The history of post-war jazz tracked the musical development of Miles Dewey Davis III so closely that it is tempting to see the trumpeter as the orchestrator of each of the most significant stylistic shifts of the era. With the notable exception of free jazz, Miles seemed to trigger a new seismic shift in the music with each passing decade. The reality is inevitably less simple, but there is no question that if Miles did not initiate successive revolutions, he was consistently in the frontline of their development and popularization.
Davis's playing style, often described as 'cool', was unique in the hotbed of 1940s New York bebop. His tone was pensive and soft, with little attack, vibrato or other ornamentation. His frequent use of a mute further created a sense of intimacy, drawing the listener into the music. While his solos may have been expressed simply, they were at the same time highly sophisticated, and his modal improvisation technique helped to lay the foundations for the free-jazz movement of the 1960s.
Early Heroes Born into a black, bourgeois family in Alton, Illinois in 1926, Miles was brought up in St. Louis and first played music professionally in that city. His parents were musical and encouraged their son's interests, while his father had a love of jazz music and presented Miles with a trumpet for his thirteenth birthday. Miles played in his high school band and through his teacher was privileged enough to meet one of his heroes, CI Terry, on whom he modelled his playing style. 1 lucky break came when Billy Eckstein's band ce St. Louis, featuring Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie with whose work Davis was familiar from recori During the performance the third trumpet play taken ill, and Davis stepped in.
Moving to New York in 1945 to study a Juilliard School of Music, Davis was in time to the flowering of bebop and determined to find and play with him again; he succeeded and soo became Parker's regular trumpet player at the 7 Deuces in 52nd Street. He also played with Pai quintet on the keystone bebop recordings with although his technical dexterity was not quite 1 Parker's and Gillespie's standards, and he gave '