The Full Biography
Miles Davis. Trumpeter. Bandleader. The East St. Louis dentist’s son who made Kind of Blue a civic object, then refused to live inside it.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a muted trumpet over a few piano chords, an unhurried line that seems to arrive from another room. The year is 1959. The record is Kind of Blue. What the still cannot show is Miles Dewey Davis III of Alton and East St. Louis, a Juilliard student who left the classroom for Charlie Parker’s chair, a habit he put down in his father’s house, a run of bands that kept changing the weather, and a death in Santa Monica on September 28, 1991, at sixty-five, that the civic album has never accepted as the end of the work.
He was born on May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, to Dr. Miles Dewey Davis Jr., a dentist, and Cleota Mae Henry Davis. The family soon settled in East St. Louis. This is not a porch-and-poverty myth. It is a Black professional household that could buy a horn and expect the boy to treat it as a discipline. A teacher named Elwood Buchanan told him to play without vibrato. The instruction stuck. The tone that later rooms would call cool began as a schoolroom refusal to wobble. He sat in with Billy Eckstine’s band when it came through town in 1944, Parker and Dizzy Gillespie already in the chairs. That was the first pressure that was not a parent: the real music, passing through, and a teenager who could hear that Juilliard would not be the last word.
His father sent him to the Juilliard School in New York in September 1944. He went to the classes. He also went to 52nd Street. The door the public still recognizes is Parker’s group. Davis took the trumpet chair in a bebop that was already too fast for the tourist, and learned, in public, how little of the harmony needed to be stated. He was not Parker. He did not try to be. The spaces he left were the beginning of a career. By 1948 the Street knew the name. The school had already lost him.
In 1949 and 1950 he recorded the nonet sessions that Capitol would issue, years on, as Birth of the Cool. Gil Evans arranged. Gerry Mulligan and Lee Konitz were in the room. The music was quieter than bebop and just as exact. It was not a retreat. It was a different architecture. Then the early 1950s took him the way they took a generation of the Street. Heroin entered the file. The records from those years are uneven because the life was. In 1954 he went home to East St. Louis, shut himself in his father’s house, and put the habit down without a clinic’s help. That is not a sermon. It is a fact he paid for in a locked room. At the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955 he played “‘Round Midnight” as if the decade had not spent him. Columbia signed him. The first great quintet assembled: John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones. ’Round About Midnight (1957) is the first Columbia weather. The sound was already leaving cool behind.
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In March and April 1959, at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York, he recorded Kind of Blue. Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on the saxophones. Bill Evans at the piano, and Wynton Kelly on one tune. Chambers. Jimmy Cobb. Scales instead of a thicket of changes. “So What.” “Freddie Freeloader.” “Blue in Green.” “All Blues.” “Flamenco Sketches.” It became the jazz record people who do not keep jazz in the house still own. It is a civic object. It is also a session, two dates, men in a room following sketches he declined to over-explain. Sketches of Spain, with Gil Evans again, arrived in 1960 and made the trumpet an orchestra’s center without turning the orchestra into a cushion. He had already begun to leave the modal room he had just furnished.
Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.Miles Davis
That is the turn, and it is easy to file as a pretty album with a cool photograph on the cover. The turn is the 1954 refusal — the locked room, the end of the needle — and then the decision, repeated for the rest of the life, to treat every style as a room to occupy and leave. A lot of leaders stay in the hit. Davis became a weather of his own. The second great quintet of the mid-1960s held Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. E.S.P. Miles Smiles. Nefertiti. The music leaned forward until the beat itself seemed to hesitate on purpose. In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970) plugged the band in. Rock rhythm, electric piano, long forms, a studio used as an instrument. The 1970s electric years split rooms. Some listeners still walk out. He did not sand the work to keep them seated. He has also said that if you understood everything he said, you would be him. The sentence is a lock on the door. The catalog is the key.
The Columbia shop between the first quintet and the plugs is a working catalog the civic album compresses. Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), and Sketches of Spain (1960), all with Gil Evans, made the trumpet an orchestra’s center without turning the orchestra into a cushion. Someday My Prince Will Come (1961) still had Coltrane in one chair. Seven Steps to Heaven (1963) is the hinge into the second quintet. Then the run: E.S.P. (1965), Miles Smiles (1967), Sorcerer (1967), Nefertiti (1968), Miles in the Sky (1968), Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968). Shorter wrote. Hancock found the space. Williams made the beat hesitate on purpose. Carter held the floor. Davis occupied the room and then left it. That is the method in one motion.
The electric years are a second shop, not a fall. In a Silent Way (1969) is the quiet plug. Bitches Brew (1970) is the long form the studio treated as an instrument. A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971) put a boxer’s name on a rock rhythm. On the Corner (1972) still empties rooms. Get Up with It (1974), Agharta and Pangaea (both 1975, Osaka) are the last public nights before the silence. He hired players better than the job description required so the music would not sit still: Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Airto, Mtume. Some listeners walked out. He accepted the empty chairs as part of the price. The 1975–1980 silence is in the file. Illness, exhaustion, the residue of the electric grind. It is not a hole. It is a locked room of another kind.
