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The space reserved for Miles Davis in the pantheon of 20th-century music is not simply because he mastered jazz, but because he refused to let it stand still. As musicians and fans mark the centenary of his birth , Davis’s work still feels limitless. “I always thought that music had no boundaries,” he wrote in his 1989 autobiography, “no limits to where it could grow and go, no restrictions on creativity.” Davis repeatedly dismantled the sound he had helped invent – embracing the electric age in 1968, much as Bob Dylan had in folk.
Davis moved to New York as an 18-year-old after hearing Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. While bebop prized speed, Davis preferred restraint and precision – spearheading cool jazz. By 1988, now the grand old man of jazz, he was playing trumpet with Prince, whom he remarked could be the “new Duke Ellington of our time if he just keeps at it”. Such was his refusal to be pigeonholed, he hated the word “jazz”. Whatever it was, Davis reasoned, had to evolve: absorbing funk, rock, African rhythms and electronica to emerge altered again.
Davis believed innovation was how tradition survived. In 1949, with the Birth of the Cool sessions, he filtered bebop through a softer lens; a decade later came the modal masterpiece Kind of Blue, which the Guardian’s jazz critic rated as Davis’s greatest work. Part of that rebirth owed much to his marriage to the dancer Frances Taylor. She helped transform Davis from a heroin-ravaged sideman, overshadowed commercially by the photogenic Chet Baker, into a figure of elegance and control. Yet the reinvention didn’t last. Taylor eventually left, worn down by Davis’s violence and addiction.
His second great quintet – with the saxophonist Wayne Shorter and the pianist Herbie Hancock – saw out the 1960s. Then came the breathtaking In a Silent Way before the swirling avant garde Bitches Brew blew apart musical convention with its 26-minute improvised title track.
Davis retired in 1975. Famous for his silences in performance, this seemed like a full stop. Davis would not pick up his trumpet for almost five years, disappearing into drug use in a grim New York brownstone full of sex workers and drug dealers. The house, he acknowledged, was “filthy and real dark and gloomy, like a dungeon” and “the roaches had a field day”.
Davis’s genius coexisted with brutality. He was deeply scarred by American racism, especially police violence and an industry that he said favoured white performers over black innovators. While Davis claims that “I didn’t hate women; I loved them, probably too much”, his own admissions reveal a long history of physical abuse, exploitation and chronic infidelity.
Davis had his critics – purists who believed in “real jazz”. Their standard-bearer was the dazzlingly gifted trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who dismissed Davis as a sellout for covering pop songs in eye-catching outfits. At just 21, Marsalis sneered that Davis’s music was a “letdown” that would have Charlie Parker “rolling in his grave”. The two never reconciled; the divide between apostate and true believer was too wide. Yet after Davis’s death, Marsalis offered a graceful, if belated, concession, writing that “few in jazz or any other music have been as good as he was at his best”. Marsalis wanted jazz preserved. Davis wanted it alive. History has largely settled the argument.
