Name-dropping:
Miles Davis (pronunciation: You can handle this one) (1926–1991).
Trumpeter whose hugely influential playing and composing puts him near the top of the list of important 20th-century musicians.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Whatever sub-genre of jazz your cocktail party hosts happen to use for a party, there’s a reasonably good chance that Miles Davis invented it, refined it, or redefined it—so Davis is sure to be a hit topic. Also, if your hosts happen to be heroin addicts, Davis serves as an excellent cautionary tale.

The Basics
Miles Davis was the rare serious musician whose work succeeded both critically and commercially. He stood at the forefront of most major jazz movements over the last 60 years of jazz, and he got rich doing it. (Miles liked to say, “I got five Ferraris to support!”)

The son of a dentist, Davis started seriously playing the trumpet when he was 13. By the time he graduated from high school, he’d played with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. In fact, he even got a full ride to Juilliard, but upon arriving in New York City, he decided to ditch school in favor of playing with Parker’s quintet. Those recordings from the mid-1940s proved to be seminal achievements in bebop, the fast-tempo and heavily improvisational music for which Parker is best remembered.

Then Miles decided to follow in a storied tradition of jazz musicians and get himself addicted to heroin. For five years, it seemed that Miles’s talent might go to waste, but he eventually returned to his hometown of East St. Louis and kicked heroin with the help of his dad the dentist (who, we’re imagining, just threatened to drill his teeth sans Novocain if Miles kept shooting up).

In 1959, Miles released his masterpiece album, Kind of Blue. It made him both famous and rich. Davis called together his new band on almost no notice, gave them brief instructions, and sat down to play. The album was recorded in two days. All the songs but one were recorded in one take. Often called the definitive jazz album, Kind of Blue was revolutionary: It used modes rather than chord progressions, ushered in the era of “cool jazz,” and—perhaps best of all—its emphasis on melody made it approachable for jazz neophytes.

By the early 1970s, Miles progressed to fusion jazz—using electric instruments and funk beats in the studio—producing the indisputable classic Bitches Brew, which marks the only time in this entire book that we get to use a curse word.

By the mid-1970s, his addictions to cocaine and alcohol (and heroin again) led to a physical and emotional breakdown. He dropped out of the jazz scene, got halfway sober, and returned to the public eye in 1981, but he was never quite the same.

Best-Seller
Kind of Blue is the best-selling jazz record of all time. It has sold more than three million copies, and 40 years after its 1959 release, it was still selling 5,000 copies a week. (Incidentally, one would have to sell 5,000 albums a week for more than 47 years to match the sales of the Backstreet Boys’s 1997 self-titled effort.) Miles Davis always resented the white establishment, particularly after a 1959 beating at the hands of New York police officers. So this oft-told story rings true: In 1987, Miles attended a reception to honor Ray Charles and was seated next to a scion of Washington society. When she asked him what he’d done to get invited to the reception, he responded, “I’ve changed music four or five times. What have you done of any importance other than being white?”

THE ORIGINAL PIMP
Miles often dressed flamboyantly, particularly in the 1970s, when America seemed to believe that only polyester could save us from the threat of Communism. Between the flamboyant dress, the fast cars, and his many affairs, Miles has often been cited as an early example of living the pimping lifestyle without actually having to, you know, pimp. Except, he did, you know, pimp. According to the New York Times, Miles briefly worked as a pimp during his early heroin-addicted days in New York.

Conversation Starters
◆ In between winning 26 Grammys, writing music (including the theme for Sanford and Son), founding Vibe magazine, and befriending everyone from Michael Jackson to Bono, Quincy Jones apparently finds an hour each day to share with Miles. He once commented, “[Kind of Blue] will always be my music, man. I play Kind of Blue every day—it’s my orange juice.”

◆ Miles once said, “I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later,” and that’s more or less the approach he took to recording. He’d often call in band members on no notice, give them no time to rehearse, talk briefly about what he wanted to happen, and then start playing. Although this annoyed some of his band members (notably John Coltrane, whose playing Miles found long-winded), others found it exhilarating.

◆ In the Jazz Cat Imitating Spider-Man category: Davis’s former road manager Chris Murphy claimed in a tell-all book that Davis once decided to scale the face of his apartment building because he had no key and was convinced that his girlfriend was in the apartment engaging in shenanigans with “a dozen white guys.”