Miles Davis at 100: A Classical Perspective on a Jazz Visionary

May 2026 marks 100 years since the birth of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic and diverse musical masters. 

The New Yorker classical music critic Winthrop Sargeant once likened Miles Davis to an “impressionist composer with… a very fastidious feeling for tone colour. The compositions have beginnings, middles, and endings. The music sounds more like that of a new Maurice Ravel than it does jazz… if Davis was an established ‘classical’ composer, his work would rank high among that of his contemporary colleagues.”

The time is right for a classical re-evaluation…

Classical Piano… and an awkward condemnation

In many ways Miles Davis was born into classical music, not jazz. His mother was an organist and pianist, fond of classical masters; what she kept hidden was her ability to play “funky blues” (his words) too, a fact he discovered only later in life. She had hoped to give young Miles a violin for his thirteenth birthday but was overruled by her husband who instead chose a trumpet. Imagine how different music might have been: Miles Davis, the legendary classical violin soloist!

Despite the instrument change, a classical thread continued through his teenage years. The St. Louis area was already celebrated for its strong brass heritage, with many German immigrants – and local musicians schooled by them – settled in the area. One of Davis’s early teachers was the Principal Trumpet of the St. Louis Symphony (who, according to Davis, called him “the worst trumpet player I have ever heard in my life”!). 

Davis’s way of writing about this period can be deceptive; his autobiography is littered with expletives, his explosive writing style mirroring his famously aloof on-stage persona and nickname, “the Prince of Darkness”. But behind this cool, earthy façade is a man whose family was highly cultured; his father was a well-paid dentist who had three degrees and a 200-acre profitable pig farm as a side hustle. In many ways, the Davis family was the definition of “establishment” – even if in later life, Davis was always setting himself up against it.

Juilliard jettison

For a while at least, his education was “establishment” too. In 1944, the 18-year-old began studies at New York’s Juilliard. While he later wrote that he learned a great deal about music theory there, ultimately the experience was a frustrating one with a Eurocentric musical bias and closeted atmosphere; instead, Davis found a better education in the nightclubs and dance halls of NYC, eavesdropping on an exciting new generation of bebop players. Far from filing essays or partying wildly, Davis spent his first week at university trying to track down Charlie Parker (find out more about his mentor here with Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker). Soon, the 24-year-old Parker hired the teenager to play in his band, and in a quintet ended up cutting some key early records that defined bebop: the kind of fast-driving, harmonically rich virtuoso showcase that could be associated as much with a freewheeling concerto cadenza as with jazz. 

With some of the world’s greatest instrumentalists as his informal teachers and collaborators, Davis dropped out of Juilliard after just three terms. 

An instrumental impact

In 1948, having left Parker’s band, Miles Davis set up one of what would become several important ensembles; much as Beethoven helped expand the size and passion of the orchestra and Wagner drew on new instrumental colours, Davis would expand the instrumentation and mindset of jazz.

His Nonet aimed to bring the sounds of an orchestra to jazz while using the smallest number of instruments. Alongside alto and baritone saxes, piano, bass and drums, he included French horn, trumpet, trombone and tuba: a combination unique to jazz at the time. It’s fairly rare in classical too, with predecessors by Louis Spohr and Louise Farrenc. 

Davis’s new combo ushered in the era of “cool” jazz: the first of several periods Davis is said to have inaugurated.

Gil Evans

The slimmed-down yet orchestral quality of sound here owes much to Gil Evans. This Toronto-born jazz pianist was Davis’s fabled arranger, whose later work exploring Jimi Hendrix can be heard on here with the Gil Evans Orchestra recorded in Ansbach Castle in 1978. 

Evans was an expert in pitching charts for the French horn, flugelhorn and tuba; his voicings were clear and golden, his harmonies unexpected. The heavy use of mutes would soon become commonplace in jazz. 

Their shared classical interests are evident in their three albums for Columbia. Miles Ahead includes musical quotations of composers as broad as Berg, Delibes and Weill. Porgy and Bess saw Evans provide charts detailing as little as a scale and no chords, reflecting Davis’s desire to depart from the “thick” textures of earlier jazz and instead “return to melody”. Sketches of Spain presented arrangements of Rodrigo and de Falla. Drawing on the dynamic subtlety, textural interplay and instrumental timbres of classical music, this was a big step closer towards so-called “Third Stream” music, where jazz and classical overlap. Little surprise the man who coined that historic phrase, Gunther Schuller, was their French horn player.

