Miles Davis

Miles Dewey Davis III was born in Alton, Illinois, on the twenty-sixth of May 1926, the son of a successful dentist. He grew up in East St. Louis in comfortable middle-class circumstances and took his early musical training under the trumpeter Elwood Buchanan. He went to New York in 1944 ostensibly to study at the Juilliard School and was, within his first year, sitting in with Charlie Parker at the Three Deuces and Minton's Playhouse.

His career across the next forty-six years redefined jazz five distinct times. The Birth of the Cool sessions (1949-50) opened cool jazz. The Walkin' (1954) and Workin' / Steamin' / Cookin' / Relaxin' (1956) quintet sessions opened hard bop. Kind of Blue (1959), recorded over two days in March and April 1959 with John Coltrane (also placed in this archive), Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb, opened modal jazz; it remains the best-selling jazz album in history. The mid-1960s quintet with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams produced the most influential post-bop small-group recordings of the decade. Bitches Brew (1969) opened jazz fusion.

He won eight Grammy Awards, sold over twenty million records, and received the National Medal of the Arts (1986). His autobiography Miles (1989), written with Quincy Troupe, remains the principal first-person record of post-war American jazz.

He had four major periods of physical decline — heroin addiction in the 1950s, the car accident and surgical complications of the 1970s, the withdrawal from public performance of 1975-80, and the final illness of 1991. Each period was followed by a comeback that reorganized jazz.

He died in Santa Monica on the twenty-eighth of September 1991, age sixty-five.

He is honored here as the trumpeter who reorganized jazz five times.