Born on May 26, 1926 in Alton, Illinois, not far across the Mississippi River from East St. Louis, Miles Dewey Davis III was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader and composer. He is considered one of the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th century music. Miles Davis "has adopted a variety of musical directions in a five-decade career that has kept him at the forefront of many important stylistic developments in jazz." Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Miles Davis began playing the trumpet in elementary school, despite his mother's desire to dedicate the violin to him. At school once a week, on a Wednesday at 2.30pm, he and his class were taught how to hold a note on the instrument. “Everyone would fight to play their best. Luckily for me, I quickly learned to play the chromatic scale... so I wouldn't have to stand there holding that note all the time." Miles Davis continued to play the trumpet throughout school, beginning formal lessons in sixth grade at Attucks Elementary School with Elwood C. Buchanan, a professional musician. And later in his life, he took lessons with Joseph Gustat, the principal trumpeter of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, whom Miles had seen many times. Gustat focused a lot on technique and having proper technique which helped the early stages of his development as a trumpeter. There is a story from the book "The Life of Miles Davis" which states that when Miles first played in front of Gustat he told him that he was the worst trumpet player he had ever heard, but Miles accepted the criticism, accepted the criticism . with his pace and worked even harder practicing longer, working on fundamentals. From a very young age he was introduced to the jazz community of East St. Louis where he would go and play concerts with his own bands or in his teens he would be asked to sit in or play with some of the bands visiting the city as well as at sixteen, when Miles auditioned for Eddie Randle's Blue Devils at the Castle Ballroom in St Louis, where Randall's band was performing, Miles auditioned for the band in front of the evening audience. He was hired and began to earn the respect of the other musicians and the other musicians in the audience. Randle's group was the house band of the Rhumboogie club in the Elks club where they had a weekly job playing to audiences that often accompanied singers, comedians and dancers. During this period with the band the young Miles Davis had the opportunity to play with artists such as Howard Mcghee and Sonny Stitt who once participated in a concert with the band. Sonny Stitt was impressed with Miles and later that night went to the Davis house to teach Miles some "little riffs". He also tried to enlist Miles in his currently touring band, Tiny Bradshaw, but Miles' mother wouldn't let him. Over time Miles began to build a good reputation in the area and received praise from other high profile musicians such as Lester Young and other bands such as Illinois Jacquet. Miles continued to play with other great bands and artists in the St Louis area, including when Dizzy Gilespie asked him to fill in for a trumpeter who had hemorrhaged in Dizzy's band "Eckstine" at Club Riviera. This band included some jazz superstars such as Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Lucky Thompson and the legendary alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. Miles was subbed in for the ill player and was good enough to last the week in St Louis, but not good enough to go with them to the next tour stop in Chicago. During this time Miles graduated from high school andhe continued to study at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. However, during his time at Juliard Davis he left his studies and made his professional debut as a member of Charlie Parker's bebop quintet, with whom he had already played in Eckstine. He was part of this gang from 1944 to 1948. This time in Miles Davis' life is when his musical career truly began with the release of his music a few years later. Miles Davis was considered a creator and shaper of many different styles of jazz such as cool jazz where albums such as "Birth of the Cool" helped pioneer this style in 1957 and the jazz fusion style which Miles pioneered through the album 'Bitches Brew,' the album 'mixed free jazz played by a large ensemble with electronic keyboards and guitar, plus a dense mix of percussion.' Davis also drew on rock music by playing his trumpet through electronic effects and pedals on this album, which led to some criticism from other artists who stated that this album was not jazz and that Miles was moving away from jazz music to which everyone knew.However, the style of jazz music of which Miles Davis is particularly notable as a pioneer and popularizer is modal jazz. The term "modal jazz" refers to improvised music organized horizontally rather than vertically with chords -emphasizing the role of chords, a modal approach forces the improviser to create interest through other means through melody, rhythm, timbre, and emotion. A modal piece will generally use chords, but the chords will be derived from prevailing mode. The creator of such an approach to music was George Russell who wrote the book "Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization" in which Russell's work postulates that all music is based on the tonal gravity of the Lydian