Miles Davis at 100 – Part 1: The Six Revolutions of Miles

by Fritz Byers

Today is the centenary of the birth of Miles Davis. Born in 1926, he passed in 1991 at the age of 65.  He made his first important recordings when he was about twenty. By many sane reckonings, he made his last radical records when he was about fifty. So, thirty years of transcendent art.

Let me give you one more number – he changed music six times. I don’t mean he changed his music six times; or that he constantly grew and evolved, burnishing his sound and expanding the range of his tastes. Most important jazz musicians have done that, and more. (As I write this piece, word comes that we’ve lost another of the music’s titans: Sonny Rollins has passed, aged 95. Sonny was Miles’s contemporary and occasional bandmate, and an unquenchable creative force in the music for more than sixty years. This week’s Jazz Spectrum shows will be all Miles, all the time; we’ll get to Sonny next week.)

Back to Miles: Impelled by visions no one else on the scene seemed able to conjure, and by an indomitable will, Miles conceived and led six distinct musical revolutions, each of which transformed not only his own stature and place in the music, but the very nature of jazz – its sound, its texture, its presence in the culture. And he did this with a fearlessness that models what we most hope for in our artists.

Before we get to his own revolutions, let’s remember that Miles was present for and abetted one of the most impactful galactic upheavals in the history of art – the birth of bebop, midwifed by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Kenny Clarke, with plenty of others in the anteroom. When he was 19, Miles played on Parker’s first official session, November 26, 1945. Although he lacked Charlie’s quicksilver imagination and had only a small fraction of Dizzy’s range and bravura power, he contributed importantly to several of the most enduring tracks from those pathbreaking tracks. In particular, on “Billie’s Bounce” and “Now’s the Time,” Miles’s muted tone and minimalist stylings reveal a young musician’s blossoming sense of his own musical identity. His vernal tone and unhurried lines, each note chosen with evident deliberation, contrast marvelously with Parker’s vast harmonic and rhythmic architectures and his extravagant, surprising cascades. That a 19-year old novice could begin to forge his own aesthetic while playing alongside the most revered innovator of the day is an exceptional act of self-definition.

So, what next for Miles? Well, how about gathering a few fellow visionaries and imagining an entirely new sound for jazz? Hanging out at Gil Evans’s famously bohemian subterranean pad and talking theory with Gil, Gerry Mulligan, and Lee Konitz, Miles gave birth to the cool. The album titled The Birth of the Cool is a belated collection of sides produced across three recording dates, and it wasn’t assembled until long after the tracks were laid down. But the music, recorded in 1949 and 1950, was a sonic revolution. Evans was an idiosyncratic genius who had already begun melding swing, bop, and classical methods into a distinctive airy sound in his arrangements for Claude Thornhill. Miles was drawn to the sound, but not interested in hearing full orchestras produce it.  Rather, he imagined a nonet, which as he saw it comprised the smallest number of instruments that could produce the full sonic palette of a big band: baritone and alto saxes; trumpet, trombone, French horn, and tuba; and the piano-bass-drums rhythm section. The resulting twelve sides are a permanent monument.

The cool vibes resounded all the way to the Pacific Ocean, providing the impetus for so-called West Coast Jazz; and they ricocheted all the way back east as the sound came to dominate the airwaves and plenty of clubs. But by then, Miles had moved on. “Hard bop” is among the squishiest terms in jazz, but let’s use it to describe the music Miles made beginning in the mid-50s, first with his clarion 1954 recording of “Walkin’” and then in the series of unrivaled albums he made with his First Great Quintet. With John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones, this band played with an elegance and a virtuosic intensity that set the standard for small-group jazz.

Then? Back to Gil Evans. This time, Miles happily abided Evans's orchestral stylings, and on Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain, the pair produced music of such beauty and complexity that it occupies its own category, at once singular and beckoning.

The inventions and elaborations of bop, cool, and hard bop presented possibilities for what a composer or improvising musician could do with scales that, while not infinite, were certainly indefinite.  But while Miles’s contributions to those challenges absorbed the attention of much of the jazz world, he moved on to his next revolution, the one for which he is most widely revered: modal jazz, music built on scales rather than chord changes. After the early exploration of this terrain reflected in the 1958 recording Milestones, Miles created Kind of Blue in 1959, a record so accessible and innovative, so seductive and bracing, that it is unparalleled in the history of the music in its sustained popular and critical adoration.

Miles, now an icon of almost impossibly broad cultural appeal, made brilliant music for the first several years of the 60s, filling the saxophone chair in his group with several superb musicians, Hank Mobley, George Coleman, and Sam Rivers among them. With them, he blended hard bop with modal scales, sifted through his superb taste.  And then, abracadabra: he formed the Second Great Quintet, with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. This band is the most sophisticated small group in the history of jazz, playing music of radical harmonic freedom within an implied but fluid rhythmic structure.

And as the world swooned over this group’s music, Miles did his final Big Thing, giving his unrivaled artistic imprimatur to the importation into jazz of electric instruments and rock conventions. Drawn to James Brown, Sly Stone, and the drones and jagged shards of the emerging electric-guitar wizards, Miles put out a series of mind- and genre-bending albums that absorbed rock, funk, and electronica into a sonic avalanche that was beyond imagination until Miles made it exist.

To my way of thinking, Miles’s ceaseless pursuit of new jazz seemed less an ongoing conversation between eras than complete breaks, an explorer finding a world, reaching its summit, scanning the horizon for what lay beyond, and then moving toward it, without regret, without so much as a look back.

I contrast this with, say, Charlie Parker’s inventions. Parker's genius was syncretic: an omnivorous intelligence that absorbed everything within reach and forged it into a new vocabulary. Parker synthesized. Miles imagined. He heard something that wasn't there and then figured out how to make it real, which required finding the right collaborators, inventing the right contexts, and always being willing to leave behind whatever he had already accomplished.

I’ve been thinking about these six revolutions for decades, wondering if there is an analog in any other music, or for that matter any other art. I’ve come up dry, but of course I’m an amateur cultural historian at best.  You can let me know if you come up with one.

This weekend, in honor of the centenary Jazz Spectrum devotes all of Friday and Saturday's programming – and both Overnight shows – to Miles’s music. Twelve hours, covering the full arc of his career from his bebop days with Bird and Diz through the electric period and beyond. We'll play all five tracks from Kind of Blue, but not consecutively – scattered across both evenings, each in a different context, which seems right for music that has always been about possibility rather than conclusion. 

Over the next three days I'll be posting reflections on different aspects of Miles's genius. Tomorrow: his collaborators – the musicians he drew into his orbit, and what his relationship with them tells us about how his vision worked in practice. Gil Evans and John Coltrane will get special attention, as we’ll think about those partnerships and what they tell us about a genius who needed other geniuses to fully realize what he heard in his head. Thursday: a close look at the Second Great Quintet, with special focus on why Miles was so uncharacteristically deferential to Wayne Shorter’s compositions, and also why the band defaulted to standards in their legendary live performances. And Friday: a few thoughts on why all of this still matters, a hundred years in. 

Miles Davis would have turned one hundred today. The music sounds like it was made yesterday. Or tomorrow.