The definitive impression French music made on a young Miles Davis

At the beginning of his growth as a musician, Miles Davis had two undisputed idols: Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie “Bird” Parker.

He revered them so much that he decided to take the few savings he had to move out to New York City, with the unique goal of not only meeting his heroes -but also to play music with them.

And he did it. After looking for them all over Manhattan, the young trumpeter was finally invited to share the stage with his idols. Nonetheless, as that wise saying claims: “be careful with what you wish for”. Davis noticed that playing along Dizzy and Bird was making him miserable. It was overwhelming: they just played too fast and he just couldn’t keep up.

The tensions were already rising within the ensemble, and Davis, foreseeing a potential blow up, decided to quit. The experience left him both frustrated and anguished about his future. However, some sort of rescue came from someone who will become one of his most important partners: Gil Evans.

Evans organized meetings in his basement on 55th street, where a group of likeminded artists (not only musicians) gathered to discuss art and life. From this soirées Davis ended up with the realization that the future of not only his career but also of jazz lied far from the type of jazz (bebop) his first two masters taught him.

Deeply influenced by the so called Impressionist French composers like Debussy and Ravel, Davis decided that the essence of jazz should be slower and lyrical. Instead of embarking on virtuosity and some sort of competition between the soloists, the key was to overlap textures, as in a chorus. He needed to focus on crafting beauty within harmony. 

With that in mind, he formed a nonet, an unprecedented formation in jazz that aimed at resembling a small chamber orchestra. His new band recorded a few pieces over three sessions that were recorded in 1949 and 1950, and then finally published in 1957. The result was entitled Birth of the cool and it would change the course of jazz -and music- forever. 

With Birth of the cool, Davis managed to craft an elegant, accessible and sensuous form of jazz while at the same time distancing it from the entertaining utility the genre had been so associated with. As Quincy Jones put it, with this music Miles Davis aspired to become “a pure musician, like Stravinsky”.

And he surely did. Throughout his career, Miles Davis always looked for new ways to reinvent jazz and, above all things, himself. According to musicians who played with him, he never talked about his greatest records, their legacy notwithstanding -he always looked ahead. At the end of the fifties, Davis took inspiration from French style, slowed jazz's formerly frantic pace, imbued it with charm and made it approachable for the rest of the world.