Miles Davis III was born in Alton, Illinois, on May 25, 1926. He was
the second of three children. His mother played the violin, and his father
was an oral surgeon. The family moved to East St. Louis, Illinois, in
1927.
Davis first became interested in music around the age of six, when
he began listening to the music of jazz musicians such as Louis
Armstrong (1901–1971) and Duke Ellington (1899–1974) on the
radio. Visits with his grandfather in Arkansas introduced him to the
soulful sounds of gospel, strains of which would find their way into his
music compositions later on in his career. Launches a career
When he was ten years old, Davis took trumpet lessons, and he was
given the chance to improvise (make up his own music spontaneously).
In 1943, when he was seventeen, he joined the Eddie Randall Blue
Devils and played with them for a year before joining a New
Orleans–based swing band called Six Brown Cats. Swing was not the
kind of music Davis wanted to perform, so after a short time with the
band, he returned to St. Louis, Missouri, where his family had moved to
earlier.
While watching a jazz band play at a local club, Davis was asked to
sit in with the group when one of the trumpeters became ill. A thrilled
Davis sat in with this group of jazz greats that included Dizzy Gillespie
(1917–1993) and Charlie “Yardbird” Parker (1920–1955) for two
weeks. He learned more about playing jazz and experimenting with
sound in those two weeks than he had in his entire lifetime.
No longer content to play music that he was not passionate about,
Davis moved to New York City, the center of the jazz world. There he
enrolled in the Juilliard School, where he studied music theory and composition. Davis dropped out of Juilliard before graduating and furthered
his education by playing with Gillespie and Parker.
The young trumpeter recorded record albums with the jazz greats,
but critics panned his solos, saying they were full of errors. Davis organized his own nine-piece ensemble, and the band recorded songs from
1949 through 1950. The compilation of songs was eventually released as
an album titled Birth of the Cool. This time, critics praised Davis’s sound.
The group traveled abroad and experienced more acclaim throughout
Europe, especially in Paris, where an annual jazz festival was held.
Turns to drugs
Like many jazz musicians in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Davis soon
began to use drugs. What began as experimentation turned into addiction, and the trumpeter soon found himself in a downward spiral. It got
so bad that he accepted jobs only if they would make it easy for him to
get heroin.
Club owners knew of Davis’s addiction, and in the first few years of
the 1950s, he was blacklisted (included on a list of people who club owners would not hire). In 1954, the musician quit drugs by sheer willpower and self-imposed physical discipline, and in the period that followed he
produced music that some critics consider his best. He formed a quintet
whose recordings sounded like nothing else being played at the time. Its
sound was a combination of jazz, bop, and urban funk blues. Davis was
finally accepted by mainstream musicians and listeners.
The 1960s saw the end of the jazz era as rock and roll took over the
music scene. Davis, inspired by the sounds of guitar great Jimi Hendrix
(1942–1970) and the funk of Sly and the Family Stone, turned to electrified jazz, a unique sound that would later be labeled “fusion.”
Later years
Davis’s new sound thrilled some listeners and critics while horrifying
others as he moved away from “pure” jazz. Although he claimed he never
let the critics negatively affect him, Davis returned to a life of substance
abuse and subsequent illness. Between 1975 and 1980, he did not pick
up his trumpet. He recorded a comeback album in 1981, which was criticized as weak sounding, but two later releases earned him Grammy
Awards. Davis continued to play throughout the 1980s.
Davis died on September 28, 1991. He had been suffering from
pneumonia, respiratory failure, and the aftereffects of a stroke. Despite
his weakness for drugs, Davis changed the music scene forever and left
his own personal sound embedded in the culture. He was inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 13, 2006.