(b Alton, IL, 25 May 1926; d Santa Monica, CA, 28 Sept 1991). American jazz trumpeter and bandleader. An original, lyrical soloist and a demanding group leader, he was the most consistently innovatory musician in jazz from the late 1940s until the mid-1970s.
Davis grew up in East St Louis and took up the trumpet at the age of 13; two years later he was already playing professionally. He moved to New York in September 1944, ostensibly to enter the Institute of Musical Art but actually to locate his idol, Charlie Parker. He joined Parker in live appearances and recording sessions (1945–8), at the same time playing in other groups and touring in the big bands led by Benny Carter and Billy Eckstine. In 1948 he began to lead his own bop groups, and he participated in an experimental workshop centred on the arranger Gil Evans. Their collaborations with Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis and Johnny Carisi culminated in a series of nonet recordings for Capitol under Davis's name and later collected and reissued as Birth of the Cool. In 1949 Davis performed with Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey, and with Tadd Dameron, until heroin addiction interrupted his public career intermittently from mid-1949 to 1953. Although he continued to record with famous bop musicians, including Parker, Rollins, Blakey, J.J. Johnson, Horace Silver and members of the Modern Jazz Quartet, he worked in clubs infrequently and with inferior accompanists until 1954.
In 1955 Davis appeared informally at the Newport Jazz Festival. His sensational improvisations there brought him widespread publicity and sufficient engagements to establish a quintet (1955–7) with Red Garland (piano), Paul Chambers (double bass), Philly Joe Jones (drums) and John Coltrane, who in 1956 was joined and later replaced by Rollins. In May 1957 Davis made the first of several remarkable solo recordings on trumpet and flugelhorn against unusual jazz orchestrations by Gil Evans. In the autumn he organized a quintet, later joined by Cannonball Adderley, that proved short-lived; in the same year he wrote and recorded music in Paris for Louis Malle’s film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud.
On his return to the USA Davis reformed his original quintet of 1955 with Adderley as a sixth member. For the next five years he drew the rhythm sections of his various sextets and quintets from a small pool of players: the pianists Garland, Bill Evans (1958–9) and Wynton Kelly; the drummers Jones and Jimmy Cobb; and the bass player Chambers. Personnel changes increased in early 1963, and finally Davis engaged a new rhythm section as the nucleus of another quintet: Herbie Hancock (1963–8), Ron Carter (1963–8) and Tony Williams (1963–9). To replace Coltrane, who had left in 1960, Davis tried a succession of saxophonists, including Sonny Stitt, Jimmy Heath, Hank Mobley (1961), George Coleman (1963–4) and Sam Rivers; ultimately he settled on Wayne Shorter (1964–70).
Because of his irascible temperament and his need for frequent periods of inactivity, these sidemen were by no means entirely faithful to Davis. Nevertheless, the groups of 1955–68 were more stable than his later ones of 1969–75. Often the instrumentation and style of his ever-changing recording ensembles (up to 14 players) diverged considerably from that of his working groups (generally sextets or septets). Influential new members joined him in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, Dave Holland, Billy Cobham, Jack DeJohnette and Airto Moreira. As with Davis’s previous colleagues, the excellence of these sidemen bore eloquent witness to his stature among jazz musicians.
Davis had sickle-cell anaemia. For years he had combatted the effects of this congenital disease by hand exercises – he trained as a boxer – but in 1975 the deterioration of his joints obliged him to retire. He had major operations on his hip and also suffered from a stomach ulcer and gallstones. In 1980 he made new recordings, and in the summer of 1981 began to tour extensively with new quintets and sextets. Although he was incapacitated by a stroke in February 1982, he resumed an active career in the spring of that year. Only the drummer Al Foster remained with him, serving as a sideman to 1975 and again from 1980 to 1985. New young members of Davis’s groups included Branford Marsalis, the guitarist John Scofield and the saxophonist Kenny Garrett.
In his final decade Davis was described as a ‘living legend’, a title he detested because it went against his continuing inclination to be associated with new popular music and energetic youthful activities, but one that was nonetheless accurate, since it reflected his position as the former partner of both Parker and Coltrane. He received an honorary Doctorate of Music from the New England Conservatory in 1986 in honour of his longstanding achievements.
