First, here’s Leroy Neiman’s artwork for the aforementioned 2023 JAM poster:
Over the years, Davis’ image has graced hundreds of posters and paintings. Here’s a sampling.
Some folks may not be aware that in his later years, Davis took up painting. His website has a gallery of his work.
His heirs maintain his website, which includes a full biography and timeline.
His birth date was May 26, 1926 and he was named Miles Dewey Davis III by his father—a college-educated dentist who also ran a profitable pig farm, and was a upstanding “race man” to use the parlance of the day: a proud African American. From him, Miles learned to never look upon the color of his skin as a detriment. He credited his equally accomplished mother, Cleota Henry Davis, who played violin and gave lessons on the organ, for a tenacious, independent spirit and taste in clothes. She also gave him two 78rpm recordings that he treasured and that started him on his musical path: one by Duke Ellington and the other by Art Tatum.
Miles grew up in a racially mixed, middle-class neighborhood in East St. Louis. The Mississippi River was walking distance in one direction and his school was in the other, and he received a strict upbringing; education was an unquestioned necessity, and a college degree was the goal. His earliest musical memories include the country blues and gospel he heard when visiting his paternal grandfather in rural Arkansas, and the popular black hits of his day that he caught on late night radio. In the early 1930s, that meant big bands and swing, the sounds of Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong.
[…]By the age of 12, music became Miles’ primary focus and his father bought him a trumpet over his mother’s objections; she preferred he take up the violin. A trumpet student during the 1930s could not have asked for a better locale than the St. Louis area—the city was already known for its rich tradition of brass players. All benefited from being just upriver from New Orleans; some had been schooled by German immigrants who shared a deep understanding of the instrument.
RELATED STORY: Black Music Sunday: Looking back to Black musicians who blew their horns in St. Louis
The National Endowment for the Arts picks up the story:
In the fall of 1944 Davis took a scholarship to attend the Juilliard School, a convenient passport to New York. It didn’t take him long to immerse himself in the New York scene and he began working 52nd Street gigs alongside Charlie Parker in 1945. Soon, Davis found work with Coleman Hawkins and the big bands of Billy Eckstine and Benny Carter.
During the late 1940s, a number of musical contemporaries began to meet and jam regularly at the small apartment of arranger-pianist Gil Evans. Among them were saxophonists Gerry Mulligan and Lee Konitz, and pianist John Lewis. Out of this group of musicians, Davis formed the nonet to record his first major musical statement, Birth of the Cool. In addition to the standard piano, bass, and drums rhythm section, Davis’ nonet horn section used French horn and tuba along with trombone and alto and baritone saxophones, lending the band a unique harmonic sound.
In case you are wondering, a “nonet” is defined as “a combination of nine instruments or voices, also: a musical composition for such a combination.”
Davis can be heard on recordings with many other musicians, starting at age 19; check out his amazing and lengthy discography from the Jazz Discography Project.
It’s important to listen to his early efforts as a bandleader to be able to recognize how fast he grew in stature. His 1951 “New Sounds” album was one of (if not his earliest) release heading his own group, comprised of Davis on trumpet, Jackie McLean on alto saxophone, Sonny Rollins on tenor saxophone, Walter Bishop Jr. on piano, Tommy Potter on double bass, and Art Blakey on drums.
It was with the 1957 release of “Birth of the Cool” that Davis made his first permanent mark in jazz history.
From the YouTube video notes:
Birth of the Cool is a compilation album by American jazz musician Miles Davis, released in February or March 1957 on Capitol Records.[1][2][3] It compiles eleven tracks recorded by Davis’s nonet for the label over the course of three sessions during 1949 and 1950.[4]Featuring unusual instrumentation and several notable musicians, the music consisted of innovative arrangements influenced by classical music techniques such as polyphony, and marked a major development in post-bebop jazz. As the title suggests, these recordings are considered seminal in the history of cool jazz. Most of them were originally released in the 10-inch 78-rpm format and are all approximately three minutes long.
From the Davis website’s discussion of the album:
Birth of the Cool was the most important stylistic step to follow after bebop—generating an entirely new wave of playing that influenced a new generation in the early 1950s. It started as a way of finding a way to meld the polyphony and other modern classical ideas (discordance, impressionism, unusual instrumentation) with the harmonic licenses pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Its reserved, emotional affect was its most recognized aspect: a laid-back reprieve from the unfettered frenetic energy of bebop that seemed a perfect fit for the insouciant, dark-sunglasses-at-midnight spirit that was shared by the likes of Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz and other purveyors of the Cool jazz sound.
Birth of the Cool was born in a series of rehearsals that began in 1947 in a small basement apartment on 55th Street: Miles was in charge, leading a crew of like-minded musicians. The musicians who popped in and out of that basement band represented the cream of the next generation of jazz modernists: Davis’ old friends George Russell and John Lewis, Lee Konitz, Kai Winding, Mike Zwerin, Al Haig, Max Roach, Gunther Schuller, Al McKibbon and many others. Some—like Mulligan and Konitz—had been in a big band led by pianist Claude Thornhill who had developed a unique sound that drew generously from 20th Century classical textures and colors. The apartment was rented by arranger Gil Evans, another Thornhill alumni, who helped give shape to the music.
