Miles Davis

• 1. Introduction

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  Miles Dewey Davis III was born on the 26th of May 1926 in Alton, Illinois, to a family that owned a 200-acre estate in Arkansas with a profitable pig farm. He died on the 28th of September 1991 in Santa Monica, California, after a stroke, pneumonia and respiratory failure. Between those two dates, he helped invent bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion. No single musician shaped more of the 20th century's sound.

  By the time he was 13, his father had already bought him a second trumpet. By 24, he was a heroin addict losing his grip on everything. By his early 30s, he had recorded Kind of Blue, an album that would eventually sell more than five million copies in the United States alone. Then he walked away from all of it and kept walking forward.

  What drove a man of such singular talent to constantly demolish what he had just built? How did a child raised in an upper-class household in East St. Louis end up playing to an estimated 600,000 people at the Isle of Wight Festival? And why did he spend the last years of his life insisting that jazz, the music he had spent five decades defining, was dead? Those are the questions this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. East St. Louis to Juilliard

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  In 1935, a family friend named John Eubanks gave the nine-year-old Miles Davis his first trumpet. The gift changed everything. His teacher, Elwood Buchanan, who was a patient of Davis's father's dental practice, stressed playing without vibrato and encouraged a clear, mid-range tone. When Davis drifted toward heavy vibrato, Buchanan slapped his knuckles. Davis later said he wanted "a round sound with no attitude in it, like a round voice with not too much tremolo and not too much bass."

  His mother wanted him to play violin. His father bought him a new trumpet for his 13th birthday. The gap between those two parental visions captures something essential about Davis's early life: a household where music was serious, where competing ambitions pressed on him from all directions, and where he ultimately chose his own path.

  At East St. Louis Lincoln High School, Davis joined the marching band, entered competitions, and took lessons from Joseph Gustat, the principal trumpeter of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. He later said racial discrimination cost him prizes in those competitions, but also made him a better musician. Part of his early earnings went toward paying for his sister's education at Fisk University.

  In July 1944, Billy Eckstine's band arrived in St. Louis with Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. The band's trumpeter, Buddy Anderson, was too sick to perform, and Davis filled the spot for two weeks at Club Riviera. After playing alongside those musicians, he was certain: New York City was where he needed to be. In September 1944, he accepted his father's suggestion and enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music. He passed the audition, attended classes in music theory, piano and dictation, then spent most of his time searching the clubs of Harlem for Charlie Parker.

• 3. Birth of the Cool

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  Gil Evans's Manhattan apartment had become a gathering place for young musicians and composers who were frustrated with bebop's increasingly virtuoso demands. Davis, Max Roach, John Lewis and Gerry Mulligan were among those who met there regularly, and out of those discussions came the Miles Davis Nonet. The group was unusual for modern jazz: it included a French horn and a tuba, producing a thickly textured, almost orchestral sound. The intent was to imitate the human voice through carefully arranged compositions.

  In August 1948, Davis turned down an offer to join Duke Ellington's orchestra to focus on the nonet's rehearsals. He persuaded the Royal Roost to bill the band properly: the sign outside read "Miles Davis Nonet. Arrangements by Gil Evans, John Lewis and Gerry Mulligan."

  After signing with Capitol Records, the nonet recorded sessions in January and April 1949. The records sold little at the time. The dozen tracks were released as singles before being compiled on the 1957 album Birth of the Cool, which became a founding document of the "Cool" or "West Coast" style.

  In May 1949, Davis traveled to the Paris International Jazz Festival with the Tadd Dameron Quintet. It was his first trip abroad, and Paris affected him deeply. He said it "changed the way I looked at things forever." He felt that black jazz musicians were better respected there than in the United States. He began an affair with singer and actress Juliette Gréco, and the city would pull him back repeatedly throughout his life.

• 4. Heroin, Hardship and Hard Bop

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  After returning from Paris in mid-1949, Davis found little work and fell behind on hotel rent. Attempts were made to repossess his car. His heroin use, which had begun while he was still in his early 20s, became an expensive addiction. He later wrote that he "lost my sense of discipline, lost my sense of control over my life, and started to drift."

