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

RUNNING THE VOODOO DOWN

Publisher description

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.

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.

Jazz, from its origins until World War II, was America's hot new music of the 20th century, and this music spread like wildfire to Europe and beyond. Shortly after the war ended a calming influence manifested itself in jazz and a new genre emerged with its own soundscape and quickly rose to worldwide popularity and influence--Cool Jazz. This book traces the history of this music to its roots in French Impressionism and European Neo-Classicism, describes the key roles played by Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young, Lennie Tristano, Claude Thornhill, and Dave Brubeck in the development of this genre, and focuses on the major figures associated with a group of landmark recordings and on an ensemble that felicitously came to be known as The Birth of the Cool. The contributions of Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and John Carisi are considered in detail, and the scores of this music, arranged for Davis's nine-piece band, are analyzed and compared. The influence of this music persists to the present day, and the final chapter of The Birth of the Cool of Miles Davis and His Associates suggests continuities and developments that might still be explored by interested readers. The book is illustrated with photos of musicians and manuscripts, contains many musical examples and a detailed index, has both a bibliography and a short discography, and it includes a compact disc that contains many of the key recordings discussed in the text [Publisher description].

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.