Welcome to the Deep Dive, where we take your
source material, all the articles, books, and
notes you've gathered, and we pull out the essential
story just for you. And today we are diving into,
I mean, a true giant, a figure who wasn't just
influential, but was, you could argue, the primary
engine of change in modern music for 50 years,
Miles Dewey Davis III. Miles Davis. Born in 1926,
he passed away in 1991. And in that time, he
completely reshaped the landscape. His career
is just this incredible story of relentless,
and I think you said it perfectly, sometimes
abrasive evolution. The list of genres is just
staggering. It's not like he dabbled in them.
He was at the forefront of defining bebop, then
cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, third stream,
and then, of course, jazz fusion, avant -garde,
even jazz funk. The man just would not stand
still. So our mission for you in this deep dive
is to... out those five huge stylistic shifts
that kept him right at the cutting edge. We're
going to look at everything from his, well, his
surprisingly privileged upbringing to the revolutionary
albums everyone knows, Kind of Blue, Bitches
Brew, and we also have to get into the really
intense personal stuff. Oh, absolutely. The volatility,
the addictions, the anger, and the defiance that
really created that very dark and distinct public
persona. Our sources give us a really comprehensive
biographical look. We've got his career arc,
his key collaborations, Gil Evans, John Coltrane,
Herbie Hancock, and the critical reaction, which,
as we'll see, was often fiercely divided. It's
a lot to unpack. It is a dense and challenging
life. Yeah. But it's an essential story of a
true American icon. Right. So let's start at
the beginning with a detail that I think really
throws people. Miles Davis didn't come from poverty.
Not at all. Not even close. He was born into
a very comfortable, affluent, upper middle class
family. First in Alton, Illinois, and then they
moved to East St. Louis. And this was significant
for a black family in the 1920s. His father was
a successful dentist, his mother a music teacher.
The sources even mention his father owned a 200
acre estate in Arkansas. That financial cushion
is so important to understand. It's not to say
he didn't face hardship, especially racism, but
he wasn't scrambling for survival in the way
many of his peers were. It gave him this freedom
to focus purely on the art. And maybe it fostered
a bit of that famous arrogance later on. He always
had a safety net. You could certainly make that
argument. Now, his formal training really kicks
off when he's 13. He gets a trumpet and he starts
lessons with a man named Elwood Buchanan. In
this single relationship, this one teacher. might
be the most important in his entire musical life.
Because of one specific instruction. One very
specific, very contrarian instruction. Play without
vibrato. Which is crazy when you think about
it. I mean, at the time, all the big trumpeters,
they had this huge, wide, almost theatrical vibrato.
It was the sound of the era. It was. And Buchanan
would literally slap his knuckles if he used
it. He wanted a pure, straight tone. Miles later
said he was aiming for a round sound with no
attitude in it. Just right in the middle. So
his foundational sound, the one that would define
him for 50 years, was an act of rebellion from
the very beginning. He defined himself by what
he eliminated. That's a perfect way to put it.
And he was a serious student. The sources tell
this story about him in his high school marching
band, where a drummer basically called him out
on not knowing music theory. So what did he do?
He went out and bought every book I could get
to learn about theory. He saw a weakness and
he just attacked it with this incredible discipline.
By 15, he's not just in a band, Eddie Randall's
Blue Devils, he's the musical director. He's
hiring people, scheduling rehearsals. He said
it was one of the most important jobs he ever
had. It gave him structure. But the real lightning
strike was in 1944. Billy Eckstein's band came
to St. Louis. And that band had Dizzy Gillespie
and Charlie Parker, the architects of bebop.
Exactly. The band's trumpeter got sick, so Miles
filled in for two weeks. He's on stage night
after night with The Future of Music. And that
was it. He knew he had to get to New York. He
said that's where the action was. His mother
wasn't happy about it, but his father helped
him work out a deal. He'd go to New York, but
he'd enroll in the prestigious Juilliard School
of Music. Which was, you know, mostly a cover
story. He lasted all of three semesters. He later
complained that the curriculum was way too focused
on white European classical music and completely
ignored jazz. Though he did credit it for teaching
him theory. Right. But the real school was in
the clubs of Harlem and 52nd Street. He drops
out and finds his hero, Charlie Parker. He basically
becomes Gillespie's replacement in Parker's quintet
in 1945. This is his apprenticeship. And even
then, you can hear his own style starting to
emerge. He couldn't always keep up with the frantic
pace of bebop, but his solo on Parker's Now's
the Time in 45, it's more lyrical, more spacious.
