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.