Miles Davis would likely have loved turning 100.
Re-listening to his latter-day catalog — along with much of his canon in rapt anticipation of May’s centenary celebration — whether you dug his glossy hip-hop touches on posthumous releases such as Doo-Bop and Rubberband or not, you had to applaud his refusal to stagnate, his continued reach into new rhythms, new vibes and newer technologies.
That sort of thinking and doing is what led Davis into the flamenco classicism of Sketches of Spain, the Broadway operatics of Porgy and Bess, the electric noise ronk of Bitches Brew, and the poptronica of Tutu: his need for speed, his want of change, his desire to morph, genre-less, into something else. And his eschewing of his past, and of jazz itself.
“I have no feel for it anymore; it’s more like warmed-over turkey” and “Jazz is dead … it’s finito. It’s over and there’s no point aping the shit” are but two of Davis’s notable comments on his dismissal of the term.
Thinking about Davis forever moving forward, a young player such as Kamasi Washington (who’ll celebrate Miles 100 with his set at Newport 2026) would certainly have been poached by the trumpet god, just as he did Coltrane and Wayne before him. These things would have put Miles ever-so-slightly ahead of the curve — just where we like him.
In consideration of his 100th birthday (and named for “Seven Steps to Heaven,” my favorite of Davis compositions, pre-Bitches Brew), this is my personal “seven steps” to my deepest Miles moments and what I’m looking forward to during this year of birthday celebration.
1. The First Time
You never forget your first time seeing Miles Davis. For me in 1983, it wasn’t that hot — a free outdoor show along Philadelphia’s waterfront, the day before July 4. On tour for Star People, Miles may have blown like a pressure cooker unleashed at times (and, at other times, strangely dozy). But it was hard to get around how bland Davis’s version of fusion-funk sounded live, and how high in the terrible mix were Mike Stern’s guitar and Bill Evans’s saxophone. While I was in awe of his legend, this live iteration of Davis was clunky.
Luckily, the supple pop of Tutu, his apt-titled, quietly theatrical score for Siesta, the African-accented Amandla and his Academy of Music concerts of 1986 and 1991 settled the score, turned my head back around and righted the ships where the brilliance of Miles — recorded and in concert — again came clear.
2. We Want Marcus Miller (and Jason Miles)
When I wrote my 2020 feature on the short-lived, mutual admiration, ego-tripping relationship between Miles Davis and Prince for JazzTimes, the person I wanted to speak with the most was the trumpeter’s longtime producer and bassist Marcus Miller. Via The Man with the Horn (1981), Miller brought Miles back to life and made him user-friendly for the likes of Prince. “When you were around him, your senses were on super-high intensity,” Miller told me. “Everything became more important. Everything you played, everything he played, had a light shone on it.”
One of the reasons I am saddest that I’m not making it to June’s Montréal Jazz Fest is that Miller is debuting his Miles 100 tribute with Mike Stern and Bill Evans. I’m all about second chances. And I haven’t witnessed Miller’s stage work in forever. If anyone wants to give me a lift to the Canadian border, please write me in care of JazzTimes.
Also noteworthy: One of Marcus Miller’s cohorts, keyboardist and programmer Jason Miles — who worked with Miller and Miles on Tutu, Siesta and Amandla — has his own new album of originals, out in time for the birthday bash, 100 Miles for Miles Davis. This record features Randy Brecker, Russell Gunn, Vinnie Colaiuta and more in tribute to Davis and the moments that made Miles Miles — such as “Jeanne Moreau.” Magnifique.
3. Live Miles 100, with Popcorn
The third promised-to-be-dynamic live tribute to Miles comes courtesy a sturdy string ensemble of Juilliard alumni playing alongside director Stanley Nelson’s 2019 documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, May 26, at the intimate National Sawdust in Brooklyn. (New York’s Summerstage showcase of August 21 will offer much more room to dance, dream and view this same live concert/viewing party jam, at Central Park’s Rumsey Playfield.)
Days later at the world-famous Apollo Theater in Harlem — May 29 — Murray Lerner’s doc Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue screens before a panel conversation and an evening dedicated to all-things Miles under the umbrella title Muted Genius.
Another necessary piece of the Miles puzzle is John Beasley, a keyboardist who became part of the Davis universe in 1989 at the advice of drummer Vince Wilburn Jr. (Miles’s nephew), went on to become a touring member of the ensemble and can be heard on Live Around the World.
Now Beasley has produced John Beasley: Unlimited Miles, shot in concert and viewable on Mezzo TV and the MEDICI.tv streaming platform — featuring a score of new-school jazz’s finest such as Kurt Rosenwinkel, Sean Jones, Mark Turner, Ben Williams and Terreon Gully. “Miles was not interested in nostalgia,” writes Beasley of a team of musicians cobbled together to challenge each other. “He was always asking, ‘What’s Next?’ Unlimited Miles grew out of that question.”
