The tormented genius of Charlie Parker was a direct and personal influence in the early career of the trumpet player Miles Davis — considered by some today the "major musical force of the second half of the 20th century," in the USA and beyond.

Miles Davis was born in 1926 (the same year as Coltrane), just north of East St. Louis, Illinois — and just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. His father was a prosperous dentist, who had graduated from Northwestern University in Chicago, and was active in his local community. Miles's mother was an accomplished parlour pianist, who, as he suddenly discovered to his great surprise in his late teens, could also play respectable blues.

The very young Miles's own growing interest in music was crystallized by a trumpet he received as a 13th birthday present. A few years later he was working part-time in the St. Louis area, which is where he first met Bird (and Diz too), then on tour with the legendary Billy Eckstine Orchestra of the mid 1940s.

In the fall of 1944, after completing high school as his (for the times) unusually upper middle-class African-American family insisted, Miles moved to New York City, to study at the Julliard School of Music. But he soon abandoned his classes to work as a New York jazz musician — and especially as the preferred trumpet player in Charlie Parker's classic bebop quintets of 1945-1948.

Bird seems to have almost instantly grasped that Miles had some form of profound musical talent, and that was no doubt fundamentally why he so often asked the younger trumpet player to work with him. But Miles did not share Dizzy Gillespie's (to say nothing of Charlie Parker's) raw technical virtuosity. His unique gifts were more lyrical and conceptual. In the end he was not well suited to playing Charlie Parker's music, and their relationship grew troubled.

Not long after he stopped working regularly for Parker, in 1949 and 1950 Miles made some pioneering recordings with an unusual "nonet" (or 9-piece band), with arrangements by Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, and John Lewis. These "Birth of the Cool" sessions (as they were later called by shrewd record-company marketing people) began a Miles Davis-Gil Evans collaboration that would reach new heights a decade later. Gil Evans would also become, as Miles himself finally explained, "probably my best and oldest friend."

Unlike Charlie Parker, Miles Davis also managed to stay alive until he was 65, in 1991. Over the first half of the 1950s he kicked a heroin habit, with some particular help from his family in St. Louis. In 1955 (the year Bird died) Miles asked John Coltrane to be his saxophone player in the first Miles Davis Quintet. This brought a more relaxed and accessible brand of the original bebop to a wider new audience — with Miles in Dizzy's role, so to speak, and Coltrane in Bird's (though in less obvious ways Miles was no doubt Bird to Coltrane's Diz as well). The first of the subsequent several American musical ages of the mature Miles Davis had begun.

2. THE APPRENTICESHIP WITH BIRD

Miles Dewey Davis III, to start with his somewhat revealing full given name, ultimately achieved a unique credibility in his chosen precarious profession. And a good part of this no doubt flowed from his early years in New York, as Charlie Parker's somewhat flawed and finally unsuitable but still somehow most favored apprentice.

The authentic depths of the late-teenage/early 20s Miles Davis's adventures with Bird are discussed rather convincingly in the compelling autobiography that Miles himself published with the writer Quincy Troupe in 1989, some two years before he died. And the latest full Miles Davis biography — published by John Swezd of Yale University in 2002 — adds a helpful neutral sounding-board for Miles's own sometimes remarkable candor ...

3. BIRTH OF THE COOL

The almost political side to Charlie Parker that vaguely anticipated the jagged black American radicalism of the 1960s came out more strongly in the mature Miles Davis.

Miles once refused to become involved in a Playboy jazz poll, because the magazine at the time did not include black playmates.(Which is somewhat ironic, considering the harsh view of at least American black women that he finally delivered in the closing pages of his autobiography: "Most white women tend to treat a man better than a black woman does ... I know this is going to make a lot of black women mad but that's just the way I see it.")

Beyond the ongoing battle between the sexes, Miles had a sharp view of the continuing black and white divide in the America of his time. Another way he saw things was that "a lot of white people like to talk about me when I was doing the nonet thing — the Birth of the Cool thing, or when I did those other albums with Gil Evans or Bill Evans because they always like to see white people up in black shit, so that they can say they had something to do with it."

There is a chronological problem of sorts with the Birth of the Cool thing as well. The original nonet recordings made in 1949 and 1950, though influential among musicians, did not cause any big popular excitement when they were first released as 78 rpm singles. The marketing label "Birth of the Cool" itself did not emerge until the recordings were re-released on a 12-inch LP in 1957. By this time Miles and Gil Evans had already embarked on their more mature collaborations, with the 1957 album Miles Ahead.

