Davis, Miles

MILES DAVIS

Born: Miles Dewey Davis III; Alton, Illinois, 26 May 1926; died 28 September 1991, Santa Monica, California

Genre: Jazz

Best-selling album since 1990: Kind of Blue (1997 re-issue)

Hit songs since 1990: "Time after Time"

Miles Davis has been the missing giant of American popular music since his death in September 1991, little more than two months after his final performances and a session on his posthumously released, Grammy-winning hip-hop effort, Doo-Bop (1992). His distinctively spare, introspective, vibratoless style was a marvel of taste and power. An indefatigable innovator, Davis was characterized by Duke Ellington as the jazz Picasso.

Davis's death was rumored to have been related to AIDS. Certainly his constitution was affected by hard living, organic disease, diverse accidents, and self-inflicted knocks. In the year prior to his death, he toured stadiums and festivals with a young electric jazz band featuring the saxophonist Kenny Garrett. He made two major appearances before his death. The first was a one-time-only review at the Montreux Jazz Festival on July 8, 1991, when he played big-band charts written by his late friend Gil Evans and conducted by Quincy Jones. Two days later in Paris, he appeared at a concert along with his longtime associates: saxophonists Jackie McLean and Wayne Shorter; pianists Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Joe Zawinul; guitarists John McLaughlin and John Scofield; bassist Dave Holland; and drummer Jack DeJohnette.

Davis was the son of a prosperous Midwestern oral surgeon and his wife, descendants of accomplished African-Americans and bearers of high cultural standards. They afforded their three children enriching opportunities. Miles started his trumpet studies in sixth grade and took private lessons with a trumpeter from the St. Louis symphony from the age of thirteen, when his father bought him a horn for his birthday. His mother never approved of his musical career.

As a young teen playing local clubs, Davis was encouraged by the trumpeter Clark Terry. Hired as a last-minute substitute on one occasion by balladeer and bandleader Billy Eckstine, Davis met trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, the chief proponents of bebop, the virtuosic, small-group jazz movement that flourished after World War II. In 1945 Davis moved to New York City to attend the Juilliard School's Institute of Musical Art, and immediately sought out Parker and Gillespie in the jazz clubs of Fifty-second Street.

Davis was quickly accepted by the boppers, becoming a mainstay of Parker's group in 1947. He also participated in informal jam sessions hosted by Gil Evans, a collaboration that resulted in the short-lived nonet that recorded the groundbreaking album Birth of the Cool (1950). The bebop milieu was pervaded by heroin addiction, and Davis fell prey to the drug in 1949, after which his career wobbled as he freelanced erratically with musicians including Eckstine, Stan Getz, and Billie Holiday. After kicking his drug habit by returning to his parents' home and going cold turkey, Davis surged to the fore of the jazz scene, working with J. J. Johnson, Horace Silver, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Milt Jackson, and others. After an acclaimed performance at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival, he never looked back.

The upward trajectory of Davis's career brought him into the leadership of his first quintet, with John Coltrane; a long association with Columbia Records (abandoned in 1985 for Warner Bros.); and the landmark albums Porgy and Bess (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960), which drew on the work of the contemporary Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo. His band that featured Coltrane, alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and pianist Bill Evans produced the landmark modal take on the blues, Kind of Blue (1959), considered by some critics the greatest album in the history of jazz; it remains the best-selling album in the history of the genre.

Nevertheless, reams of criticism has piled up about the music of Kind of Blue ; among its chief attractions is the mood it sets, and maintains, of relaxed yet alert, soothing but never soporific sweet sadness. The themes are simple (though deceptively so) and repetitious, yet not cloying. The rhythms are mostly soft and mid-tempo, nonetheless propulsive. Davis's improvisations seem casual yet are perfectly phrased; his ideas are never forced, but by turns bold and vulnerable. Each major soloist matches this standard: Adderley, Coltrane, and Evans give performances of their lives, the saxophonists flowing and lucid, the pianist spreading a color spectrum of harmonies. Kind of Blue redeems a promise of jazz: to bestow a dollop of grace on those who hear it.

