Miles Davis

312 W 77th St, New York, NY

Last updated 8/27/2026

Miles Davis's career moved through more distinct stylistic eras than perhaps any other major jazz musician — bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion — and his 1959 album Kind of Blue, built around modal rather than traditional chord-based improvisation, remains the best-selling jazz album of all time. Davis assembled a series of legendary small ensembles throughout his career, each featuring musicians who themselves went on to become major jazz innovators — John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter all passed through Davis's bands before establishing significant careers of their own. His 1970 album Bitches Brew, which incorporated electric instruments and rock-influenced rhythms into a jazz framework, helped launch the jazz fusion movement and drew significant criticism from jazz traditionalists at the time, even as it opened the genre to a younger audience more accustomed to rock and funk. Davis's willingness to repeatedly abandon commercially successful styles in favor of new creative directions, often alienating existing fans in the process, made him one of the most restlessly innovative figures in jazz history, and his catalog spans a broader range of jazz's stylistic evolution than any other single musician's body of work.

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