More Miles Davis: The Cool and Modal Years!

Miles Davis was a true jazz lovers — jazz musician. Well, if the criteria is that he was never very popular with mainstream music buyers. Unlike other jazz greats like Louis Armstrong, Stan Getz, Herbie Mann, Chuck Mangone, Ramsey Lewis, Dave Brubeck and even former Davis band-member Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis never had a hit record in spite of releasing 57 singles. He had just a few albums that charted in the top 100 out of the over one hundred that were released during his lifetime, nor the nearly one hundred more released since. So no, Miles Davis never crossed over into popular music circles.

Supposedly, you have to really know something about jazz to understand his music. Which is too bad because he did record a whole heck of a lot of accessible music. And he did create the best selling jazz album of all times. It just took a few decades, well or actually a half a century to reach that 5 million number. Sure there are all these categories when looking at Miles, many of which he invented or was on the ground floor of: Bebop, Cool Jazz, Hard Bop or Post Bop, Modal jazz, Jazz Rock or Jazz Fusion and orchestral or third wave music. But in the end they are just names. What matters is the music. And Miles Davis produced some truly great music. And amongst the best of the best is Kind of Blue, that five times platinum album.

Copyright Notice: All of the music samples used in this podcast series are used under Fair Use provisions of the US Copyright Law which states: “it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports.”

The copyright of all music in this podcast series is held by the individual holders. The theme and end songs are licensed from Fresh Music Library. All commentary is copyright by David Husom. All rights are reserved. Contact the author for educational use of this material.