7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7short-lived but during its brief history recorded a dozen
tracks that were originally released as singles (1949 –50).
These recordings changed the course of modern jazz and
paved the way for the West Coast styles of the 1950s.
The tracks were later collected in the album Birth of the
Cool (1957).
During the early 1950s Davis recorded albums that
rank among his best. In 1954, having overcome drug
addiction, Davis embarked on a two-decade period during
which he was considered the most innovative musician
in jazz. He formed classic small groups in the 1950s that
featured saxophone legends John Coltrane and Cannonball
Adderley, pianists Red Garland and Bill Evans, bassist Paul
Chambers, and drummers “Philly” Joe Jones and Jimmy
Cobb. Davis’s albums recorded during this era, including
’Round About Midnight (1956), Steamin’ (1956), and Milestones
(1958), among others, affected the work of numerous other
artists. He capped this period of his career with Kind of
Blue (1959), perhaps the most celebrated album in the
history of jazz. A mellow, relaxed collection, the album
includes the finest recorded examples of modal jazz, a style
in which improvisations are based upon sparse chords and
nonstandard scales rather than on complex, frequently
changing chords.
Released concurrently with the small-group recordings,
Davis’s albums with pieces arranged and conducted by Gil
Evans—Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), and
Sketches of Spain (1960)—were also monuments of the
genre. The Davis-Evans collaborations were marked by
complex arrangements, a near-equal emphasis on orchestra
and soloist, and some of Davis’s most soulful and emotion-
ally powerful playing. Davis and Evans occasionally
collaborated in later years, but never again so memorably
as on these three masterful albums.