Miles Davis Turned 100: If You Couldn't Play It, You Couldn't Steal It

It's Wednesday, May twenty seventh. Yesterday marked a hundred years since Miles Davis was born in Alton, Illinois. If you know one jazz album, it's probably Kind of Blue, which Davis recorded in 1959 with two sessions, almost no rehearsal, and a band that included John Coltrane (coal-TRAYN) and Cannonball Adderley (ADD-er-lee). It's sold over five million copies and it's still the best-selling jazz album of all time. The timing is worth noting, though: Kind of Blue came out at roughly the moment jazz stopped being popular. By the mid-1960s, jazz had gone from the dominant form of American popular music to something that most people didn't listen to at all. Today it accounts for about 1.3 percent of total US music consumption, tied with classical at the bottom. So on Miles Davis's hundredth birthday, the question worth asking isn't just who he was. It's what happened to the music he spent his life pushing forward, and whether it's actually gone or just hiding inside everything else. It's hard to overstate how big jazz was in the 1930s and 1940s. Swing bands filled ballrooms and concert halls across the country. Duke Ellington (EL-ing-ton), Benny Goodman, Count Basie (BAY-see), and Ella Fitzgerald were household names in the way that Taylor Swift and Drake are now. Jazz wasn't a niche genre for connoisseurs. It was the music you danced to on a Saturday night. It was on the radio in every diner. It was the soundtrack to an entire generation's social life. And then, sometime in the mid-1940s, a group of musicians decided to blow it up. Bebop emerged in the clubs of Harlem and 52nd Street in New York, pioneered by Charlie Parker on saxophone and Dizzy Gillespie (gill-ES-pee) on trumpet, with Miles Davis, barely twenty years old, playing alongside them. Bebop was fast, complex, and deliberately difficult. The tempos were punishing. The chord changes were dense. The melodies were jagged and unpredictable. If swing was music you danced to, bebop was music you sat down and listened to, assuming you could follow it. There's a version of this story that says bebop was a purely artistic evolution, musicians pushing the boundaries of what was possible. That's partly true. But there's another layer that most popular histories skip. Swing had been commercialized and, to a significant degree, co-opted. White bandleaders like Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller were selling millions of records playing music that Black musicians had created. The economics of the music industry meant that Black artists often saw a fraction of the money their music generated. Bebop was, among other things, a response to that dynamic. By making the music harder and more virtuosic, bebop musicians created something that couldn't easily be simplified, packaged, and sold by someone else. The complexity was a kind of ownership. If you couldn't play it, you couldn't steal it. The problem was that most audiences couldn't follow it either. Swing had been accessible. Bebop was demanding. And just as jazz was becoming harder to listen to, something much simpler arrived. Rock and roll didn't just compete with jazz. It replaced jazz as the music of young people, and once that happened, jazz never got them back. Elvis Presley's explosion onto the national stage in 1956 was the visible moment, but the shift had been building for years. The cultural energy of postwar America was moving toward youth, simplicity, and rebellion. Rock and roll offered all three. It was built on a backbeat you could feel in your chest. You didn't need musical training to enjoy it. And for teenagers looking to define themselves against their parents' generation, rock was theirs in a way that jazz, which their parents had danced to, could never be. Jazz clubs started closing. Record labels shifted their investment toward rock and pop. Radio stations reformatted. By the time the Beatles arrived in 1964, the transformation was complete. Jazz went from the main stage to the back room in less than a decade. Miles Davis watched all of this happen and responded by reinventing himself, more than once. In 1959, he recorded Kind of Blue, which moved away from bebop's density and toward something spacious, melodic, and almost meditative. He called it modal jazz, and it was, in some ways, an attempt to make jazz listenable again without sacrificing its sophistication. Kind of Blue is the album people who don't listen to jazz can still enjoy, and that's not an accident. Davis designed it that way. Then in 1970, he did something that horrified jazz purists. He plugged in. Bitches Brew fused jazz improvisation with electric guitars, rock rhythms, and funk grooves. Critics called it a betrayal. Davis called it evolution. The album sold over half a million copies in its first year, far more than any other jazz record of the era, and essentially invented jazz fusion. Davis kept pushing for another twenty years, incorporating hip-hop, electronic production, and pop structures into his work until his death in 1991. Two hundred and eighty six Wikipedia articles cite Davis as an influence. Some historians have argued that jazz as a genre stopped evolving after he stopped playing. Whether that's fair to the musicians who came after him is debatable, but the observation captures something real: Davis was the last jazz musician who could bend the genre toward the mainstream through sheer force of personality and artistic ambition. After him, jazz retreated into academia, preservation societies, and a dedicated but shrinking audience. So is jazz dead? The market share numbers say yes. 1.3 percent of US music consumption. Fewer album sales than classical. Jazz venues closing across the country. The median age of a jazz festival audience is somewhere north of fifty. But there's a contrarian case worth making, and it's more convincing than you might expect. Jazz didn't disappear. It dissolved into everything else. Hip-hop has been sampling jazz since the genre began. A Tribe Called Quest built entire albums around jazz samples in the early 1990s. Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, one of the most acclaimed albums of the 2010s, features jazz musicians directly inspired by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and the album's sonic architecture is closer to a jazz record than a rap record. Robert Glasper has built a career straddling jazz and R&B, collaborating with everyone from Erykah Badu (eh-REE-kah bah-DOO) to Common. Anderson .Paak and Thundercat play jazz-inflected music to audiences that would never call it jazz. Film scoring runs on jazz harmony. Every major composer working in Hollywood, from Hans Zimmer to Ludwig Goransson (LOOD-vig GOR-an-son), uses harmonic concepts that originated in jazz. The chord voicings, the modal structures, the approach to rhythm and improvisation that Davis and Coltrane pioneered are now so thoroughly absorbed into the musical vocabulary that they're invisible. Jazz is the foundation underneath pop, hip-hop, R&B, film music, and electronic production. You just can't see it because the building went up on top of it. Davis would probably be fine with that. He never cared about preserving jazz as a museum piece. "Do not fear mistakes," he said. "There are none." His entire career was about moving forward, absorbing new influences, and refusing to repeat himself even when repetition would have been commercially safer. The genre he helped create may have lost its name as a mainstream category, but its DNA is in virtually every form of popular music being made today. Whether that counts as dead or alive depends on what you think a genre is: the label, or the sound. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Jazz was the dominant form of American popular music from the 1920s through the 1940s, until bebop made it harder to listen to and rock and roll gave young people something simpler to call their own. Miles Davis, whose hundredth birthday was yesterday, spent his career trying to keep jazz relevant by reinventing it every decade: bebop in the forties, modal jazz in the fifties, fusion in the seventies, hip-hop and electronic in the eighties. After his death in 1991, jazz retreated to the margins, where it now accounts for about 1.3 percent of US music consumption. But jazz harmony, jazz rhythm, and jazz improvisation are the invisible foundation underneath hip-hop, R&B, film scores, and most of the music you actually listen to. The genre that seems dead may just be the one that won so completely that nobody calls it jazz anymore. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.