Davis, Miles Dewey, III

(b. 26 May 1926 in Alton, Illinois; d. 28 March 1991 in Santa Monica, California), jazz trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and painter who helped introduce the neo-bop and modal styles of music.

Davis was one of three children born to Miles Dewey Davis, II, a dental surgeon, and Cleota Henry, a homemaker. Davis’s father established his practice in East St. Louis, Illinois, and from the age of one Davis was raised and educated there. Davis’s youth was spent in relatively affluent circumstances. He spent vacation times on his father’s 200-acre hog farm near Millstadt, Illinois. From early adolescence Davis came to know big-city nightlife in St. Louis, Missouri, across the Mississippi River from East St. Louis.

Miles Davis had the favor of his father to the point of indulgence, and from him he inherited a strong sense of family pride predicated on three generations of African American success against oppressive odds. Davis’s mother had social pretensions that often rankled her husband and, through him, her son.

Davis began studying trumpet at fourteen, under the tutelage of a dance-band musician named Elwood Buchanan who was indebted to Dr. Davis for dental work. Davis’s parents separated at this time. Davis’s father took the boy’s side in favoring the trumpet over the violin, which his mother preferred. The rancor between Davis’s parents and his close identification with his father may have been the source of the deep-seated misogyny in Davis’s relations with women. In any event, the choice of Buchanan as his teacher, arbitrary as it might have seemed, proved fateful. Buchanan had played with touring orchestras, including Andy kirk’s Clouds of Joy, and he knew about the new musical currents that would crystallize into the bebop revolution. Buchanan made Davis aware of harmonic departures from conventional scales and encouraged him to play with a crisp, vibratoless tone. Both traits would eventually inspire admiration for and emulation of Davis’s mature style.

Davis played professional gigs in St. Louis starting at age sixteen. He was nicknamed “Little” because of his stature; he was only five-foot seven and weighed about 135 pounds. He had a penchant for sharp, conservative attire that led him to favor Brooks Brothers suits and spit-polished oxfords with elevated soles from adolescence until 1967, when he began wearing dashikis, jumpsuits, thick-soled clogs, and other bohemian attire.

At the age of eighteen Davis’s high-school romance with Irene Birth resulted in the birth of his first child in 1944. The relationship continued after he moved to New York City, where his second child was born in 1946. Davis and Birth had a third child in 1950, but Davis later denied paternity.

After graduating from Lincoln High School in East St. Louis, Davis moved to New York City in 1944, ostensibly to study at the Juilliard School of Music. Instead, he gravitated toward the jazz clubs playing bebop. He dropped out of Juilliard in his second term to devote himself to jazz, and he developed a close musical association with the saxophonist and bebop genius Charlie (“Bird”) Parker. Davis recorded with Parker frequently between 1945 and 1948 and played as the second horn in the front line of Parker’s quintets in both Hollywood and New York City during the same period.

Davis’s natural proclivities as a trumpeter ran contrary to the bebop style. He favored ballad tempos and he excelled at middle-register melodic variations that used understatement eloquently. In 1948 he led a nine-piece band tailored to that style, with fastidious arrangements by Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, and John Lewis. Although the band, known as the Miles Davis Nonet, played only two weeks (in September 1948 at the Royal Roost in New York City) and recorded only twelve three-minute sides (in 1949 and 1950, collected as The Birth of the Cool), it founded the style known as cool jazz. Hallmarks of the style were legato voicings with orderly, thoughtful solos in arranged contexts. Davis’s nonet recordings profoundly influenced jazz in the 1950s, contributing to its international dissemination as concert music accessible to a broad audience in college auditoriums, symphony halls, and festival tents.

Even as Davis’s early achievements as a leader were establishing him as an influential figure during the period from 1949 to 1954, his own musical talents suffered a sharp decline while he struggled with a debilitating heroin addiction. He finally brought his addiction under control by locking himself in a room at his father’s farmhouse and putting himself through cold turkey withdrawal. He emerged to become the most influential stylist and the most admired instrumentalist in jazz in the postwar era.

