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IN THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN JAZZ, Miles Davis is central but controversial. From his arrival in New York City in 1945, Davis participated in the bebop movement alongside Charlie Parker, helped initiate the "cool" jazz movement in the mid-1950s, pioneered "modal" jazz in the late 1950s with John Coltrane and the "First Great Miles Davis Quintet:' and stretched the boundaries of jazz composition and improvisation in the 1960s with the "Second Great Miles Davis Quintet." But when he began to integrate electric instruments and elements of popular songs into his music around 1968, Davis initiated a bitter debate among musicians, scholars, critics, and audiences about the relationship between jazz and popular music. Was Davis pandering to commercial trends, or was he merely updating jazz's long-standing tradition of refashioning popular songs as vehicles for improvisation?
Even though the era of "jazz-rock fusion" had effectively ended by the early 1980s, the debate has persisted to the present. Fusion intensified the conflict generated by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and other creators of "free-jazz" in the 1960s. jazz has arguably never recovered from the schism produced by the fusion and free movements. Both innovations combined to lay waste to what might be thought of as the "linear historical narrative" of jazz, which in most accounts stretches from New Orleans around 1900, through Kansas City in the 1930s, to New York in the 1950s.
The stereotypical narrative of fusion music holds that when Davis began to change the sound of his music during 1968 and 1969, all of his former band members in the "Second Great Quintet" (with the exception of bassist Ron Carter) followed suit, and went on to form commercially motivated fusion bands-with great economic success and calamitous aesthetic consequences. In this narrative, the success of former Davis pianist Herbie Hancock's "Chameleon" (1974) and Weather Report's 1975 "Birdland" (the group was cofounded by two former Davis sidemen, Wayne Shorter and Josef Zawinul) came to epitomize the commercial highs and aesthetic lows to which the jazz tradition had been dragged by the mid-1970s. This same line of reasoning can be applied to Davis himself; although he fell short of the commercial successes of his former sidemen while avoiding their artistic compromises, his gestures became progressively less subtle by the...