A relative dearth of black faces is striking enough when you look at the surviving photographs of the 1949 and 1950 nonet at work in the studio in New York. The nonet graduate who most profited from the first cool jazz wave of the early 1950s probably was the white guy Gerry Mulligan, who went to California to form his piano-less quartet in 1951. As Miles would much later recollect: "White musicians who were copying my Birth of the Cool thing were getting the jobs."

At the same time, this view probably also underrates the black nonet graduates John Lewis and Kenny Clarke, who in 1952 went on to become part of the Modern Jazz Quartet — which would play together until 1974, and was "arguably the most successful ensemble in the history of jazz." (And then of course there's the point that the Birth of the Cool thing was not just Miles's own invention in the first place. Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans, and John Lewis did write the arrangements.) Miles Davis in any case spent much of the early 1950s struggling with the heroin habit that formed another of his ambiguous legacies from Charlie Parker: "I was only twenty-three years old in 1949 ... I lost my sense of discipline, lost my sense of control over my life, and started to drift."

Even in the midst of a drift that would last until the middle of the 1950s, Miles was hardly immobile. The discography at the back of his 1989 autobiography lists over 40 record dates that he appeared on from the start of 1950 to the end of 1954 . In his work with the nonet of 1949 and 1950 he had also shown the first flashes of the organizational skill and music-director brilliance that would bloom with greater discipline and effect in virtually all his later careers.

In the original conception of the nonet that had arisen from Gil Evans's basement apartment on 55^th Street in Manhattan, Bird himself was going to be the lead voice. For whatever exact reasons this did not work out, and the most favored apprentice, Miles Davis, stepped into the void. Gerry Mulligan would later remember "Miles, the bandleader. He took the initiative and put the theories to work. He called the rehearsals, hired the halls, called the players, and generally cracked the whip." (As, on Miles's own story, he had already done for Bird's classic quintets in any case, Bird having too many other more important things to do.)

In 1949 Miles also made his first trip to France, with a Tadd Dameron quintet that became "the hit of the Paris Jazz Festival, along with Sidney Bechet." Miles hung out with Jean-Paul Sartre, fell in love with both Paris and the actress Juliette Greco (with whom he would have intermittent further involvements over the next few decades), and "even found myself announcing the songs in French."

Back in the USA, over the first half of the 1950s he continued to play intermittently with Charlie Parker and other acolytes of the bop generation, at the new Birdland bar in Manhattan and elsewhere. But the more independent and personally authentic — and perhaps even "cooler" — trumpet style he began to fashion on the original nonet recordings continued to grow.

4. "HARD BOP" ... THE MILES-COLTRANE QUINTETS AND THE SEXTET WITH CANNONBALL ADDERLY ... and more Gil Evans

From one point of view, the cool Miles ended in the middle of the 1950s, when he finally got rid of his heroin habit altogether, in his very late 20s. (While continuing some significant involvement with alcohol, cocaine, tobacco, and a wide assortment of sweet things to eat.)

Like West Coast Jazz in the rising new golden state of California, perhaps, the first post-Parker "cool" Miles Davis style proved too anaemically laid-back — or as Miles himself might see it, a little too white. As early as the spring of 1954 cool started to give way to a second style that someone would ultimately call "hard bop," with a Miles Davis All Stars' album by Prestige records, rather coolly known as Walkin'.

Yet, again, the real-life chronology does not quite fit such tidy stylistic concepts. Miles himself would finally define the "real fertile creative periods in my life" as "1945 to 1949, which was the beginning," and "after I got off drugs, 1954 to 1960." (And then "1964 to 1968 wasn't so bad.") The most crucial act of the mature musician who found his own feet at last came in 1955, when he asked John Coltrane to be the saxophone player in a new Miles Davis Quintet, that would quickly become a worthy heir to the classic Charlie Parker quintets of the later 1940s.

In the end, to characterize even the main thrust of the remarkable variety of provocative American music Miles Davis created from 1954 to 1960 as "hard bop" leaves too many loose ends. It almost makes more sense to say that three distinct musical styles of the mature Miles Davis blossomed almost side by side in the last half of the 1950s — "cool," "hard bop," and "modal."

"Hard bop" can also be a suit that doesn't quite fit right, even for the music played by the Miles Davis Quintet with John Coltrane. Allowing for all the usual labeling problems, it may be an apt enough characterization of Coltrane's "sheets of sound" in the last half of the 1950s — which were a kind of variation on the technically demanding bebop that Charlie Parker had played. But one of the successes of the new Miles Davis Quintet was that Miles himself was no longer trying to play this way. Whatever else the birth of the cool may have done, it somehow continued to liberate Miles's more authentic personal lyricism.

