The Jazz Education Database

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The history of Jazz has seen few personalities as influential as Miles Davis. Today he is known as the most successful jazz musician of all time, but his success did not come over night. He played with virtuosos like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker at a very young age but soon realized that his technical ability on the instrument would never come close to that of these giants. So Miles found his own way, and he developed a sound that would stand out by its musicality and simple beauty. The following transcriptions are from a very important but often overlooked period of Miles's work. They illustrate a point in Miles's career where he had already found his very personal sound and had already been playing a leading role in a major revolution in jazz. From today's point of view this period of his work is to be seen as a point of departure for several revolutions to come.