Backstory

Miles Davis (1926–1991) was a trumpeter, bandleader and composer, born in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis. He came to New York in 1944 and played with Charlie Parker, and in 1959 led the sextet that recorded Kind of Blue, with John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans. His second quintet, with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, took the music further out through the later 1960s.

From 1968 he added electric piano, electric guitar and electric bass. In a Silent Way was recorded on 18 February 1969 and released that July. Bitches Brew followed in August 1969, three days in a Columbia studio with a band of thirteen, released as a double LP in March 1970. He played the Fillmore East and the Fillmore West that year, on bills with rock bands, and the Isle of Wight festival on 29 August 1970.

A Tribute to Jack Johnson, the soundtrack to a film about the boxer, came out in 1971, and On the Corner in 1972, built on funk and street rhythms and dividing critics and listeners at the time. In 1975, after years of ill health, he stopped playing. He came back in 1981 with The Man with the Horn and, in 1986, left Columbia after three decades and made Tutu for Warner Bros. with the bassist and producer Marcus Miller.

His autobiography and his biographers also record his violence towards women and his addictions, to heroin in the 1950s and to cocaine later. He died in Santa Monica on 28 September 1991, aged 65.

This is a demo site, a tribute built to show what a musician’s page on TJP can hold. Its nights on tour are the demo’s own. Portrait: Miles Davis, Bordeaux, 1971, by JPRoche (CC BY-SA 4.0).