Born on 26 May: Miles Davis, Bringing Jazz To the Big Screen

Miles Dewey Davis III, as his full name goes, was born in Alton (Illinois) in 1926. Endlessly versatile, the career of this brilliant jazz trumpeter is difficult to summarize. Let's focus on his magnificent (and rare) contributions to film music.

A visionary musician, Miles Davis is particularly associated with the emergence of the Birth Of Cool movement at the end of the 1940s. But let's look at his first journey outside the United States in May 1949. He arrived in Paris to perform at a festival. He believed that black artists and people of colour in general were better respected on the Old Continent.

Paris is where he discovered the bohemian lifestyle and the jazz clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He soon fell under the spell of singer Juliette Gréco. They shared an intense relationship, which the trumpeter, however, always described as "platonic". He did not want her affair with a black man to damage her fledgling career in America. Unfortunately, it was a love story hindered by racial barriers…

First encounter with the silver screen

It was also in France that Davis experienced his first encounter with the silver screen. In 1958, director Louis Malle invited him to compose and perform the music for his film "Lift to the Scaffold" ("Ascenseur pour l’échafaud") with actress Jeanne Moreau. A few years later, critic Phil Johnson described this sublime score as "the most melancholic and solitary trumpet sound ever heard. You listen to it and you can't help but cry". Even more surprisingly, these haunting instrumentals are improvisations recorded in less than four hours while watching the film’s images!

Davis often liked to say that "music is also the silence between the notes". He undeniably put this minimalist and emotional approach into practice for "Lift to the Scaffold". "I’d never seen the film before. They showed me the images, and I played what I felt. It was like breathing," he confided in a 1986 interview with "DownBeat" magazine.

After this remarkable debut, Miles distanced himself from cinema, though he did allow his music to be used for a few minor films. Between tours, he also enjoyed acting (often playing himself), notably in the famous TV series "Miami Vice" (1985) and in a film adaptation of "Scrooged" on the big screen in 1988. Because, whenever he was asked to play a musician, Miles was also an actor!

He composed the original soundtrack for "Dingo" (1991) with Michel Legrand, but his other masterpiece for the cinema is called "The Hot Spot," a superb, dark film directed by Dennis Hopper in 1990. He brought his trumpet to the compositions of Jack Nietzsche, alongside John Lee Hooker and Taj Mahal. Yet another of his (rare) film scores that gives you goosebumps—with or without the images…

(Stéphane Soupart/ML – Photo: © Etienne Tordoir)

Photo: Portrait of Miles Davis at the President Hotel in Brussels (Belgium), 29 October 1986