It’s said that Kind of Blue is the jazz record owned by anyone who owns only one jazz record. What’s interesting is that there seems to be no obvious equivalent for either classical or mainstream popular music, both of which have their legendary bestsellers but neither can point to a single pivotal recording by an individual artist. In the year that marks the centenary of the birth of trumpet player, composer and bandleader Miles Davis, the inevitable celebratory writings, musical tributes and rehashed recordings are already in generous supply (not that there was a dearth of such material previously), so perhaps Miles’s main achievements are more easily viewed at distance.
Miles Davis: education and early career
Born in Alton, Illinois into a land-owning professional family (a favourite boyhood pastime was riding horses on his grandfather’s farm), Miles Dewey Davis III received a typical middle-class education culminating in a year at the Juilliard School, although he abandoned his music studies when professional engagements overtook them. Despite encounters with racism at various times in his life, Miles (who always insisted on being referred to thus) had no time for the stereotype of the downtrodden negro; when presented with the idea of the blues being rooted in suffering, he simply said, paraphrasing Gershwin, ‘My daddy is rich and my momma’s good-looking. I haven’t suffered and I don’t intend to suffer. I can play the blues.’ He preferred instead to focus on the inner workings of the music that had obsessed him since childhood, a mindset that would inform his artistic development throughout his career.
His family moved to the St Louis area a year after his birth, where trumpet tuition led to the young Miles forging an early career as a musician. Unexpectedly roped into the Billy Eckstine band, he found himself sharing the bandstand with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, remaining intermittently after they had left. Already restless, this presented him with the final incentive he needed to move to New York, where he could seek out fresh opportunities. Joining Parker’s quintet in 1947, he was swept up in the creative maelstrom that would become known as bebop.
Miles Davis: bebop and recording debut
Many regarded bebop, with its complexity and often hectic pace, as a new and different music altogether, to the extent that even towards the end of the 20th century a band might present itself as playing ‘jazz and bebop’. Just short of his 19th birthday in 1945, he made his recording debut with reeds player Herbie Fields before playing on Parker’s recordings for Savoy and Dial Records.
While his contributions to these sessions have provoked as many opinions as there are critics, the signs of Miles’s developing style are clearly discernible. However, while his technique allowed him to place suitable notes in the right places, bebop was not an obvious environment for his musical thinking. He was wary of overstatement, having gravitated towards restraint, precision and informed evaluation. He famously described this as wearing both spats and a flower in your lapel, deciding you didn’t need both and then realising you didn’t need either.
Classical influences and Birth of the Cool
A combination of internal dissent and Parker’s heroin-fuelled behaviour led Miles to part company with him at the end of 1948. He subsequently became a member of the creative circle surrounding the arranger Gil Evans, who was interested in working with ideas associated with classical composition within the broad context of jazz. Evans admired the attention to detail, texture and timbral density he heard in the music of Debussy and had also absorbed ideas from a host of other composers such as Milhaud and Weill. Miles had found a kindred spirit, as had Gerry Mulligan, a youthful baritone saxophonist also possessed of the kind of arranging skills that could be brought to bear on this new approach.
The upshot was the seminal nonet recording entitled Birth of the Cool, with subsequent issues tagged as The Real… and The Complete… depending on the mixture of track sources. Credited to Miles but with much input from his associates, the innovative style and an extended instrumentation that included French horn and tuba saw a critical reception that tended in the direction of polite perplexity. The original band had a short lifespan and the album would only find true appreciation in hindsight, exacerbated by its intermittent recording schedule delaying its release until 1957. Nonetheless, Miles now had a basis for further progress.
Drug addiction and hard bop
The intervening period was one of mixed experiences. A visit to Paris in 1949, which he found inspiring and liberating, was followed by a shortage of engagements on his return to New York. Good news came in 1951, when producer Bob Weinstock, who understood where the music on Birth of the Cool had come from, signed him to his Prestige label. A period of heroin addiction was brought to an end when he returned to live with his father in 1953, allowing him to re-enter the fray with a sense of clarity and renewed energy the following year.
