Miles Davis

The sound of Miles Davis is unlike any other. His trumpet, filtered through the Harmon mute, sounds like a metallic whisper that weaves through silences rather than an instrument that cuts through the air. It’s not a sound that strikes; it breathes: short phrases, suspended notes, a phrasing that seems always on the verge of fading away. When he recorded Birth of the Cool in the studios of Capitol Records in the late 1940s, he wasn’t inventing a new style, but he was shaping something that still had no name. Cool jazz wasn’t a genre, but a way of playing that avoided the exhibitionist virtuosity of bebop to make room for melody and space. That recording, made in lightning-fast sessions with musicians who had just played with Charlie Parker, sounded as if jazz had decided to take a deep breath after years of frenetic sprints.

By the mid-1950s, Davis had left behind heroin and the chaos of the previous years. His return to the stage at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955 catapulted him back to the forefront, and with it came a contract with Columbia Records. The first fruit of that alliance was 'Round About Midnight, an album that marked the beginning of his collaboration with John Coltrane and Paul Chambers. But the real turning point came in 1959 with Kind of Blue, recorded in two days with a band that improvised over modal scales. There were no written arrangements, only loose ideas that the musicians developed on the spot. The result was an album that sold millions without trying: a record that sounded as if jazz had been composed in the very moment it was being recorded.