Knowra Miles Davis Miles Davis Miles Davis (1926–1991) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer whose recordings helped shape bebop, cool jazz, modal jazz, and jazz fusion.
Birth of the Cool : A collection of recordings by Miles Davis’s nonet, made between 1949 and 1950 and released as an album in 1957. Its restrained ensemble sound established Davis’s early cool-jazz direction.
Gil Evans : A Canadian-born jazz arranger, composer, and pianist known for orchestral collaborations with Miles Davis. His arrangements gave Davis’s trumpet a distinctive setting on several landmark albums.
Modal jazz : A jazz approach that organizes improvisation around scales or modes rather than rapidly changing chords. Davis used modal frameworks to give soloists longer stretches of harmonic space.
East St. Louis : A city in Illinois across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. Davis grew up here in a prosperous Black family and began studying trumpet.
Second great quintet : The Miles Davis group of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, active chiefly from 1964 to 1968. Its collective improvisation and rhythmic ambiguity expanded the possibilities of the acoustic jazz group.
Kind of Blue : A 1959 Miles Davis album built around modal improvisation and featuring John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and other leading musicians. It made modal jazz widely influential through spacious, memorable performances.
John Coltrane : An American jazz saxophonist and composer whose work transformed modern improvisation. His searching solos helped define Davis’s first great quintet and Kind of Blue.
Cool jazz : A style of jazz associated with restrained dynamics, lighter tone, and carefully arranged textures. Davis helped establish this sound with the nonet recordings later collected as Birth of the Cool.
Juilliard School : A performing-arts conservatory in New York City, founded as the Institute of Musical Art in 1905. Davis studied there after moving to New York, while pursuing work in jazz clubs.
Weather Report : An American jazz-fusion group founded in 1970 by Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter. Shorter carried ideas from Davis’s band into a major fusion ensemble.
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