In the early 1960s Davis hired his second great quintet, composed of pianist Hancock, saxophonist Shorter, bassist Ron Carter, and seventeen-year-old drummer Tony Williams, all of whom ably enacted Davis's visionary experiments with elliptical forms, newly available electric instruments, and rhythmic variation. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the creatively restless Davis was enthralled with the budding progressive rock scene; he gathered guitarist John McLaughlin; bassist Dave Holland; electric keyboardists Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett; electric bassists; sitar players; and drummers Don Alias, Jack DeJohnette, and Lenny White for the suitelike jazz-rock fusion recording (produced by Teo Macero) titled Bitches Brew (1970).

That two-LP set announced a revolution in American contemporary instrumental music, fusing grandiose themes and dense orchestrations at high volumes with ferocious improvisation and roiling polyrhythmics. Davis followed with a dozen albums in the same vein—many of them live-in-concert before integrated young audiences—and an international tour of venues that could accommodate his requirements of sound.

Many key members of that ensemble and of other heavily amplified and processed bands Davis maintained until the late 1970s have remained in the forefront of jazz: among them are saxophonists Gary Bartz, Sonny Fortune, Steve Grossman, and David Liebman; tablaist Badal Roy; percussionist Airto Moirea; Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal; and guitarist Pete Cosey. After a period of inactivity, Davis rebounded with the album Man with a Horn (1981), which features an even younger ensemble in stripped-down productions that did not tax his lapsed trumpet technique.

In the 1980s Davis regained his trumpet technique while continuing to talent-scout and develop material for electronically enhanced, improvising ensembles. He employed guitarists Scofield and Mike Stern; saxophonists Bob Berg, Bill Evans, and Branford Marsalis; bassists Marcus Miller, Darryl Jones, and Foley McCreary; percussionists Alias, Mino Cinelu, and Marilyn Mazur; drummer Al Foster; and a succession of electric keyboardists (including George Duke and Joey DeFrancesco) and synthesizer programmers.

As Davis renewed his career, he extended himself, commercially, artistically, and politically. He was among the first jazz musicians to adapt pop hits of the eighties for his own use, claiming both Cindy Lauper's "Time after Time" and Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" with unique interpretations. He recorded soundtracks—Siesta (1987), The Hot Spot (1990), and Djingo (1990)—for films in which he also acted. He appeared as an icon of cool in advertising campaigns, and began to exhibit his paintings in art galleries. Davis gave pointed titles to his albums: Tutu (1986), named for the black archbishop and antiapartheid leader of South Africa, and Amandla (1989), meaning "freedom" in Swahili. He also contributed a cameo to the album released by Artists United Against Apartheid, Sun City (1985). His personal life, however, remained tempestuous; his fourth marriage, to actress Cicely Tyson, was marked by bursts of violence and ended in divorce.

Davis's gaunt scowl, dramatic clothing, and hoarse voice became legendary, even among those who did not know his music. But they are part of the sensibility that underlay his unforgettable trumpet sound, a gripping evocation of the loneliness, strangeness, exhilaration, and pathos of life in postwar America that rivals the achievement of any artist in any medium of the past fifty years.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Decoy (Columbia, 1984); Tutu (Warner Bros., 1986); Original Motion Picture Soundtrack: The Hot Spot (Antilles, 1990); Doo-Bop (1992); Live Around the World (Warner Bros. 1996); The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings of Miles Davis and Gil Evans (Columbia Legacy, 1996); Dark Magus (Columbia reissue, 1997); Live-Evil (Columbia reissue, 1997); Black Beauty (Columbia reissue, 1997); Live at the Philharmonic (Columbia reissue, 1997); Live at the Fillmore East Columbia reissue, 1997); Kind of Blue (Columbia reissue, 1997); The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions Columbia Legacy, 1998); Birth of the Cool (Capitol EMI reissue, 2001); The Complete Miles Davis at Montreux 1973–1991 (Warner Music, 2002).

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

J. Szwed, So What, the Life of Miles Davis (New York, 2002); B. Kirchner (ed.), A Miles Davis Reader (Washington, DC, 1997); P. Tingen, Miles Beyond: The Electronic Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967–1991 (New York, 2001); M. Davis, Miles, the Autobiography (New York, 1989).

WEBSITES:

www.milesdavis.com/home.html; www.wam.umd.edu/~losinp/music/miles_ahead.html; servercc.oakton.edu/~larry/miles/mile-stones.html.

howard mandel