The Miles Davis Reader Downbeat Hall Of Fame

Interviews and features from Downbeat Magazine

This research and information guide provides a wide range of scholarship on the life, career, and musical legacy of Miles Davis, and is compiled for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars in jazz and popular music, musicology, and cultural studies. It serves as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars sorting through the massive amount of material in the field.

It was 1969, and Miles Davis, prince of cool, was on the edge of being left behind by a dynamic generation of young musicians, an important handful of whom had been in his band. Rock music was flying off in every direction, just as America itself seemed about to split at its seams. Following the circumscribed grooves and ambiance of In A Silent Way; coming off a tour with a burning new quintet-called 'The Lost Band'-with Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette; he went into the studio with musicians like frighteningly talented guitarist John McLaughlin, and soulful Austrian keyboardist Joe Zawinul. Working with his essential producer, Teo Macero, Miles set a cauldron of ideas loose while the tapes rolled. At the end, there was the newly minted Prince of Darkness, a completely new way forward for jazz and rock, and the endless brilliance and depth of Bitches Brew. Bitches Brew is still one of the most astonishing albums ever made in either jazz or rock. Seeming to fuse the two, it actually does something entirely more revolutionary and open-ended: blending the most avant-garde aspects of Western music with deep grooves, the album rejects both jazz and rock for an entirely different idea of how music can be made.

A bandleader and trumpet player, Miles Davis was one of the twentieth century's greatest musicians. Performing with jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker early in his career, Davis expanded the idea of what jazz could be. His greatest albums redefined the genre, and members of his band, such as Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea, went on to become famous in their own right. Readers will learn that Davis also faced challenges, including rocky romances and a drug addiction he struggled to kick. Through it all, he found comfort in his music, which remains relevant decades after his death.

Focusing on one of the legendary musicians in jazz, this book examines Miles Davis's often overlooked music of the mid-1960s with a close examination of the evolution of a new style: post bop. Jeremy Yudkin traces Davis's life and work during a period when the trumpeter was struggling with personal and musical challenges only to emerge once again as the artistic leader of his generation. A major force in post-war American jazz, Miles Davis was a pioneer of cool jazz, hard bop, and modal jazz in a variety of small group formats. The formation in the mid-1960s of the Second Quintet with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams was vital to the invention of the new post bop style. Yudkin illustrates and precisely defines this style with an analysis of the 1966 classic Miles Smiles.

The Giants of Jazz series is designed to provide a method for studying, analyzing, imitating and assimilating the idiosyncratic and general facets of the styles of various jazz giants. The Coltrane book provides many transcriptions, plus discography, biographical data, style traits, genealogy, and bibliography.

The Giants of Jazz series is designed to provide a method for studying, analyzing, imitating and assimilating the idiosyncratic and general facets of the styles of various jazz giants. The Jazz Style of John Coltrane provides many transcriptions, plus discography, biographical data, style traits, genealogy, and bibliography.

Joni Mitchell was a solidly middle-class bohemian; an anti-feminist who loved men but scorned free love; a female warrior taking on the male music establishment. She was both the party girl with torn stockings and the sensitive soul. Her earthy, poetic lyrics and the unusual melodic intervals traced by that lissome voice earned her the status of a pop legend. Joni on Joni is a chronologically arranged anthology of Mitchell's most illuminating interviews, spanning the years 1966 to 2014. Included are revealing pieces from her early years in Canada and Detroit, along with influential articles such as Cameron Crowe's Rolling Stone piece. Interspersed throughout are key quotes from dozens of additional Q&As. Together, this material paints a revealing picture of the artist—bragging and scornful, philosophical and deep, but also a beguiling flirt.