49 Fun Facts About Miles Davis

Miles Davis was born in 1926 in Alton, Illinois, and raised in which nearby city?

East St. Louis, Illinois, where the family moved a year after his birth. It was a prosperous home: his father was a dental surgeon, and his mother, a violinist, hoped Miles would take up her instrument, not the trumpet.

Davis's boyhood teacher Elwood Buchanan would not let him play the trumpet with what?

Heavy vibrato. Davis recalled Buchanan rapping his knuckles for it at a time when the fashion was to shake every note, and the clear, straight tone he learned stayed his trademark for life.

Davis moved to New York as a teenager to study at which institution, dropping out to play jazz full-time?

Juilliard. By day he took classes in theory and piano; by night he combed the clubs of 52nd Street for his idol Charlie Parker, who became his roommate, and the clubs won.

Whom did the teenage Davis replace as the trumpeter in Charlie Parker's group?

Dizzy Gillespie. Davis's first records with Parker, in the restrained mid-register style that became his signature, were panned by reviewers, who heard only mistakes and a copy of Gillespie.

Which pair of instruments, unusual in modern jazz, did the Miles Davis Nonet use in the late 1940s?

French horn and tuba. With them the band's arrangers built a thick, almost orchestral blend meant to imitate the human voice, though the nonet's only live booking was two weeks at one New York club.

The Miles Davis Nonet's recordings won fame when reissued under what title?

Birth of the Cool. The title was earned: the nonet's soft, unhurried sound, heard live at just one two-week club booking, set off the cool jazz movement of the 1950s.

At the 1949 Paris Jazz Festival, Davis began an affair with which French singer and actress?

Juliette Gréco. When Jean-Paul Sartre asked why they did not marry, Davis said he loved her too much to make her unhappy: in the America of the day, she explained, a mixed-race couple would have been abused.

Which drug addiction derailed Davis's early 1950s, until he kicked it at his father's home in 1954?

Heroin. After four years as an addict he went home to his father and quit cold turkey, and by 1954 he was back in New York making some of the best records of his life.

Davis's 1954 recording Walkin' is credited with launching which jazz style?

Hard bop. Walkin' turned away from the hushed cool style toward the blues and a heavier beat, and it announced Davis's own comeback: he had just beaten a four-year addiction.

Davis's famous rasping voice was the result of what?

Arguing too soon after throat surgery. Told to stay silent while he healed from the removal of polyps on his larynx, Davis got into a quarrel instead and was left with a rasp for life.

Miles Davis's acclaimed 1955 comeback performance took place at which festival?

Newport. Davis was the least-known player in an all-star pickup group, but his solo on 'Round Midnight' was the talk of the festival and won him a contract with Columbia Records.

Which saxophonist replaced Sonny Rollins to complete Davis's 'first great quintet' in 1955?

John Coltrane. He left in 1957 to beat a drug habit and returned to Davis the next year a far bolder soloist, in time for the sextet albums Milestones and Kind of Blue.

Davis's quintet cleared its Prestige contract in two marathon 1956 sessions, issued as Cookin', Relaxin', Workin' and what?

Steamin'. Davis had already signed with Columbia but still owed Prestige four albums, so the quintet taped them all in two long sessions, and the label released them one at a time until 1961.

Who directed the 1958 French thriller Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, whose soundtrack Davis improvised while watching the film?

Louis Malle. Davis gave his French sidemen only a few chord sequences worked out in his hotel room, and the band improvised the entire score as scenes from the film were projected in the studio.

Which 1957 album began Davis's run of orchestral records with arranger Gil Evans?

Miles Ahead. Davis played flugelhorn throughout in front of a large orchestra, and Evans linked the ten pieces so that almost every track flows into the next without a pause.

Davis's Sketches of Spain (1960) centres on the second movement of which Joaquín Rodrigo work?

Concierto de Aranjuez. Nobody asked the composer's leave: Rodrigo learned of the record only after its release and was unimpressed, and his wife's memoir called it 'an act of piracy'.