Even before these three more directly “classical” albums, there were moves that raised eyebrows in jazz circles. 1957’s Birth of the Cool excluded the tenor sax entirely; this feels rather like eschewing drums in a pop record, or violins in a symphony (though Stravinsky’s 1930 Symphony of Psalms did just that)! 

It was the setting up of said sections that also proved so daring. Big band jazz in the days of Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington was based on the ping-pong between sections, an idea thrown from saxes to trumpets and back; the parallel with classical orchestras here is clear. But Davis didn’t think of his group in terms of multiple sub-sections; he saw his ensemble as one unit, more about the blend than the bounce, the combination over the conversation. Interestingly, Davis said his inspiration was more a choir than an orchestra: “I wanted the instruments to sound like human voices… I looked at the group like it was a choir.” 

This is where the debate began around Davis’s categorisation; cue Sargeant’s article, where he argued “it is not really jazz”. True, this era of his music is one that lingers rather than drives; indulges rather than expounds. To many it suggests more hazy classical impressionism than the manic energy of bebop. Perhaps this is why Davis’s ensemble was far from a household name at this time, even in jazz; only in later years would the Nonet be recognised for its seminal impact. 

From French Horns to Jazz Rock 

Just as Stravinsky passed through phases of late Romanticism to neoclassicism and serial, so too was Davis a restless soul. He once acknowledged it as an almost debilitating personality trait: “I have to change. It’s like a curse.”

In the 1960s he raised eyebrows again for experimenting with instrumentation and style, ushering in what came to be called “jazz rock fusion”. From 1968 Davis began to draw on rock rhythms and included electric keyboards and electric guitars in his line-up, even stretching to include Indian instruments like the sitar and tabla. 

The ultimate expression of this fusion was Bitches Brew, which seemed radical for 1969 but soon set the tone for much of jazz through the 1970s. Musicians in the session recalled: “it was like an orchestra, and Miles was our conductor…. All live recording, no overdubs”. 

Contrary to the gentle, calm, even suspect intonation of his earliest trumpet playing, here Davis performs with aggressive energy, shooting from the very lowest register up into the stratosphere and back. Joining him in the group was Chick Corea (who later played Mozart double concertos with Keith Jarrett) and Herbie Hancock (who you can see on here alongside Friedrich Gulda at the 1989 Salzburg Festival, and who began his career at eleven playing Mozart with the Chicago Symphony). This was an ensemble of open minds.

Later in life, Davis collaborated with legendary film composer Michel Legrand on the 1991 soundtrack to Dingo; in this, Davis was an actor as well as trumpeter, starring as fictional jazzer Billy Cross. You can hear “Dingo Rock” in a stunning Versailles concert here, recorded in 2014 as part of the Nights of the Orangerie: 

As with any innovator, Davis drew as much scorn as praise; some thought his constant attempts at fusion were simply commercial dross aimed at funding the next Ferrari, while others celebrated how he was broadening musical horizons and breaking down genres. He’s a study of contradictions, an aloof unapproachable giant who simultaneously built musical bridges and opened jazz to a wider number.

A Jazzical conclusion

We must celebrate the Miles Davis centenary as we would any restless creative visionary: in many ways, he is the Stravinsky or Picasso of Jazz. His endless exploration of genres points to a wider connection between musical styles that feels highly contemporary. In 2026 we see an increasing freedom of collaboration and connection: just look at pop star Rosalía recording with the London Symphony Orchestra, or songwriter Laufey including original orchestral movements between songs in her pop albums. Who better reflects this stylistic and timbral curiosity than Miles Davis?

Jazz masters have long embraced classical music. Chick Corea wrote a Piano Concerto for the London Philharmonic; Keith Jarrett has recorded Bach and contemporary piano concertos by the likes of Peggy Glanville-Hicks; likewise, Brad Mehldau’s own compositions on the album After Bach use The Well-Tempered Clavier as their inspiration. There is deep shared practice, too: improvisation was once not alien to classical music, best epitomised by the cadenza or the diva singers who embellished Handel’s melodies, a fact he so bemoaned; check out Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation here for a deep dive into musical freedom through time. Elsewhere, soloistic virtuosity and ensemble interplay could apply as much to a classical concerto as they do a jazz combo. Music is music, with the genre a mere label slapped on long after the moment. Play now and work out what it is later – to paraphrase the centenary man himself.

Davis put it best when he said: “Do not fear mistakes. There are none… my future starts when I wake up every morning.”