Duke Ellington: The jazz master Miles Davis said everyone should thank
Jazz is an often misunderstood world, unjustly denounced by nonbelievers as being a self-congratulatory and conceited landscape of pretentiousness. In reality, though, musical expression as we know it would be virtually unrecognisable without the impact of jazz trailblazers like Miles Davis.
An artistic revolutionary armed only with a trumpet, Davis altered the course of music history forever, rising from the background of Charlie Parker’s Quintet back in the 1940s to become an unwavering voice of originality and innovation. From his enduring Birth of Cool period to the transformative jazz psychedelia of his ultimate masterpiece, Bitches Brew, Davis was not only responsible for some of the greatest jazz records of all time, but he consistently subverted audience perceptions of jazz music itself.
Like any great artist, after all, Davis had an insatiable desire for development, routinely reinventing himself and his sound and incorporating seemingly every sonic influence that passed him by, stretching from funk, soul, and psychedelia all the way to the traditional music of Spain. Each and every project that the trumpeter embraced over the years added entirely new layers to his artistic appeal, so it should come as no surprise that his genius spawned a wealth of future songwriters in his wake.
Regardless of genre or generation, the unending artistic drive within Miles Davis’ soul seemed to resonate with his fellow artists, and with good reason. Such was his individuality and inventive nature that Davis might as well have been beamed down from a higher plane of existence in order to provide something of a guide to all other musicians. It can be easy to forget, then, that the trumpeter was an ordinary person at his core and, like every musician, was indebted to his own range of influences.
Having performed alongside a wealth of utterly iconic jazz masters, from the aforementioned Charlie Parker through to the likes of Herbie Hancock, Max Roach, and John Coltrane, Davis was never short of figures to draw musical inspiration from. However, there is one figure that virtually every jazz titan inevitably leads back to: Edward ‘Duke’ Ellington.
“At least one day out of the year all musicians should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington,” Davis once declared of Ellington, and it is easy to see why. Although there is certainly a case for Davis having carved out the sound of modern jazz expression through his Birth of Cool era, it should go without saying that those revolutionary sounds would never have materialised were it not for the groundwork laid by Duke Ellington years earlier.
Arguably, in fact, popular music as a whole wouldn’t be the same without the Duke. From the moment he first emerged back in the 1910s, the pianist orchestrated a chain reaction that led to the jazz domination of the 1920s, inspired a countless array of other artists to follow suit, and ended up influencing everything from the big band era to emergence of rock ‘n’ roll decades later.
If any musician is worthy of worship, then Miles Davis’ declaration that it should be Duke Ellington is certainly hard to dispute.
