In response to your editorial marking the centenary of Miles Davis's birth, Dr Richard Carter and Meirion Bowen offer further insights into the musician's unique genius.
Dr Richard Carter on Davis's Technical Adaptation
Dr Richard Carter of Putney, London, argues that the editorial understates Davis's musical intelligence. Unable to match the technical facility of trumpeters like Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro, Davis did not simply prefer "restraint and precision"; he recognised his technical limitations and adapted accordingly. Carter points to Davis's early recordings with Charlie Parker, where following Parker's blazing solos, Davis stumbles through chord changes. Instead of competing, Davis chose a gentler approach, evident in his collaborations with arranger Gil Evans on Birth of the Cool, Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain, as well as his quintets with John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter. In these works, his lack of technique became irrelevant beside his great lyricism. Carter calls this conscious choice the real genius of Davis's career, though he laments that it was overshadowed by the "frankly dreadful rock-influenced work of his later years," which he compares to the Hundred in cricket versus Test cricket.
Meirion Bowen on Davis's Flugelhorn and Influence on Classical Music
Meirion Bowen of London agrees that Davis was a special figure who saw jazz as something to develop with new ideas, not stuck in past modes. He notes that Davis was a fine exponent of the flugelhorn, a point not mentioned in the editorial. Bowen recounts how Sir Michael Tippett, while composing his Third Symphony, sought a special sound for the blues numbers in the second part. When Bowen played Tippett Davis's version of Porgy and Bess featuring flugelhorn solos, Tippett's eyes lit up. In the end, the flugelhorn obbligato was played by jazz trumpeter Henry Lowther, sitting alongside the brass section of the London Symphony Orchestra. Bowen remarks that stylistic divisions seemed not to exist—there was just music.
