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Miles Davis · S1 E2
Elwood Buchanan
Miles's music teacher at Lincoln High School. He tells the young trumpeter to play without vibrato, a clean, straight tone. Every other teacher says add more expression. Buchanan says subtract. It changes everything
A practice room at Lincoln High School, East St. Louis. A teenage Miles Davis lifts his trumpet, pours on a wide vibrato like his hero Harry James, and his band director Elwood Buchanan cuts him off mid-phrase.
Miles Davis, Blue in Green, from Kind of Blue (1959). Close your eyes and listen to the tone: no vibrato, no decoration, just a clean sound so fragile it could shatter at any moment. This sound started in a practice room at Lincoln High.
Blue in Green -- Miles Davis (1959)
From Kind of Blue, this ten-bar composition (unusual in jazz, where most forms are 12 or 32 bars) drifts like smoke through a quiet room. Miles plays with the Harmon mute pressed close to the microphone, producing a whisper of a tone with zero vibrato. That restraint is Buchanan's fingerprint, still audible years after the lesson.
“Play without the vibrato. You gonna get old enough to shake on your own.”
— Elwood Buchanan, as recalled by Miles Davis in Miles: The Autobiography (1989)
TAP TO REVEAL: Why was Buchanan's advice so radical in the 1940s?
Two Teachers, One Choice
Miles is also taking private lessons from a teacher who tells him the exact opposite: add more vibrato, play with more feeling, sound like Harry James. The two instructors pull him in opposite directions and Miles has to choose. He chooses Buchanan. That decision shapes everything that follows.
It Never Entered My Mind -- Miles Davis
From Workin' with the Miles Davis Quintet (1956), one of the legendary marathon Prestige sessions. A Rodgers and Hart ballad played through the Harmon mute with the kind of exposed, vibrato-free vulnerability that started in Buchanan's classroom.
Who was Miles Davis's trumpet hero before Buchanan changed his approach?
A trumpeter named Clark Terry, already playing in Count Basie's band, takes an interest in the teenager from East St. Louis. He is about to become the big brother Miles never had, and the bridge between a high school band room and the professional jazz world.
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