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“Don’t play what's there, play what's not there.” Miles Davis
Miles Davis was a revolutionary. At a White House dinner, he was asked what he'd done to deserve to be there. He replied, "Well, I've changed music five or six times." This was not an idle boast and he fully intended to say ‘music’ – not ‘jazz’.
In his seminal album ‘Kind of Blue’, he kept the backgrounds to the songs simple. The soloists (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans) played a melody and then improvised over a structure of simple, repeated chord changes. Davis had been introduced to “modal” classical composers like Bartók and Ravel and applied their compositional techniques to popular music. It made his music accessible - this album has stayed as one of the best selling albums in the jazz charts for nearly sixty years and has sold over forty million copies!
In Miles and Beyond, we explore how his approach to music has continued to influence so many musicians since.