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Miles Davis: Charlie Parker
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Miles Davis was one of the most diverse innovators of modern jazz. While his career began absorbing the sounds of bebop, he progressed to initiate many other styles of music including cool-jazz, modal jazz, and fusion. Davis's solo ideas incorporated lyricism and subtle phrases that richly contrasted the interpretations of Parker and Coltrane. He was ... well known for assembling all-star musicians to perform on memorable recordings including Kind Of Blue that featured John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Cobb, Bill Evans, and Paul Chambers. He popularized the sound of the harmon mute, played the Flugle Horn on select recordings, and defined an era of music. By and large, Miles Davis brought a new dimension to jazz.
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Born Miles Dewey Davis III in Alton, Illinois, he grew up in East Saint 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 1944, after graduating from high school, he went to New York City to study classical music at the Juilliard School of Music. While there, he ... began playing with alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and other pioneers of the new jazz style known as bebop.
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Miles Davis took an all-inclusive, constantly restless approach to jazz that had begun to fall out of favor by the time of his death, even as it earned him controversy during his lifetime. It was hard to recognize the bebop acolyte of Charlie Parker in the flamboyantly dressed leader with the hair extensions who seemed to keep one foot on a wah-wah pedal and one hand on an electric keyboard in his later years. But he did much to popularize jazz, reversing the trend away from commercial appeal that bebop began. And whatever the fripperies and explorations, he retained an ability to play moving solos that endeared him to audiences and demonstrated his affinity with tradition. At a time when jazz is inclining toward academia and repertory orchestras rather than moving forward, he is a reminder of the music\'s essential quality of boundless invention, using all available means. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide', 'Throughout a professional career lasting 50 years, Miles Davis played the trumpet in a lyrical, introspective, and melodic style, often employing a stemless Harmon mute to make his sound more...');">Expand [+]
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In the Fall of 1944 Miles took a scholarship to attend Julliard, a convenient passport to New York City. It didn’t take him long to immerse himself in the New York scene and he began working 52nd Street gigs alongside Charlie Parker in 1945. Soon Miles ... found work with Coleman Hawkins, and the big bands of Eckstine, and Benny Carter. During the late 1940s a number of musical contemporaries began to meet and jam regularly at the small apartment of arranger-pianist Gil Evans. Among them were saxophonists Gerry Mulligan and Lee Konitz, and pianist John Lewis. Out of this group of musicians, all interested in seeking new ways to express their modern jazz proclivities, Davis carved his own nonet.
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Miles had his first professional gig when he was 17. Miles traveled across the river to St. Louis, Missouri to hear well-known jazz musicians play in clubs. Mesmerized by their talent and style, he would listen to their all night jam sessions. Charlie Parker, a talented saxophonist, arrived in St. Louis with the Billy Eckstine Band in 1944. Charlie was the creative force behind a new form of jazz that was later to be called bebop. In playing bebop, musicians shifted accents to give the music an unpredictable and exciting sound.
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The son of a prosperous dental surgeon, Davis began playing the trumpet at age 13 and was soon performing with local jazz bands in St. Louis. He moved to New York City in 1944 to study at the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard School), which he soon left to play bebop with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and others. He played primarily in Parker's bands from 1945 until becoming the leader of a short-lived nonet (1948–49) whose studio recordings became the album Birth of the Cool (1949). One of the pioneering cool jazz groups, the nonet featured the saxophonists Gerry Mulligan and Lee Konitz and the pianist-arrangers Gil Evans and John Lewis.
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