Feeling a need to make up for lost time, Miles recorded several albums in succession. He had become drawn in the direction of hard bop, the more straightforward but nonetheless energetic offspring of bebop that rehabilitated more conventional structures, adopted tight, funky rhythms and incorporated arrangements of popular songs, a strategy that he would make his own later in his career. This period also saw John Coltrane playing in his band, although the saxophonist was sacked in 1957 due to his own heroin addiction which he too overcame, leading to his reinstatement and his subsequent appearance of two more essential albums: Milestones in 1958 and the aforementioned Kind of Blue in 1959.
Milestones, Kind of Blue and modal jazz
Milestones retained components drawn from several areas of the trumpeter’s musical experience, with elements of the blues, swing and bebop and the music that followed it. However, it also marked the first fully gestated piece of modal jazz in the form of the title track, based around a brief, uncomplicated but memorable uptempo riff that recurs at intervals during the composition, which overall is joyously liberated yet also perfectly sculpted. Kind of Blue consolidates this approach. With typical insight, Miles described modality as a challenge to melodic invention that also avoided the dead end of improvising on a chord sequence when ‘you know at the end of 32 bars that the chords have run out’. Seasoned jazz listeners will have encountered examples of this, typically marked by a hapless player ending a solo with long single notes while waiting for the cavalry to arrive.
Anyone new to Miles’s music could do far worse than starting with these two albums before exploring his recorded timeline in either direction. He would continue to innovate, very much on his own terms, with such projects as the soundtrack to the Louis Malle film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. Dating from the same period and informed by the same modal style, the music was largely created through live improvisation inspired by footage from the film. Sketches of Spain from 1960, co-composed by Gil Evans and derived from interpretations of music by Rodrigo and de Falla, is either a brilliant example of the notional classical/jazz fusion tagged by Gunther Schuller as ‘Third Stream’ or simply nondescript, depending on who you ask. Sketches of Spain was produced by Teo Macero, whose subsequent artistic relationship with Miles has been compared to that of George Martin and The Beatles.
Miles Davis: the later years
Miles embraced electric instruments and rock rhythms from the late 1960s onwards, resulting initially in In A Silent Way and Bitches [sic] Brew, the former assured and elegant, the latter either an inspired and fearless incursion into the avant-garde or a noble/ignoble failure, again depending on who you ask. Certainly, the whole ‘electric Miles’ era has been an area of contention between traditionalists and futurists, but his methodology, rooted in a pluralist ethic that today would be regarded as musicological as much as musical, retains its own identity regardless of context.
Miles was, after all, a musician who was perfectly at ease referencing Indian music (a natural fit with his modal approach), flamenco or Stockhausen. One likeable example of his good-music-is-where-you-find-it stance is his take on Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’ on the 1985 album You’re Under Arrest, its limpid melody providing the perfect environment for the trumpeter’s sparse yet uplifting improvisations.
Miles Davis died in 1991 of pneumonia and respiratory failure exacerbated by a stroke. He was 65. It’s impossible to do more than sample his sprawling discography here and equally impossible to list all the A-list musicians associated with him, but happily there are plenty of sources for this information. However, despite his unique gifts, he was also notoriously aggressive, authoritarian and misogynistic, exemplifying Anthony Braxton’s proposal that the history of music is not exclusively the history of nice people. In very different ways, we can hopefully learn from both these aspects of Miles’s legacy.
Miles Davis: style
No vibrato Miles’s teacher Elwood Buchanan encouraged him to play without vibrato, supposedly on the grounds that ‘you gonna be shaking enough when you get old’ but added he already had his own unique style that he should continue to develop.
Favouring the midrange Rather than stretching the range of the trumpet to extremes at the cost of the instrument’s timbre, Miles would focus on the midrange, where tone, dynamics, projection and intonation could be properly controlled.
The Harmon mute This aluminium mute (pictured above) was strongly identified with Miles’s sound. The Harmon has a removable stem for producing the often comedic ‘wah-wah’ effect which Miles unsurprisingly dispensed with, saying of the resulting tone that ‘it sounds like a voice’.
A modal approach As an alternative to the energy of bebop, Miles adopted a modal style that provided scope for improvisation but with an added element of structural discipline, the open-ended results allowing the use of static harmony rather than chords as a backdrop. The distinctive nature of modal scales in general is easily demonstrated on a keyboard instrument by playing a white-notes-only seven-note scale.