(And thus the legend says that he famously complained to Coltrane: "you know you don't have to make all the changes." Similarly, the 1954 Walkin' album, which predates Coltrane, does pay a kind of renewed homage to Bird's own deep immersion in the blues — and what Miles apparently saw as the more funky rural black music of his own Arkansas grandparents, whom he had happily visited during childhood summer vacations. But "easy bop"— to listen to as well as to play — might be a better label than "hard bop" here.)

Miles's reputation finally started to profit as well from the re-release of the original Birth of the Cool recordings in 1957 — also the year that saw the first Miles Davis-Gil Evans revival or update of the old nonet cool concept, as it were, on the album Miles Ahead ...

... Cannonball Adderly, Bill Evans, and Kind of Blue in 1959 ... the start of the modal style ... ?and still the best-selling modern jazz record in history? ...

5. AT LEAST FREER JAZZ ... FROM COMPLEX CHORDS TO MODES AND SIMPLICITY

6. FUSION AND JAZZ-ROCK ... "THE ELECTRIC MILES"

7. THE TORMENTED PRIVATE LIFE AS A SUCCESS STORY

It could be said that Miles Davis was in some intriguing ways a finally successful version of the original Charlie Parker model of the modern jazz musician. Miles himself would seem to agree that he was never Bird's equal in music. ("Nobody could play like Bird, then or now.") But Miles did have some high musical talent that Charlie Parker recognized and promoted from the first. As Miles remembered only a few years before he died, in his best moments Bird "treated me like his son ... used to build up my confidence," and "always tell me that I could play with anybody."

As with others, Charlie Parker also and even perhaps unwillingly lured the young Miles Davis into many of the more self-destructive sides of the original ornithological jazz-scene legacy. Yet, while enduring his own recurrent bouts of private torment, Miles finally found enough ways around all this to live almost twice as long as Charlie Parker. As early as the 1960s he had begun to achieve the kind of decisive professional and commercial success, in the mainstream American mass market, that always eluded Bird in the flesh. And in the very end Miles Davis may have been Charlie Parker's ultimate flawed but much more successful successor.

In his most lucid moments Bird himself may have appreciated that this had  something to do with Miles Davis's more ambitiously supportive family background. John Szwed tells how much the young adult Miles enjoyed his father's hobby farm, in the Illinois countryside around East St. Louis, where Miles "had his own horse and loved to spend days riding across the fields." Miles's brother Vernon remembered Bird visiting the place once too, "wearing a suit as he walked through the pig pens and the barn, then looking at Miles and saying 'So this is why you're like you are'" ...

8. "SIR MILES DAVIS, 1926-1991"

"Miles Davis is forever the innovator, not only as a musician, but in other realms. His artistic impressions in oil paintings and sketches have drawn critical acclaim and have been shown in galleries around the world. "Sir" Miles Davis was inducted into the Knights of Malta in November 1988. In November 1984, he received the Sonning Music Award for lifetime achievement in music, and in March 1990, his twenty-fourth Grammy Award, this time for lifetime achievement in music."

"For one-upmanship, check out the grave of "Sir" Miles Davis. Although the famed trumpeter was inducted into the Knights of Malta in 1988, three years before his death, most members of the order rarely use the honorific "Sir." Davis' family, however, chose to inscribe "Sir" on the headstone so he wouldn't be outdone by Duke Ellington, who's buried across the road."

The Chicago Public Schools today include a Sir Miles Davis Academy.

(And there is a Miles Davis Elementary School in East St. Louis too — scroll down the list.)

* * * * * *

Appendix A: Miles Ahead ... A Bibliography

The original on the net has been arranged here in reverse chronological order ...

2004 Yasuki Nakayama, Listen to Miles, Version 6. Tokyo: Futabasha.

2002 Chris Murphy, Miles to Go: The Later Years. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press.

2002 Yasuki Nakayama, Miles Davis: We Love Music, We Love the Earth. Tokyo: Tokyo FM.

2001 Gerald Early (ed.), Miles Davis and American Culture. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press.

2001 Paul Tingen, Miles Beyond: Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991. New York: Billboard Books.

2000 Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. New York: Da Capo Press.

