The career of trumpeter Miles Davis was one of the
most astonishingly productive that jazz music has ever
seen. Yet his genius has never received its due. The
impatience and artistic restlessness that characterized
(5) his work spawned one stylistic turn after another and
made Davis anathema to many critics, who deplored
his abandonment first of bebop and then of "cool"
acoustic jazz for ever more innovative sounds.
Having begun his career studying bebop, Davis
(10) pulled the first of many stylistic surprises when, in
1948, he became a member of an impromptu musical
think tank that gathered in a New York City apartment.
The work of this group not only slowed down tempos
and featured ensemble playing as much as or even
(15) more than solos-in direct reaction to bebop-it also
became the seedbed for the "West Coast cool" jazz
style.
In what would become a characteristic zigzag,
Davis didn't follow up on these innovations himself.
(20) Instead, in the late 1950s he formed a new band that
broke free from jazz's restrictive pattern of chord
changes. Soloists could determine the shapes of their
melodies without referring back to the same unvarying
repetition of chords. In this period, Davis attempted to
(25) join jazz phrasings, harmonies, and tonal qualities with
a unified and integrated sound similar to that of a
classical orchestral piece: in his recordings the
rhythms, no matter how jazzlike, are always
understated, and the instrumental voicings seem muted.
(30) Davis's recordings from the late 1960s signal that,
once again, his direction was changing. On Filles de
Kilimanjaro, Davis's request that keyboardist Herbie
Hancock play electric rather than acoustic piano caused
consternation among jazz purists of the time. Other
(35) albums featured rock-style beats, heavily electronic
instrumentation, a loose improvisational attack and a
growing use of studio editing to create jagged
soundscapes. By 1969 Davis's typical studio procedure
was to have musicians improvise from a base script of
(40) material and then to build finished pieces out of tape,
like a movie director. Rock groups had pioneered the
process; to jazz lovers, raised on the ideal of live
improvisation, that approach was a violation of the
premise that recordings should simply document the
(45) musicians' thought processes in real time. Davis again
became the target of fierce polemics by purist jazz
critics, who have continued to belittle his contributions
to jazz.
What probably underlies the intensity of the
(50) reactions against Davis is fear of the broadening of
possibilities that he exemplified. Ironically, he was
simply doing what jazz explorers have always done:
reaching for something new that was his own. But
because his career endured, because he didn't die
(55) young or record only sporadically, and because he
refused to dwell in whatever niche he had previously
carved out, critics find it difficult to definitively rank
Davis in the aesthetic hierarchy to which they cling.
most astonishingly productive that jazz music has ever
seen. Yet his genius has never received its due. The
impatience and artistic restlessness that characterized
(5) his work spawned one stylistic turn after another and
made Davis anathema to many critics, who deplored
his abandonment first of bebop and then of "cool"
acoustic jazz for ever more innovative sounds.
Having begun his career studying bebop, Davis
(10) pulled the first of many stylistic surprises when, in
1948, he became a member of an impromptu musical
think tank that gathered in a New York City apartment.
The work of this group not only slowed down tempos
and featured ensemble playing as much as or even
(15) more than solos-in direct reaction to bebop-it also
became the seedbed for the "West Coast cool" jazz
style.
In what would become a characteristic zigzag,
Davis didn't follow up on these innovations himself.
(20) Instead, in the late 1950s he formed a new band that
broke free from jazz's restrictive pattern of chord
changes. Soloists could determine the shapes of their
melodies without referring back to the same unvarying
repetition of chords. In this period, Davis attempted to
(25) join jazz phrasings, harmonies, and tonal qualities with
a unified and integrated sound similar to that of a
classical orchestral piece: in his recordings the
rhythms, no matter how jazzlike, are always
understated, and the instrumental voicings seem muted.
(30) Davis's recordings from the late 1960s signal that,
once again, his direction was changing. On Filles de
Kilimanjaro, Davis's request that keyboardist Herbie
Hancock play electric rather than acoustic piano caused
consternation among jazz purists of the time. Other
(35) albums featured rock-style beats, heavily electronic
instrumentation, a loose improvisational attack and a
growing use of studio editing to create jagged
soundscapes. By 1969 Davis's typical studio procedure
was to have musicians improvise from a base script of
(40) material and then to build finished pieces out of tape,
like a movie director. Rock groups had pioneered the
process; to jazz lovers, raised on the ideal of live
improvisation, that approach was a violation of the
premise that recordings should simply document the
(45) musicians' thought processes in real time. Davis again
became the target of fierce polemics by purist jazz
critics, who have continued to belittle his contributions
to jazz.
What probably underlies the intensity of the
(50) reactions against Davis is fear of the broadening of
possibilities that he exemplified. Ironically, he was
simply doing what jazz explorers have always done:
reaching for something new that was his own. But
because his career endured, because he didn't die
(55) young or record only sporadically, and because he
refused to dwell in whatever niche he had previously
carved out, critics find it difficult to definitively rank
Davis in the aesthetic hierarchy to which they cling.
