Who is Miles Davis?

Son of a dentist from East St Louis who became a successful musician performing and recording during the second half of the 20th century?

 

He is a musical genius. But nowadays a genius is just a favorite artist (or oneself) and has lost its value. I would give up people who don't recognize Miles Davis.. There is no knowledge. Nothing I can contribute.

 

make it more enjoyable, and get the movie biography 'Miles Ahead'. Not too bad.

 

Reinhold Daniel Fielding Elmore said that Sketches of Spain was his favourite "desert island" album.
Before that, I'd never heard of the album.
I went out, bought it, then listened to it.
I'm glad I listened to Dan's endorsement.

 

My son's called Miles too.
My wife suggested it, and I was very happy to go with it.

An artist I have a huge amount of repeat for; a personality full of good stuff-open-minded, principled, confrontational ( can be a good thing...), a bit salty.
The negatives (drugs, aggression towards women) are unfortunate. I can respect his battles against narcotics, but the violence is hard to reconcile.

As a previous poster noted, it is good to wrestle with these conundrums.

Miles is a great name, and people who know me know I love Miles the musician.
I can teach my son the better qualities that MD displayed, and educate him about the bad.

 

Exactly!!

Philo

 

He's an East St. Louis Toodle-Oo

 

I do think it's odd that a 57-year-old American (she is American is she not?), has never heard of Miles Davis, in our day -- and I'm around your mom's age -- Miles was kind of a well-known public figure and in a lot of ways the face of or examplar of jazz. Even if you never heard his music -- and Bitches Brew was kind of a big deal during the time when we were young -- he was kind of the name, and his voice and style and look were kind of the look, that someone would just casually refer to as example of jazz or jazziness. He had been on the Tonight Show and the Dick Cavett Show and SNL, over the years. He was a very well known public figure. Even if he never heard his music or maybe even if she never new what instrument he played, Oh, Miles Davis, jazz musician, is at least a kind of awareness that I would have expected for a lot of folks in my generation. I mean, people my age tend to know that much.

How would I describe him? Miles Davis was a 20th century trumpet player, bandleader and composer who played major roles in many of the stylistic developments in jazz in the post war era from the '40s to the '80s -- from be-bop to cool jazz to hard bop to orchestrated jazz to modal jazz to jazz-rock fusion. In most cases he wasn't the original creator of these styles but he was their popularizer and pushed their development forward in a series of landmark recordings and with a series of classic band first as a member of Charlie Parker's bebop quintet then as a leader on records like The Birth of Cool sessions; early hard bop classics like Walkin', Cookin' and Relaxin'; Sketches of Spain; Kind of Blue; and Bitches Brew. As a leading jazz draw for 40 years, he was also a star maker -- a gig in one of his band often dramatically helped advance the careers of other musicians including many other major jazz figures of the period including but not limited to John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett.

As a trumpet player, although he didn't possess the chops of the great players of his era like Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, he developed a spare style that put a premium on space, openness, note choice and was particularly know for the intimate sound of a Harmon-muted trumpet playing close to a mic.

Then maybe I'd put on this, noting that the guy changed styles a lot so while this isn't indicative of the sound of all of it, it is the sound of probably his greatest band and captures his famous, characteristic spare, muted trumpet playing:



FWIW, Miles, Mahalia and Mavis were all on the list of names I floated before what turned out to be my daughter was born. None went over with my wife, though she likes the music of all of them, Miles though least of all.

 

Maybe but only after the true greats, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington........

No one I know who isn't seriously into 'classic rock' or jazz has heard of Miles Davis either. His name certainly doesn't trip off the tongue like Elvis, The Beatles, Sinatra.

 

And then On The Corner.

EDIT, and then Birth of the Cool.

 

I'd play them Birth Of The Cool and On the Corner, tell them it's the same guy and watch them look at you all weird-like.

 

Hey ...... we had the same thought !

 

Would you say they know Louis or Duke though? If they know Louis Armstrong it's likely the guy with the gruff voice singing What a Wonderful World, not the hot fives/sevens. That's not really jazz.

 

I agree with you but nevertheless everyone has heard of Louis for whatever reason (he was in a lot of films too) as he was a cultural icon for many decades, irrespective of why people remember him. This thread was started by someone who was questioning if people have heard of Davis in general as opposed to say whether they know him because of Kind Of Blue or anything he specifically recorded.

 

Yeah.
It can be observed that while Miles was sometimes critical of other jazz performers, he always paid respect to Louis and especially Duke (the 1974 tribute He Loved Him Madly).

 

Gershwin? Armstrong?

 

Having just finished his autobiography, I'd say he was a mutha%$*&er. Well, everything else in the book was anyway.

 

I'd hand them Birth Of The Cool, Kind Of Blue and On The Corner and tell them to go listen.

 

There is no 'most important', there are many as great as Miles. Myself I would include Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Messiaen, Copland, Ives, Cage ( because of his influence), Stockhausen, Zappa just to name a few.

 

One cool dude.

 

not saying they were the greatest, I just threw a couple names out there......(Robert Johnson?) I could list 100 more.

 

Yes and changed the "direction" of music more than one time.

 

He was one of the most important jazz artists of the 20th century.

 

Certainly