page_title: Miles Davis
section_title: Legacy and influence
hierarchical_section_title: Miles Davis / Legacy and influence
caption_attribution_description: English: Miles Davis Way is part of W. 77th Street in New York City.
context_page_description: Miles Dewey Davis III was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in a five-decade career that kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz.
  Born in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis, Davis left to study at the Juilliard School in New York City, before dropping out and making his professional debut as a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker's bebop quintet from 1944 to 1948. Shortly after, he recorded the Birth of the Cool sessions for Capitol Records, which were instrumental to the development of cool jazz. In the early 1950s, Miles Davis recorded some of the earliest hard bop music while on Prestige Records but did so haphazardly due to a heroin addiction. After a widely acclaimed comeback performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955, he signed a long-term contract with Columbia Records and recorded the 1957 album 'Round About Midnight. It was his first work with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers, key members of the sextet he led into the early 1960s.
context_section_description: Miles Davis is considered one of the most innovative, influential, and respected figures in the history of music. Based on professional rankings of his albums and songs, the aggregate website Acclaimed Music lists him as the 16th most acclaimed recording artist in history. The Guardian described him as "a pioneer of 20th-century music, leading many of the key developments in the world of jazz." He has been called "one of the great innovators in jazz", and had the titles Prince of Darkness and the Picasso of Jazz bestowed upon him. The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll said, "Miles Davis played a crucial and inevitably controversial role in every major development in jazz since the mid-'40s, and no other jazz musician has had so profound an effect on rock. Miles Davis was the most widely recognized jazz musician of his era, an outspoken social critic and an arbiter of style—in attitude and fashion—as well as music."
  William Ruhlmann of AllMusic wrote, "To examine his career is to examine the history of jazz from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s, since he was in the thick of almost every important innovation and stylistic development in the music during that period ... It can even be argued that jazz stopped evolving when Davis wasn't there to push it forward." Francis Davis of The Atlantic notes that Davis' career can be seen as a critique of the jazz music played time, specifically bebob. Music writer Christopher Smith wrote,
  Miles Davis' artistic interest was in the creation and manipulation of ritual space, in which gestures could be endowed with symbolic power sufficient to form a functional communicative, and hence musical, vocabulary. ... Miles' performance tradition emphasized orality and the transmission of information and artistic insight from individual to individual. His position in that tradition, and his personality, talents, and artistic interests, impelled him to pursue a uniquely individual solution to the problems and the experiential possibilities of improvised performance.
  His approach, owing largely to the African-American performance tradition that focused on individual expression, emphatic interaction, and creative response to shifting contents, had a profound impact on generations of jazz musicians. Musicians and admirers of Davis work include Carlos Santana, Herbie Hancock, Flea, The Roots, Wayne Shorter. In 2016, digital publication The Pudding in an article examining Davis' legacy found that 2,452 Wikipedia pages mention Davis with over 286 citing him as an influence.
  Kind of Blue remains the best-selling jazz album of all time. On November 5, 2009, U.S. Representative John Conyers of Michigan sponsored a measure in the United States House of Representatives to commemorate the album on its 50th anniversary. The measure also affirms jazz as a national treasure and "encourages the United States government to preserve and advance the art form of jazz music". It passed with a vote of 409–0 on December 15, 2009. The trumpet Davis used on the recording is displayed on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It was donated to the school by Arthur "Buddy" Gist, who met Davis in 1949 and became a close friend. The gift was the reason why the jazz program at UNCG is named the Miles Davis Jazz Studies Program.
  In 1986, the New England Conservatory awarded Davis an honorary doctorate for his contributions to music. Since 1960 the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) honored him with eight Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and three Grammy Hall of Fame Awards.
  In 2001 a two-hour documentary film by Mike Dibb entitled The Miles Davis Story won an International Emmy Award for arts documentary of the year. Since 2005, the Miles Davis Jazz Committee has held an annual Miles Davis Jazz Festival. Also in 2005, a London exhibition was held demostrating his paintings, 'The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis, 1980-1991' was released detailing his final years and eight of his albums from the 1960s and 70s were reissued in celebration of the 50th anniv
caption: The westernmost part of 77th Street in New York City has been named Miles Davis Way. He once lived on the block.
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