Miles Davis at the Kool Jazz Festival 1981
Davis did something few successful musicians do: He dramatically changed his style four times during his career. Most musicians, once they have found an approach that gains them an audience, will stick with it to the grave. Davis enjoyed success with each change and altered his audience as he changed. In this regard, a good portion of his audience did not grow old with him but rather renewed itself with fresh listeners. He first made his name as a trumpeter (and foil) for bebop saxophone virtuoso Charlie Parker. He was associated with a major jazz innovator but was not an innovator himself at this point, but a sidekick. With the Birth of the Cool sessions of 1949-1950, Davis became a major voice in a jazz style that was something like a countermovement to bop. But he moved on from this phase quickly. When Davis hit his stride in the 1950s, he had a band of bop-oriented players: John Coltrane on saxophone, Philly Jo Jones on drums, Paul Chambers on bass, Red Garland on piano; yet the band was never identified as a bebop band. Davis was in many ways still considered a “cool” player, although he did not perform in that context anymore.

His 1960s band with Wayne Shorter on saxophone (and chief composer), Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums, were not players associated with bop or cool. They possessed those elements of style, but they also brought the influences of the avant-garde that was then the new wave of jazz. Davis adapted to this without abandoning elements of bop or cool but with a completely different sound than he had in the 1950s.

Then, with 1970 album, Bitches Brew, Davis adopted an electric, rock sound that was a complete departure from everything that went before, (although In a Silent Way which preceded Bitches Brew in 1969 was a preview of things to come, though, shall we say, prettier). There would be more permutations of the electronic, rock-influenced, wall of sound until 1975, when he stopped playing for five years. This was the period where he was accused by critics such as the late Stanley Crouch of selling out, having a middle-age crisis, wanting a young audience, chasing the filthy lucre, as if, after all, he had not been doing that before, in his own fashion. What artist does not want to make money!?

It is hard to imagine how albums like Bitches Brew, Live-Evil, Big Fun, On the Corner, or Get Up With It could be considered commercial. They hardly fit the format for radio play. The music was often densely textured, loud, and long; compositions were often 20 or 30 minutes long. For people who liked some earlier stage of Davis, some form of acoustic Miles, this music was not even listenable. This new music clearly appealed to a certain set of young people; Davis was playing at rock concerts. There were frequently no discernible solos or even a discernible melody. The music sounded not merely modern but the cutting edge of modern, made up of all the elements that made music on the cutting edge of modern in the 1970s—electric guitars, sitars, various and sundry percussion, electric keyboards, soprano saxophones, modes, vamps. That was its appeal and that was always Davis’s appeal throughout the 25 years he was a major presence in American music. He was the personification of making the new sound newer and, well, cooler.

When he returned in the 1980s, his chops not quite what they were, the music was more pop-oriented, a bit of rock, a bit of smooth jazz, a bit of hip hop. This was a coda, rather like a great athlete hanging on a few more years as an adequate impersonation of himself. He had made his career.

Source: Gerald Early /  The Common Reader

photo  ©1981 Mituhiro Sugawara