Miles Davis

3 Pages 708 Words

Miles Davis American trumpet player and bandleader, one of the most innovative influential, and respected figures in the history of Jazz. Davis was a leading figure in the bebop style of jazz and in combining styles of jazz and rock music. As a player, he was a master improviser who player seemingly simple melodies with great subtlety and expressiveness. As a combo leader, he assembled classic groups and allowed then the freedom to experiment and develop. The recordings of Davis and his groups have been imitated by musicians around the world.

Born Miles Dewey Davis III in Alton, Illinois, he grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois. Davis began music lessons after receiving a trumpet on his 13th birthday from his father. Two years later he joined the musicians union and began playing with a local band on weekends. About this time he met trumpeter Clark Terry, who helped and encouraged him. In 1947, after graduating from high school, he went to New York City to study classical music at the Julliard School of Music.

While there, he also began playing with alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and other pioneers of new jazz style known as “bebop”. In 1945, at the age of 19, he began playing in a combo led by Parker. The recordings he made with Parker that year demonstrate that Davis had excellent tone but an immature style of improvising. However, he refined and improved his style of improvising during the next few years with Parker.

In 1949 and 1950, Davis made a series of recording with nine-person group that appeared on the album “The Birth of the Cool” (1950). The terms cool and cool Jazz referred to a slower, more subdues style of bebop. By the mid- 1950s Davis had developed one of the most distinctive style in all of Jazz. Unlike Gillespie, the first great bebop trumpeter Davis preferred simple, lyrical melodies to speedy flashy ones.

Using delicate pitch-bending and a light vibrato he cr...