Davis rejected the standards set for jazz trumpeters in the 1940s by Dizzy Gillespie’s bop improvisations, partly because of his limited technique (some of his early recordings were marred by errors), but principally because his interests lay elsewhere. He created relaxed, tuneful melodies centred in the middle register. Not reluctant to repeat ideas, he drew from such a small collection of melodic formulae that many solos seemed as much composed as improvised. Harmonically he was also conservative, and tended to play in close accord with his accompanists. Beneath this apparent pervasive simplicity lay a subtle sense of rhythmic placement and expressive nuance.
These characteristics remained central to Davis’s playing throughout his career. Their mature expression first came on the nonet sessions (in particular Move/Budo, Jeru/Godchild and Boplicity/Israel, all 1949, Cap.), which inspired the cool-jazz movement. Davis’s liking for moderation meshed perfectly with his arranger’s concern for smooth instrumental textures, restrained dynamics and rhythms, and a balance between ensemble and solo passages. In the 1950s, as cool jazz became popular, Davis ignored this style, instead surrounding himself with fiery bop players.
Davis’s fallow period in the early 1950s came to an end with his celebrated blues improvisation Walkin’ (1954, Prst.). In a session with Sonny Rollins in the same year he introduced the stemless harmon mute to jazz; its intense sound led to delicate recordings by his first quintet (for example, Bye Bye Blackbird and ’Round Midnight on Round about Midnight, 1955–6, Col.), which are even more memorable than the fierce swing of the Garland-Chambers-Jones rhythm section on fast bop tunes. Many jazz trumpeters turned to flugelhorn after Davis had demonstrated its potential in his collaborations with Gil Evans (notably Summertime, on Porgy and Bess, 1958, Col.); these recordings offer rare examples in jazz of lush orchestral settings with sustained emotional substance, and present an ideal foil for the relaxed tunefulness, melodic and harmonic simplicity and subtle swing of Davis’s improvisations (ex.1).
By the late 1950s Davis had tired of bop structures, and turned to a new approach formulated at this time by Gil Evans and Bill Evans and later called ‘modal playing’. However, the use of modes in Davis’s recordings of 1958–9 (Milestones, on Milestones, 1958, Col., So What, Flamenco Sketches, on Kind of Blue, 1959, Col.) had less significance for the future than the slowing of harmonic rhythm. In place of fast-moving, functional chord progressions, Davis used diatonic ostinatos (vamps), drones, half-tone osciallation familiar from flamenco music and tone-dominant alternation in the bass line.
Until 1965 Davis’s groups performed a small repertory of bop, blues, popular songs and ostinato tunes. During these years the technical and emotional compass of his playing expanded greatly, which can be heard to advantage on My Funny Valentine and Fair and More (both 1964, Col.). The addition of Wayne Shorter to the ensemble led to a change in repertory that began with E.S.P.(1965, Col.). Discarding standard tunes, Davis’s groups recorded improvisations in a chordless, tonally ambiguous bop style, as well as new ostinato pieces on which the Hancock-Carter-Williams rhythm section found extraordinarily flexible ways of expressing 4/4 rhythms.
In 1968–9 Davis turned to jazz-rock. In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew (both 1969, Col.) blended the sounds of acoustic and electronic instruments, and melodic jazz improvisations with open-ended rock accompaniment. From this point on Davis regularly edited his recordings from lengthy taped performances, both live and in the studio. Thus Teo Macero, his recording engineer, and producer from 1959 to 1983, became in a sense the most important ‘member’ of Davis’s ensembles. From 1969 to 1975 these various groups made use of electronically altered trumpet, Indian sitār and tablā, and African and Brazilian percussion, as well as funky black-American dance rhythms (Big fun, 1969–72, Col., and On the Corner, 1972, Col.). Their music is best described by the term fusion, which embraces a blend of musical elements broader than jazz-rock. During Davis’s efforts to resume his career in the 1980s, the results were a rough juxtaposition of disparate sounds rather than a fusion, but the album Decoy (1983–4, Col.) offers fine examples of his style. Davis himself concentrated on trumpet, but he also played synthesizer; his performance on both instruments can be heard on the title track of Star People (1982–3, Col.). Among his projects in his final years was an effort to unite jazz and rap music.
