Thousands Davis, it grew in a well-off white quarter of East St. Louis, city to which his parents had moved from Alton in Illinois where he was born in 1926. His first admirers also were white musicians, fundamentally, Harry James and Bobby Hackett. Seriously interested in the music, it took classes of Elwood Buchanan, occasional trumpeter of the band of Andy Kirk, when it had not even fulfilled thirteen years. From this musician it received his first advice that went literally during all his life ". it touches without vibrato, you will tremble already when you are old". This was the embryo of this smooth and lyric, seemingly cold but exciting style up to almost crying.

With 16 complete years, it had the opportunity to go out of tour with the band of Tiny Bradshaw but the denial of the father it one prevented. In 1944 he listened for the first time to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in the band of the singer, Billy Eckstine. It struck up a friendship with him and "Bird" advised him to move to New York. Once in the city, Thousands there was direct witness of the bloody stylistic battle between the old of the jazz - the swing - and the new thing - the bebop-. After several performances to one and another side of the Street 52 with the creators of the new sound, it was qualified to give a crucial step in his career.

In 1949, Thousands his first cardinal work germinated in the history of the jazz. Along with the composer Gil Evans and musicians of the size of Gerry Mulligan and Lee Konitz between others, it recorded "Birth Of The Cool", a work that passed the famous one "Nonclear Capitol" a democratic company that was distributing responsibilities between soloist, composer and arreglista. In that one epoch suffered his first detention for drug consumption and in 1951 it recorded for the stamp "Prestige" for which it recorded some years later four formidable álbumes that appear between the best of his discography. Behind they were staying the stormy recording meeting with Thelonius Monk and his participation in the famous quintet of John Coltrane.

Precisely the collaboration of Thousands with Coltrane convinced the chiefs of the Columbia so that he was signing Thousands with them. In the Columbia arks, some of the best recordings are of Thousands, between them the obligatory one, "Kind Of Blue" recorded in 1959, the live recordings in "Plugged Níkel" of 1965, thousand times indexed like the first disc of the titled jazz - rock of the history: "Bitches Brew" or the disc that inaugurated the electrical stage of Thousands titled "In to Silent Way" of 1969. In that epoch, around him the events were rushing and in the sixties the psicodelia, and the rock they were calling strongly to the youth of then and Thousands he did not want to get off the bus. His discs began to take a slant every time noisily and in his band they were predominating increasingly over the electrical shallows and amplified guitars and although that helped him to increase his popularity between the new generations, his creativity was diminishing significantly.

Shortly after a concert celebrated in Madrid in there 1990 him were evident the first symptoms of an illness that took him to the death. He died in Santa Monica on September 28, 1991. Nobody like Thousands Davis, has made correspond the artistic ages of his stylistic development with the different stages of the jazz. His youth was surrounded to the bebop, the torrid sound of the hardbop, then relieved by the breeze of the cool they took possession of during his adolescence and the autumnal temptation of the electrical jazz recrudecida in his last phase occupied him until him the death supervened. Miles took the secret of his music and of his vitality.

Source: The Big Jazz. Vol 5. Editions of the Meadow. Author Juan Claudio Cifuentes.