Born May 26, 1926 in Alton, Illinois, not far across the Mississippi River from East St. Louis, Miles Dewey Davis III was a trumpeter and American jazz bandleader. , and composer. He is considered one of the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th century music. Miles Davis "adopted diverse musical orientations during a five-decade career that kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz." Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Miles Davis began playing the trumpet in elementary school, despite his mother's desire for him to study the violin. At school, once a week, on Wednesdays at 2:30 p.m., he and his class taught him how to keep a note on the instrument. “Everyone would be fighting to play their best. Luckily for me, I learned to play the chromatic scale right away… so I didn’t have to stand there and hold that note the whole time.” Miles Davis continued playing trumpet throughout school beginning formal lessons in sixth grade at Attucks Elementary School with Elwood C. Buchanan, a professional musician. And later in life he had lessons with Joseph Gustat, the principal trumpeter of the St. Louis Symphony, whom Miles had seen several times. Gustat focused heavily on technique and possessing proper technique, which aided in the early stages of his development as a trumpeter. There is a story from the book "The Life of Miles Davis" where it says that when Miles first played for Gustat, he told him that he was the worst trumpeter he had ever heard, but Miles accepted the criticism. in his stride and worked even harder by training longer, working on the fundamentals. At an early age he was introduced to the East St. Louis jazz community where he would go and play at concerts with his own bands or, as a teenager, he would be asked to sit in or play with some of the visiting bands in town, such as at sixteen, when Miles was trying to play for Eddie Randle's Blue Devils at the Castle Ballroom in St. Louis where Randall's band was performing, Miles auditioned for the band in front of the evening audience. He was hired and began to gain the respect of fellow musicians and fellow musicians in the audience. Randle's band was the house band for the Elks Club's Rhumboogie club where they had a weekly gig in front of audiences often accompanying singers, comedians and dancers. During this stint with the group, a young Miles Davis was able to play with artists such as Howard Mcghee and Sonny Stitt, who once appeared in a concert with the group. Sonny Stitt was impressed with Miles and later that night came to the Davis house to teach Miles some "little licks." He also tried to enlist Miles into his currently touring band, Tiny Bradshaw, but Miles' mother wouldn't let him. Over time, Miles began to build a good reputation in the area and received praise from other high profile musicians such as Lester Young and other bands such as Illinois Jacquet. Miles continued to play with other incredible bands and artists in the St. Louis area, including when Dizzy Gilespie asked him to replace a trumpeter who had hemorrhaged in Dizzy's band "Eckstine" at Club Riviera. This group included jazz superstars such as Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Lucky Thompson and legendary alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. Miles wasreplaced by the ailing player and was good enough to spend the week in St Louis, but not good enough to make it to the next tour venue in Chicago with them. It was during this time that Miles graduated from high school and continued his studies at the Julliard School of Music in New York. However, while at Juliard, Davis dropped out and made his professional debut as a member of Charlie Parker's bebop quintet, with whom he had previously performed in Eckstine. He was part of this group from 1944 to 1948. It was during this time in Miles Davis' life that his musical career truly began with the release of his own music a few years later. Miles Davis was considered a creator and shaper of many different styles of jazz, such as cool jazz where albums such as "Birth of the Cool" helped launch this style in 1957 and the jazz fusion style which Miles was the pioneer through the album "Bitches Brew", the album "mixed free jazz blown by a large ensemble with electronic keyboards and guitar, plus a dense mix of percussion. Davis was also inspired by rock music by playing his trumpet through electronic effects and pedals on this album, which led to criticism from other artists that this album was not jazz and that Miles was moving away from the jazz music for which everyone knew him However, the style of jazz music that Miles Davis particularly stands out as being a pioneer and popularizer of is modal jazz. The term "modal jazz" refers to improvisational music organized in a rather horizontal manner. than vertical in chords. By minimizing the role of chords, a modal approach requires the improviser to generate interest in other ways through melody, rhythm, timbre, and emotion. A modal piece will generally use chords, but the chords will be derived from the dominant mode. The creator of this approach to music was George Russell who wrote the book “Lydian