May 26 - BlackFacts.com Black History Minute

BlackFacts.com: Learn/Teach/Create Black History

BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for May 26.

Miles Davis was born.

He was an American jazz musician, a trumpeter who as a bandleader and composer was one of the major influences on art from the late 1940s.

Davis grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois, where his father was a prosperous dental surgeon, and began studying trumpet in his early teens.

He played with jazz bands in the St. Louis area before moving to New York City in 1944 to study at the Institute of Musical Art, although he skipped many classes and instead was schooled through jam sessions with masters such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

Davis's stint from 1947 to 1948 in a quintet led by bebop genius Charlie Parker brought him early fame. A fine bebop trumpeter, Davis soon felt a need to rid his music of bebop's style and to restore jazz's more melodic elements.

In 1955 Davis formed his most celebrated group, a remarkably talented quintet that featured tenor saxophonist John Coltrane (1926–1967), pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones.

In his much-praised and revealing autobiography, "Miles", he wrote frankly of his hedonistic past and of the racism he saw in the music industry.

Along with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, Davis is regarded as one of the four most important and influential musicians in jazz history, as well as the music’s most eclectic practitioner.

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