artist american
Miles Davis
View in the web ↗1926–1991 · Alton, Illinois → New York
Jazz's serial revolutionary: from Parker's bandstand to 'Birth of the Cool', 'Kind of Blue' and 'Bitches Brew' — he re-angled the music at least four times.
Miles Davis arrived in New York at eighteen, ostensibly for Juilliard, actually to find Charlie Parker — whose quintet he joined while still a teenager. Where Parker was velocity, Davis became space: a middle-register trumpet voice, often through a Harmon mute, that made silence part of the line (Gioia 2011).
No one else stands at the head of so many branches. The 1949–50 nonet sessions named cool jazz. The mid-fifties quintet with John Coltrane redefined the working jazz group; Kind of Blue (1959) made modal improvisation the music’s new common ground and became its best-selling record (Kahn 2000). The sixties quintet with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams rebuilt small-group interplay; then Bitches Brew (1970) plugged jazz into rock and funk and fathered fusion, scandalizing the purists he had already outrun twice.
Within this site’s web, Davis appears at two nodes — cool jazz and fusion — and his career is the argument in miniature: genres are snapshots of a moving current. “I have to change,” he said. “It’s like a curse.”
Part of
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Cool Jazz
genreBebop with the temperature lowered: lyrical, spacious, often modal — 'Birth of the Cool' to 'Kind of Blue', and the bridge to bossa nova.
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Jazz Fusion
genreJazz plugged into funk and rock: Miles Davis's electric bands and their alumni — Weather Report, Mahavishnu, Head Hunters — rewired improvisation for the amplifier age.
Sources
- The History of Jazz — Ted Gioia (2011). Oxford University Press (2nd ed.; first published 1997) · Book
- Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece — Ashley Kahn (2000). Da Capo Press · Book