Davis quickly attained his apogee, leading quintets and sextets from 1955 to 1960 that featured John Coltrane on tenor saxophone. Davis displayed a wistful, introverted, expressive lyricism especially on ballads such as “Round Midnight” (1955), “Jazz Track” (1956), and “Someday My Prince Will Come” (1961). He also introduced modal structures, in which improvised choruses were based on scales rather than chord sequences (“Milestones” 1958; “Kind of Blue” 1959), and he soloed in elegant concerti grossi orchestrated by Gil Evans, such as “Miles Ahead” (1956), “Porgy and Bess” (1958), and “Sketches of Spain” (1960). All of these recordings rank among the most abiding accomplishments of modern jazz.

During the late 1950s, Davis was also enjoying a period of relative calm in his personal life. In 1955 he signed a lucrative contract with Columbia Records that provided him with worldwide distribution for his music and a measure of financial security; the relationship lasted for thirty years, ending when he signed with Warner Brothers in 1985. He married the dancer Frances Taylor on 21 December 1960. They renovated a five-story brownstone on West Seventy-seventh Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Davis’s children came from St. Louis to live with them.

In the early 1960s jazz went through a period of audacious experimentation, but at first Davis held to the musical course he had set. Then, in 1963, he formed a quintet of brilliant young musicians—with Wayne Shorter on saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums—that led him into radical modal experiments (“Miles Smiles” 1965; “Nefertiti” 1967). He played with the quintet for five years. With Davis’s imprimatur, the music of this quintet found a steadfast audience, even as jazz, like opera, ballet, symphony, and other forms of serious music, struggled against the burgeoning rock and folk waves of a surprisingly vital pop music. The adventurous style of Davis’s quintet, combining neo-bop elements with harmonic exploration, established what has become the main current of contemporary jazz.

Davis, as characteristically restless in his artistic life as in his personal life, moved his music in yet another direction. In 1968, he began fusing jazz harmonies with rock instrumentation and rhythms to become the most influential exemplar of the style known as jazz-rock fusion (“In a Silent Way” 1969; “Live-Evil” 1970). In recording studios and on stages, he led bands featuring electric guitars, electric keyboards, synthesizers (which he himself began playing during this period), electric bass, drums, and assorted percussion instruments, setting up a wall of percussive sound against which he unloosed declamatory wails on his amplified trumpet, often with electronic “wah-wah” effects. This music found initial commercial success; the double-LP recording Bitches Brew (1970) was Davis’s best-selling record for over twenty years, until it was overtaken posthumously by Kind of Blue (1959), his bona fide masterpiece from an earlier period.

Other changes accompanied Davis’s adoption of fusion music. Davis began dressing in colorful robes and batik tunics. His performances became continuous, unbroken recitals, segueing between tunes with intervals of dense funk rhythms. In both his musical direction and his personal tastes he was influenced by the soul singer Betty Mabry, whom he married on 30 September 1968 and divorced the next year. (His marriage to Frances Taylor ended in divorce in 1968 but it had effectively ended some four years earlier.) In 1970 his four-year off-and-on relationship with Marguerite Eskridge resulted in the birth of a son, Erin Davis. In 1978 Davis was imprisoned for failing to support the child, but ten years later Erin was living with Davis in Malibu, California, and he was named the main beneficiary in Davis’s will.

Davis suffered from sickle-cell anemia, which gave him acute arthritic symptoms and led to hip-replacement operations, brittle bones (he broke both ankles in a car accident in 1972), and other ailments. By the 1970s, he was consuming large quantities of analgesics and other drugs, especially cocaine. In 1975 he retired for six years and became reclusive, devoting himself by his own description to a cocaine habit that cost $500 a day and (in his own words) to “kinky sex and other weird sick shit.”

Davis resumed his performance career with a concert at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City as part of the 1981 Kool Jazz Festival. His health appeared to improve under the influence of his third wife, the actress Cicely Tyson, whom he married on Thanksgiving Day in 1981 at the home of the actor and comedian Bill Cosby. Tyson urged him into therapy with acupuncturists and other specialists. For the remaining ten years of his life he led bands of young, often rock-trained, musicians on commercially successful international tours. His music became simplistic, based on melodic riffs that he played repetitively over lush synthesized chords. On stage he wore baggy jumpsuits, out-sized sunglasses, and berets. His custom-made Martin trumpets were black enameled or red enameled, with a portable microphone attached to the bell that allowed him to stump around the stage in a restless trek. His performances became exhibitions of shadow, noise, and antics. He teased ovations from his young audiences by raising his pant-legs to show his bright-red cowboy boots or chugging liter bottles of mineral water.

