Happy Birthday to jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Miles Dewey Davis III (b. May 26, 1926, in Alton, IL), who resisted archetypes and led genre revolutions from a young age. His middle-class upbringing, artistic persona, and that he spent most of his life in fame and prestige demonstrated African American excellence in the mid-twentieth century. The flaws and complexities of his story remind us of his humanity. For example, he struggled with alcoholism, drug addiction, sex addiction, and more. He was also a violent abuser of women and must be emphatically condemned for this. His music was also complex. As scholar Richard Cook writes “He turned away from categorizing anything he did, unwilling to accept even the word ‘jazz,’ yet he refused to admit the anarchy of free jazz and its supposed liberations from imposed rule. He is often thought of as a restrained musician, but he could be bitingly expressive, frequently sounding sour and aggressive, and at many points in his career he played the trumpet with something approaching venom: he made sure that his sound was always the one that cut through to the audience.”
Citations: Richard Cook, It’s About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1-4, https://archive.org/details/itsaboutthattime0000cook; William P. Gottlieb, [Portrait of Charlie Parker, Tommy Potter, Miles Davis, Duke Jordan, and Max Roach, Three Deuces], photograph (New York, NY, c. August 1947), public domain, https://www.loc.gov/item/gottlieb.06851/.
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