The nine-man group they finally settled on was a reduced version of the jazz-band-cum-orchestra-brass Thornhill model: trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, piano, bass and drums. “We wanted that sound but . . . as small as possible, “ Davis noted, adding: “I looked at the group like it was a choir . . . I wanted the instruments to sound like human voices.”
Jazz aficionados are all aware of the brilliance of Thelonious Monk’s 1944 composition “Round Midnight.”
RELATED STORY: The singular genius of Thelonious Monk
In 1957, Davis recorded “Round About Midnight,” with alto and tenor saxophonists Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, drummer Philly Joe Jones, bassist Paul Chambers, and pianist Red Garland. The album opens with Monk’s tune.
Thom Jurek’s review for All Music is a rave.
Besides the obvious lyrical and harmonic beauty of “Round About Midnight” that is arguably its definitive version even over Monk‘s own, there are the edges of Charlie Parker‘s “Au Leu-Cha” with its Bluesology leaping from every chord change in Red Garland‘s left hand. Coltrane‘s solo here too is notable for its stark contrast to Davis’ own: he chooses an angular tack where he finds the heart of the mode and plays a melody in harmonic counterpoint to the changes but never sounds outside. Cole Porter‘s “All of You” has Davis quoting from Louis Armstrong‘s “Basin Street Blues” in his solo that takes out the tune, and Coltrane has never respected a melody so much. But it’s in “Bye-Bye Blackbird” that we get to hear the band gel as a unit, beginning with Davis playing through the melody, muted and sweet, slightly flatted out until he reaches the harmony on the refrain and begins his solo on a high note. Garland is doing more than comping in the background; he’s slipping chord shapes into those interval cracks and shifting them as the rhythm section keeps “soft time.” When Coltrane moves in for his break, rather than Davis’ spare method, he smatters notes quickly all though the melodic body of the tune and Garland has to compensate harmonically, moving the mode and tempo up a notch until his own solo can bring it back down again. Which he does with a gorgeous all-blues read of the tune utilizing first one hand and then both hands to create fat harmonic chords to bring Davis back in to close it out. It’s breathtaking how seamless it all is.
“Blue in Green” is the third tune on Davis’ 1959 album, “Kind of Blue” and is one of my favorite ballads, with Miles Davis on trumpet, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on double bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums.
It’s lyrical.
Part of the Davis “mystique” was not just listening to him, but also seeing him play—always so very cool, even now. The official video for “So What,” recorded on April 2, 1959, currently has 27 million views on YouTube.
Years later, his “cool” attire would attract the attention of my friend Betty Mabry, who briefly became Betty Davis, his second wife.
In 1960, Columbia Records released Davis’ epic “Sketches in Spain” album, which was one of my family’s top picks from the Columbia Record Club we belonged to.
The uniquely creative collaboration between Miles Davis and Gil Evans has already resulted in two extraordinarily evocative Columbia albums-Miles Ahead (CL 1041) and Porgy and Bess (CL 1274/CS 8085). Of the former, British critic Max Harrison wrote: “These scores represent the full expression of Evans’ powers. In elaboration and richness of resource they surpass anything previously attempted in big band jazz and constitute the only wholly original departure in that field outside of Ellington’s work …. In any given chord careful consideration is given to the best instrument to play each constituent note. The weight of that instrument is most sensitively calculated in relation both to the others used and to the particular effect the chord is meant to have.”
Porgy and Bess was, in a sense, even more challenging because the score was so familiar. Miles, however, played so strikingly from inside the music that I’m convinced the Davis-Evans version of the score is the most expressive yet recorded. In Sketches from Spain, the two have gone on to challenge themselves even further. A brooding, dramatic Spanish sound and feeling pervade all the works on this record. Davis, I believe, has rarely if ever soloed with such concentration of emotion, as in several sections of this album particularly in Concierto de Aranjuez and Saeta. What is most remarkable is the surprising authenticity of phrasing and timbre with which he plays. It is as if Miles had been born of Andalusian gypsies but, instead of picking up the guitar, had decided to make a trumpet the expression of his cante hondo (“deep song”). And Evans also indicates a thorough absorption of the Spanish musical temper which he has transmuted into his own uncompromisingly personal style.
The album came about because, when Miles was on the West Coast early in 1959, a friend had played him a recording of Concierto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra by the contemporary Spanish composer, Joaquin Rodrigo (ML 5345). “After listening to it for couple of weeks,” Miles said later, “I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Then when Gil and I decided to do this album, I played him the record and he liked it. As we usually do, we planned the program first by ourselves for about two months. I work out something; he takes it home and works on it some more; and then we figure out how we’re going to do it. He can read my mind and I can read his.”
Here’s the full album:
Another beautiful ballad (on an album of the same name) is “Someday My Prince Will Come.” The album cover is graced by Davis’ first wife, ballerina Frances Taylor Davis.
The tune is from Walt Disney’s 1937 classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and written by Larry Morey (lyrics) and Frank Churchill (music). I doubt either of them imagined their tune would become a jazz classic.
I’m going to close here, knowing that there are many more miles of Davis’ music to explore, notably his later shift into jazz fusion and funk. However, I’ll leave it up to you, dear readers, to post your favorites in the comments.
Denise Oliver Velez
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