Frances Taylor’s face is on the covers the first quintet’s audience still holds; that marriage ended in 1968. Betty Mabry pointed him toward the electric street; that marriage ended almost as soon as it began. Cicely Tyson married him in 1981 and stayed until 1988, a second attempt at a house that could hold him. The children have had to share a father who is also a climate. Friends from the bands describe a man who could be cruel in a corridor and exact in a booth, who turned his back to a room that wanted a smile. Both the prince of the still and the difficult employer are the life. Home, in the last decade, was Malibu and then the medical rooms in Santa Monica. He painted as if the canvas were another mute. He sat for honors he did not stay home to admire.
Six things most people never knew
- Alton and East St. Louis, not a New York invention, are the first rooms. A dentist’s household. Elwood Buchanan’s no-vibrato rule. The cool tone is a schoolroom before it is a brand.
- He left Juilliard for Parker’s chair. September 1944. 52nd Street. The conservatory was the father’s plan. The Street was the work.
- He put the heroin down in 1954, in his father’s house, without a clinic. Newport the next year is a return, not a debut. Columbia signed a man who had already paid.
- Kind of Blue is two studio dates, March and April 1959. Coltrane, Adderley, Evans, Cobb, Chambers. A civic hymn recorded like a session, because it was one.
- The electric years were a method, not a fall. In a Silent Way. Bitches Brew. Rooms still empty when the plugs went in. He accepted the empty chairs as part of the price.
- After a 1982 stroke he painted as if the canvas were another mute. The 1975–1980 silence is in the file. So is the return. The last decade was work, not a waxwork of 1959.
He married young; the first household gave him children who have had to share a father who is also a climate. In 1959 he married the dancer Frances Taylor, whose face is on the covers the first quintet’s audience still holds. The marriage ended in 1968. A brief marriage to Betty Mabry, who pointed him toward the electric street, ended almost as soon as it began. He married Cicely Tyson in 1981. That marriage lasted until 1988 and was, while it lasted, a second attempt at a house that could hold him. Friends from the bands describe a man who could be cruel in a corridor and exact in a booth, who turned his back to a room that wanted a smile, and who hired players better than the job description required so the music would not sit still. Both the prince of the still and the difficult employer are the life.
The later years
From about 1975 until 1980 he stopped. Illness, exhaustion, the residue of the electric grind. The silence is part of the file, not a hole in it. He came back with The Man with the Horn (1981) and went on the road as if the decade had been a long count. We Want Miles (1982) is a live return. Star People (1983), Decoy (1984), and You’re Under Arrest (1985) kept the electric suit on. Tutu (1986), with Marcus Miller’s studio architecture, put him in a pop-facing jacket some old listeners still refuse. He accepted the refusal. Amandla (1989) is another Miller shop. Dingo (1991), a film score with Michel Legrand, and the hip-hop experiments issued after as Doo-Bop (1992) are the last rooms. He did not become a waxwork of 1959. He became a man still leaving.
He painted after a 1982 stroke, canvases that treated color the way the mute treated air. The autobiography with Quincy Troupe, issued in 1989, is a speaking voice as blunt as the back he turned to rooms. In July 1991 France made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour; he accepted in a wheelchair, weeks before the end. On September 28, 1991, he died at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, of pneumonia, respiratory failure, and the aftershock of a stroke. He was sixty-five. Cicely was no longer the wife. The children remained. The civic album was already thirty-two years old and had not agreed to age with him. Malibu had been the working home. Santa Monica was the last address.
What those last ten years were is easy to file as a comeback tour with a pop sheen. They were work. He hired young players. He took a Prince tune and a Cyndi Lauper tune and did not apologize. He sat for the honors and then went back to the mute. East St. Louis is the first room. 52nd Street is the door. Columbia is the shop. Kind of Blue is the still. The locked room of 1954 is the turn. The plugs, the silence, the paintings, and the last electric dates are the correction. He occupied a style and left it. He did that until the body quit. The recordings did the traveling he could not finish. Santa Monica is the last address. The civic album did not age with him. He had already left it.
After he was gone
The children remained. The catalog remained. Coltrane still arrives in the same sentence, correctly, as a man he hired and could not keep. Gil Evans is the other shop. Every trumpeter still pays him a tax in space. Every fusion date still pays him a tax in voltage. Kind of Blue still walks into a kitchen that does not know the second quintet. That is not a theft. It is the still doing its job. The leaving is the correction.
He came out of Alton, sat with Parker, made a cool that was not a retreat, put the habit down, furnished a modal room the country moved into, hired Coltrane and then let him go, plugged the band in, split the rooms, stopped, came back, and died in Santa Monica with the mute still in other people’s hands. If you only remember Kind of Blue, you have the still. If you remember East St. Louis, the locked room, and a man who would not occupy last year’s weather, you have him.
Portrait: Firma Hagblom-Foto · Public Domain · via Wikimedia Commons