Which classically trained pianist did Davis hire in 1958 to play modal jazz?

Bill Evans. Worn out by touring, he quit within the year, but Davis called him back in 1959: the music for Kind of Blue had been planned around his impressionistic piano style.

For Kind of Blue, what did Davis hand his musicians in place of full written parts?

Brief outlines of scales and melody lines, handed over as the sessions began. With almost no rehearsal, the sextet recorded the whole album in two sittings in the spring of 1959.

On which single Kind of Blue track does Wynton Kelly play piano?

Freddie Freeloader, a twelve-bar blues. Kelly was the band's regular pianist by then, but Davis had planned the album around his predecessor's style and called him back for the other four tracks.

On Kind of Blue's 50th anniversary in 2009, the US House of Representatives reaffirmed jazz as what?

A national treasure. The resolution also noted that drummer Jimmy Cobb, the last surviving member of the sextet, was still touring the album's music fifty years on.

Outside which New York club was Davis beaten and arrested by police in August 1959?

Birdland. Davis was working there that night and had stepped outside between sets when a patrolman told him to move on; he refused, was clubbed over the head by a detective, and was later cleared of all charges.

The cover of Someday My Prince Will Come (1961) shows Frances Taylor after Davis demanded Columbia do what?

Depict black women on his covers. Davis is said to have bridled when an earlier album of his appeared with a young white woman on a sailboat on its sleeve; this time the face on the cover was his own wife's.

Which saxophonist, lured from the Jazz Messengers in 1964, became the main composer of Miles Davis's second quintet?

The album E.S.P. (1965) was named after one of his compositions.

Davis's second quintet kept a steady pulse but dropped fixed chord sequences, an approach he called what?

Time, no changes: the rhythm section kept time while the soloists roamed free of set chords. It let Davis borrow the liberty of free jazz without surrendering to it completely.

Before Bitches Brew, which 1969 album, recorded in a single session, took Davis into jazz fusion?

In a Silent Way. Its two hushed, side-long tracks added three electric keyboards and John McLaughlin's guitar to the band, and Bitches Brew, taped six months later with a larger group, pushed the sound further.

When Bitches Brew appeared in 1970, Davis became the opening act for what kind of performers?

Rock bands: at New York's Fillmore East he went on before the Steve Miller Band and Neil Young. The album climbed to No. 35 on the Billboard chart and later went gold.

Davis played to the largest crowd of his career, an estimated 600,000 people, at which August 1970 event?

The Isle of Wight Festival, which by most estimates outdrew Woodstock on an island of fewer than 100,000 people. Davis's unbroken set was later issued under the title 'Call It Anythin''.

Whose funeral was the last one Davis ever attended, after plans to record together were cut short?

The guitarist died in September 1970; Davis's 30-minute 'He Loved Him Madly' later paid tribute to Ellington.

Davis's soundtrack album Jack Johnson accompanied a 1970 documentary about which kind of sportsman?

A heavyweight boxer. Davis, a keen boxer himself, wrote the liner notes, and the album closes with an actor speaking as the 'heavyweight champion of the world', who says he is black and will never let anyone forget it.

Which avant-garde composer, introduced to Davis by Paul Buckmaster in 1972, influenced On the Corner?

Karlheinz Stockhausen. Davis fused his tape and electronic ideas with street funk, hoping to win back young Black listeners, but Columbia sold On the Corner to jazz radio and it became one of his worst sellers.

Which stage habit was Davis known for at his concerts?

Turning his back to the audience. He also walked off the stage while his sidemen soloed, refused to announce tunes and rarely acknowledged applause.

Why did Davis stop performing and recording between 1975 and 1980?

Illness and addiction. Ulcers, a hernia and a ruined hip stopped him in 1975, and he spent five years shut away in his New York house, by his own account lost to drink and drugs, without touching the trumpet.

Which actress nursed Davis after his 1982 stroke, got him off drink and drugs and encouraged him to draw?

