Miles Davis

Money, first. His father was a dental surgeon, his mother a violinist and music teacher, and the family held 200 acres near Pine Bluff, Arkansas with a paying pig farm on it, where the children fished and rode horses through the summers. They moved to East St. Louis in 1927, into rooms above a commercial building behind the dental office, in a white neighborhood. He got a trumpet at nine from a friend of his father's, and lessons from Elwood Buchanan, one of his father's patients, who told him to drop the vibrato and stay in the middle of the horn. His mother had wanted violin. Juilliard took him in September 1944. He found Charlie Parker on 52nd Street and left after three semesters.

He played in Parker's quintet until 1948, then walked away from bebop and cut the Birth of the Cool sessions for Capitol. Hard bop on Prestige in the early 1950s, then Columbia, then the first quintet with John Coltrane. Milestones in 1958. Kind of Blue in 1959, which has sold more than five million copies in the United States and 6.4 million worldwide and is still the record people buy when they buy one jazz record. Orchestral work with Gil Evans alongside it, and Sketches of Spain in 1960. The second quintet from 1964, with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. Then electricity: In a Silent Way in 1969, Bitches Brew in 1970, a million copies sold and a genre split down the middle.

Heroin had him from 1949 to 1954. Los Angeles police arrested him for possession and he was acquitted, and he went back to his father's house in Illinois, then spent about six months in Detroit where the drug was harder to find, and came into New York clean in February 1954. Five years later, outside Birdland, a patrolman told him to move along, he said he was working there, and a third officer came at him from behind and opened his head — five stitches, an assault charge, an acquittal the following January. He beat his wives. He put it in his own book in 1989: every time he hit Frances Taylor he felt bad, he wrote, because most of it was not her fault.

He stopped playing for five years after September 1975 — ruined hips, cocaine, alcohol — and returned in 1980 to make pop records that critics disliked and audiences bought in numbers he had never reached before. A stroke in 1982 took the use of his right hand for a time. Diabetes by 1985. He died in Santa Monica on September 28, 1991, at 65, of a stroke, pneumonia and respiratory failure, and went into Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx under a headstone carved with the opening notes of Solar, a tune whose authorship other musicians have disputed. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame took him in 2006. Kind of Blue keeps selling and the autobiography keeps complicating him.

Miles Davis's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Birth of the Cool album
  Nonet sessions recorded for Capitol in 1949 and 1950 1957
• Kind of Blue album
  More than five million copies sold in the United States alone 1959
• Sketches of Spain album
  Orchestral, arranged with Gil Evans 1960
• Bitches Brew album
  A million seller, and the start of the long argument about fusion 1970
• Tutu album
  Programmed synthesizers, sampling and drum loops 1986
• Miles: The Autobiography book
  Written with Quincy Troupe 1989

• 1935 aged ~9 Given his first trumpet at nine Elwood Buchanan, a patient of his father's, taught him to play without vibrato.
• September 1944 aged 18 Enrolls at Juilliard and starts sitting in with Charlie Parker
• May 1949 aged 22 Plays the Paris jazz festival and decides France treats him better The trip, he said, changed the way he looked at things forever.
• February 1954 aged 27 Returns to New York free of heroin
• October 1955 aged 29 A larynx operation and an argument days later leave him with the whisper
• 1959 aged ~33 Records Kind of Blue
• August 1959 aged 33 Police beat him outside Birdland while he is working there Five stitches and an assault charge. He was acquitted in January 1960.
• September 1975 aged 49 Stops playing for five years
• September 28, 1991 aged 65 Dies in Santa Monica at 65

• Charlie Parker 1920–1955
  Saxophonist whose virtuosity and harmonic innovations made him a principal creator of bebop and modern jazz. apprenticed to
• John Coltrane 1926–1967
  Saxophonist and composer whose technical and spiritual explorations transformed modern jazz. hired and fired
• Duke Ellington 1899–1974
  Composer and bandleader who expanded the artistic ambition and vocabulary of jazz. declined his orchestra
• Billie Holiday 1915–1959
  Jazz singer whose intensely personal phrasing and performances, including 'Strange Fruit,' transformed American vocal music. toured with
• Louis Armstrong 1901–1971
  Trumpeter and singer whose innovations and worldwide fame made jazz a central American art form. the tradition he refused