Miles Davis changed the course of modern Jazz throughout his remarkable career. Swing into the world of Miles Davis and his charismatic style that influenced musicians for decades to come.
Critic Francis Davis joins us for the weekly program "Interval," in which he looks at new jazz releases. Today Davis reviews "We Want Miles" by jazz legend Miles Davis, and "The Great Pretender" by trumpeter Lester Bowie.
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In 1965, Davis led one of the all-time great jazz groups. That December, they recorded seven sets over two nights in a Chicago nightclub. The complete recordings went unreleased for decades.
An excerpt from the new public radio program "This American Life" by Ira Glass. Miles Davis' biographer shares his memories, and funny stories about Davis. "This American Life" premiers nationally in June.
Coltrane played his last engagements as a sideman with Davis in the spring of 1960. Recordings from those European shows have been bootlegged for years; now a few are collected in a new anthology.
The new Miles Davis biopic begins in the 1970s, at the end of Davis' five-year hiatus from the music scene. Critic David Edelstein calls Don Cheadle's portrayal of the musician "electrifying."
The new box set Miles Davis: The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 is the latest in a crop of critical anthologies that add perspective to the history of jazz.
Writer John Szwed is the author of the new biography, So What: The Life of Miles Davis about the influential jazz trumpeter. Szwed is the John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, Music and American Studies at Yale University. He is also the author of the biography Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, about another innovative musician.
Jackie McLean, the legendary jazz saxophonist who died last week at age 74, began playing at the age of 15 in his native New York City. Schooled in bebop at the start of his career, the alto sax player names Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Charlie Parker as influences. We offer a rebroadcast of a conversation with McLean.
Born March 13, 1925, Haynes was a drummer who liked to prod his fellow players. Over the course of his career, he played with Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Chick Corea and many others.
In a transitional period between different groups with Miles Davis and Anthony Braxton and his fusion band, Return to Forever, Chick Corea recorded a series of solo piano improvisations in 1971. Those recordings and a 1983 follow-up have been reissued in a three-CD box set.