Before we start talking about jazz and Miles Davis, it is important to know about the arrival of jazz music. Jazz music is not just an influence of African American or European roots. In fact, “both blues and jazz have been intertwined since before either style had a name.” (Wald, 2010, p.81). Many historians believed that rural blues songs were a significant source for early jazz, like plaintive dirges with African roots. Additionally, both blues and ragtime contributed to the emergence of jazz music. Both influenced the blues in many similar and different ways, for example 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 how they play their music, which is key to improvisation. The meter found in the blues is usually in the twelve-bar blues form. The line format is usually AABA. This type of form is also found in the African form of call and response and evidently present in jazz. The blues was also known for its fill-ins and breaks that allowed jazz musicians to showcase their talent. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay This led to the birth of the great Miles Davis. The reason I chose to write about Miles Davis is the coolness and swagger he brought to jazz. As appropriate as it may seem, he was at the forefront of the revolutionary development of cool jazz. Unlike ragtime jazz and New Orleans jazz, cool jazz became popular in the 1940s and arose from the bebop movement. Unlike bebop's fast tempo, complex syncopation, and advanced harmonies, cool jazz has more soothing melodies and softer sounds. 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 discovered the trumpet around the age of 12 when he began taking trumpet lessons from his father's patient, Elwood Buchanan. The family moved to St. Louis in 1939. At about 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 tried to become a full-time jazz musician. He had worked with important figures who were the forefathers of bebop, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Through imitation and continuous improvisations alongside these great musicians, Davis learned the difficult language of bebop. Davis was ahead of his time in playing the trumpet. He was bold and creative with jazz music. He did things with jazz music that many musicians would not have dared to do. In the 1950s he brought jazz into a new world. He added instruments that were not usually traditionally present in jazz, such as the French horn or the tuba. Subsequently, he is believed 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 this is 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 bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums. Even though there is a lot of improvisation that takes up most of the piece, the addictive riff sets the piece in motion and prepares it harmonically for improvisations. The.