It's the beginning of cool jazz, right there
in the middle of a bebop record. you can already
hear him thinking differently. And at this point,
his famous discipline is still there. The sources
say he was a vegetarian, didn't do drugs, while
everyone around him, especially Parker, was deep
into it. Yeah, but that didn't last. By 1947,
he was using alcohol and cocaine. The relationship
with Parker got toxic. Parker was erratic, unreliable
with money. So in late 1948, Miles quit. He's
stepping away from the bebop revolution he just
helped codify, ready for his first major reinvention.
And that reinvention happens almost immediately.
He leaves Parker, leaves the frantic energy of
bebop, and basically invents cool jazz. Well,
he co -founds the Miles Davis Nonet with the
brilliant ranger Gil Evans. Evans' apartment
becomes this laboratory for a new sound. They
brought in guys like John Lewis and Jerry Mulligan,
and they were all kind of tired of the competitive
nature of bebop. They wanted something more controlled.
More controlled, more textural. And the key was
the instrumentation. They added instruments you
just didn't hear in a modern jazz group at the
time. A French horn, a tuba. It created a much
richer, thicker sound, almost like a small orchestra.
The sources say they were trying to imitate the
human voice with the arrangements. Precisely.
And the tracks they recorded between 1949 and
1950, which were later collected on the album
Birth of the Cool, they literally become the
blueprint for the entire West Coast cool jazz
movement. But even this intellectual project,
it wasn't without controversy, specifically around
race. It wasn't. The nonet included several white
musicians, like Mulligan, and that angered some
of the unemployed black musicians in New York.
They felt Miles was overlooking his own. And
his response was typically Miles. He basically
dismissed it. For him, it was about... the music,
not the race of the players. He was going to
work with whoever could get the sound he heard
in his head. Then in 1949, he goes to Paris for
the first time. This seems to be a huge turning
point personally. Massive. He gets to Paris and
he's treated like a king, like a true artist.
He realized that black musicians had a level
of respect there that was just. unimaginable
back in the United States. He had an affair with
the actress Juliet Greco. He was celebrated.
He said, the trip changed the way I looked at
things forever. And that's what makes what happened
next so tragic. He comes back to the U .S. and
that feeling just evaporates. He's back in a
segregated country. The work dries up and he
gets depressed. And his drug use spirals. This
is what the sources call the dark period. It
was incredibly dark. His casual heroin use became
a full -blown expensive addiction. He talks about
losing all discipline, all control. He was hustling,
living off women, anything to support the habit.
And it became public, didn't it? There was an
interview in Downbeat magazine. Yeah, with Cab
Calloway, who basically outed him. That was a
huge betrayal for Miles. It made it even harder
to get work. And it just created this vicious
cycle of addiction and marginalization. The lowest
point, really. He's physically and mentally a
wreck. But then that same discipline that made
him learn theory, that made him play without
vibrato, it kicks back in. It's an incredible
turnaround. He goes home to his father's house
to get clean. Then he moves to Detroit for six
months, specifically to get away from the temptation
in New York. And it works. He comes back in early
1954 completely renewed. He's hitting the gym.
He's focused. And his music changes with him.
He abandons the complexity of his old work. and
moves towards something earthier, more blues
-based. He moves toward hard bop. A more direct,
rhythmic style. You can hear the blues and gospel
roots in it. Absolutely. And he gets really influenced
by the pianist Ahmad Jamal, who is famous for
using space and silence in his playing. This
is also when Miles perfects his use of the harmon
mute. But not just any mute. He put it right
up close to the microphone. Which created that
iconic sound, that crisp, compressed, almost
whispered tone. It's so intimate and yet so detached
at the same time. It's the sound of a man who
has been through hell and has come out the other
side with this incredible steely control. His
album Walkin' from 1954 is often cited as, I
mean, the birth of hard bop. You could say that.
And his public persona is solidifying at the
same time. The coldness, the aloof attitude.
He starts turning his back on the audience. He
called it the Prince of Darkness. And then the
voice, the famous raspy voice. A total accident.
He has surgery on his larynx in 1955, and the
doctors tell him not to speak for 10 days. But
he gets into an argument and just yells. And
that's it. He permanently damages his vocal cords.
And ironically, it just added to the mystique.
This gravelly whisper that became as much a part
of his identity as the trumpet. So he's clean.
