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ALBUMA Catalogue of Jazz: Miles DavisMiles Davis
Albums by Miles Davis
ALBUMA Catalogue of Jazz: Miles DavisMiles Davis
ALBUMTurnaround: Rare Miles From The Complete On The Corner SessionsMiles Davis
ALBUMRubberbandMiles Davis
ALBUMEverything's BeautifulMiles Davis & Robert Glasper
ALBUMMiles Davis and HornsMiles Davis
ALBUMAt Newport 1958Miles Davis
ALBUMPanthalassa - The Music of Miles Davis 1969-1974 Reconstruction & Mix Translation By Bill LaswellMiles Davis
ALBUMIn Paris Festival International de Jazz May, 1949Miles Davis
ALBUMDoo-BopMiles Davis
ALBUMDingo (Selections from the Motion Picture Soundtrack)Miles Davis & Michel Legrand
Miles Davis's Popular Music Videos
So What
Miles Davis
Maiysha (So Long) (feat. Erykah Badu)
Miles Davis & Robert Glasper
So Emotional (feat. Lalah Hathaway)
Miles Davis
So What
Miles Davis
Maiysha (So Long) [feat. Erykah Badu] [Extended Version]
Miles Davis & Robert Glasper
Maiysha (So Long) [feat. Erykah Badu] [Extended Version]
Miles Davis & Robert Glasper
It's About That Time/The Theme (Live In Copenhagen, 1969)
Miles Davis
Boplicity
Miles Davis
What's Love Got To Do With It
Miles Davis
Moon Dreams
Miles Davis
Artist Playlists
Miles Davis Essentials
The dynamo who revolutionized the world of jazz again and again.
Miles Davis: Flipped
Jazz's most iconic trumpeter gets sampled, lifted, fused, and remixed.
Miles Davis: Chill
Lean back and relax with some of their mellowest cuts.
Miles Davis: Deep Cuts
The trumpeter turns downright fierce on his fusion work.
Miles Davis: Live
The studio perfectionist's explorations blossomed on stage.
Artist Biography
Miles Davis had a story about a big dinner he went to at the White House in the late ‘80s. Lots of powerful people, almost none of them Black. A politician’s wife—he didn't say who—asked if he thought America truly values jazz. There’s a back-and-forth. But the gist, Davis explained, was that white Americans were too stubborn and proud to ever let Black people win. The woman bristled. What’d he do that was so great to get invited to dinner at the White House anyway, she asked. He changed music five or six times, he said—what had she ever done other than be white?
True or not (his autobiography is filled with this stuff), it speaks to Davis’ conception of his legacy. Tender, vicious, understated, or relentlessly confrontational, his music captures a life in constant creative flux, from the cool of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s (Birth of the Cool), through the bop and modal experiments of the ‘50s (Miles Ahead, Kind of Blue); the electric density of the ‘70s (A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Agartha) to the almost-pop of the ‘80s (You’re Under Arrest). He could pitch jazz as self-consciously sophisticated as orchestral music (Sketches of Spain) and as direct and colloquial as funk (On the Corner).
He was born in 1926 and raised in East St. Louis, Illinois, the son of a dentist and a music teacher—solidly middle-class professions that Davis, who came up though the dissipated, supposedly alleviated racism of the Jim Crow era, never let people forget. (Studying at the Institute of Musical Arts, later known as Julliard, Davis corrected a white music history professor who said that Black people played the blues because they were poor and had to pick cotton, saying that his dad was rich and didn’t have to pick cotton a day in his life, and he still played the blues—what about that?)
If his band members changed music in their own rights—John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans—it’s in part because Davis prized individual expression above all. Asked in 1986 about some of the foundational songs in jazz—“I Got Rhythm,” “Body and Soul”—he said they were done at the right time and the right place by the right people, but that was over now—same goes for “Kind of Blue” or “So What.” What he had was better: the present.
Hometown
Alton, IL, United States
Genre
Jazz