HOW MILES DAVIS AND JOHN COLTRANE CHANGED JAZZ FOREVER:

Both musicians were products of the 1940s bebop age. Davis joined Charlie Parker’s group in 1944, long before he had the technique, by his own admission, to keep pace with Parker’s breakneck improvisations. Coltrane hailed from a generation of saxophonists – including Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz and Paul Desmond – who picked up the pieces after Parker had roared through jazz like a tornado, smashing the existing landscape, before dying, aged just 34, in 1955. The rhythmic and melodic complexity of Parker’s work threw down the gauntlet. Matching his intensity and perfecting the techniques of his music was not enough. Parker upped the ante constantly, never settling for the songs he’d already worked out how to play.

Davis and Coltrane had been aware of each other during the early 1950s, but properly entered each other’s orbits in 1955, when Coltrane auditioned for a quintet Davis was organizing. Davis had quit Parker’s group just before Christmas 1948, finding himself increasingly unwilling to deal with the saxophonist’s self-destructive addictions. In that spirit of renewal, Davis’s antidote to four years of improvising around Parker’s high-tempo melodic obstacle courses was to start a nine-piece ensemble in collaboration with arranger Gil Evans and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, which favored instead airy and spacious arrangements, heavily influenced by the perfumed delicacy of the French composers Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. If Parker’s music had been “hot,” this group leaned toward the “cool” – and the records they made would be subsequently anthologized as Birth of the Cool.

Coltrane passed his audition and Davis’s new quintet aimed to fuse hot and cool. The titles of the four albums they recorded in 1956, Cookin’, Workin’, Relaxin’ and Steamin’, tell you something of the emotional palette the group encompassed, from “When I Fall In Love,” an early taste of the cut-glass fineness of Davis’s approach to playing a ballad, to their stampeding reboot of Sonny Rollins’s “Airegin.” With its emotional range and the space Davis was prepared to give his musicians to develop their improvisations, his quintet surpassed even Parker’s work. But in 1957, Davis let his saxophonist go. Coltrane had cultivated a debilitating drug dependency – and having recently shaken his own habit, going cold turkey, Davis recognized the dangers and knew Coltrane had to get himself clean. The Davis/Coltrane mythology properly began when the quintet reunited a year later. Classic album followed classic album, each fresh installment apparently compelling the music to follow a radical new direction. Milestones, from 1958, used hectic compositions to kick-start muscular, finger-popping improvisations. By comparison, Kind of Blue, recorded a year later, was strikingly sparse and introverted.

Speaking of which, from me in 2019: The 60th Anniversary of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis’ Masterpiece.