Miles Davis Biography Quotes 13 Report mistakes

Early Life and Musical Beginnings (1926–1944)
Miles Dewey Davis III was born on May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, and raised in nearby East St. Louis in a middle-class African American family. His father, Miles Dewey Davis II, was a successful dentist; his mother, Cleota Henry Davis, was a music teacher. Given a trumpet at age 13, he came under the tutelage of Elwood Buchanan, a stern high school band director who insisted he play with a clear, vibrato-less tone, an aesthetic that would become a lifelong signature. By his mid-teens Davis was already working local gigs, learning discipline, sight-reading, and the essentials of bandstand craft.

New York, Juilliard, and the Bebop Crucible (1944–1948)
In 1944 Davis moved to New York City to attend the Juilliard School. He found the curriculum too rigid and eurocentric for his ambitions, and soon spent more time in Harlem jam sessions than in classrooms. He sought out the leading lights of bebop, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, absorbing their innovations at Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House. By late 1945 he was recording with Parker, contributing to sessions that reset the course of modern jazz. While his facility wasn't as volcanic as Gillespie's, Davis's concise phrasing and melodic economy stood out. He left Juilliard and committed fully to a life in music.

Birth of the Cool and a New Sound (1948–1950)
Eager to move beyond bebop's ferocious density, Davis joined a collective centered around arranger Gil Evans, along with Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and others. Their nonet sessions for Capitol, later released as Birth of the Cool, used chamber-like voicings, unusual instrumentation, and relaxed tempos to create a spacious, modern sound. While not immediately a commercial success, these recordings were profoundly influential, launching the "cool jazz" idiom and establishing a creative bond between Davis and Gil Evans that would bear fruit for decades.

Struggles, Renewal, and the Columbia Era (1951–1958)
The early 1950s saw Davis fighting a heroin addiction and uneven work, though he still recorded striking sides for Prestige and Blue Note. In 1954 he got clean and soon thereafter unveiled a defining hallmark: the close-miked Harmon mute, which lent his trumpet an intimate, vocal quality. A galvanizing appearance at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival led Columbia Records' George Avakian to sign him, while producer Teo Macero would later become Davis's crucial studio partner. With tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones, Davis assembled the "First Great Quintet", documenting a taut, swinging approach on 'Round About Midnight and a string of Prestige albums. He also recorded the brooding soundtrack for Louis Malle's film Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1957) during a fabled Paris stay.

Gil Evans Collaborations and Modal Breakthroughs (1957–1960)
Reuniting with Gil Evans, Davis recorded Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), and Sketches of Spain (1960), ambitious large-ensemble projects that blended jazz improvisation with orchestral color. In smaller groups he moved toward modal frameworks, reducing harmonic turbulence to allow greater melodic freedom. Milestones (1958) foreshadowed this shift, and Kind of Blue (1959), with Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb, perfected it. Kind of Blue became a touchstone across genres, revered for its lyricism, space, and timeless clarity.

Confronting America and Artistic Authority
Davis's growing stature coincided with the civil rights era. In 1959 he was assaulted by a white police officer outside Birdland despite doing nothing wrong, an incident that fueled his outspoken criticism of racism. He was unafraid to defy expectations, musical, social, or sartorial, and that assertiveness was key to his authority as a bandleader.

The Second Great Quintet and Post-Bop Innovation (1964–1968)
In the mid-1960s Davis formed the "Second Great Quintet": Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums). This band expanded post-bop language with elastic time, harmonic ambiguity, and collective interplay, captured on E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, and Filles de Kilimanjaro. Their approach, simultaneously abstract and grounded, reshaped small-group jazz and trained a generation of virtuosos who would become major bandleaders.