The identification of Davis’s compositions is not a simple matter. He wrote several important bop themes, including Donna Lee and Half Nelson (recorded with Parker) and Boplicity (with the nonet). As a leader, he sometimes followed the widespread practice of appropriating music: such pieces popularized by and credited to Davis include Tune-up and Four (actually by Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson), Solar (actually Sonny by Woody Herman) and Blue in Green (almost certainly by Bill Evans). But a number of pieces from this decade, including Milestones, So What, All Blues and Freddie Freeloader, are Davis’s own. Flamenco Sketches exemplifies another commonplace approach to jazz composition, in which he would develop an idea from a sideman (in this instance, Evans again) according to his approach at the time; later, during his jazz-fusion decades, this collaborative approach characterized Davis’s music-making. Nardis, first heard on Adderley’s Portrait of Cannonball (1958, Riv.) and subsequently a staple of Evans’s repertory, became a jazz standard without his ever having introduced it on record.
Two volumes of transcriptions of Davis’s solos have been published: Miles Davis: Jazz Improvisation by T. Hino (Tokyo, 1975) and Miles Davis by S. Isacoff (New York, 1978), the latter based entirely on Hino’s edition.
A. Hodeir: Hommes et problèmes du jazz, suivi de La religion du jazz (Paris, 1954; Eng. trans, rev. 1956/R, as Jazz: its Evolution and Essence)
N. Hentoff: ‘An Afternoon with Miles Davis’, JR, i/2 (1958), 9–12
M. James: Miles Davis (London, 1961) [incl. discography]; repr. in Kings of Jazz, ed. S. Green (South Brunswick, NJ, 1978), 75–108
N. Hentoff: The Jazz Life (New York, 1961/R) [incl. previously pubd articles]
D. Heckman: ‘Miles Davis Times Three’, Down Beat, xxix/23 (1962), 16–19
G. Hoefer: ‘The Birth of the Cool’, Down Beat, xxxii/21 (1965), 24–5, 40
G. Hoefer: ‘Early Miles’, Down Beat, xxxiv/7 (1967), 16–19
D. DeMichael: ‘Miles Davis’, Rolling Stone (13 December 1969)
L. Feather: ‘Miles’, From Satchmo to Miles (New York, 1972/R), 225–58
M.C. Gridley: Jazz Styles (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978, 2/1985)
D. Baker: The Jazz Style of Miles Davis: a Musical and Historical Perspective (Lebanon, IN, 1980) [incl. transcrs.]
B. Kernfeld: Adderley, Coltrane, and Davis at the Twilight of Bebop: the Search for Melodic Coherence (1958–59) (diss., Cornell U., 1981)
T. Naitho: Miles (Pyworthy, nr Holsworthy, 1981)
I. Carr: Miles Davis: a Critical Biography (London, 1982) [incl. discography by B. Priestley]
H. Brofsky: ‘Miles Davis and My Funny Valentine: the Evolution of a Solo’, Black Music Research Journal, iii (1983), 23–45
J. Chambers: Milestones, i: The Music and Times of Miles Davis to 1960 (Toronto, 1983); ii: The Music and Times of Miles Davis since 1960 (Toronto, 1985); complete edn (1989)
A. Baraka: ‘Miles Davis’, New York Times Magazine (16 June 1985)
F. Davis: ‘The Unsure Egoist Is Not Good for Himself’, In the Moment: Jazz in the 1980s (New York, 1986), 248–52
B. McRae: Miles Davis (London, 1988) [incl. discography]
M. Davis (with Q. Troupe): Miles: the Autobiography (New York, 1989)
‘Miles: the Final Bow’, Down Beat, lviii/12 (1991) [memorial issue]
G. Tomlinson: ‘Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: a White Historian Signifies’, Black Music Research Journal, xi (1991), 229–64
G. Giddins: ‘Juilliard Dropout Makes Good’, Faces in the Crowd: Players and Writers (New York, 1992), 151–63
J. Lohman: The Sound of Miles Davis: the Discography (Copenhagen, 1992)
L. Cugny: Electrique: Miles Davis, 1968–1975 (Marseilles, 1993)
R. Williams: Miles Davis: the Man in the Green Shirt (London, 1993)
G. Camer, ed.: The Miles Davis Companion: Four Decades of Commentary (New York, 1996)
K. Vail: Miles’ Diary: the life of Miles Davis, 1947–1961 (Chessington, 1996)
B. Kirchner, ed.: A Miles Davis Reader (Washington DC, 1997)
Oral history material in US-NEij
BARRY KERNFELD