Before we start talking about jazz and Miles Davis, it is important to know the arrival of jazz music. Jazz music is not just an influence of African-American or European roots. In fact, “blues and jazz were closely linked long before either style had a name.” (Wald, 2010, p.81). Many historians believed that rural blues songs were an important source of early jazz, such as Holler wailing with African roots. Additionally, blues and ragtime contributed to the emergence of jazz music. They both influenced the blues in many similar and different ways, such as in syncopation and improvisation. Jazz is influenced by both styles, blues and rag time, in a personal and emotional nature that allows artists to be creative in the way they play their music, which is key to improvisation. The meter found in blues is usually in twelve-bar blues form. The line form for this is usually AABA. This type of form is also found in the African call and response form and is obviously present in jazz. The blues was also known for its fill-ins and breaks that allowed jazz musicians to display their talent. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay This led to the emergence of the great Miles Davis. The reason I chose to write about Miles Davis is the composure and boldness he brought to jazz. Appropriate as it may seem, he was at the forefront of the revolutionary development of cool jazz. Different from ragtime jazz and New Orleans jazz, cool jazz became popular in the 1940s and grew out of the bebop movement. Unlike bebop's fast tempo, complex syncopation, and advanced harmonies, cool jazz has more relaxing melodies and a smoother sound. Miles Dewey Davis III was born on May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois. His father Miles Dewey Davis II was a dentist and his mother Cleota Mae Henry was a music teacher. He was introduced to the trumpet around the age of 12 when he began taking trumpet lessons from a patient of his father, Elwood Buchanan. The family moved to St. Louis in 1939. Around age 13, he began playing in local bands. In September 1944, he accepted his father's idea to attend the Institute of Musical Arts, also known as the Juilliard School of Music in New York. The following year, he dropped out of Juilliard and sought to become a full-time jazz musician. He had worked with notable figures who were the forefathers of bebop, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Through imitation and constant jamming alongside these great musicians, Davis learned the difficult language of bebop. Davis was ahead of his time playing the trumpet. He was bold and creative with jazz music. He did things with jazz that many musicians wouldn't dare do. In the 1950s, he took jazz to a new world. He added instruments that were not generally present in jazz, such as the French horn or the tuba. He was later considered to have created the beginnings of cool jazz, or modal jazz, and recorded Birth of the Cool with Miles Davis' nonet. One of my favorite songs recorded by Miles Davis is “So What”. I think it's one of the best examples of cool jazz. It appears on Davis' best-selling album, Kind of Blue. This song was composed by great jazz artists, with Miles Davis on trumpet, Cannonball Adderly on alto saxophone, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on.