NPR Music
May 26, 2026
Icon and iconoclast, Nate Chinen writes for NPR, both fit Miles Davis, the first of his paradoxes. He looms larger than any jazz musician you can name yet means something different to everyone, because he embodied so many things himself. Chinen traces the cool from the Brooks Brothers hush of Kind of Blue to the funk rupture of Bitches Brew, and reaches for Picasso, one of the few other artists so driven to remake himself. To remember Miles properly, he argues, is to contend with the contradictions.
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JazzWax
May 27, 2026
Nineteen tracks, 1947 to 1970, a way in through the ear. Marc Myers uses the birthday to build a listening path across the whole arc, from a 1947 Charlie Parker session through Birth of the Cool, the Prestige sides, the Newport 'Round Midnight that won the Columbia deal, Kind of Blue, and the first electric experiments. His through-line is Davis as jazz's first superstar and its most restless, the fashion icon and addict who kept inventing post-war movements. Each pick carries its personnel, a route rather than a monument.
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The New York Times
May 22, 2026
Sunglasses like goggles, a canary-yellow Ferrari, MILES22 vanity plates, a floor-length snakeskin cape. The New York Times Styles desk builds its portrait from the objects that made Miles cool. A Berklee professor notes he was no gearhead, playing whatever trumpet let him sound like himself, the mute turning it human. The look shifts with the sound, cropped 1950s hair to a 1971 Afro to '80s microbraids, and the piece credits Betty Davis with pulling him into the Bitches Brew years and toward Jimi Hendrix.
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Pitchfork
Jul 8, 2026
For a few nights in 1956, in a Greenwich Village club called the Café Bohemia, the first great quintet was a working band burning off a contract. Natalie Weiner's Pitchfork review of the centennial box set finds Davis, Coltrane, Red Garland, the twenty-year-old Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones cutting four albums in first takes. "We're not trying to prove anything," Davis told a reporter. "All we want to do is blow." Weiner hears jazz's past and future distilled into music that sounds like a place you could live.
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All Things Jazz
May 20, 2026
On records like Nefertiti, the horns hold the melody while the rhythm section improvises underneath, the usual order quietly reversed. All Things Jazz catches Davis in the mid-sixties with the Second Great Quintet, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, the teenage Tony Williams and Wayne Shorter, playing standards over something radical. He had assembled the most advanced small group in jazz and stayed dissatisfied, already hearing Betty Mabry's Hendrix and Sly Stone. The restlessness was the point. By the decade's end he no longer believed in permanence at all.
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EchoLocator
Tom Moon
Jul 1, 2026
The centennial has become a machine. Tom Moon watches the Davis estate and its labels stack boxed sets, sonic upgrades and unreleased live tapes into a monument modeled on how the classical world commemorates dead composers, and finds the joke buried inside it: the man being monumentalized rarely looked back. Davis lived in nextness, Moon writes at EchoLocator, gone before the culture caught up. His proof is the 1964 quintet, five musicians inventing a different music every night, exactly what a monument cannot hold.
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DownBeat
May 26, 2026
At a Jazz Congress roundtable, the musicians who knew Miles Davis circle the same question: how do you love the music and face the man. Ashley Kahn moderates his nephew Vince Wilburn Jr., Marcus Miller and Terence Blanchard, who remember a man who kept none of his own records at home. When the writer Lauren du Graf raises his abuse of women, Miller answers without dodging. "How do I reconcile the two sides? And I don't know if I can." What keeps them there is the dare in the music.
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Vanity Fair
Jul 8, 2026
Jimmie Briggs first met Miles Davis in 1985, in a Honda scooter ad and a Miami Vice cameo, then spent years holding the genius against harm. His Vanity Fair remembrance sets the litany down without flinching: Chameleon, Bandleader, Maverick, Abuser, Icon. He names the abuse of Davis's wives, points to Pearl Cleage's 1990 "Mad at Miles," and refuses to tuck it under the greatness. He offers an album road map, not a verdict, and admits he may skip the public tributes to play an early record alone.
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Tyler King from Jazz Journey Newsletter
Tyler King
May 27, 2026
Frances Taylor gave up her career for Miles Davis. The first Black dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet became the muse of Fran Dance and the face on his covers, and steered him toward the flamenco records behind Sketches of Spain. Tyler King's profile lets her speak from a 2001 interview, and what she remembers is the cost. By the E.S.P. session, she says, "it was only a matter of days before I left running for my life." The centennial can reappraise everything but that.
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Nate Chinen from The Gig
Nate Chinen
May 20, 2026
A single photograph of Miles at Lennie's on the Turnpike in 1971, horn bent to the floor, Harmon mute in the bell, half his face in shadow. Nate Chinen tries to pin it down and watches every detail slip. The date is uncertain, the poem he recalls may be misremembered, the bootleg is from another night. Every tribute is a translation, he writes, and Davis refused to translate himself. Chinen lets the mystery stand. We only have what is in front of us, and Miles is already gone.
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