The Guardian view on 100 years after Miles Davis’s birth: why he still shapes modern music | Editorial

The trumpeter, composer and band leader still towers over jazz because he treated reinvention not as a betrayal, but as necessary for its survival

The space reserved for Miles Davis in the pantheon of 20th-century music is not simply because he mastered jazz, but because he refused to let it stand still. As musicians and fans mark the centenary of his birth , Davis’s work still feels limitless. “I always thought that music had no boundaries,” he wrote in his 1989 autobiography, “no limits to where it could grow and go, no restrictions on creativity.” Davis repeatedly dismantled the sound he had helped invent – embracing the electric age in 1968, much as Bob Dylan had in folk.

Davis moved to New York as an 18-year-old after hearing Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. While bebop prized speed, Davis preferred restraint and precision – spearheading cool jazz. By 1988, now the grand old man of jazz, he was playing trumpet with Prince, whom he remarked could be the “new Duke Ellington of our time if he just keeps at it”. Such was his refusal to be pigeonholed, he hated the word “jazz”. Whatever it was, Davis reasoned, had to evolve: absorbing funk, rock, African rhythms and electronica to emerge altered again.