“The difference between me and other musicians,” Miles Davis once said, “is that I’ve got charisma.” He became a cultural icon, nearly as well known for his elegant clothes, plain-spoken opinions and rejection of every remnant of minstrelsy as for his music. But it was the music that mattered in the end, and he is best remembered both for the unmistakable sound of his muted trumpet – spare and sometimes plaintive but always swinging – and for the skill with which he found and brought together great musicians and made them sound still greater. “That was my gift,” he said, “...the ability to put certain guys together [and] create a chemistry...letting them play what they knew, and above it ... That’s where great art and music happens.” With Davis’s involvement, great music happened again and again. Among the highlights of his long career: the 1949 “Birth of the Cool” sessions; the classic quintet that introduced John Coltrane to the world in 1955; the orchestral collaborations with Gil Evans; the 1959 modal experiments captured on the record “Kind of Blue;” and the 1964-66 quintet that struck a rare balance between intricate interplay and individual improvisational freedom. “Even we didn’t know where it was all going to,” he once said of his music. “But we knew it was going somewhere and that it was probably going to be hip.”

So What

Learn more: www.milesdavis.com

Listen to more music at NPR: www.npr.org/programs/jazzprofiles/archive/miles_styles.html