Miles: The Autobiography

Born in 1926 and raised in East St. Louis by a dentist father and a glamorous mother whose love of clothes he absorbed, Miles gets his first trumpet at thirteen. Teacher Elwood Buchanan tells him to play without vibrato — cleaner, cooler. His father’s counsel never to copy (the mockingbird has no sound of its own) underpins every later pivot.

He studies classical theory seriously while recognizing the real curriculum is on the bandstand. He tracks down Bird and Diz, sits in, and is rapidly pulled into their orbit. Juilliard gives him the harmonic vocabulary; the street gives him the ear for what to do with it.

Miles records defining bebop sides in the late 1940s and writes about Parker with reverence and frustration — the greatest mind he’d met, and someone who treated his body as disposable. The lesson would later apply to his own heroin years, and pushed him toward a quieter, more compositionally organized kind of band.

With Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, and Lee Konitz, Miles records the Capitol sides later collected as Birth of the Cool — a conscious turn toward orchestral texture and space, fewer notes carrying more weight. The Evans collaboration is one of the book’s most affectionate threads. It barely registered commercially but reshaped jazz arranging.

Miles is candid about going from observing Bird’s addiction to sharing it — four largely wasted years, unreliable on the bandstand. His account of getting clean alone at his father’s farm is physical and unromantic. Motivated partly by Sugar Ray Robinson’s discipline, he emerged clean in 1954 and did not relapse.

After getting clean he builds the first great quintet with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. He is frank about Coltrane’s early struggles and his own impatience, and equally frank about Coltrane’s genius. His theory: accomplished musicians play safe; hungry ones discover things.

The sessions with Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Cannonball Adderley produce the best-selling jazz album of all time, but Miles is forward-looking rather than celebratory. He describes the modal approach — improvising on scales rather than chord changes — and his private verdict that he never captured the African finger-piano texture he heard. He refused to rest on it.

With Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, Miles assembles one of the finest small groups in jazz — and is already restless inside it. James Brown, Sly Stone, and Jimi Hendrix pull him toward electric instruments, leading to In a Silent Way (1969) as the next necessary disruption.

He describes the sessions as an organized chaos he conducted like a painter. The album outsold any previous jazz record and alienated the jazz establishment — an outcome he found clarifying. By 1975 his body was failing and his interest collapsed; the 1975–80 years are documented bluntly as a period of drugs and almost no music.

Hospitalization forces the comeback; Cicely Tyson, whom he marries in 1981, is central to his recovery. He returns to Columbia, records The Man with the Horn, and performs again — diminished but present. The final stretch covers his 1980s work and ongoing restlessness, ending two years before his death in 1991.