Miles Davis

Trumpeter, bandleader, one of the most brilliant composers of all time, Miles Davis is one of the legends of jazz.

Born in rural Illinois in 1926, by the age of eighteen he was already in New York (with a fair amount of experience under his belt from the jazz clubs of St. Louis), taking classes at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music and playing every night in the blistering jam sessions of the clubs on Harlem and 52nd Street, alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Out of the be-bop experience came — though by contrast: the spasmodic velocity of its solos replaced by the warm, accessible appeal of more restrained harmonic lines — Davis's first landmark work, "Birth Of The Cool", recorded between 1949 and '50 and released as an LP in 1954. The influence of these recordings on the entire jazz scene is enormous, but the early 1950s were, for Davis (and for many of his fellow musicians), the dark years of heroin addiction.

He got clean in 1954, and within a few years put together a legendary sextet, with John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. The recordings from this period are all classics: from the series of albums for Prestige ("Walkin'", "Cookin'", "Relaxin'", "Workin'", "Steamin'") to the orchestral records arranged by his friend Gil Evans ("Miles Ahead", "Porgy And Bess", "Sketches Of Spain"), to the experiments with modal music ("Milestones"), through to what many critics consider the greatest album in the history of jazz, the glorious "Kind Of Blue", from 1959.

The early Sixties saw free-jazz musicians challenging Davis's status as the genre's great innovator; he found that kind of music too pretentious and contrived. His response, in 1964, was to form another formidable group, this time a quartet with Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Ron Carter and Wayne Shorter, and he began gradually moving closer to rock and electric instrumentation (a collaboration with Gil Evans and Jimi Hendrix that would have gone down in history fell through only because of the tragic death of the Seattle guitarist).

Increasingly fascinated by West Coast psychedelic rock, towards the end of the decade Davis began appearing at major rock festivals, winning over the young, "alternative" white audience. Albums like "In A Silent Way" and "Bitches Brew" mark the birth of jazz rock and paved the way for the fusion phenomenon.

Davis's restless personality, however, seemed to be leading him toward collapse: a renewed drug addiction, run-ins with the police, a serious car accident, health problems of every kind, increasingly strained personal relationships... In 1975 Miles withdrew from the scene and shut himself away at home, in the grip of drugs and depression. Everyone wrote him off as finished, but they were wrong. Six years later he returned to blow his trumpet, fiercer than ever. Indifferent to critics and jazz purists, he threw himself into every kind of fusion with the newest sounds: funk, pop, electronics, the music of Prince and Michael Jackson (and in his spare time he also took up painting, with some success).

Audience acclaim never deserted him: right up until a few months before his death Davis kept playing on stages around the world, and so the final incarnation of jazz's great genius was, surprisingly, that of a pop star.