2000 Yasuki Nakayama, Miles Davis Complete Discography. Tokyo: Futabasha.

1999 Ian Carr, Miles Davis The Definitive Biography. HarperCollins (revised from 1982 publication)

1999 Larry Fisher, Miles Davis and Dave Liebman: Jazz Connections. Stroudsberg: CARIS Music Services.

1998 Chris Smith, "A Sense of the Possible: Miles Davis and the Semiotics of Improvised Performance", in In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation (edd. Bruno Nett and Melinda Russell), University of Chicago Press.

1997 Luca Bragalini, "Miles Davis e la Disgregazione dello Standard, parts 1-2," Musica Jazz, 53/9 (Agosto-Settembre 1997) and 53/10 (Ottobre 1997). An English translation is available on this website.

1997 Todd Coolman, The Miles Davis Quintet of the Mid_1960s: Synthesis of Improvisational and Compositional Elements. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.

1997 Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.

1997 Bill Kirchner (ed.), A Miles Davis Reader (Smithsonian Readers in American Music) Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

1996 Franck Bergerot, Miles Davis: introduction a l'ecoute du jazz moderne, editions du Seuil, Paris.

1996 Gary Carner, The Miles Davis Companion: Four Decades of Commentary. New York: Schirmer Books.

1996 Chris Murphy, The Prestige Book: Discography of All Series. Jazz Critique Special Edition No. 3 (1996). Tokyo: Jazz Hihyo.

1996 Eric Nisenson, 'Round About Midnight: A Portrait of Miles Davis. New York: Da Capo Press.

1996 Ken Vail, Miles' Diary: The Life of Miles Davis, 1947-1961. London: Sanctuary Publishing.

1995 Bob Belden and John Ephland, "Miles... What was that note?" Downbeat, December 1995, pp. 17-22.

1995 Frederic Goaty, Miles Davis, Editions Vade Retro, Paris.

1995 Yasuhiro Fujioka, Lewis Porter, and Yoh-Ichi Hamada, John Coltrane: A Discography and Musical Biography. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Rutgers University Institute of Jazz Studies, Studies in Jazz, Volume 20.

1994 Bill Cole, Miles Davis: The Early Years. New York: Da Capo Press.

1994 Daryl Long, Miles Davis For Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers.

1993 Laurent Cugny, Electrique Miles Davis 1968-1975. Marseille: André Dimanche Éditeur.

1993 Robert Walser, "Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis," Musical Quarterly, Summer 1993, pp. 343-65.

1993 Richard Williams, The Man in The Green Shirt. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

1992 Bret Primack, "Remembering Miles," Jazz Times, February 1992, pp. 17-88 (with interruptions).

1991 Frank Alkyer, "The Miles Files," Downbeat, December 1991, pp. 22-24.

1991 Miles Davis with Scott Gutterman, The Art of Miles Davis. New York: Prentice Hall Editions.

1991 Jan Lohmann, The Sound of Miles Davis: The Discography 1945-1991. Copenhagen: JazzMedia ApS.

1991 Howard Mandel, "Sketches of Miles," Downbeat, December 1991, pp. 16-20.

1991 Takao Ogawa a.o., Jazz Hero's Data Bank. Tokyo: JICC.

1991 Gary Tomlinson, "Miles Davis: Musical Dialogician," Black Music Research Journal 11/2, Fall 1991, pp. 249-64.

1988 Michael Cuscuna and Michel Ruppli, The Blue Note Label: A Discography. New York: Greenwood Press.

1988 Barry McRae, Miles Davis. London: Apollo Books.

1988 Peter Weissmüller, Miles Davis: Sein Leben, Musik, Schallplatten. Berlin: OREOS.

1987 Amiri Baraka, "Miles Davis: One of the Great Mother Fuckers," in Amiri and Amina Baraka (edd.), The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues. New York: William Morrow, pp. 290-301.

1987 Toyoki Okajima (ed.), The Complete Blue Note Book: Tribute to Alfred Lion. Jazz Critique Special Edition, No. 3 (1987). Tokyo: Jazz Hihyo.

1983 Howard Brofsky, "Miles Davis and My Funny Valentine: The Evolution of a Solo," Black Music Research Journal 3, Winter 1983, pp. 23-34.

1983 Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. Previously published by Quill/Morrow, 1989. Originally published in two volumes, 1983 and 1985.

1983 Greg Tate, "The Electric Miles: Parts 1 and 2," Downbeat, July and August 1983.

1982 Ian Carr, Miles Davis: A Critical Biography. New York: Morrow; London: Quartet Books.

1981 Barry Kernfield, Adderley, Coltrane, and Davis at the Twilight of Bop: The Search for Melodic Coherence (1958-1959). Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.

