Who is the biggest influence in jazz music

A.� There can be few musicians more able to claim the 'biggest influence' label than Miles Davis.

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Q.� Why is he considered so important

A.� If you check back through the history of jazz music from the forties to the nineties, and that's how long his career lasted, you will find the name of Miles Davis running through it like a thread through a tapestry. In fact there is a school of thought that reckons jazz only evolved at all if Davis was there to assist in its changes.

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Q.� How does one man manage to create such a legend

A.� In Davis's case, it's a combination of style innovations in which he was directly involved, combined with the musicians with whom he played and recorded, a list of which reads like a Who's Who of jazz giants, including artists who crossed over into r 'n' b and pop areas, such as Herbie Hancock and John McLaughlin. Davis's work is reflected in a prodigious recording career, he appeared on almost two hundred albums, and his name crops up as an influence on most jazz musicians' lists of heroes.

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Q.� What was Davis's start on such an influential musical journey

A.� Miles Davis began trumpet lessons when he was 12, and within four years his talent was sufficiently evident for him to be joining in with professional jazz musicians in his hometown of East St Louis. He sat in with Billy Eckstine's Big Band just after his high school graduation, joining trumpet and saxophone legends Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, who were developing the new jazz style of bebop.

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Even though bebop was a style considerably different from Davis's own less urgent more melodic playing, he was sufficiently enamoured of it to move to New York to join the Institute of Musical Art (now named Julliard) in 1944. Playing in Parker's band, it wasn't long before Davis's own mercurial talent shone through, and he was given a recording deal with Capitol Records. Davis's own band produced a similarly revolutionary shift in jazz styles, the birth of cool, and Capitol released Davis's band's first album under the title The Birth Of Cool.

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Q.� Did Davis succumb to the lure of drugs, as Parker had done

A.� For a period in the early fifties, Davis did struggle with, and eventually overcome a heroin habit, and he entered the prolific output period that enhanced his image even further, mainly as a result of having signed simultaneous album deals with both Columbia and Prestige, and fulfilling his contractual obligations to both labels, giving jazz fans a veritable feast of recorded music to enjoy.

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Q.� What about Davis's musical evolution

A.� That continued in 1959 with an album called Kind Of Blue that encapsulated Davis's development of the modal style of playing, basing improvisations on scales, as opposed to the more familiar jazz style that used chord changes. The album was a Grammy winner and became a landmark in jazz music, selling over two million copies, a phenomenal amount of sales for a jazz album at that time.

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Q.� Was Davis known for working with other famous musicians

A.� He was, in a parallel with blues legend John Mayall, Davis became known for working with players who went on to greater success as solo artists, and always acknowledging their debt to the master craftsman. Names such as Cannonball Adderly, John Coltrane, Victor Feldman, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, and many more, began or extended their reputations working with Miles Davis.

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Q.� How did his career end

A.� Davis's last studio album, Doo-Bop was released in 1992, and was a collaboration with rapper Easy Mo Bee, proving that right to the end, Davis was continuing to push the boundaries of jazz even further, and a characteristic that had underpinned his entire career. The album won Davis a posthumous Grammy Award for 'Best Rhythm and Blues Instrumental Performance'.�

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In his career, Davis's work was acknowledged�by numerous Grammy Nominations and Awards, his 1957 Birth Of Cool album was inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame, designed to honour exceptional works recorded before the Grammys began in 1959. Miles Davis died of respiratory failure, pneumonia and a stroke in 1991.

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Q.� For what will Miles Davis be remembered

A.� Miles Davis stands as a giant in the jazz world, his approach to his music epitomises the essence of jazz music, the willingness to experiment and extend the genre as often as comprehensively as possible. Anyone looking for a personification of that attitude and approach has only to explore the vast collection of recorded music Davis left behind, it's all there to be discovered and enjoyed.

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By� Andy Hughes.�

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