Cicely Tyson. After three months with a Chinese acupuncturist his paralysed right hand recovered and he could play again, and the drawing she urged on him grew into a second career as a painter who showed in galleries.

Davis's 1985 album You're Under Arrest covered Michael Jackson's 'Human Nature' and which Cyndi Lauper song?

Time After Time. Davis kept the ballad in his concerts until his last years, and Cyndi Lauper said that of all the covers of her song his was the one that honoured her most.

Davis's Tutu (1986), his first album built on programmed synths and drum loops, was made with which bassist-producer?

Marcus Miller, who wrote and arranged nearly all of its music as well as producing it. Davis named the album for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African campaigner against apartheid.

Davis had a cameo as a street musician in which 1988 film comedy?

Scrooged, the Bill Murray Christmas film. One of the most famous musicians alive turns up as an anonymous busker, in a street-corner band with David Sanborn, Paul Shaffer and Larry Carlton.

Who conducted the orchestra when Miles Davis revisited his Gil Evans arrangements at Montreux in 1991?

Quincy Jones. For three decades Davis had refused to play his old music; that July night he finally went back to the Evans scores, and he died less than three months later.

Davis's final studio album, Doo-Bop, set his trumpet against which style of music?

Hip-hop. Davis went looking for young producers and teamed up with Easy Mo Bee, but he died with only six tracks finished, and the producer completed the album from older trumpet tapes.

Davis played his last concert, in August 1991, at which Los Angeles venue?

The Hollywood Bowl. Soon afterwards he entered a hospital in nearby Santa Monica, where he died on 28 September, aged 65; 'Hannibal' from that last night later closed the album Live Around the World.

Davis was buried with a trumpet in Woodlawn Cemetery, near which jazz giant's grave?

Duke Ellington. A month after Ellington died in 1974, Davis recorded a half-hour elegy for him, 'He Loved Him Madly'; now the two lie close together in the Bronx.

How did Davis come to win the last two of his eight Grammy Awards?

After his death: one for the album he left unfinished when he died in 1991, the other for a concert recorded that summer. His first had come three decades earlier, for Sketches of Spain.

In 2006 Davis entered the hall of fame of which kind of music?

Rock and roll: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in the same class as Black Sabbath and Blondie, saying the waves he made in jazz had rippled throughout rock.

Which actor made his debut as a film director by playing Davis in a 2015 biopic?

Don Cheadle. He skipped the cradle-to-grave biopic for a largely invented caper set in the late 1970s, the years when Davis had stopped playing, with Ewan McGregor as a journalist on his trail.

Which mute, held close to the microphone, gave Davis his signature hushed sound?

A harmon mute, a metal mute that he played with its stem removed. It gave the hushed, close-up sound that became his trademark and was soon copied by trumpeters everywhere.

Which saxophonist shook up New York jazz in 1959 with a quartet Davis publicly dismissed?

Ornette Coleman, whose Five Spot residency and album The Shape of Jazz to Come stirred up controversy that autumn, months after Kind of Blue appeared. Davis scoffed, yet his own 1960s quintet went on to borrow free jazz's methods.

Which institution chose Kind of Blue for preservation in 2002?

The Library of Congress. Its National Recording Registry opened with fifty recordings judged culturally, historically or aesthetically significant, and the House cited the choice when it honoured the album seven years later.

Davis's restless reinvention of his music earned him which nickname?

The Picasso of Jazz. Like the painter, Davis kept remaking his art: he was at the head of several movements in turn, among them cool jazz, orchestral jazz, modal playing and fusion.

Producer Teo Macero built the stop-start opening of 'Pharaoh's Dance' on Bitches Brew out of what?

Spliced tape loops. The track contains 19 edits, and its opening was assembled entirely in the studio from repeated fragments of the band's playing, with the studio itself used as an instrument.

The ballad "'Round Midnight", which gave Davis's first Columbia album its title, was composed by which pianist?

Thelonious Monk. He was at the piano in the pickup band when Davis's solo on the tune caused a sensation at a 1955 festival, and Davis then made it the title track of his Columbia debut.