He's created hard bop. And then in July 1955,
he has this triumphant comeback performance at
the Newport Jazz Festival. That performance was
everything. It put him back on the map in a huge
way, especially with with more affluent white
audiences. A producer from Columbia Records,
George Vakian, was in the audience and signed
him almost immediately. But there was a catch.
He still owed his old label prestige four more
albums. Right. So he assembles what we now call
his first great quintet. An unbelievable lineup.
Just legendary. John Coltrane on tenor sax, Red
Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and
Philly Joe Jones on drums. And to get out of
the prestige contract, he marches this legendary
band into the studio for two marathon recording
sessions in 1956. And they knock out four full
albums, which is... just insane it's incredible
the album's cooking relaxing working and steaming
all classics and you can really hear the dynamic
that defined that group miles playing these cool
long lyrical lines and then coltrane just exploding
with these dense searching solos he called sheets
of sound but even with this incredible band the
old problems resurfaced he briefly fired both
jones and coltrane for their drug use He was
demanding a level of discipline that he now had,
but they didn't yet. And musically, he was already
getting restless again. The sources point to
a really interesting influence, a performance
he saw by an African dance troupe, Les Ballet
African. What did he take from that? He was fascinated
by the music. It was built on these slow, simmering
rhythms and simple, static harmonies rather than
constantly changing chords. It was all about
creating tension and mood over a simple foundation.
And this leads him to modal jazz. It's a huge
shift. It's a fundamental shift in the architecture
of the music. B -bop and hard bop are all about
navigating these complex, fast -moving chord
changes. As a soloist, you're constantly thinking
about the next chord. But modal jazz just sits
on one chord or one scale, one mode for a long
time. For minutes at a time. It completely frees
up the soloist. You're not worried about the
harmony, so you can focus entirely on melody,
rhythm, and texture. It's a much more open canvas.
You hear it first on his 1958 album Milestones.
And while he's developing this, he also reconnects
with his old collaborator, Gil Evans. A hugely
important partnership. They did five albums together
that basically created the third stream genre.
This fusion of jazz improvisation with classical
orchestration. Miles Ahead was the first one,
right? Where Evans wrote these lush orchestral
parts and Miles played flugelhorn over them.
Yes, and they became huge commercial successes.
The albums Porti and Bass, and especially Sketches
of Spain, which was influenced by Spanish folk
music, sold incredibly well for jazz records
at the time. Which all leads to 1959. To the
masterpiece. To kind of blue. Often called the
greatest jazz album ever made. And it's the ultimate
expression of modal jazz. He brought back the
pianist Bill Evans for these sessions specifically
because Evans had this beautiful impressionistic
touch that was perfect for this music. And the
most amazing part is how it was created. They
basically didn't rehearse. No. Miles brought
in these sketches of compositions, and the band
saw them for the first time in the studio. The
entire thing is built on this incredibly relaxed,
spontaneous improvisation. And the result is
transcendent. It was a huge hit, commercially
and critically. It sold over 5 million copies
in the U .S. alone. The government literally
declared it a national treasure. It's one of
those rare, perfect artistic statements. But
just a few months after making this beautiful,
serene music, his life is violently interrupted.
The incident outside the Birdland Jazz Club,
August 1959. He's taking a break outside the
club, standing on the sidewalk, escorting a white
woman to a cab. A police officer tells him to
move on. Miles points to the marquee and says
his name is on it, that he works there. And the
officer attacks him. Beats him with a nightstick.
Another detective joins in. He was arrested for
assaulting an officer, needed five stitches in
his head. He was eventually acquitted, but the
damage was done. He said that incident made me
feel bitter and cynical again. It's like no matter
how famous or successful he became, he was still
just a black man to that cop. That bitterness
really hardened his public persona from that
point on. Now, after Coltrane leaves the band,
Miles struggles for a bit. But by 1963, he's
put together his second great quintet. Another
legendary lineup. Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron
Carter on bass, and this 17 -year -old drumming
prodigy, Tony Williams. Just unbelievable talent.
And then in 1964, Wayne Shorter joins on saxophone
and becomes the group's main composer. This band
pioneered what we call post -bop. So what's the
difference? How did they move beyond modal jazz?
