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…
