audiences and demonstrated his affinity with tradition. At a time when jazz is inclining toward academia and repertory orchestras rather than moving forward, he is a reminder of the music's essential quality of boundless invention, using all available means. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
