7 Miles Davis 7Starting Out
Davis grew up in East St. Louis, Ill., where his father
was a prosperous dental surgeon. He began studying
trumpet in his early teens; fortuitously, in light of his
later stylistic development, his first teacher advised
him to play without vibrato. Davis played with jazz bands
in the St. Louis area before moving to New York City in
1944 to study at the Institute of Musical Art (now the
Juilliard School)—although he skipped many classes
and instead was schooled through jam sessions with
masters such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
Davis and Parker recorded together often during the
years 1945–48.
Davis’s early playing was sometimes tentative and not
always fully in tune, but his unique, intimate tone and his
fertile musical imagination outweighed his technical
shortcomings. By the early 1950s Davis had turned his
limitations into considerable assets. Davis explored the
trumpet’s middle register, experimenting with harmonies
and rhythms and varying the phrasing of his improvisations.
With the occasional exception of multinote flurries, his
melodic style was direct and unornamented.
Cool Jazz and Modal Jazz
In the summer of 1948, Davis formed a nonet that
included the renowned jazz artists Gerry Mulligan, J.J.
Johnson, Kenny Clarke, and Lee Konitz, as well as play-
ers on French horn and tuba, instruments rarely heard
in a jazz context. Mulligan, Gil Evans, and pianist John
Lewis did most of the band’s arrangements, which jux-
taposed the flexible, improvisatory nature of bebop
with a thickly textured orchestral sound. The group was