Miles Davis

Random and bite-sized facts on all things from the mythical figure that is Miles Davis. Totally random but totally fascinating if you're into it. Do you know Miles Davis now?

Miles Davis was originally supposed to learn the violin. His mother preferred classical music and wanted him to study it, but when he was 13 his father gave him a trumpet instead. His first trumpet teacher, Elwood Buchanan, deliberately taught him not to use vibrato and encouraged him to develop a clear, distinctive tone.

Miles Davis dropped out of Juilliard after only three semesters. He went back to East St. Louis and asked his father for permission to leave. His father agreed, but gave him one important piece of advice: learn to play his own sound rather than becoming a copy of another musician.

Before Miles Davis became a major bandleader, he was playing alongside Charlie Parker. His first modern-jazz recording session came in 1945 with Parker's group, and the young Davis appeared on “Billie's Bounce”, “Thriving on a Riff” and “Now's the Time”. His relatively spare trumpet style already sounded different from the faster, higher-register approach associated with Dizzy Gillespie.

Miles Davis once turned down a chance to join Duke Ellington's orchestra. In 1948, Ellington offered him a chair in his legendary big band, but Davis declined because he was committed to the experimental nonet project that became Birth of the Cool.

Birth of the Cool wasn't originally an album. The recordings were made as a series of 78rpm singles between 1949 and 1950. Capitol didn't collect them into an LP called Birth of the Cool until 1957 — years after the music had been recorded.

Miles Davis' first trip outside the United States was to Paris in 1949. He performed at the first Festival International de Jazz and met the French actor and singer Juliette Gréco. Davis later remembered the trip as a life-changing experience, particularly because of the different racial atmosphere he encountered in France.

The music for Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows was largely created on the spot. In Paris in December 1957, Miles and his French quintet recorded the soundtrack during a late-night session at a radio station, improvising music while scenes from the film were shown to them. The result became one of the earliest striking examples of Miles' emerging modal sound.

When Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, the musicians were given remarkably little conventional preparation. Miles supplied sketches and musical directions rather than fully worked-out arrangements, and the official Miles Davis site notes that almost all the tracks were first complete takes, with no edits or second tries.

Miles Davis once described Kind of Blue as a “failed experiment”. Despite the album's enormous reputation, Davis felt that it hadn't completely realised the sound he had been hearing in his head before the sessions. Decades later, when told that critics regarded it as perhaps the greatest jazz record, his response was simply: “Isn't that something.”

The title of 'Round About Midnight has an odd history. The album uses the word “about”, even though the lyrics to Thelonious Monk's composition don't contain it. According to producer George Avakian, the song had already been copyrighted under the title 'Round About Midnight, and the publisher insisted that the album use that form.

Miles Davis' In a Silent Way was assembled partly through studio editing that would have seemed radical in jazz at the time. Teo Macero repeatedly spliced and looped sections of the performances, including repeated passages from the same performance. The finished album therefore wasn't simply a document of what happened in the studio — the studio became part of how the music was constructed.

Miles Davis' Jack Johnson album began as music for a documentary about the heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. Davis had a lifelong fascination with boxing, and he identified strongly with Johnson's story. The music was recorded in 1970 and eventually became one of the most ferocious records of his electric period.

On Jack Johnson, Miles Davis literally sampled himself before “sampling” became a normal part of popular music. Teo Macero inserted a passage from “Shhh/Peaceful” from In a Silent Way into “Yesternow”, making an earlier Miles recording part of the new composition.

On the Corner was influenced by a surprisingly unlikely source: the electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Miles became fascinated by Stockhausen's approach to patterns, repetition and electronic sound, and later described Stockhausen as helping him think about music as a process of “elimination and addition”.

Teo Macero was far more than a conventional record producer for Miles Davis. From the late 1950s onwards he became increasingly important in editing and mixing the recordings, developing techniques involving looping and cut-and-paste that would later become commonplace in other forms of recorded music.

The first music Miles Davis released during his electric period was unexpectedly quiet. In a Silent Way, recorded in February 1969, introduced electric keyboards and John McLaughlin's guitar but presented them in an unusually spacious, restrained setting. The explosive Bitches Brew came afterwards.

Bitches Brew was Miles Davis' first double-LP. Columbia accepted the title despite its unconventional name, agreed to release it with Mati Klarwein's striking artwork and promoted it towards a younger audience. It went on to sell more than 100,000 copies — an exceptional figure for a jazz release at the time.

Miles Davis' trumpet sound was shaped by a teacher who specifically told him not to sound like other famous trumpeters. Elwood Buchanan discouraged vibrato and pushed Davis towards a clear mid-range tone. That decision became part of the sound that eventually made Miles instantly recognisable.

The famous Kind of Blue session brought together an extraordinary group: John Coltrane, Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley joined Miles, with Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb forming the rhythm section. Yet the album was built around unusually simple musical structures, deliberately reducing the harmonic complexity that had dominated bebop.

Miles Davis' career repeatedly involved musicians appearing briefly and then moving on to completely different projects. By In a Silent Way, he had begun using a rotating cast of musicians rather than treating the idea of a permanent band as essential. Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul and John McLaughlin all appear around this transitional period.