David and Art - Miles to Go

Miles was born in Alton, Illinois in May 1926 and when we left him last week, it was 1944 and he had just graduated high school. He’d been playing the trumpet since he was about nine.His mother really wanted him to follow his older sister and attend Fisk University, but that was not what he wanted.He wanted to play music.His father encouraged him to apply to the Juilliard School in New York City.He did, he was accepted, and before he was 20, he was moving to New York.Soon he was sitting in with bands in Harlem, including Charlie Parker’s group at a club called Minton’s and, elsewhere, a club called Monroe’s.The timing, as it turned out, was perfect.

Just then at both places, there was a handful of players pioneering a new style of music that would come to be known as “bebop.”It was marked by complex and rapid chord changes, fast tempos, and virtuoso improvisation.Miles sat in on jam sessions almost every night honing his chops and picking up pointers from the established players.After three semesters enrolled at Julliard, he dropped out because all he wanted to do was play all the time.

In 1945 Miles replaced Dizzy Gillespie in Charlie Parker’s quintet.Three years later he turned down an offer to join Duke Ellington’s orchestra.He also started going into the studio to make his own recordings.In 1949, he recorded a slate of songs that were laid back and swung kind of gently, a world away from Bebop.A few years later those cuts were compiled into an album called The Birth of the Cool that redirected jazz.

By the early 50s, like so many other players in that scene, Miles was hooked on heroin.It took its toll, but he struggled against it.In 1955 he’d cleaned up and that summer he played a celebrated set at the Newport Jazz Festival.It introduced him to a much wider audience than ever before.

What followed was a chain of, quite literally, groundbreaking albums, many of which pulled music in different direction and created new styles that rippled out from him like waves in a pond.The Birth of the Cool was only his first revolution.In early 1959, he recorded what would become revered as his masterpiece and one of the key albums in all American music:It was called Kind of Blue, and it has introduced more people to jazz than any other recording.

By no means was he finished.He was only getting started.

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