The great musical talent of Miles Davis | Miles Davis

Your post celebrating Miles Davis’ 100th birthday instead criticizes his musical genius (The Guardian’s thoughts on 100 years after Miles Davis’ birth: why he’s still making music today, 24 May). Unable to play with great trumpeters like Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro, it was less a matter of preferring “restraint and precision” in his playing than admitting that he was not one of them, and having an ability to adapt.

Listen, for example, to his early recordings with Charlie Parker where, following Parker’s fiery music, Davis stumbles through a musical transition, only to realize that he’s decided to focus on a gentler path instead. This was reflected in the collaboration with designer Gil Evans, depicted in Birth of the Cool. recordings and later sketches of Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess and Spanish Sketches, and later his quintets with John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter, where his lack of technique became irrelevant when placed beside his great voice.

That conscious choice is the real art of Davis’s musical career. Sadly, this was overshadowed by the more serious work he did in his later years: these things are as jazzy as a Hundred and a cricket test, an absurd comparison.
Dr. Richard Carter
Putney, London

Your leader Miles Davis he was right there. He was one of those unique people who saw jazz as something that should be created with new ideas, not stuck in old styles. You didn’t mention that he was a famous flugelhorn player.

When Sir Michael Tippett was writing his Third Symphony, he wanted a unique sound that would be familiar with the blues tone of the second part of the work. When I played him Miles Davis’ Porgy and Bess, complete with flugelhorn solos, his eyes lit up.

At the event, the flugelhorn obligato was played by the great jazz trumpeter Henry Lowther, sitting alongside the brass section of the London Symphony Orchestra. It was as if stylistic divisions did not exist. There was only music.
Mayion Bowen
London