Electric Turn and the Fusion Vanguard (1968–1975)
Listening keenly to rock, funk, and global music, Davis embraced electric instruments and studio experimentation. In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970), with contributors including Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin, Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette, used vamp-based forms, tape edits, and layered textures to open a vast sonic frontier. Live bands with Keith Jarrett, Gary Bartz, and Michael Henderson further emphasized rhythm and atmosphere. Albums like Jack Johnson (1971), On the Corner (1972), Agharta, and Pangaea (both 1975, recorded in Japan) pushed groove, timbre, and improvisation into radical territory, catalyzing jazz-rock and funk-fusion. Producer Teo Macero's splicing and montage techniques were integral to this era's sound world.

Hiatus and Return (1975–1981)
After years of punishing schedules, substances, and physical pain, including hip and leg issues, Davis withdrew from public performance in 1975. He reemerged in 1981 with The Man with the Horn, beginning a vibrant late period. He drew on young talent, contemporary R&B, pop, and hip-hop currents, reasserting his relevance not by repetition but by forward motion.

Late 1980s: Pop Dialogues and New Collaborations (1981–1991)
In the 1980s Davis recorded for Columbia and then Warner Bros., collaborating extensively with bassist-producer Marcus Miller on Tutu (1986) and Amandla (1989), which blended synthesizers, programmed grooves, and atmospheric orchestrations around his still-penetrating trumpet lines. He revisited and reimagined pop materials, covering Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time and Scritti Politti's Perfect Way, without sacrificing his musical identity. He engaged, to varying degrees, with figures like Quincy Jones and Prince, and late in life returned to the music of Gil Evans in a celebrated appearance with Jones at Montreux. He also cultivated a parallel life as a painter, channeling his improvisational instincts into bold visual canvases.

Sound, Style, and Bandleading
Davis's tone, focused, burnished, often through a Harmon mute, carried a conversational intensity. He prized space and narrative contour over sheer velocity, letting silence and short motifs do expressive work. As a bandleader he surrounded himself with strong, inquisitive players and pushed them to find new solutions. Many future luminaries, Coltrane, Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Shorter, Hancock, Carter, Williams, Corea, Jarrett, Zawinul, McLaughlin, and others, passed through his bands, and he granted them latitude to develop personal voices within evolving conceptions.

Personal Life
Charismatic and complicated, Davis cultivated an elegant, cutting-edge style in dress and demeanor. A 1955 operation on his throat left him with a permanent rasp after he spoke too soon during recovery. He was demanding, sometimes volatile, yet capable of deep loyalty to collaborators. His relationships included the French singer Juliette Gréco; marriages to dancer Frances Taylor Davis (1958, 1968), musician Betty Mabry Davis (1968, 1969), and actress Cicely Tyson (1981, 1989); and important artistic relationships with arrangers and producers such as Gil Evans and Teo Macero. He had several children and remained close to family even as his career kept him on the road.

Death and Posthumous Recognition
Miles Davis died on September 28, 1991, in Santa Monica, California, from complications including pneumonia and a stroke. He received multiple Grammy Awards during his life, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and numerous posthumous honors; he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. His final studio project, Doo-Bop, blending jazz trumpet with hip-hop production, was released posthumously in 1992.

Legacy
Across five decades, Davis repeatedly anticipated the next phase of modern music: bebop apprentice, cool-jazz architect, hard-bop leader, modal pioneer, post-bop experimentalist, electric fusion innovator, and pop-era reinterpreter. Each reinvention was less a repudiation of the past than an insistence on currency and risk. He changed not only how the trumpet could sound, but how bands could think, about harmony and form, rhythm and space, recording and editing, repertoire and repertoire's place in the present. For countless musicians and listeners, Miles Davis remains a compass: a model of restlessness, curiosity, and style whose path shows that the future of music belongs to those willing to imagine it.

Our collection contains 13 quotes who is written by Miles, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Music - Legacy & Remembrance - Learning from Mistakes.

Other people realated to Miles: Carlos Santana (Musician), Bill Graham (Politician), Stanley Crouch (Critic), Sonny Rollins (Musician), Charlie Parker (Musician), Jeanne Moreau (Actress), Bill Laswell (Musician), Gunther Schuller (Composer), Lee Konitz (Musician), Max Roach (Musician)

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