4. All Jazz Roads Lead to Laufey
Jazz-pop’s softest, most durable millennial figurehead, Laufey, jumped headfirst into Miles’s birthday celebration back in March with a multi-corporate sponsored, Twitch-streamed live event featuring the vocalist’s tiny, torrid take on Davis’s tender “Blue in Green.” And how sweet it is.
5. Miles Movies
Sadly, too many Miles fans have forgotten how Oceans 11’s Don Cheadle played the troubled trumpeter in his self-directed, co-written biopic of 2015, Miles Ahead. Focused as it is on Davis’s post-addiction 1970s and ’80s, that now ten-year-old film featured Cheadle in more than a few difficult wig and costume choices — and yet, it’s a worthy watch, with Cheadle digging deep into Miles’s swagger and sadness.
Currently, director Bill Pohlad is in pre-production on Miles & Juliette, a dramatic film starring Damson Idris, the guy who went up against Brad Pitt on F1’s racetrack, as Miles, and Anamaria Vartolomei (from the confounding Mickey 17) as Davis’s one-time love, Juliette Gréco. Even if Miles & Juliette is terrible, with these two gorgeous actors essaying the coolest-ever period of sartorial splendor, it’s going to look and sound fantastic.
6. Miles: The Autobiography Redux
First published in 1989 as an offshoot of a SPIN magazine feature with poet-author Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography was a great jazz and social history lesson and a devastating recounting of Davis’s true voice — often misogynistic, egotistical — as a person beyond the playing.
Hearing LeVar Burton do the audiobook is even better. In fact, if there ever is an audiobook Oscars, Burton should get one retroactively (it did get nominated for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Album at that year’s Grammy Awards). Simon & Schuster’s brand-new version of Miles: The Autobiography – The Centennial Edition gets a new book jacket and a fresh foreword by author Hanif Abdurraqib and another by Nas, the rapper who knows from great trumpet players via the work of his father, Olu Dara (and where are Dara’s reissues for Neighborhoods and In the World: From Natchez to New York?).
7. The Reissues
This is where I live my best life: in the vaults. After Legacy dropped the chewy entirety of Miles’s The Complete Plugged Nickel Live 1965 gigs on 10 LPs earlier this year, the reissues and the rarities have been strong and steady. First came April’s compact Live at Montreux (Rhino Reserve) from the 1991 teaming of Miles Davis, Quincy Jones, Kenny Garrett, the Gil Evans Orchestra and George Gruntz’s Concert Jazz Band.
Forever sworn to never playing the music of his past, Miles was convinced, legend has it, by a psychic to relive his earlier compositions with Q, and, in part, in tribute to Evans who has passed several years prior to this hangout with a Quiji board. Davis played the Montreux gig ill and made these his final recordings three months before his death. But he did his past music proud with stirring, strange orchestral takes on Evans’s compositions such as “The Maids of Cadiz” and “Blues for Pablo,” and a handsome handful of selections from their masterpiece Sketches of Spain.
Following in May, the Tone Poet direct-from-the-master-tapes capture of Birth of the Cool is a waking daydream vision of post-bop chill jazz classicism and the imaginative power of the Davis-led nonet, where off-beat instrumentation (tubas, French horn) ruled and Max Roach and Gerry Mulligan matched wits with Miles at the height of their power. Davis’s co-composed “Budo” and “Deception” never sounded better than they do on this Tone Poet iteration.
Also re-released in a less-than-loud fashion this month (on Decca France) is Miles’s 1957 live-in-the-studio cues/score to (then) French New Wave cinema avatar Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows, or if you prefer, Lift to the Scaffold). With one American bop drummer (Kenny Clarke) and three French players (tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen, pianist René Urtreger, bassist Pierre Michelot), Davis — off the cuff, in one evening — free-balled one of his most touch-sensitive recordings, a noir ambient modal jazz masterpiece that preceded Kind of Blue in its distant, distingué harmonic openness, yet doesn’t eschew sexy blues and rapid fire trumpet runs in accordance with the action onscreen.
By sheer volume at four LPs, and by virtue of his mid-1950s vision when it came to curating moods and musicians, the big mama of Miles birthday drops comes from Craft Recordings this June with the vinyl box set Miles ’56: The Prestige Recordings. Produced, of course, by label leader Rudy Van Gelder, featuring Davis’s first quintet (John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones), Miles ’56 is the soaring sound of intuitive, likeminded players dining out on each other’s silken, steely, newly found inventiveness and melodicism on showy Tin Pan Alley standards such as “If I Were a Bell” and “I Could Write a Book,” while their leader penned “Blues by Five” and “Tune Up,” edging closer to genius with each emotionally nuanced, silver-lined solo. JT