They called it time no changes. The rhythm section
was liberated. They weren't just keeping time
anymore. Tony Williams wasn't just playing a
beat. He was interacting with a soloist, adding
splashes of color. Herbie Hancock wasn't just
playing chords. He was responding to the melodic
lines. It sounds almost telepathic. It was. Incredibly
fluid and interactive. But the audience wasn't
always following. The sources show his album
sales were dropping by the mid -60s. And his
health was starting to fail him too. He was in
constant pain. Just brutal. He had a hip replacement
surgery that failed. He needed a plastic one
put in. He was hospitalized for a liver infection.
He was a physical wreck. And we have to mention,
because the sources are very frank about it,
this is also a period where his personal life
is marred by violence. He was physically abusive
to his wives, Frances Taylor and Betty Mabry.
He admitted as much in his autobiography. It's
this dark, contemptible part of his story that's
impossible to ignore. The genius who created
this sublime music. was also capable of this
terrible cruelty it's the central contradiction
of the man so by the late 60s album sales are
down he's in physical pain and he's seen these
huge crowds for rock artists like jimi hendrix
and sly and the family stone he wants a piece
of that energy he absolutely does and that leads
to the most controversial and for some the most
exciting phase of his career the electric period
it starts tentatively on albums like Miles in
the Sky and Phil's De Kilimanjaro, where you
start to hear an electric piano, an electric
bass. But the full leap happens with In a Silent
Way in 1969. It's this beautiful, atmospheric,
ambient record. He has multiple keyboardists,
Herbie Hancock. Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, and
the English guitarist John McLaughlin. And this
is where his producer, Taro Mero, becomes almost
like a member of the band. Completely. Mishiro
took the long, improvised jams they recorded
in the studio and used tape splicing and editing
to construct the final tracks. He was composing
with the recorded material. It was a revolutionary
approach to making a record. But the jazz purists,
they hated it. Oh, they were outraged. The accusations
of selling out started immediately. They felt
he was dumbing down the music for a rots audience.
But he dumbed down the music. Doubles down, the
real earthquake, as you put it, is Bitches Brew
in 1970. It's a double album. It's dense, it's
dark, it's psychedelic. The compositions are
these long, sprawling 20 -minute -plus epics
that Mashro pieced together from hours and hours
of tape. And commercially, it was a monster.
It hit number 35 on the Billboard chart, which
was unheard of for a jazz album. It sold over
a million copies. It basically launched the entire
jazz fusion movement into the mainstream. And
to promote it, Miles did something no jazz artist
had done before. He started opening for rock
bands. He's playing with the Steve Miller Band,
with Neil Young. He played the Isle of Wight
Festival to an audience of 600 ,000 people. Which
just fueled the criticism from the jazz world.
They said he was genuflecting to white culture.
But here's the contradiction, because Miles himself
said he was trying to reconnect with a young
black audience that was listening to funk and
R &B, not to the old jazz standards. That's the
core of it. He felt jazz had become too intellectual,
too disconnected from the black community. He
wanted to make music that had the groove and
the power of James Brown. You hear that on albums
like Jack Johnson and especially on The Corner.
Which was so far out, people called it space
music. It was influenced by funk, but also by
avant -garde composers like Stockhausen. It was
incredibly dense and rhythmic. And Miles was
furious because Columbia Records had no idea
how to market it. They sent it to jazz radio,
and he wanted it on R &B stations. But this creative
explosion was happening while his personal life
was just completely falling apart. Totally. In
1972, he breaks both ankles in a car crash. He
becomes heavily dependent on painkillers, on
top of already serious cocaine addiction. He
said in his book, Everything started to blur.
His live shows became erratic. He'd play with
his back to the audience. The music was dense,
aggressive, and for many, impenetrable. And then
in 1975, he just stopped. He was in constant
pain from his hips, ulcers, a hernia. He was
just physically and mentally exhausted. He dropped
out of music entirely for five years. The hiatus.
He described his New York apartment as a wreck.
and said, chillingly, sex and drugs took the
place music had occupied in my life. A complete
void. But what's fascinating is that even though
he was completely inactive, Columbia Records
knew how important he was. In 1976, they renewed
his contract and set up something called the
Miles Davis Fund. What was that? It was a fund
that gave him regular payments, whether he produced
anything or not. The only other artist on their
roster who had that kind of deal was the classical
pianist Vladimir Horowitz. That's the level of
respect they had for his legacy, even when he
couldn't play a note. So after five years of
silence in 1980, he decides to come back. But
it wasn't easy. Not at all. He said he had a
really hard time getting his Zamboucheur back,
the muscle control you need to play the trumpet.
