Collection: Miles Davis

Miles Davis received a trumpet at thirteen, dropped out of Juilliard to play on 52nd Street, spent two years in Charlie Parker's quintet, kicked a heroin addiction in 1954 by locking himself in his father's house in East St. Louis, and then played a solo at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival so striking that Columbia Records signed him the same week. He spent the next thirty-five years doing the thing nobody in jazz does: refusing to play the last record again. The Birth of the Cool sessions (1949-50) replaced bebop's density with space and a nonet that included French horn, tuba and Gil Evans's orchestral voicings. "Kind of Blue" (Columbia, 1959), with the first great quintet of Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, built an entire modal language out of scales rather than chord changes and became the best-selling jazz album in history. The second great quintet with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams (1964-68) made time itself negotiable: the rhythm section played "time, no changes" while Davis and Shorter moved freely above and below them. "In a Silent Way" (1969) and "Bitches Brew" (1970) arrived with electric instruments, rock rhythms, studio editing, and a critical reception that split the jazz world in half. Each time Davis changed direction, he did it before the previous direction had stopped working, which is either the mark of genius or of someone constitutionally unable to repeat himself. Probably both.