Miles Davis Trivia
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49 free Miles Davis trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Miles Davis trivia for jazz heads, record collectors and anyone who owns Kind of Blue and wants to know what came before and after it. The quiz opens in East St. Louis with the dentist's son whose teacher rapped his knuckles for using vibrato, then follows him to Juilliard, to Charlie Parker's bebop quintet, and to Gil Evans's apartment where the nonet that became Birth of the Cool was hatched. The middle rounds cover the great 1950s: the Prestige marathon sessions, the first quintet with Coltrane, the Newport comeback, the raspy voice that earned him the 'prince of darkness' tag, Ascenseur pour l'échafaud improvised to picture, Sketches of Spain, and the six weeks in 1959 that produced Kind of Blue and the beating outside Birdland. Later questions take in the second quintet of Shorter, Hancock, Carter and Williams, the electric shock of In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, the Isle of Wight crowd, the five-year silence, the pop covers, Tutu, Scrooged, the Legion of Honour and the trumpet buried with him at Woodlawn. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our jazz and John Coltrane quizzes.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Miles Davis was born in 1926 in Alton, Illinois, and raised in which nearby city?
East St. Louis
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.
Q 02Davis's boyhood teacher Elwood Buchanan would not let him play the trumpet with what?
heavy vibrato
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.
Q 03Davis moved to New York as a teenager to study at which institution, dropping out to play jazz full-time?
Juilliard
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.
Q 04Whom did the teenage Davis replace as the trumpeter in Charlie Parker's group?
Dizzy Gillespie
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.
Q 05Which pair of instruments, unusual in modern jazz, did the Miles Davis Nonet use in the late 1940s?
French horn and tuba
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.
Q 06The Miles Davis Nonet's recordings won fame when reissued under what title?
Birth of the Cool
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.
Q 07At the 1949 Paris Jazz Festival, Davis began an affair with which French singer and actress?
Juliette Gréco
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.
Q 08Which drug addiction derailed Davis's early 1950s, until he kicked it at his father's home in 1954?
Heroin
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.
Q 09Davis's 1954 recording Walkin' is credited with launching which jazz style?
Hard bop
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.
Q 10Davis's famous rasping voice was the result of what?
arguing too soon after throat surgery
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.
Q 11Miles Davis's acclaimed 1955 comeback performance took place at which festival?
Newport
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.
Q 12Which saxophonist replaced Sonny Rollins to complete Davis's 'first great quintet' in 1955?
John Coltrane
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.
Q 13Davis's quintet cleared its Prestige contract in two marathon 1956 sessions, issued as Cookin', Relaxin', Workin' and what?
Steamin'
Q 21Outside which New York club was Davis beaten and arrested by police in August 1959?
Birdland
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.
Q 22The cover of Someday My Prince Will Come (1961) shows Frances Taylor after Davis demanded Columbia do what?
depict black women on his covers
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.
Q 23Which saxophonist, lured from the Jazz Messengers in 1964, became the main composer of Miles Davis's second quintet?
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.
Q 14Who directed the 1958 French thriller Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, whose soundtrack Davis improvised while watching the film?
Louis Malle
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.
Q 15Which 1957 album began Davis's run of orchestral records with arranger Gil Evans?
Miles Ahead
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.
Q 16Davis's Sketches of Spain (1960) centres on the second movement of which Joaquín Rodrigo work?
Concierto de Aranjuez
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'.
Q 17Which classically trained pianist did Davis hire in 1958 to play modal jazz?
Bill Evans
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.
Q 18For Kind of Blue, what did Davis hand his musicians in place of full written parts?
Brief outlines of scales
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.
Q 19On which single Kind of Blue track does Wynton Kelly play piano?
Freddie Freeloader
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.
Q 20On Kind of Blue's 50th anniversary in 2009, the US House of Representatives reaffirmed jazz as what?
A national treasure
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.
Wayne Shorter
The album E.S.P. (1965) was named after one of his compositions.
Q 24Davis's second quintet kept a steady pulse but dropped fixed chord sequences, an approach he called what?
Time, no changes
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.
Q 25Before Bitches Brew, which 1969 album, recorded in a single session, took Davis into jazz fusion?
In a Silent Way
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.
Q 26When Bitches Brew appeared in 1970, Davis became the opening act for what kind of performers?
Rock bands
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.
Q 27Davis played to the largest crowd of his career, an estimated 600,000 people, at which August 1970 event?
The Isle of Wight
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''.
Q 28Whose funeral was the last one Davis ever attended, after plans to record together were cut short?
Jimi Hendrix's
The guitarist died in September 1970; Davis's 30-minute 'He Loved Him Madly' later paid tribute to Ellington.
Q 29Davis's soundtrack album Jack Johnson accompanied a 1970 documentary about which kind of sportsman?
a heavyweight boxer
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.
Q 30Which avant-garde composer, introduced to Davis by Paul Buckmaster in 1972, influenced On the Corner?
Karlheinz Stockhausen
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.