Miles DAVIS

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«Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word… just [call it] music, man.»

Both a musical chameleon constantly on the lookout for new sounds and an inflexible personality who always demanded the respect (and the fees!) that were his due, Miles Davis (1926-1991) accompanied - and often anticipated - the evolution of black American music for almost half a century. In his final years, he became something more than just a star: a true myth.

The more he seemed to play only for himself, the more his aura grew. The influence of Miles Davis on the music of his time is inversely proportional to the parsimony of his trumpet playing. From 1944 until his death, Miles participated, successively and sometimes simultaneously, in all the revolutions of the blue note: pioneer of bebop alongside Charlie Parker, inventor of cool jazz (Birth of the Cool), genius of film music (Lift to the Scaffold), great master of hard-bop at the head of his various quintets, hero of orchestral jazz thanks to Gil Evans' arrangements (Sketches of Spain), forerunner of electronic music (In A Silent Way), precursor of jazz-rock (Bitches Brew), wizard of jazz-funk (Dark Magus), and finally, at the end of his career, icon of a universal fusion between jazz and its pop or even hip-hop derivatives!

Miles is also - and perhaps above all - an extraordinary talent scout, a leader with unparalleled flair. With each new adventure, he picks the musicians best able to do justice to his creative vision: John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, Marcus Miller or Joe Zawinulhave all joined Miles as promising talents, as diamonds in the rough. And they all became stars as soon as they left him...

Miles Dewey Davis III was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, into a relatively affluent middle-class black family. His father was a successful dentist, his mother a housewife who trained as a music teacher. The teenager has a gift for the trumpet: his parents finance his enrolment at the prestigious Institute of Musical Art in New York (now the Juilliard School). For a year, he studies during the day and goes to jazz clubs at night. At 18, he meets his idols Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. The latter invites him to replace Dizzy in his band and Miles drops out of school. "If I had stayed in school longer, I would have ended up playing like a white man," he said.

His muted trumpet playing, seemingly ill-suited to the feverish runs of bebop, is precisely what makes him unique and instantly recognisable. His reputation grows rapidly. At the end of the 1940s, he tours Europe for the first time. In Paris, he meets Juliette Gréco, with whom he has an affair. He struggles after returning to the United States, sinks into drugs, and barely escapes with his life. His health would suffer until his death. In 1955, a rising star of jazz, he signs an exclusive contract with Columbia, which gives him complete creative freedom. Miles alternates between small band records and four albums of orchestral jazz arranged by Gil Evans, which are highly acclaimed by the public and the specialist press.

1959 sees the release of Kind of Blue, a modal and impressionistic masterpiece in which his melancholic trumpet works wonders. The album went on to become one of the best-selling albums in the history of jazz (over five million copies). At the same time, with its libertarian approach to improvisation, the free jazz movement shatters the established musical order. Not interested at all, the trumpeter prefers to refine the traditional formula of the trumpet-saxophone-piano-bass-drums quintet, until he reaches a quasi-telepathic perfection with the band comprising Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams.

Having reached the pinnacle of hard-bop, Miles Davis finds himself in a stylistic impasse. Conscious that the public's appetite for jazz is inexorably declining in favour of rock and pop, Miles gets up to date: he introduces guitars, bass and up to three electric keyboards into his new group. The trumpeter also swaps his impeccable suits for increasingly eccentric, colourful and funky stage outfits. Above all, he definitively abandons the last formal remnants of "mainstream" jazz for a sound closer to rock: dark, violent, declined in long uninterrupted sequences with incantatory improvisations worthy of a voodoo ceremony.

His regular fans struggle to keep up with him, but his band is a hit with a younger audience at rock venues and festivals. The album Bitches Brew hits the charts and sells a million copies. But in 1975, the trumpeter's drug problems and failing health force him to withdraw from the music scene for five years.

His third wife, the actress Cicely Tyson, helps him out of this bad patch. He returns to the forefront in 1981 with the release of the album The Man With The Horn. Until his death ten years later, with Miles now favouring a more accessible music, between funk and pop, he tours continuously in front of an ever-growing audience. He covers Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time and Michael Jackson's Human Nature, collaborates with Prince, Toto and Zucchero. He also starts painting at the instigation of his last partner, the artist Jo Gelbard.

Miles Davis moves from Columbia to Warner in 1985, but the change of label does not affect his new "universal" approach. From 1984 onwards, the trumpeter plays every year (except 1987) at the Montreux Jazz Festival. It was there, in July 1991, at the instigation of Quincy Jones, that Miles returns to his past for the first and only time in his career, playing excerpts from the famous arrangements that Gil Evans had written for him over 30 years earlier. Two months later, the trumpeter dies in California of complications from pneumonia. Released after his death, the album Doo-Bop, overseen by hip-hop producer Easy Mo Bee, marks a final shift for Miles, towards rap and acid jazz.