Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

At the end of 1955 Miles Davis received an unexpected Christmas gift. For the first time, the readers of Down Beat had elected him to first place on trumpet in the annual popularity poll. At that, it was a close race, with only a few votes separating him from the next two eligibles.

That this token of esteem was long overdue can be gauged by the fact that Miles, as for back as 1947, won a poll in which the voters were not the public but a handful of critics, who selected him as the new star of the year in the Esquire balloting. (He tied with Dizzy in this year’s Down Beat Critics’ poll, too.)

Poll victories, however, are a reflection neither of success nor of artistic merit. Miles’ talent is its own best reward, for the music you can hear between these covers stands a good chance of lasting long alter the details of the voting are forgotten.

Miles Dewey Davis – born Alton, Illinois, May 25, 1926, raised in East St. Louis, Dizzy and Bird admirer when the old Eckstine band passed through town, Juilliard student in 1945, Fifty Second Street denizen, big band sideman with Eckstine and Benny Carter – is a singular human being. Today’s leader is always yesterday’s follower. Just as Dizzy Gillespie was the chrysalis that grew from an Eldridge egg, so was Miles the butterfly that emerged in the next stage of stylistic development. In fact, so swiftly did his own style develop that it is hard to remember back to the time when Miles’ solos seemed to bear a resemblance to Dizzy’s.

Wasn‘t it Barry Ulanov who once wrote that Miles’ tone reminded him of a man walking on eggshells? If not, let whoever it was come forward and take a bow, for nothing could more aptly conjure up the manner in which Miles’ notes emerge from the bell of his horn, the staccato yet fluid drive of his rhythmic conception. Melodically it would be harder to express his personality in words; one can only observe that if Dixieland is, as it has so often been called, “happy music,” then the solos of Miles Davis more likely reflect the complexity of the neurotic world in which we live. The soaring spurts of lyrical exultancy are outnumbered by the somber moments of pensive gloom.

How can you prove it? Miles uses the same twelve notes every other living jazzman uses. Who can say that this music is happy and that music is sad? That Miles can be so completely Miles that Dizzy’s Woody’n You assumes a new and un-Gillespieish coloration in his hands?

You can’t prove it. All you can say is, well, that’s what makes jazz the exciting thing it is, limning the character at the man who makes it, fabricating moods and transmitting thought vibrations in the very moment of creation. And in this process Miles is a past master.