Editor’s introduction
Neil Croally
‘The Picasso of Jazz’
Duke Ellington on Miles Davis
As you are no doubt aware from all the newspaper articles, TV tributes and radio commemorations, 2026 is the centenary of the birth of Miles Davis. There are plenty of compelling accounts of Davis’ eventful life, including his addiction to heroin, experience of racism, and cruelty to women. 1 There are many analyses – from the journalistic to the seriously academic – of Davis’ contributions to an astonishing variety of jazz styles, 2 from the hot, heady harmonic virtuosity of bebop, through cool jazz, hard bop, the modal jazz of 1959’s Kind of Blue , 3 the novel approach to big band jazz in collaboration with Gil Evans ( Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain ), the abstract sophistication of his second great quintet’s music in the 1960s 4 and, finally, to the still divisive form known as fusion. 5 Much has also been made of Davis as a nurturer of talent. The list of jazz players who attended (in Jackie Maclean‘s words) ‘the university of Miles Davis’ reads like a roll-call of jazz greats: Paul Chambers, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Keith Jarrett, Marcus Miller . . . All-in-all, Miles Davis was the very embodiment of artistic creativity and of self-reinvention. Hence the appreciation of Duke Ellington (himself a giant of jazz) quoted at the top of this essay.
But the truth of Ellington’s comparison lies not only in Davis’ and Picasso’s artistic achievements but also in the troubling fact that both men abused women. Can we appreciate the art and overlook the violence and the abuse? Will our discovery of intolerable behaviour towards other human beings
1 The autobiography – Davis 1990 – is certainly compelling. See also Carr 1982; Chambers 1998; Szwed 2002. 2 Carr 1982; Chambers 1998. More academic work: Waters 2011; Yudkin 2024. See also Kirchner 1997. 3 For two contrasting but both interesting accounts of the making of Kind of Blue , see Kahn 2000; Kaplan 2024. 4 Detailed appreciations of the 1960s quintet can be found in Waters 2011 and Yudkin 2024. 5 My own view is that the some of the records between 1968 and 1972 – In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew (on which, see Grella 2015) , Live Evil, On the Corner – are extraordinary. None of them sounds like anything else made by anyone else, yet they have at the same time been remarkably influential (in ambient music, hip-hop and so on). However, some of the records Davis put out in the mid-70s (e.g. Agharta, Pangaea – both recordings of a concert on the same day in 1975), dominated by heavy guitars and drums, are distinctly less appealing. It does not help, of course, that aficionados of prog rock see this sort of thing as their music. That fusion was divisive is obvious from the famous article by Stanley Crouch (‘Play the Right Thing’, New Republic , 12 February 1990; quoted by Grella 2015: 10), in which he argues that first there was jazz: ‘And then came the fall.’ From In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew , Davis is seen as ‘infecting jazz with the virus of rock’ (Grella 2015: 10). Neither record sounds much like any rock music I know. That this view is still present can be seen from these Telegraph- reader-like remarks I found (oddly) in the Guardian comments online: ‘Sadly, this [Davis’ musical intelligence] was overshadowed by the frankly dreadful rock-influenced work of his later years: that stuff is to jazz as the Hundred is to Test cricket.’ The statement belongs to Dr Richard Carter of Putney; see https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/may/31/miles-daviss-superior- musical-intelligence (31 May 2026).
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