A childhood bathed in music

Miles was born on May 26, 1926, into a wealthy family: his father was a dental surgeon and a great music lover. He was surrounded by music from a very young age: his mother played the piano and violin and his maternal grandmother was an organ teacher in Arkansas. His younger brother Vernon and his older sister Dorothy also studied music.
Around the age of 10, a friend of his father gave him his first trumpet and Miles began playing by listening to the Harlem Rhythms jazz broadcasts on the radio. It was not until he was 13 that he took his first lessons with Elwood Buchanan at Lincoln High. In 1942, after meeting Clark Terry, he decided to become a professional and joined the American Federation of Musicians.

The Flight

That same year, he joined Eddie Randle's rhythm & blues band - The Blue Devils. He developed his taste for musical theory which would contribute to making possible the many stylistic evolutions that characterize his career. He then met and performed with musicians such as Kenny Dorham, Benny Carter and especially the saxophonist Lester Young, one of Miles' models.
Later, he would meet Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk - the most famous representatives of bebop which had been shaking the jazz scene since the early 1940s. His career took off.

The Legend

Miles Davis's various bands were like laboratories in which the talents of new generations and new horizons of modern music were revealed; notably Sonny Rollins, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Bill Evans and John Coltrane during the 1950s. From 1960 to the 1980s, his sidemen were Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, George Coleman, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Keith Jarrett, Tony Williams, Joe Zawinul, Dave Liebman and Kenny Garrett; it was with them that he moved towards jazz fusion, of which he remains one of the pioneers. The discovery of Jimi Hendrix's music was decisive in this evolution, but above all the shock of the Newport festival in 1969, where we originally attended exclusively jazz concerts, but which, that year, programmed rock. Many of the musicians who passed through his formations from 1963 to 1969 went on to form emblematic jazz fusion groups, notably Weather Report, led by Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, Chick Corea's Return to Forever, as well as Herbie Hancock's various groups.

The star goes out

Miles Davis is one of the few jazzmen and one of the first black musicians to be known and accepted by middle America. Like Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis is that curious phenomenon: a jazz superstar. Unlike his glorious elder who had sought integration into the mainstream culture dominated by the white population, Miles Davis' musical career is accompanied by a political stance in favor of the black cause and its fight against racism.

On September 28, 1991, Miles Davis died at the age of 65 at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica near Los Angeles. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York.