mode. This is the book that influenced some New York musicians in the 1940s and 1950s, including Miles Davis and Bill Evans, which led Miles Davis to begin to further explore the idea of ​​modal music. The first example we hear of Miles Davis using modal music musical concepts is in 1958 when he was tasked with creating the music (soundtrack) for a French film called Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. He was eager to contribute to the film, a thriller starring Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet as lovers who conspire to kill Moreau's husband and then face some sobering consequences. “I agreed to do it and it was a great learning experience,” Miles wrote in his autobiography, “because I had never written a film score before.” Miles wrote the music while in Paris on a tour of Europe, which he did due to the ever-present racism in America at the time, as the tour only lasted a few days during the three weeks Miles was in Paris, the trumpeter managed spend some time working on the score. “I would watch parts of the film and get musical ideas to write,” he explained. Reviews say his trumpet has never sounded so desolate and desolate, especially on the opening track, "Générique," which is slow, portentous and peppered with blues inflections. Even more melancholy is "L'Assassinat De Carala", in which Miles' horn combines with funereal piano chords to depict a murder scene. Brighter moments can be found, however, in the fast-paced "Diner Au Motel" and "Sur L'Autoroute", both propelled by Kenny Clarke's frenetic brushwork. Stylistically, the venerated Ascenseur Pour L'Échafaud soundtrack was also significant because it deliberately avoided the language of bebop, with Miles preferring to adopt a modal vocabulary that showed the change that was beginning to take place in his music(Malle, 1958). The film turned out to be a great success and, although the film has been long forgotten, the soundtrack remains one of Miles' greatest albums as it truly represents the beginning of the modal jazz era and how Miles truly pioneered and started experimenting with modal. jazz. Along with that, another classic Miles Davis album came in 1958 called Miles Davis, an album recorded in February and March 1958 by Miles Davis. It is renowned for including Miles' early forays into developing modal jazz experiments, as noted in the piece "Milestones". This album was Miles' first taste of starting to experiment with modal jazz. This album is also significant in another sense as it was also the last time the rhythm section of Jones, Garland and Chambers played with Miles on record. However, there is another Miles Davis project that is most likely one of his greatest successes. for him and not only jazz music but all musical forms. The album that truly pushed and changed the course of jazz forever and put modal jazz at the forefront of 60s music. This project is known as the "Kind of blue" album. The album was recorded on March 2 and April 22, 1959, at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York City, and was later released on August 17 of that year by Columbia Records. The album features the Miles Davis ensemble sextet of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and alto saxophonist Julian 'Cannonball' Adderley, pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb, with the band's former pianist Bill Evans appearing on most of Kelly's songs. Partly thanks to Evans joining the sextet in 1958, Davis continued Milestones' partial modal experimentation by basing Kind of Blue entirely on modality. The entire album was composed as a series of modal sketches, where each artist was given a set of scales that defined the parameters of their improvisation and style. In an interview that year with critic Nat Hentoff, Miles explained the new approach. “When you go this way,” he said, “you can go on forever. You don't have to worry about changes and you can do more with time. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you are. … I think a movement is starting in jazz away from the conventional chord series and back to an emphasis on melodic variations rather than harmonic variations. There will be fewer agreements but infinite possibilities of what to do with them.' This last phrase about chords raised a problem for miles before recording the album and that was that he needed a pianist who could accompany with fewer chords. This was a radical idea. Setting the chords – providing front-line horn players with the compass that kept their improvisations on the right path – was what modern jazz pianists did. Russell recommended someone he had hired for some of his sessions, an intense young white man named Bill Evans. Evans trained at the music conservatory with a penchant for French Impressionist composers, such as Ravel and Debussy, whose harmonies floated airy above the melodic line. When Evans began playing jazz, he tended not to play the root of a chord; for example, when playing a C chord, it will avoid playing a C note. Instead, he played a few more notes in the chord, or hovered around, suggesting the chord without locking himself into its restrictions. The clearest example of this style of playing by Bill is a piece, composed by Evans, called "Flamenco Sketches". In most jazz sessions, the sheet music that the leader passes to the band consists of "heads" - the first 12 or so bars of a melody, with the chords’.