1980 Michel Ruppli and Bob Porter, The Savoy Label: A Discography. Westport: Greenwood Press.

1978 Julie Coryell and Laura Friedman, Jazz-Rock Fusion: The People, The Music. New York: Delta Books.

1976 Tore Mortensen, Miles Davis: Den Ny Jazz. Aarhus: n/a.

1976 Harvey Pekar, "Miles Davis: 1964-69 Recordings," Coda, May 1976, pp. 8-14.

1975 Jimmy Saunders, "An Interview with Miles Davis," Playboy, April 1975.

1974 Gregg Hall, "Miles Davis: Today's Most Influential Contemporary Musician," Downbeat, July 18, 1974, pp. 16-20.

1971 Chris Albertson, "The Unmasking of Miles Davis," Saturday Review, November 27, 1971, pp. 67-87 (with interruptions).

1970 Dan Morgenstern, "Miles in Motion," Downbeat, September 3, 1970, pp. 16-17.

1969 Ralph J. Gleason, "Miles Davis," Rolling Stone, December 13, 1969.

1964 Leonard Feather, "Miles and the Fifties" (Classic Interview), Downbeat, March 1995, pp. 36-39. (Interview originally appeared in Downbeat July 2, 1964.)

1962 Alex Haley, "The Miles Davis Interview," Playboy, September 1962.

1962 Don Heckman, "Miles Davis Times Three: The Evolution of a Jazz Artist," Downbeat, August 30, 1962, pp. 16-19.

1961 Michael James, Miles Davis. London: Faber and Cassell.

1960 R.B. Shaw, "Miles Above," Jazz Journal, November 1960, pp. 15-16.

1958 Max Harrison, "Sheer Alchemy, for a While: Miles Davis and Gil Evans," Jazz Monthly, December 1958 and February 1960.

1955 Leonard Feather and Miles Davis, "Blindfold Test." Davis did five Blindfold Tests with Feather in Downbeat magazine: September 21, 1955 (pp. 33-34); August 7, 1958 (p. 29); June 18, 1964 (p. 21); June 13, 1968 (p. 34); and June 27, 1968 (p. 33).

Appendix B: Notes on John Szwed

B1. SZWED'S BACKGROUND

(1) Some academic background on Szwed ... including his interest in Newfoundland: "John F. Szwed published his first successful book in 1966. It was entitled Private Cultures and Public Imagery: Interpersonal relations in a Newfoundland Peasant Society. Three years later, in 1969, he published his second book Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives."

(2) John Szwed, "Paul E. Hall: A Newfoundland Song-Maker and Community of Song," in Henry Glassie, Edward D. Ives, and John Szwed, eds, Folksongs and their Makers (Bowling Green: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1970)

(3) Szwed's short bio from Yale U (and a photo of him today, more or less)

(4) Interesting interview with Szwed in Jerry Jazz Musician, where S says to a particular question about Miles: " It takes a better person than me to work out exactly what happened here. As with everything else with him, you can find your own reading of his behavior." (It is one virtue of S's book that it does let you do this, generally. He just tells you what he has found out about Miles, and lets you draw your own conclusions.)This Jerry Jazz Musician also notes their parallel interview with Miles Davis historian Gerard Early, editor of Miles Davis and American Culture, published in 2001 by the Missouri Historical Society Press, in connection with a retrospective Miles Davis exhibit.

B2. REVIEWS OF SZWED'S SO WHAT: THE LIFE OF MILES DAVIS

(1) On Amazon site ...

(2) Salon.com by Allen Barra: "So What" is the best book to date on Davis' life, work and mystique. Though he knows a great deal more about jazz than I ever will, Szwed has written a book that will appeal not only to jazz nuts but to people like me, for whom jazz is a major pleasure if not an all_consuming passion, and who have a fairly good idea what they're hearing even when they can't always articulate it in technical terms."

(3) By Martin Brady

(4) City Paper in Baltimore area — "a workmanlike biography that occasionally achieves eloquence and is blessedly free of cant ... tells the story in a straightforward chronological manner interspersed with anecdotes and reminiscences."

(5) By Raymond Chowkwanyun

(6) By Jules Epstein in Jazzamatazz ...

(7) By Matthew Wuethrich in All About Jazz

(8) Yale Review of Books ... "Since Davis's death at age 65 in 1991, he has been the subject of more than twenty books, including biographies, memoirs, and critical studies. Unfortunately, according to Szwed, some of those authors—including Davis himself and Quincy Troupe, who together produced Davis's autobiography in 1989—were too enamored of the fanciful rumors about their subject and created enjoyable but fictive reads."