Miles Davis

Miles Dewey Davis III was born into an upper-class Illinois family in 1926 and picked up trumpet as a teenager. He dropped out of Juilliard to play in Charlie Parker's bebop quintet, then recorded the Birth of the Cool sessions that helped define that sound. A heroin addiction shadowed the early 1950s, but a comeback at Newport in 1955 led to Columbia Records and 'Round About Midnight with John Coltrane and Paul Chambers. Kind of Blue followed in 1959 — still the bestselling jazz album ever, more than six million copies worldwide — and through the 1960s he cycled lineups and styles, from orche…