We’ve been talking about musician Miles Davis for the past couple of weeks because this month is the centennial of his birth. A couple of weeks ago I brought up Picasso’s remark that every child is an artist, and the only trick is to continue to be one as we grow up. Miles ranks alongside Picasso as one of the central artists of the 20th century. He also reminds me also of Picasso because Miles went through stylistic periods like Picasso did. Like Picasso had his blue period or rose period or African inspired period. So too did miles. He went from Bebop to cool jazz to modal jazz to post-bop, to electric, to a sort of pop-funk-jazz fusion. Sometimes the transitions were indeed jarring.
A few years after turning toward what was called “modal jazz” and recording the album we mentioned last week called “Kind of Blue,” he stopped working with the people who had been recording with him for several years. He put together a new group of younger players like 23-year-old pianist Herbie Hancock and 17-year-old drummer Tony Williams. The group came to be known as Miles’ “second great quintet.” They recorded a handful of albums together starting with 1965’s “ESP,” but by 1968 that group too had begun to come apart as Miles, influenced by the rock music of the later 60s, began to move toward electric instruments.
What became known retrospectively as his electric period started in 1969 with an album he recorded in February called “In a Silent Way.” It was met with controversy from many directions. Still, a critic for Rolling Stone said the album was “part of a transcendental new music which flushes categories away and, while using musical devices from all styles and cultures, is defined mainly by its deep emotion and unaffected originality"
In the 1970s he took a years-long break from recording and touring. He returned in the 1980s and moved more in the direction of pop and funk. He recorded versions of songs by Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson and collaborated with Prince and multi-instrumentalist and producer Marcus Miller.
His final live performance was at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1991. He died of pneumonia a stroke and respiratory failure the next month.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles Philharmonic said that “from the time he started appearing on stages in the mid-1940s until his final performance...Miles Davis could do anything. He was not only present for every twist and turn jazz made as it rose to prominence following World War II; he was usually responsible for them. It is, simply put, impossible to imagine the history of jazz without him.”
May 26 would have been his 100th birthday. Miles has been gone since 1991. He was 65 when he died.
