Davis, Miles Dewey III
1926-1991 · Contribution: 1957-1991
Stood at the forefront of nearly every major stylistic development in jazz across a five-decade career, including bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion, and led the sessions for Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album of all time
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Impact on the world
Davis's 1957 album Birth of the Cool, recorded with arranger Gil Evans, helped establish the cool jazz movement, while his 1959 album Kind of Blue, built around modal scales rather than conventional chord changes and featuring saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, became the best-selling jazz album in history and is widely regarded as one of the most important recordings in American music. In 1969 Davis again transformed jazz with the electric, rock-influenced Bitches Brew, launching the jazz fusion movement and inspiring former sidemen to found influential groups including Weather Report, Return to Forever, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra; the U.S. House of Representatives passed a unanimous resolution in 2009 commemorating Kind of Blue's 50th anniversary and affirming jazz as a national treasure. Davis won eight competitive Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990, and was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, which recognized him as “one of the key figures in the history of jazz.”
Life & background
Born May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis by a dental-surgeon father, Davis began playing trumpet at age 13 and studied briefly at the Juilliard School before joining Charlie Parker's bebop quintet in 1945. He continued recording and touring internationally for more than four decades, and died in Santa Monica, California, on September 28, 1991, at age 65, from the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia, and respiratory failure.
Sources
- Encyclopædia Britannica; National Endowment for the Arts
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