Extract from ABC News
From bebop to fusion and beyond, Miles Davis continually reinvented his sound over a five‑decade career. (Getty Images: Express Newspapers)
Within the pantheon of jazz, Miles Davis has assumed an almost godlike position.
The trumpeter, who was born 100 years ago on May 26, was a player who kept his place at the bleeding edge of jazz throughout his five-decade career.
He played with legendary figures from Charlie Parker to John Coltrane, and many of jazz's leading names today count him among their mentors.
His 1959 album Kind of Blue proved to be seminal in the history of jazz.
"Davis built musical foundations, but he was just as happy to knock those very pillars in the music down if they were impeding his journey as an artist," says Jazz Legends presenter Eric Ajaye.
A consummate artist with a "takes no prisoners" attitude, Davis didn't play to his fans' whims.
He even had a nickname, "the dark prince", Ajaye says.
"People ask me: 'Why don't you play this?' Go buy the record. What you like is on the record," Davis was recorded saying.
Early opportunities
Davis was born in Alton, Illinois to a relatively affluent black family. His father was a dentist and his mother a music teacher.
But growing up during the Great Depression took its toll.
Davis's father moved the family to East St. Louis on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, working six days a week to make ends meet.
It was one of his father's patients, a veteran of the Andy Kirk Band, Elwood Buchanan, who became instrumental in Davis's development as a trumpeter.
"It was Buchanan who Miles looked to when it came to developing his tone," Ajaye says.
"Miles sought to imitate the warmer cornet sound that he'd heard Buchanan play, doing away with the heavy vibrato style that was popular in the '30s."
Buchanan recruited Davis to be part of his town band, where the young musician learned everything he could about the trumpet and the theory of how music works.
At 17, he took a dare from his girlfriend to call up a local bandleader, Eddie Randall, to ask for a job.
Davis soon found himself leading Randall's dance orchestra, tasked with arranging and composing, and this trial by fire pushed him to new heights.
Bebop to Birth of the Cool
Ajaye says that when Davis discovered bebop, "the new sound coming out of New York, led by the fastidious Charlie Parker and the exuberant Dizzy Gillespie, was like nothing Miles had heard before."
"It really turned my brain," Davis told pianist Ben Sidran in 1986.
Davis met Parker and Gillespie in 1945 in St. Louis when he stood in for another trumpeter.
"I decided right there that I was going to New York so I can be around them."
To convince his parents to let him move to New York, Davis enrolled in Juilliard, a prestigious music school.
"But really, it was just a ploy to get to New York," Ajaye says.
His father sent Davis off with advice he took to heart: "Whatever you be, be a good one."
By mid-1945, Davis had dropped out of Juilliard, replacing Gillespie in the Charlie Parker quintet later that year and becoming "Bird's go-to-brass buddy," Ajaye says.
But by 1948, exacerbated by Parker's drug addictions, the pair parted ways, and Davis was looking for a new musical outlet.
For a time, Miles Davis became Charlie Parker's go-to trumpeter, but they soon drifted apart. (William P. Gottlieb/US Library of Congress)
He found it with eight other like-minded musicians in a small basement underneath a Chinese laundry.
Here, arranger Gil Evans gathered players who were enamoured with "the adventurous side of bop, but also the more lyrical and impressionistic threads of contemporary European composers," Ajaye says.
Between 1949 and 1950, the group later known as Miles Davis's Nonet released a series of sporadic singles that initially didn't draw much attention.
That all changed in 1957, when Capitol Records sought to leverage Davis's fame as one of the biggest names in jazz by releasing his back catalogue as the Birth of the Cool sessions.
The album's re‑release became an instant hit, but by then Davis had already moved miles beyond those Nonet days.
Nevertheless, Evans's orchestrating skills would leave a lasting mark on Davis's work, and the pair continued to collaborate on three more albums in the 1950s.
Iconic rise and Kind of Blue
Davis experienced drug addiction in the 1950s. During this period, he moved back to St. Louis to live with his father and eventually recovered.
Back in New York, Davis was courted by two rival record companies: Prestige and Columbia. He recorded dozens of albums for both labels with a different lineup of musicians from a quartet to a sextet.
But the dream quintet he formed at the suggestion of Columbia's George Avakian would be the group that cemented his place in history.
Some of the group's line-ups included pianist Bill Evans and tenor saxophone player John Coltrane.
Legendary saxophonist Sonny Rollins was another erstwhile member of the band.
Davis started trialling his new idea of modal jazz during the group's recording sessions of Milestones in 1958.
Inspired by pianists like Ahmad Jamal and the compositions of Maurice Ravel, Davis wanted to explore "the melodic potential of single modes or scales," Ajaye says.
"Rather than forcing musicians to stay in a specific tonal centre, modal jazz unshackles the improviser [by shifting] the focus from complex chords to a more simplistic harmonic aesthetic," Ajaye explains.
Miles Davis didn't rest on his laurels after the success of Kind of Blue. (Mosaic Records)
This was the context in which Kind of Blue, considered by many to be the pinnacle of 20th-century jazz, emerged.
"It broke new ground, signalling the end of Bebop's reign while setting the scene for the decade to come," Ajaye says.
Davis's quintet disbanded soon after the release of Kind of Blue.
Constantly on the move
For the next 30 years, Davis reinvented his sound over and over.
He also collaborated with young musicians who became jazz royalty in their own right: Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett and many more.
"Younger players were far more malleable than those who belonged to the preceding generation," Ajaye reflects.
Hancock described how Davis "wanted me to discover me."
Gary Bartz, another collaborator, recalls: "If [Miles] wanted you in that band, you were in the band."
This was in contrast to Davis's "dark prince" persona.
In 1969, Davis recorded Bitches Brew, featuring, among others, electric pianist Chick Corea.
It proved to be another of Davis's seminal albums, blending jazz, rock and funk with the new amplified electronic sounds stitched from hours of recording sessions.
"Bitch's Brew was polarizing for many of jazz's traditionalists, but to the wider populace, it was one of the defining albums of this era," Ajaye says.
In 1972, Davis broke his ankle in a car crash, which also left him with a long-term injury.
By 1975, he had all but retired.
Miles Davis's signature sound was his warm, lyrical trumpet playing. (Peter Buitelaar/Wikimedia CC)
But a meeting with his old idol Gillespie galvanised Davis to pull himself together again, according to Ajaye.
In the 1980s, Davis signed with Warner Bros. Records, releasing albums like Tutu, where bass clarinettist and producer Marcus Miller helped guide him toward a new sound.
In the final chapter of his life, Davis blended cutting‑edge synthesiser technology with orchestration techniques that harked back to his Gil Evans collaborations of the 1950s.
An Australian cameo
In 1990, Davis appeared almost by chance in an Australian movie called Dingo.
It tells the story of John Anderson, a young trumpet player who followed his dream from outback Western Australia all the way to Paris.
He was mentored by a jazz veteran, Billy Cross, played by none other than Miles Davis.
"Director Rolf De Heer himself couldn't quite believe that they could cast Miles, but his magnetic stage presence easily transferred itself to the big screen," Ajaye says.
"I was given the opportunity to meet with Miles, and he was not quite the ogre that he was meant to have been," De Heer was recorded saying.
Davis also contributed to the score of Dingo, one of his last projects before he died in 1991 at the age of 65.
Reflecting on Davis's legacy, Ajaye says:
"For much of his musical life, Miles set the terms. Really, he set the terms for himself."
