Book description
Miles Davis was one of the crucial influences in the development of
modern jazz. His Kind of Blue is an automatic inclusion in any
critic's list of the great jazz albums, the one record people who own
no other jazz records possess, and still sells 250,000 copies a year
in the US alone. But Miles regularly changed styles, leaving his
inimitable impact on many forms of jazz, whether he created them or
simply developed the work of others, from modal jazz to be-bop, his
seminal quintet and his big-band work, to the jazz funk experiments of
later years.
Miles not only knew and worked with everyone who was anyone in jazz,
from Coltrane to Monk, he was a friend of Sartre's, lover of Juliette
Greco and musical collaborator with musicians who ranged from
Stockhausen to Hendrix. John Swzed is uniquely well-qualified to do
justice to Miles, both in terms of his impact on jazz, and as one of
the great Black Americans: as political figure, icon and archetypal
cool dude. His book fills in the gaps left by myth-making about Miles'
life - both by Miles himself and by his previous biographers - telling
the story of his childhood, his depressions and his relationship with
heroin as well as the more familiar public career.
John Swzed is a professor of Music, Anthropology, African-American
Studies and American Studies at Yale University, and author of Space is
the Place, a biography of the jazz musician Sun Ra.
