Miles Dewey Davis III was born May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, to a comfortably well-off family — his father, Miles Dewey Davis Jr., was a dentist, and his mother, Cleota Mae Henry, was a music teacher and violinist. The family moved to East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1927. Davis got his first trumpet in 1935 and began weekly lessons with Elwood Buchanan, a teacher he later called the biggest influence on his life; Buchanan's insistence on a clear tone without vibrato shaped the sound Davis carried for the rest of his career. By his teens Davis was already working, eventually becoming musical director of Eddie Randle's Blue Devils, a St. Louis territory band. In September 1944, fresh out of high school, he enrolled at Juilliard in New York — nominally to study music, actually to be near Charlie Parker, whom he'd first heard sit in with Billy Eckstine's big band in St. Louis that same year. He skipped classes to chase down Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in Harlem clubs, and dropped out after three semesters, with his father's blessing, to play full-time.

He recorded his first session in April 1945 and by year's end had replaced Gillespie in Parker's quintet, recording with Parker's groups steadily through 1948. In August 1948 he turned down an offer to join Duke Ellington's orchestra and instead assembled a nine-piece band with arrangements by Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan, built around unusual voicings for jazz — French horn, tuba — aiming for an almost orchestral sound. The Miles Davis Nonet played exactly one live engagement, a two-week stint opening for Count Basie at the Royal Roost in September 1948, and recorded a dozen sides for Capitol across 1949 and 1950 that sold poorly at the time. Compiled in 1957 as the album Birth of the Cool, that material became one of the foundational documents of cool and West Coast jazz.

The years right after were rougher. A May 1949 trip to the Paris Jazz Festival — where he had an affair with singer Juliette Gréco and fell for the city — was followed by a return to New York, little work, and a heroin addiction that hit by the time he was 23. He was arrested for possession in Los Angeles, spent time back in St. Louis with his father, and lived roughly six months in Detroit avoiding New York before returning in February 1954, the habit finally broken. He signed with Prestige Records in January 1951, and once George Avakian signed him to Columbia in 1955 — requiring his Prestige contract be fulfilled first — Davis and a newly assembled quintet (Sonny Rollins, then John Coltrane, on tenor; Red Garland, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Philly Joe Jones, drums) knocked out two marathon sessions in May and October 1956 that filled four Prestige LPs (Cookin', Relaxin', Workin', Steamin') while the group's real debut, 'Round About Midnight, opened the Columbia era in 1957. That November, in Paris, Davis improvised a full score to Louis Malle's film Ascenseur pour l'échafaud watching the picture with a quartet of French musicians and drummer Kenny Clarke — one night's work that became one of the most influential jazz film scores ever made.

Parallel to the quintet, Davis built a five-album collaboration with arranger Gil Evans between 1957 and 1962: Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1959), and Sketches of Spain (1960) — a set of Spanish-themed orchestral pieces that sold more than 120,000 copies and won a Grammy — stand as the peak of that partnership; a later bossa nova record, Quiet Nights (1963), was released against both men's wishes and caused a two-year rift between Davis and producer Teo Macero. In between, on March 2 and April 22, 1959, Davis's sextet — Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley on alto, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly splitting the piano chair, Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb — recorded Kind of Blue, built loosely around modal scales rather than fixed chord changes. Released that August, it became a steady, enormous seller: RIAA-certified 5x platinum in 2019, with the US House of Representatives honoring it as a national treasure in 2009. It remains the best-selling jazz album in history.

By late 1962 that quintet had run its course. Davis paid more than $25,000 to cancel bookings while he rebuilt the band, eventually landing on Herbie Hancock (piano, 23 years old) and Tony Williams (drums, 17) alongside Ron Carter (bass), with George Coleman on tenor until Wayne Shorter left Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers to join in 1964. This Second Great Quintet — Davis, Shorter, Hancock, Carter, Williams — became one of the most studied rhythm sections in jazz, pursuing what the band called "time, no changes": improvising with structural freedom over a pulse rather than a fixed harmonic sequence. E.S.P. (1965), Miles Smiles (1967), Sorcerer (1967), and Nefertiti (1968) — the last built almost entirely around Shorter's compositions — mapped that language across four studio albums, alongside touring documented on Miles Davis in Europe, My Funny Valentine, and Four & More. Davis endured serious health trouble through the mid-1960s, including a failed 1965 hip replacement, a second successful one that same year, and a hospitalization for a liver infection in early 1966; through it, his relationship with actress Cicely Tyson helped him cut back on drinking.

