Miles Davis

About Miles Davis

Davis was born into an upper-middle-class family in Alton, Illinois in 1926 and raised in East St. Louis. He picked up trumpet in his early teens and moved to New York to study at Juilliard, but left to join Charlie Parker's bebop quintet from 1944 to 1948. The Birth of the Cool sessions he recorded for Capitol Records became foundational to cool jazz development. In the early 1950s, while battling heroin addiction, he recorded hard bop sides for Prestige Records before his comeback at Newport led to a Columbia Records contract.

From the mid-1950s into the 1960s, Davis assembled his most celebrated groups. His 1959 album Kind of Blue remains one of the best-selling jazz records ever, while his work with saxophonist John Coltrane, bassist Paul Chambers, and later Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams defined the sound of modern jazz. He balanced this with orchestral arrangements from Gil Evans on records like Sketches of Spain (1960). When Wayne Shorter joined his quintet in 1964, Davis moved toward post-bop abstraction with albums such as E.S.P. (1965) and Miles Smiles (1967). The 1970s saw his most divisive period: electric, rock-influenced records starting with In a Silent Way (1969) through the concert document Agharta (1975), with Bitches Brew (1970) becoming his million-selling crossover moment. After stepping back due to health issues, he returned in the 1980s with younger players and pop-oriented material on records like The Man with the Horn (1981) and Tutu (1986), achieving his highest commercial success before his death in 1991.

The Groove Hunter currently tracks 26 editions of Miles Davis releases, including pressings of Kind of Blue, Miles '56: The Prestige Recordings, Birth of the Cool Blue Note Tone Poet Edition, and Doo-Bop among others, giving collectors a solid window into his catalog across different eras and reissue formats.