As his music grew ever more trite in his waning years, Davis discovered a remarkable passion for painting. He had begun sketching with felt pens and charcoal as part of Tyson’s therapy regime, and his interest quickly extended to oils and acrylics. He pursued his art long after his and Tyson’s acrimonious divorce in 1989. His considerable artistic talent, abetted by his musical fame, resulted in gallery shows in the United States, Spain, Germany, and Japan, as well as a handsome folio entitled The Art of Miles Davis (1991).

Davis was often hospitalized in the 1980s and early 1990s for various ailments—arthritis, diabetes, gallstones, heart palpitations, liver infection, bleeding ulcer—most of which resulted from his decades of drug addiction. Tabloids and other sources reported that he was suffering from AIDS but the reports were never corroborated. He died in Santa Monica on 28 September 1991. The official causes were pneumonia, stroke, and respiratory failure.

Despite a turbulent, quixotic personal life, Davis managed to harness his creative impulses in ways that helped fulfill the potential of jazz as concert music and expanded its grammar in often unexpected directions. During the years of the bebop revolution, Davis apprenticed under the greatest innovators, and after that he led jazz through no fewer than four stylistic changes. Cool jazz in the early 1950s restored order and textural richness that had been sacrificed by the pyrotechnical excesses of bebop. Neo-bop (or hard bop), beginning around 1954, restored the blues as the primary jazz form and toughened the rhythmic base. The modal experiments of the 1960s freed improvisers from predictable harmonic resolutions based on chord sequences and challenged them, as Davis said it would, to develop their melodic imaginations in freer contexts. The fusion of jazz with electronic instruments and rock (or funk) rhythms proved more ephemeral, initially raising hopes for a productive amalgam but stalling largely because of its predictability. The mainstream of contemporary jazz diffuses from Davis’s music in his peak years, the neo-bop and modal styles that he helped to introduce and influentially developed. The best of his recorded legacy, which began in 1945 and was sustained for forty-six years, with consummations abounding in the long period from 1954 to 1971, sounds so fresh that it remains among the best-selling jazz music years after his death. Davis’s musical influence remains audible in both the sounds and the styles of the best young musicians.

Miles’s autobiography, written with Quincey Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (1989), is highly personal and often shocking in Davis’s casual references to beating his wives, tangling with managers, and pursuing drugs; this is self-inflicted tabloid journalism with little indication of the author’s stature as a musician. Miles Davis and Scott Gutterman, The Art of Miles Davis (1991), is a beautiful coffee table book with full-color plates of about seventy of Davis’s paintings. Bill Cole, Miles Davis: A Musical Biography (1974), is a spotty biography, notable because of the author’s affection for Davis’s music. The British jazz trumpeter Ian Carr highlights his narrative of the main events of Davis’s life with his knowledge of trumpet technique in Miles Davis: A Biography (1982). Eric Nisenson, ’Round About Midnight: A Portrait of Miles Davis (1996), is concerned more with Davis’s style than with his music and more with his image than his life, but is succinct and highly readable. Ken Vail, ed., Miles’ Diary: The Life of Miles Davis 1947-61 (1996), is a chronology of Davis’s early career with reproductions of clippings and photographs. Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis (1998), was originally published as two volumes in 1986, but the meticulously-detailed revised edition is compiled in one volume with an additional chapter on the last decade of Davis’s life. Gary Carner, ed., The Miles Davis Companion (1996), is a collection of articles and documents about Davis, and a useful complement to Bill Kirchner, ed., A Miles Davis Reader (1997), another collection of articles and documents. Quincey Troupe, Miles and Me (2000), is a personal account of the author’s experiences with the irascible trumpeter when he was supposed to be helping Davis assemble his autobiography. Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (2000), is a detailed account of the recording of the 1959 Kind of Blue album by Davis, with his sextet that included John Coltrane, Julian (“Cannonball“) Adderley, and Bill Evans.

Jack Chambers