Here’s our take on 20 Miles Davis albums ranked, rated, evaluated and given a closer listen.
This selected Miles Davis discography is a musical journey unlike any other. So, in a slight twist to the Celebrate the Catalog modus operandi, I’ve chosen to select 20 of Davis’ albums, in honor of the 20 years since his passing, with recordings culled from all of his notable eras: the Prestige years, his early Columbia recordings, collaborations with Gil Evans, his mid-late ’60s quintet recordings, the “electric” years and his somewhat less well-received ’80s recordings. To take on Davis’ entire studio discography would be unfathomably forbidding with 67 studio albums, just to listen to all of them could take a month. And while Davis had his share of dark periods, from drug abuse to depression, the body of music he leaves behind is immense, and a big chunk of it absolutely essential. The fact that he wasn’t afraid to make music that some people may not like, at least not immediately, certainly speaks to his boldness as a composer, musician and bandleader. His influence, meanwhile, is immeasurable, having made an impact not only on jazz, but on rock, electronic and hip-hop. And by having attempted so many different sounds and techniques, he’s been likened to Pablo Picasso. By never allowing any one style to dominate, he left little opportunity for any of his music to grow stale. Davis was the type of artist for whom experimentation meant freedom and vision. At times his albums sounded more composed and melodic, while at others, they were alien and disorienting. To listen to Miles Davis is to hear true exploration in music. And within these movements, he took inspiration from a wide range of styles, be it the traditional Spanish elements of Sketches of Spain to the raucous rock’ n’ roll sounds of A Tribute to Jack Johnson and the nasty funk of On the Corner. From the late ’40s up through the ’70s, he was at the forefront of every major movement in jazz, from cool jazz to hard bop, modal jazz to fusion. Few other artists made as massive an impact on jazz and popular music as Davis did, his nearly five decades of performing adding up to a body of work that runs the gamut from celebrated to controversial. Twenty years ago, the world lost one of its most incredible and gifted musicians: jazz trumpeter, composer and bandleader Miles Davis. Yet, as ambitious as it might have been to tackle all of Sonic Youth’s studio albums, the time seemed right to start an even more audacious discography project: The selected Miles Davis albums. In our first three editions of Treble’s Celebrate the Catalog, we examined the careers of some of the most notable artists to arise from the indie and alternative rock movements of the ’80s and ’90s.