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Miles Davis · S1 E4
Eddie Randle's Blue Devils
Miles joins a local band at sixteen and starts playing dances and clubs around St. Louis. He is still in high school. The band backs visiting musicians from New York, and the young trumpeter holds his own
A basement club on 52nd Street, 1945. Charlie Parker tears through a solo at impossible speed, and the nineteen-year-old trumpet player standing next to him on the bandstand has to figure out what to play next.
Miles Davis, Freddie Freeloader, from Kind of Blue (1959). A simple, swinging blues that proves a point Miles learned the hard way on 52nd Street: you don't have to play fast to play deep. Every note here earns its place.
Freddie Freeloader -- Miles Davis (1959)
The only track on Kind of Blue built on standard blues changes rather than modal scales. Wynton Kelly replaces Bill Evans on piano, giving the tune a looser, earthier feel. Miles's solo is a masterclass in economy: short phrases, long pauses, each note placed with surgical precision. This is what years of playing next to Charlie Parker taught him, not to copy Bird, but to find the opposite path.
“Do not play what's there. Play what's not there.”
— Miles Davis
TAP TO REVEAL: What happened when Miles first tried to keep up with Parker in a recording studio?
Learning from Bird
Playing in Parker's quintet is a nightly education in harmony, rhythm, and survival. Bird is brilliant and unreliable, showing up late or not at all, borrowing money he never returns. Miles watches everything: how Parker hears chord changes nobody else can, how he builds solos that tell stories. He also watches Parker destroy himself with heroin, and he takes notes on that too.
Four -- Miles Davis
A classic up-tempo swinger from a 1954 Prestige session. The confidence, the swing, the sense that the whole band is locked in and moving as one. This is what playing on 52nd Street every night teaches you.
What made Billy Eckstine's big band revolutionary?
By 1948, Miles is tired of playing bebop. He starts meeting with an arranger named Gil Evans in a cramped basement apartment on West 55th Street, sketching out a new sound with French horns and tubas. They call the project "Birth of the Cool," and it is about to change jazz forever.
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