The Last Miles

The story of the final recordings of one of the greatest jazz musicians of the twentieth century

Presents an in-depth exploration of the musician's controversial electric period and the impact it had on the jazz community, as drawn from firsthand recollections about his artistic and personal life. Reprint.

Here is the illustrated history of Miles Davis, the world’s most popular jazz trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and musical visionary. Davis is one of the most innovative, influential, and respected figures in the history of music. He’s been at the forefront of bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz-rock fusion, and remains the favorite and best-selling jazz artist ever, beloved worldwide.He’s also a fascinating character—moody, dangerous, brilliant. His story is phenomenal, including tempestous relationships with movie stars, heroin addictions, police busts, and more; connections with other jazz greats like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Gil Evans, John McLaughlin, and many others; and later fusion ventures that outraged the worlds of jazz and rock.Written by an all-star team, including Sonny Rollins, Bill Cosby, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Clark Terry, Lenny White, Greg Tate, Ashley Kahn, Robin D. G. Kelley, Francis Davis, George Wein, Vincent Bessières, Gerald Early, Nate Chinen, Nalini Jones, Dave Liebman, Garth Cartwright, and more.

Quincy Troupe's candid account of his friendship with Miles Davis is a revealing portrait of a great musician and an intimate study of a unique relationship. It is also an engrossing chronicle of the author's own development, both artistic and personal. As Davis's collaborator on Miles: The Autobiography,Troupe--one of the major poets to emerge from the 1960s--had exceptional access to the musician. This memoir goes beyond the life portrayed in the autobiography to describe in detail the processes of Davis's spectacular creativity and the joys and difficulties his passionate, contradictory temperament posed to the men's friendship. It shows how Miles Davis, both as a black man and an artist, influenced not only Quincy Troupe but whole generations. Troupe has written that Miles Davis was "irascible, contemptuous, brutally honest, ill-tempered when things didn't go his way, complex, fair-minded, humble, kind and a son-of-a-bitch." The author's love and appreciation for Davis make him a keen, though not uncritical, observer. He captures and conveys the power of the musician's presence, the mesmerizing force of his personality, and the restless energy that lay at the root of his creativity. He also shows Davis's lighter side: cooking, prowling the streets of Manhattan, painting, riding his horse at his Malibu home. Troupe discusses Davis's musical output, situating his albums in the context of the times--both political and musical--out of which they emerged. Miles and Me is an unparalleled look at the act of creation and the forces behind it, at how the innovations of one person can inspire both those he knows and loves and the world at large.

Based on interviews with family and friends, this account of the jazz great's life reveals the influence of Miles Davis' life on his work as well as the musician's persistent desire to re-invent himself.

MILESSTYLE examines the fashion of Miles Davis, one of the best dressed men of the 20th century (GQ & Esquire) through biography, photos and exclusive interviews with friends, bandmates, designers, photographers ex-wives and fashionistas like Quincy Jones, Lenny Kravitz, Bryan Ferry, Ron Carter and many more.

Miles discusses his life and music from playing trumpet in high school to the new instruments and sounds from the Caribbean.

An investigative history of Depression Era power brokers and labor wars in the construction of the Pulaski Skyway across the New Jersey Meadowlands. In the 1930s, as America’s love affair with the automobile began, cars and trucks leaving the nation’s largest city were dumped out of the Holland Tunnel onto local roads winding through New Jersey swampland. The Pulaski Skyway, America’s first “superhighway,” would change all that by connecting the hub of New York City to the rest of the country. But the corrupt and violent path to its completion would change much more for Jersey City’s residents and labor unions. Jersey City mayor Frank Hague—dictator of the Hudson County political machine and a national political player—was a prime mover behind the ambitious transit project. Hague’s nemesis in this undertaking was union boss Teddy Brandle. Construction of the last three miles of the Pulaski Skyway, then simply known as Route 25, marked an epic battle between big labor and big politics, culminating in a murder and the creation of a motorway so flawed it soon became known as “Death Avenue”—appropriately featured in the opening sequence of HBO’s hit series The Sopranos. A book in the tradition of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker and Henry Petroski’s Engineers of Dreams, The Last Three Miles brings to vivid life a riveting and bloodstained chapter in the heroic age of public works. “A revealing look into how local politics can affect the design and construction of our national infrastructure, sometimes with disastrous results. Hart uses his considerable narrative talent to tell an engaging human story about what might seem otherwise to be but an enormous black steel structure.” —Henry Petroski, author of Engineers of Dreams and Success Through Failure