  A DownBeat magazine story reported his arrest for heroin possession in Los Angeles, reducing his opportunities further, though he was acquitted weeks later. In January 1951, he signed a one-year contract with Prestige Records after the label's owner, Bob Weinstock, became a fan of the nonet. Those sessions contributed to what became Miles Davis and Horns (1956) and other releases. To fund his habit, Davis also began transcribing scores for record labels and, as he later wrote, adopted the life of a hustler.

  By 1953, addiction had begun to impair his playing. A DownBeat interview in which Cab Calloway discussed Davis's drug use publicly brought what Davis called "all pain and suffering." He returned to his father's home in St. Louis for several months, then lived in Detroit for roughly six months, performing locally with Elvin Jones and Tommy Flanagan at the Blue Bird club, where Billy Mitchell led the house band.

  In February 1954, Davis returned to New York, reporting he felt good "for the first time in a long time." He had ended his addiction and joined a gym. The recordings that followed, including Walkin' (April 1954), moved away from bebop toward what a few critics consider the album that created the hard bop genre. That same year, Davis had an operation to remove polyps from his larynx. Against medical advice, he got into an argument afterward that permanently damaged his vocal cords, giving him the raspy voice that became part of his public identity for the rest of his life.

• 5. Kind of Blue and the Newport Turning Point

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  In July 1955, Davis played the Newport Jazz Festival with a lineup that included Thelonious Monk, Percy Heath, Connie Kay, Zoot Sims and Gerry Mulligan. Critics and audiences called it a festival highlight, and it drew the attention of George Avakian of Columbia Records. Davis still had one year remaining on his Prestige contract, which required four more albums. He signed with Columbia for a $4,000 advance, with the condition that his Columbia recordings remain unreleased until the Prestige agreement expired.

  To fulfill the Prestige obligation quickly, Davis and his new quintet worked through two marathon sessions in May and October 1956 that produced four LP releases. His first Columbia album, 'Round About Midnight (1956), introduced saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers. The chemistry was immediate: Davis played long, legato, melodic lines while Coltrane contrasted with energetic solos.

  In March and April 1959, Davis recorded Kind of Blue. He named it for its mood. He brought back pianist Bill Evans, around whose style the music had been planned. Both Davis and Evans were familiar with George Russell's ideas about modal jazz. Pianist Wynton Kelly appeared on only one track, "Freddie Freeloader," because Davis had neglected to tell him Evans was returning. The remaining three compositions the band saw for the first time in the studio.

  Released in August 1959, Kind of Blue received widespread radio play and strong reviews. In 2019, it achieved 5x platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America for more than five million U.S. sales. In 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring it as a national treasure, with a vote of 409-0 on the 15th of December.

  That same August, outside Birdland in New York City, police officer Gerald Kilduff told Davis to "move on" while he was escorting a woman to a taxi. Davis refused, explaining he worked at the club. Kilduff arrested him; witnesses said the officer struck Davis in the stomach without provocation. A third detective approached from behind and beat him over the head. Davis received five stitches and was charged with assaulting an officer, charges of which he was acquitted by January 1960. He later said the incident "changed my whole life and whole attitude again, made me feel bitter and cynical again when I was starting to feel good about the things that had changed in this country."

• 6. The Electric Turn and Jazz Fusion

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  In a Silent Way was recorded in a single session in February 1969. The album featured Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, Tony Williams, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul and John McLaughlin. Teo Macero pieced together its two side-long tracks from different takes recorded that day. When it was released later that year, critics accused Davis of selling out to rock audiences. The album reached number 134 on the U.S. Billboard Top LPs chart, his first album since My Funny Valentine to chart there at all.

  For the double album Bitches Brew (1970), Davis assembled an even larger group, using multitrack recording in new ways: long compositions, some exceeding twenty minutes, built from spliced takes and tape loops. The album peaked at No. 35 on the Billboard Album chart. By 2003, it had sold one million copies. In March 1970, Davis began performing as the opening act for rock bands. He shared a Fillmore East bill with the Steve Miller Band and Neil Young with Crazy Horse on the 6th and the 7th of March. On the 29th of August 1970, he performed at the Isle of Wight Festival before an estimated 600,000 people, the largest audience of his career.

