Rethinking Miles Davis

What hasn't been said about Miles Davis?

Much has been written about the jazz trumpeter and band leader, yet studies of Davis are often restricted to the groundbreaking acoustic jazz he produced between the 1940s and 50s. While more recent studies revisit his 1960s and 1970s work, Davis' later engagements with music, fashion, and the mainstream media are ripe for reassessment. Rethinking Miles Davis confronts familiar narratives about Davis and his music through a range of perspectives: from the ways Davis pushed jazz into new genre forms, re-envisioned jazz standards, and collaborated musically, to his role in the record companies that released his music, the persona he developed in video, film, and fashion, and how his masculinity manifested both professionally and personally. The collection includes a photo-essay of international jazz musicians' take on Davis' albums in which each musician explains the personal significance of a favourite recording. Ultimately, Rethinking Miles Davis challenges the orthodoxy of jazz criticism, repositioning Miles Davis within a larger framework of modernism and mass culture.

Roger Fagge is Associate Professor of History at the University of Warwick. His publications include The Vision of J.B. Priestley (2012), and with Nicolas Pillai, New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice (2017). Recent work includes, with Nicholas Gebhardt, an AHRC research network, 'Jazz and Everyday Aesthetics', which led to a jointly-edited special issue of Jazz Research Journal.

Nicolas Pillai is Assistant Professor in Creative and Critical Practice at University College Dublin. He is the author of Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image (2016) and a former editor of Jazz Research Journal. His AHRC project Jazz on BBC-TV 1960-1969 was the basis for the award-winning BBC Four documentary Jazz 625 Live!

Tim Wall is Professor of Radio and Popular Music Studies in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Studies at Birmingham City University. He is the author of Studying Popular Music Culture (2003, 2013), and, with Sarah Raine and Nicola Watchman Smith, the co-editor of The Northern Soul Scene (2019). He has published dozens of articles on jazz, radio, and popular music studies. He is currently writing the history of Jazz on BBC Radio 1922 - 1972.