Change came again at the decade's end. Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro (both 1968) tentatively brought in electric bass, piano, and guitar, and by the second half of the Filles sessions Chick Corea and Dave Holland had replaced Hancock and Carter. In a Silent Way, recorded in a single session on February 18, 1969, with Corea, Joe Zawinul, and John McLaughlin joining the band, was assembled by Macero from studio takes into two side-long tracks; some critics called it a sellout to rock audiences, but it's now regarded as the opening statement of jazz fusion. Bitches Brew followed that August, a double album of long, spliced, multitracked compositions that reached No. 35 on the Billboard chart, went gold in 1976, and had sold roughly a million copies by 2003 — a genuinely unprecedented commercial result for a record this abstract. Davis began touring with rock acts, sharing a March 1970 Fillmore East bill with the Steve Miller Band and Neil Young, and playing to an estimated 600,000 people at the Isle of Wight Festival that August, the largest crowd of his career. On the Corner (1972), shaped partly by arranger Paul Buckmaster's introduction of Davis to the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, fused funk rhythm with dense, textured production; it topped the Billboard jazz chart but was widely panned by jazz critics at the time and, Davis felt, marketed to the wrong audience entirely. An October 1972 car crash broke both his ankles, and worsening health, alcohol, and cocaine use shadowed the touring bands documented on Get Up with It, Agharta, Pangaea, and Dark Magus through the mid-1970s. After a September 1975 performance at New York's Schaefer Music Festival, Davis stopped performing and recording entirely.

The five years that followed were a genuine retreat — by his own account in his autobiography, a period of heavy drug and alcohol use with almost no music at all — interrupted mainly by a 1975 hip replacement and a near-collapse of his Columbia contract that the label resolved by establishing a standing fund to keep paying him. He began working again in 1980, and after a slow, difficult return to shape on the horn, released The Man with the Horn in 1981 — poorly reviewed but a commercial success — and returned to the stage that June for the first time since 1975. We Want Miles (1982), drawn from that year's live shows, won him a Grammy. A serious stroke in January 1982, which temporarily paralyzed his right hand, slowed him again, but through the rest of the decade he kept recording and touring: Star People (1983), Decoy (1984), and You're Under Arrest (1985) closed out his Columbia contract, and a 1986 move to Warner Bros. produced Tutu, a tribute to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu built almost entirely around bassist-producer Marcus Miller's arrangements and programming. Tutu split critics on release — some heard a bold new direction, others a synth-driven concession to commercial trends — but won two Grammys and stands as the signature recording of Davis's comeback years. He kept working into 1991, including an unusual return to acoustic, orchestral territory that July at the Montreux Jazz Festival, performing arrangements of his old Gil Evans collaborations, and had begun a hip-hop collaboration with producer Easy Mo Bee that spring. He completed roughly six tracks before he died on September 28, 1991, in Santa Monica, California, from the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia, and respiratory failure, at 65. Easy Mo Bee finished the album, Doo-Bop, released posthumously in 1992; it won a Grammy for Best R&B Instrumental Performance. Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.

Davis's earliest and most lasting influence was his childhood teacher Elwood Buchanan, whose insistence on a light, clear, vibrato-free tone gave Davis the melodic voice he kept for the rest of his life; trumpeter Freddy Webster, whose sound Dizzy Gillespie himself called the best he ever heard, was another frequently cited early model. Where many trumpeters filled every available beat, Davis built his style around space and restraint — leaving silence where a phrase could have gone, using a Harmon mute to give his tone a cool, almost vocal quality, and trusting a handful of well-placed notes to carry more weight than a run of them. That instinct for economy over display stayed consistent even as the musical context around it changed completely, from the bebop he learned at Charlie Parker's side, through the modal harmony he explored with pianist Bill Evans and theorist George Russell on Kind of Blue, to the open, pulse-driven "time, no changes" concept his Second Great Quintet pursued and the electric funk-and-rock vocabulary he adopted from the late 1960s onward.

What set Davis apart across five decades wasn't a fixed sound but a career-long habit of moving toward whatever was next before anyone else had gotten there, and doing it as a bandleader rather than a soloist chasing trends alone — hearing something in young, largely unproven musicians (Coltrane at 29, Hancock at 23, Williams at 17, McLaughlin barely known outside London) and building the next phase of his music around them. Critics and historians consistently place him at the center of nearly every major stylistic turn in postwar jazz — bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz-rock fusion — not as a participant in each but as one of the musicians who defined it. Rolling Stone called him "the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century."