Miles Davis

Miles Dewey Davis III was born in Alton, Illinois in 1926 and grew up in East St. Louis, where his father was a successful dentist and gave him a new trumpet on his thirteenth birthday; his first, in 1935, had been a gift from John Eubanks, a friend of his father. He moved to New York in 1944 ostensibly to study at Juilliard, but quickly found his way into the bebop scene and began playing with Charlie Parker. The recordings he made with Parker in his late teens and early twenties are not his best work, but they document a musician of unusual intelligence absorbing the most complex music of the era at extraordinary speed.

The first great reinvention came in 1949 with the Birth of the Cool nonet, which Miles organized around a lighter, more orchestral conception of jazz that owed something to Claude Thornhill's ensemble work. The sessions were a commercial failure at the time but became retroactively foundational for an entire movement in West Coast jazz. The Prestige years that followed were more conventional hard bop, but they produced some of the most beloved recordings in jazz history once the first great quintet with Coltrane coalesced in 1955.

The Columbia era from 1957 to 1963 is the period most listeners start from: the Gil Evans collaborations, Kind of Blue, and the steady accumulation of albums that made Miles Davis the most famous name in jazz. The second great quintet with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams from 1964 to 1968 represents the peak of his small-group work, producing a run of studio albums that redefined what a jazz group could do in terms of collective improvisation and rhythmic freedom.

The electric period from 1969 onward divided his audience and continues to divide it, but the best records from those years, especially In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Get Up with It, Agharta, and Pangaea, belong in any serious conversation about the most important music of the twentieth century. After six years of retirement, his comeback in 1981 produced the Scofield albums and the Marcus Miller productions, culminating in Tutu in 1986. He died in September 1991. The hip-hop album Doo-Bop was released posthumously the following year.