His first album back, The Man with the Horn,
was not well received by critics. even though
it sold okay. And the health problems just kept
coming. In 1982, he has a stroke that paralyzes
his right hand. Yeah, and the sources really
treaded his wife at the time, the actress Cicely
Tyson, with helping him recover. She pushed him
into physical therapy and also encouraged him
to take up drawing and painting. And that became
a whole new passion for him. It did. He saw a
direct connection between his art and his music.
He said, line is like phrase and coding colors
is like code. My paintings are the same as my
music. It was another outlet for that minimalist,
expressive style. Meanwhile, the music itself
was changing again. He leaves Columbia in 1985
and signs with Warner Bros. And his last Columbia
album, You're Under Arrest, points to the new
direction. Pop covers. Polished 80 -sounding
pop covers. He did Cyndi Lauper's Time After
Time and Michael Jackson's Human Nature. And
he defended it. He said, you know, all the old
jazz standards were just the pop songs of their
day from Broadway shows. He argued he was just
doing the same thing, updating the repertoire
for a new generation. which really comes to fruition
on the 1986 album Tutu. It's a collaboration
with the bassist Marcus Miller, and it sounds
very, very 80s. Oh, yeah. It's full of program
synthesizers, drum machines, sampling. It's sleek.
It's atmospheric. It's highly produced. And it
was a huge commercial success. He won a Grammy
for it. It kind of cemented his status as a crossover
icon beyond just jazz. He was everywhere for
a while. He played on the Sun City Protest song.
He did a solo on a Toto album. He even worked
with Prince, though that material was never released.
released. But his health was still a constant
issue. There were rumors he had AIDS, which he
furiously denied. But he kept working, kept receiving
awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in
1990. And his final performances were. Really
powerful full circle moments. Yeah. In 1991 at
the Montreux Jazz Festival, he did something
he hadn't done in 30 years. He looked back. He
looked back. He performed the music from his
old collaborations with Gil Evans, Miles Ahead,
Sketches of Spain with an orchestra conducted
by Quincy Jones. A beautiful nostalgic moment
from a man who famously hated nostalgia. That
same summer, France awarded him their highest
cultural honor, calling him the Picasso of jazz.
And his final concert was at the Hollywood Bowl
in August of 1991. He died just a month later,
on September 28, 1991. He was 65. The official
cause was a combination of a stroke, pneumonia,
and respiratory failure. The sources do note
he was taking AZT, the antiretroviral drug. during
his treatment. He was buried with his trumpet
in New York. His gravestone has the first few
notes of his song Solar on it. And so we're left
with this massive, complicated legacy. You have
this artist who was completely committed to moving
forward, who called his own classic work warmed
over Turkey. And you have his old friends like
Bill Evans, who kind of lamented that he let
commercial pressures push him too far into rock
and pop. The critical world is still divided.
Absolutely. Stanley Crouch famously called his
electric period the most brilliant sellout in
the history of jazz. Wynton Marsalis said his
later stuff was not jazz, man. And Miles' response?
His response was, jazz is dead. It's over. He
was always going to have the last most defiant
word. It's his constant battle in his career
between innovation and tradition, between art
and commerce. And you can't talk about his legacy
without also acknowledging... the dark side,
the personal turmoil, the abuse that's detailed
in the sources. You can't. He was a man of profound
contradictions. Incredible discipline on one
hand, the discipline to quit heroin cold turkey,
and this uncontrollable destructive volatility
on the other. His genius and his cruelty are,
unfortunately, completely intertwined so when
you look at the whole arc of the steep dive you
see this career of really calculated rebellion
it starts with the simple stark rebellion of
playing without vibrato moves to the intellectual
rebellion of cool jazz then reaches this sublime
universally loved peak with kind of blue an album
that sold five million copies a peak most artists
would have happily stayed on for the rest of
their lives but he couldn't he had to dive into
the sonic cave Which brings us to the final thought
for you to consider. Miles Davis' most commercially
and culturally enduring work is Kind of Blue,
the very music he later dismissed and refused
to play. So... Does his career prove that true
lifelong artistic innovation demands that you
constantly and aggressively alienate the very
audience and critics who love you? Or was his
constant forward motion just unnecessary, maybe
even a desperate rebellion against the monumental
expectations that his own genius had created
for him? Something to think about the next time
you put on one of his records. Thank you for
joining us for this deep dive.