  The music grew more experimental and more contested. On the Corner (1972) blended the influence of avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who had been introduced to Davis by composer-arranger Paul Buckmaster, with funk elements. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard jazz chart but only No. 156 on the Top 200 Albums chart. Davis believed Columbia marketed it to the wrong audience. "The music was meant to be heard by young black people," he said, "but they just treated it like any other jazz album."

  In October 1972, Davis broke both ankles in a car crash and relied on painkillers and cocaine to manage the pain. By the time he recorded two sets in Osaka on the 1st of February 1975, he was relying on alcohol, codeine and morphine to get through the shows. Those performances became the albums Agharta and Pangaea. After appearances at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1975 and the Schaefer Music Festival in New York in September, Davis dropped out of music entirely.

• 7. Return, Controversy and Last Years

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  Davis spent his hiatus in his Upper West Side brownstone, which he called a wreck. He later wrote that "Sex and drugs took the place music had occupied in my life." In December 1976, Columbia was reluctant to renew his contract, but after his lawyer opened talks with United Artists, Columbia matched the competing offer, establishing the Miles Davis Fund to pay him regularly. Only pianist Vladimir Horowitz held similar status on the CBS Records roster.

  His first post-hiatus studio appearance came in May 1980. The Man with the Horn (1981) received poor reviews despite selling well. In January 1982, while actress Cicely Tyson, whom Davis had married in November 1981, was working in Africa, Davis suffered a stroke that temporarily paralyzed his right hand. After three months of treatment with a Chinese acupuncturist, he was able to play again. Davis credited Tyson with his recovery and, at her encouragement, began to draw and paint, a pursuit he continued for the rest of his life.

  The comeback period garnered Davis his highest level of commercial recognition. You're Under Arrest (1985) included cover versions of "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson's "Human Nature." Tutu (1986), made with Marcus Miller, was the first album on which Davis used programmed synthesizers, sampling and drum loops. Its front cover was a photographic portrait by Irving Penn, and it won a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist in 1987.

  In December 1984, while in Denmark to accept the Leonie Sonning Music Prize, Davis was so impressed by the contemporary classical piece "Aura," written for the occasion by trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, that he returned to Denmark in early 1985 to record a full album of it.

  On the 8th of July 1991, Davis appeared at the Montreux Jazz Festival with a band and orchestra conducted by Quincy Jones, performing arrangements from his albums with Gil Evans. It was the first time in three decades he had performed that material. A concert two days later in Paris, billed as "Miles and Friends," brought together musicians from across his career, including John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock and Joe Zawinul. French Culture Minister Jack Lang awarded him a knighthood, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, calling him "the Picasso of Jazz." His final live performance came on the 25th of August 1991, at the Hollywood Bowl in California.

• 8. Legacy in Dispute

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  In 2016, a digital publication called The Pudding found that 2,452 Wikipedia pages mention Davis, with over 286 citing him as an influence. Rolling Stone magazine described him as "the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century." In 2006, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which called him "one of the key figures in the history of jazz." The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences honored him with eight Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and three Grammy Hall of Fame Awards.

  But the legacy has never been settled. Critic Stanley Crouch, in 1990, labeled Davis "the most brilliant sellout in the history of jazz." Wynton Marsalis said in a 1982 DownBeat interview: "They call Miles's stuff jazz. That stuff is not jazz, man." Davis was not entirely unmoved by that critique. He said: "Jazz is dead... it's finito! It's over and there's no point apeing the shit."

  Davis himself had little patience for his own earlier work. When singer Shirley Horn urged him in 1990 to revisit the ballads and modal tunes of the Kind of Blue period, he replied: "Nah, it hurts my lip." He compared returning to those recordings to "warmed-over turkey."

  At his funeral on the 5th of October 1991, at St. Peter's Lutheran Church on Lexington Avenue in New York City, around 500 people gathered inside while fans stood in the rain outside. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx with one of his trumpets, near the grave of Duke Ellington. In 2025, Reservoir Media acquired the rights to Davis's publishing catalog, a reminder that the arguments over what his music means, and who it belongs to, are nowhere near finished.