The album that made Miles Davis proud of John Coltrane
The late legend Miles Davis is undoubtedly the most widely celebrated jazz musician ever. His trumpeting virtuosity led him into the blossoming world of bebop jazz in the early 1940s. Very soon, Davis’ seamless talent for composition and multi-instrumentalism saw him rise swiftly to the top.
In the late 1940s, Davis began to migrate from his roots in high-tempo bebop jazz, joining the smaller cult of “cool jazz”. This transition is defined by his Birth of the Cool sessions for Capitol, recorded between 1949 and ’50 but commercially released in 1957.
Through the 1950s, Davis’ most prolific and essential spell, he was joined by a band of cool jazz musicians, including John Coltrane. The unknown saxophonist joined Davis’ backing band in 1955 and departed in 1959 a national legend and global star. This fame is mainly attributable to Coltrane’s work on Davis’ seminal 1959 album, Kind of Blue.
In his 1989 book, Miles: The Autobiography, Davis reflected on his friendship and professional relationship with Coltrane, or as he nicknamed him, Trane. “Trane was an innovator, and you have to say the right thing to people like that. That’s why I’d tell him to begin in the middle because that’s the way his head worked anyway,” Davis recalled of the musician, who passed away in 1967.
“He was looking to be challenged, and if you brought the shit to him wrong, he wasn’t going to listen. After the gig, he would go back to his hotel room and practice while everybody else was hanging out. He would practice for hours after he had just got through playing three sets.”
Continuing, Davis articulated Coltrane’s unparalleled devotion. “He was only really concerned about playing his music and growing as a musician,” Davis wrote. “That’s all he thought about. He couldn’t be seduced by a woman’s beauty because he had already been seduced by the beauty of music, and he was loyal to his wife. Whereas for me, after the music was through, I was out the door seeing what pretty lady I was going to be with that night.”
Following the release of Kind of Blue in 1959, Coltrane began to make tracks into a solo career of his own. “It was in San Francisco that Trane gave an interview to a writer named Russ Wilson and told him that he was seriously thinking about leaving the group, which Wilson wrote in the papers the next day,” Davis remembered in his memoir. “The only thing negative during this time was Trane still grumbling about leaving the band, but everyone had gotten used to that.”
After Coltrane set out on a career under his own name, he began a prolific spell of album releases, reaching a pinnacle of commercial and critical engagement in 1965 with A Love Supreme. In his autobiography, Davis noted that the album heard a more “spiritual” side of his friend.
“His change to a more spiritual music in the music on A Love Supreme—which was like a prayer—reached out and influenced those people who were into peace, hippies and people like that,” Davis wrote. “His music was embraced by a lot of different kinds of people, and that was beautiful and I was proud of him, even if I liked his earlier music more. I miss him, his spirit, and his creative imagination and his searching innovative approach to what he was doing. He was a genius like Bird [Charlie Parker]. But his music is what he left us and we can all learn from that.”
Watch some rare footage of Miles Davis and John Coltrane trading solos in the late 1950s below.
