The trumpeter who kept reinventing jazz, moving from bebop through cool jazz to fusion across five decades.
MOODS · cool · exploratory · moody · restless · innovative · atmospheric · modal · adventurous · sophisticated · brooding · virtuosic · genre-shifting
BIOGRAPHY
Miles Dewey Davis III (1926-1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer born into an affluent family in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis. He studied briefly at Juilliard before dropping out to join Charlie Parker's bebop quintet from 1944 to 1948, launching a career that pushed jazz through bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and fusion.
His Birth of the Cool sessions helped define cool jazz, and Kind of Blue (1959) became the best-selling album of his career, eventually moving over two million copies. Bitches Brew (1970) later pulled jazz toward rock and funk. In 2009 the U.S. House of Representatives honored Kind of Blue as a national treasure, and Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.
WHY THEY'RE COOL
Miles Davis is regarded, alongside Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, as one of the four most important figures in jazz history. Rolling Stone called him the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, and critic Gerald Early named him among the most influential and innovative musicians of the 20th century. Over nearly five decades he helped originate or shape bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, third stream, modal jazz, avant-garde jazz, and fusion, collecting eight Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and three Grammy Hall of Fame honors along the way.
GEORGE'S PLAYS
George has played this artist 5 times.
PLAYED ON WOKE1
