Miles Davis Essay Research Paper The Electric

Miles Davis Essay, Research Paper

The Electric Miles Davis

Born in Alton, Illinois, Miles Davis grew up in a middle-class family in East St. Louis. Miles Davis took up the trumpet at the age of 13 and was playing professionally two years later. Some of his first gigs included performances with his high school bandand playing with Eddie Randall and the blue Devils. Miles Davis has said that the greatest musical experience of his life was hearing the Billy Eckstine orchestra when it passed through St. Louis. In September 1944 Davis went to New York to study at Juilliard but spend much more time hanging out on 52nd Street and eventually dropped out of school. He moved from his home in East St. Louis to New York primarily to enter school but also to locate his musical idol, Charlie Parker. He played with Parker live and in recordings from the period of 1945 to 1948. Davis began leading his own group in 1948 as well as working with arranger Gil Evans. Davis. career was briefly interrupted by a heroin addiction, although he continued to record with other popular bop musicians.

1955 was Miles Davis. breakthrough year. His performance of .round midnight. at the Newport Jazz Festival alerted the critics that he was .back.. Davis form a quintet which included Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, and John Coletrain. In 1957 Davis made the first of many solo recordings with the unusual jazz orchestrations of Gil Evans, and he wrote music for film by Louis Malle.

In 1963Davis formed a new quintet including the talents of Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, and Wayne Shorter. The late 1960s sound Davis playing with a variety of talented musicians. Davis retired during the mid-.70s due to severe ailments and an automobile accident. He returned in 1980 making new recordings and expensive tours. He received an honorary doctorate of music from the New England Conservatory in 1986 in honor of his long-standing achievements.

Davis. playing Incorporated many styles, from bop to modal fusion. Oftentimes Davis was the victim of negative criticism because of his adopting sometimes unpopular styles of music, but he is most respected for being one of a few jazz musicians who continually took the music to newer and more creative heights.

The musical events Miles Davis created during his so-called electric period (1969-1975), are acts of constant exploring in constant willingness to push into the unknown, daring to always look forward and to not rely on any conventions or any of the safety nets of the past. The music is rebellious and its uncompromising intensity is uncatagorizable for its urgent flooding past genre definitions. Miles. music of the five-year period is unlike any music that preceded it, and still, 30 years later, so original, so Progressive, and so inadequately described.

It.s no wonder that with his transformation into electric experiment, Miles lost a huge share of the loyal audience who had been following his earlier career. This new electric music dared to shed a .jazz. sound to integrate the highly charged, youthful raw power from rock and funk. Ignoring barriers, this music refuses to stay in any .proper. place. Besides being multicultural, it makes an even bigger transgression: it is often unpleasant, assaulted, harsh, macho, eerie, and seemingly formless. Just as Miles Davis. career is a continuous progression of remaking and replenishing himself, he has moved on and left his old self in the past decade.

This music is not useful as background music. It cannot be used in the same way the 30 years worth of Miles. previous music can be used. It demands attentiveness. It is militant and arrogant. It is sometimes more a display of audacity and an assertion of absolute independence then a lovely palette to summon dreams. The dream is over. All the romantic ballads and pleasurable entertainment is history. With this sound he describes a new reality for which he invents a new musical vocabulary. He cannot waste time making things pretty and acceptable anymore. To the urgency expressed is not pretty in the community standards form of understanding, but it does contain aspects of pretty, lush, and soothing standards. It is just the context for all these elements have been radically altered, with elements of ugly and brutal arrays of emotions.

This music is on fire, crackling with effervescence and affirmation. It may not always be successful as public artistic expression, but it generates all sorts of emotions previously rained in and socialized. As a body of music, this period seems highest order with no concession for the audience.s expectations or for presenting what the audience might be comfortable with. Despite the ignorant criticism of the time that Miles was selling out to the big selling rock market, this music is more real than real has ever been. You can question this mutant symbiotic merging of musical forms as a matter of taste, but you cannot question the integrity of its attempt at opening new emotive ground for exploration, declaration, and celebration.

Long out of prints or available only as expensive CD imports from Japan, the records of this prolific and fertile period of Miles. career has, for 20 years, been the least accessible and the least examined. Columbia/legacy has now given us the opportunity of reassessing and catching up with this period of musical evolution by iss