chromatic concept of tonal organization” in which Russell's work posits that all music is based on the tonal gravity of the Lydian mode. It was the book that influenced some New York musicians in the 1940s and 1950s, including Miles Davis and Bill Evans, which led Miles Davis to explore the idea of ​​modal music more deeply. The first example we hear of Miles Davis using modal music concepts in music occurred in 1958 when he was given the task of creating the music (soundtrack) for a French film called Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. He was keen to contribute to the film, a thriller starring Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet as lovers who conspire to kill Moreau's husband and then face sobering consequences. “I agreed to do it and it was a great learning experience,” Miles wrote in his autobiography, “because I had never written music for a film before.” Miles wrote the music while he was in Paris touring Europe, which he did because of the racism still present in America at the time, as the tour only lasted a few days during the three weeks that Miles was in Paris, the trumpeter was able to spend time working on the score. “I was watching the rushes of the film and asking to write down musical ideas,” he explained. Critics said his trumpet had never sounded so desolate and desperate, particularly on the opening track, "Générique", which is slow, menacing and peppered with blues inflections. Even more melancholy is "The Murder of Carala", on which Miles' horn combines with the funeral chords of the piano to describe a murder scene. Brighter moments can, however, be found on the ultra-fast“Diner Au Motel” and “Sur L’Autoroute,” both propelled by the brushwork of Kenny Clarke. Stylistically, the revered Ascenseur Pour L'Échafaud soundtrack was also significant because it deliberately avoided the language of bebop, with Miles preferring to adopt a modal vocabulary showing the change that was beginning to take place in his music (Malle, 1958). The film turned out to be a great success and even though the film has been long forgotten, the soundtrack remains one of Miles' greatest albums as it truly signifies the beginning of the modal era of jazz and how Miles really pioneered and started experimenting with modal. jazz. Along with this, in 1958, came another classic Miles Davis album called Miles Davis, an album recorded in February and March 1958 by Miles Davis. It is noted for including Miles' early forays into the developing experiments of modal jazz, as noted on the track "Milestones". This album was Miles' first taste of beginning to experiment with modal jazz. This album is significant in another way because it was also the last time the rhythm section of Jones, Garland and Chambers played with Miles on record. However, there is another project that Miles Davis has done that is probably one of his greatest projects. for him and not just jazz but all forms of music. The album that truly pushed and changed the course of jazz forever and brought modal jazz to the forefront of music in the 1960s. This project being known as the 'Kind of blue' album. The album was recorded on March 2 and April 22, 1959 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York, then released on August 17 of the same year by Columbia Records. The album features Miles Davis' ensemble sextet consisting of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and alto saxophonist Julian 'Cannonball' Adderley, pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb, along with the band's former pianist Bill Evans appearing on most of Kelly's venue tracks. Thanks in part to Evans' addition to the sextet in 1958, Davis continued Milestones' partial modal experimentation by basing Kind of Blue entirely on modality. The entire album was composed as a series of modal sketches, in which each performer was given a set of scales defining the parameters of their improvisation and style. In an interview that year with critic Nat Hentoff, Miles explained the new approach. “When you follow this path,” he said, “you can go on forever. You don't have to worry about changes and you can do more with time. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you are. …I think a movement in jazz is beginning, moving away from the conventional chord chain and returning to an emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variations. There will be fewer agreements but endless possibilities as to what to do with them. That last phrase about chords posed a problem miles before the album was recorded and that was that he needed a pianist who could accompany with fewer chords. It was a radical notion. Establishing the chords—providing front-line horn players with the compass that kept their improvisations on track—was what modern jazz pianists did. Russell recommended someone he had hired for a few of his own sessions, an intense young white man named Bill Evans. Evans trained at a music conservatory with a penchant for French impressionist composers, like Ravel and Debussy, whose harmonies floated lightly above the melody line. When Evans first started playing jazz, he tended not to play the root of a chord; For example,’.