Miles Davis

Abstract

Miles Davis is consistently regarded as one of the most iconic, impactful, and creative innovators in the history of jazz. He is recognized by most jazz historians as being a key player in the development of several of the major subgenres in modern jazz. As a bandleader, Miles Davis repeatedly created some of the most cohesive, integrated, and innovative groups in jazz. Many of the musicians who joined Miles Davis groups became major voices in jazz, both with his groups and as leaders; a short list includes John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Chick Corea. Born Miles Dewey Davis III on 26 May 1926 in Alton, Illinois, Davis was the son of a dentist and was raised in a middle-class lifestyle, yet one amid the endemic racism of the Midwest in the 1930s. While still in his teens, Davis moved to New York City and almost immediately was playing music with the progenitors of the modern jazz movement. After replacing Dizzy Gillespie in the frontline of Charlie Parker’s quintet, Davis went on to lead his own mid-sized group, the Miles Davis Nonet, which explored a novel approach to modern jazz that was later associated with the cool jazz subgenre. Never willing to compromise and striving for continual development, Davis fought through heroin addiction in the early 1950s and produced music in 1954 associated with the development of yet another subgenre, hard bop. With the critical and popular success of a 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, Davis ascended to the highest ranks of jazz stardom, and formed the 1950s Miles Davis Quintet with John Coltrane, regarded as a model of modern jazz interaction and performance. 1959 saw Davis exploring another new approach termed modal jazz and producing what is commonly regarded as the best-selling record in the history of jazz, Kind of Blue. By 1964, Davis had retooled his quintet to produce the Miles Davis Quintet of the 1960s (known to many as Davis’s Second Great Quintet), featuring Wayne Shorter, which created an approach to composition and group improvisation subsequently referred to as post bop. Refusing to become static creatively, Davis was innovative in the application of popular and rock music influences to jazz, helping lead the way toward the development of jazz-rock fusion. Davis continued to explore electronic forms of jazz until his death in 1991. This article generally privileges scholarly writing and collections to best aid the Miles Davis researcher.