How Miles Davis Shaped Jazz Music

Miles Davis
Miles Davis’ career began while he was still in high school living with his family in St. Louis. He had been given a trumpet at an early age and a friend of the family encouraged Miles to play the instrument without vibrato, “which was contrary to the common style used by trumpeters such as Louis Armstrong” (“Miles Davis Biography”). This encouragement gave Miles the confidence and ability to develop a unique sound, different from what the other major players were doing. He played trumpet for St. Louis bands, became a father, and—when Charlie Parker visited the city on a tour—Miles was invited to perform on stage with Parker as Parker’s trumpet player was sick. Miles filled in for a number of days until Charlie and his group went on with their tour (“Miles Davis Biography”). Miles knew then that he had to follow in the footsteps of the greats and go to New York. His father persuaded him to at least attend Juliard in New York to learn music theory (Macnie). Davis did so for a little while, but Davis’ hero was Charlie Parker and Davis scoured Harlem looking for the jazz musician—and when he found him, he quit school and devoted himself full-time to playing in the jazz clubs, ultimately replacing Dizzy Gillespie in Parker’s band.
Miles believed that “the way you change and help music is by tryin’ to invent new ways to play” (“Miles Davis Biography”). In other words, Miles was an innovator, and his time in New York and in Parker’s circle helped him to meet various other performers, with whom he would develop the new bebop sound in jazz—a faster, more improvisational sound that would characterized jazz in the mid-century. In 1946, Miles made his first record with the Miles Davis Sextet. And three years later, Miles was pushing the envelope and boundaries of jazz still further: he put together a nine-piece band that used players on the French horn, the tuba and the trombone. It was like his early days playing in St. Louis and learning from the trumpeter of the St. Louis Symphony Orhestra, Joe Gustat, which surely influenced Miles’ ear for music and diverse instruments, even though he told the young trumpet player that he “was the worst player he’d ever heard”—a dig that also surely motivated Miles to be even more innovative (Craig). It was during this period that Miles worked on the Birth of the Cool, which contributed to the cool jazz movement and pushed jazz in a new direction again—and again Miles was at the forefront of it all (“Miles Davis Biography”).
Unable to steer clear of drugs, however, Miles ran into difficulty in his personal life, which eventually impacted his professional life as a jazz musician at the musical frontier of the jazz movement. He found it difficult to perform in public because of his substance abuse, and though he still did some recordings in the early 1950s, his impact in the public arena was muted. Yet, by 1954, Davis was back on the wagon, performing “Round Midnight” in public, which caught the attention of Columbia Records. Back in the spotlight again, Miles formed a new band with John Coltrane, Paul Chambers and Red Garland (“Miles Davis Biography”).
In the 1959, Davis released Kind of Blue, which has been described as the best selling jazz album of all time and an album on which he “dispensed with chords as the basis for improvisation, instead favoring modal scales and tone centers” (Macnie). Throughout the 1950s, Davis had ranged from experimenting with more complex arrangements to going the minimalist route and composing more simple fare. He introduced cool, hard bop, and modal jazz to the world, showing great range and taste for expanding and creating new blues and jazz sounds, slowing down the music and making the beats harder as in hard bop, or encouraging more spontaneity in the music and letting the impresarios of the day shine.
The 1960s followed with Miles once again pushing the boundaries of jazz, this time with a new quintet of Ron Carter on Bass, Herbie Hancock on piano, Tony Williams on drums and George Coleman on sax before Wayne Shorter took over in the position in 1965. This group blurred the boundaries between where one song ended and another began, letting the sounds flow and ebb into one another so that it was like a continuous musical dream.
Throughout these decades, Miles met and married a number of different women, each of whom impacted him in some way—whether it was to help him with his drug addictions or introducing him to new sounds like the rock of the 1960s that was capturing the imaginations of the young people. Miles developed the jazz fusion sound, which combined jazz with rock: his album Bitches Brew, recorded in 1969, landed Miles on the cover of the Rolling Stone—and while it alienated jazz purists who admired Miles’ earlier music, it helped once again to push the boundaries of jazz. As always, Miles was an innovator and experimenter, and his music helped to inspire others like Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter and John McLaughlin (“Miles Davis Biography”). Miles continued innovating into the 1970s and 1980s, covering pop songs by Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper and giving them his own spin (“Miles Davis Biography”).
Miles’ insistence on always pushing the art form attracted new talent his way and opened them up to discovering new sounds that they would then go on to produce. Miles heard everything—from his earliest days, he had been enamored of jazz but he always kept an open ear to what others were doing and sought to build and expand on it and make it into something new and interesting that all could enjoy.

References
Craig. “Miles Davis: The Complete Illustrated History: Book Review.” Pop! Blerd,
2012. http://popblerd.com/2012/12/12/miles-davis-the-complete-illustrated-history-book-review/
Macnie, Jim. “Miles Davis Bio.” Rolling Stone, 2018.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/miles-davis/biography
“Miles Davis Biography.” Biography, 2018.
https://www.biography.com/people/miles-davis-9267992