Davis, Miles 1926–1991

Miles Davis 1926–1991

Trumpet player, composer, bandleader

At a Glance…

Left Juilliard for Jazz Club Education

Peerless Quintet

Bitches Brew Heralded Fusion

Selected discography

Selected writings

Sources

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.

At a Glance…

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.

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.

Awards: Numerous Grammy awards and Down Beat magazine awards; Sonning Music Award for lifetime achievement, Denmark, 1984.

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.”

Left Juilliard for Jazz Club Education

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.”

Peerless Quintet

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’échafaud (“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.

Bitches Brew Heralded 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.”

Selected 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.

Selected writings

(With Quincy Troupe) Miles: The Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 1989.

Sources

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.

Esquire, March 1959.

Guitar Player, November 1982; September 1984.

Guitar World, September 1983.

National Review, August 20, 1990.

New Republic, February 12, 1990.

New Yorker, December 4, 1989.

New York Times, June 16, 1985.

Rolling Stone, March 11, 1976; November 14, 1991.

—Isaac Rosen