Miles Davis and John Coltrane at 100
Detroit-based author and jazz historian Mark Stryker shares some historical context behind the lasting legacies of Miles Davis and John Coltrane in advance of UMS’s presentation of a centennial tribute to the great jazz icons on Sunday, February 15, 2026, by Terence Blanchard and Ravi Coltrane.
American jazz musicians Miles Davis and John Coltrane play together on stage at the Blue Note jazz bar in Chicago, IL, 1950s.
Walk into almost any jazz club in 2026, from Ann Arbor to New York to Berlin to Tokyo, and the ghosts of trumpeter Miles Davis and tenor and soprano saxophonist John Coltrane will be hovering ringside like hip guardian angels. Invisible to the eye but audible to the ear, their spirits pulsate through the music — as instrumentalists, improvisors, composers, bandleaders, and conceptualists.
Sometimes their influence resonates on the surface. Sometimes it wafts up faintly from the lower frequencies, braising within the collective unconscious of jazz history. One way or another, however, a century after Davis and Coltrane were born in 1926, their innovations remain an everyday presence in contemporary American music. Equally remarkable, in an age in which jazz and popular culture are rarely on speaking terms, Davis and Coltrane retain broad cultural currency and cache.
Stars during their lifetimes, they remain strikingly popular. Davis died in 1991 and Coltrane in 1967, but the public can’t get enough of an endless stream of their reissues, previously unreleased material, audiophile vinyl, and luxury box sets. Madison Avenue employs their music and likenesses to sell the Chrysler Jeep Grand Cherokee and Lexus RZ electric vehicle. Even listeners whose primary allegiance is to rock, country, hip hop, or classical music recognize Miles Davis and John Coltrane as brand names.
Recordings such as Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959) and Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (1964), revered as masterpieces by musicians, connoisseurs, and critics, were also bona fide hits upon release and rank among the best-selling jazz records in history. Certified lifetime sales have now passed five million for Kind of Blue (which includes Coltrane) and one million for A Love Supreme. Both LPs regularly top lists aimed at novices that purport to identify the best jazz records of all time.
Bonus Playlist
Miles and Trane on Record: A Critic’s Favorites
Mark Stryker selects his top 10(ish) records of Miles Davis and John Coltrane
Common touch, emotion, charisma
Davis and Coltrane owe their mass appeal to a unique confluence of music and culture. Most importantly, their music moves people emotionally. It retains a common touch through nearly every period in their stylistic development.
The moody lyricism of Davis’s trumpet tone, whether open horn or tightly muted, manifests a seductive marriage of vulnerability and virility. Signature ballads like “My Funny Valentine” and “Stella by Starlight” unfold in plaintive eloquence and erotic shivers. His melodic ideas at swinging tempos make virtuoso use of the negative space of dramatic silence. Davis is rarely prescriptive; he leaves room for listeners to find their own way into a sound world of feints and parries, arresting honesty, and the biting blues of an African American man at midcentury who knows the score about race relations and refuses to suffer fools.
Coltrane’s laser-like sound on tenor and soprano saxophone compels attention. He takes listeners on a trip, elevates the spirit, offers catharsis. On anthems like his epic reinvention of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s waltz “My Favorite Things” or his scorching original “Impressions,” Coltrane rides the turbulence of drummer Elvin Jones’s crashing waves. His saxophone tone splinters into expressive squalls and split tones. He plays with the energy and passion of a Black Pentecostal preacher in the pulpit. The sheer intensity was never for everyone, and dissenters still walk among us. But for true believers, Coltrane remains a pied piper of the most profound sort.
Davis and Coltrane also embody a certain celebrity charisma that speaks to the masses. The trumpeter as the ultimate avatar of cool: Black, proud, badass, rebellious, handsome, taciturn, admired by Bohemians and the intelligentsia, speaks in a famously raspy growl, drives a red Ferrari, wears natty Italian suits and seersucker back in the day that land him on Esquire’s Best Dressed list. He dates Juliette Gréco, pals around with Richard Pryor and Prince, marries Cicely Tyson, appears in an episode of “Miami Vice.”
Coltrane as the humble, relentless seeker of truth and transcendence. Though never linked to Hollywood royalty like Davis, his stature in the culture has only grown since his death. A hero and metaphor to Black scholars like Cornel West, there is even a church founded in his honor, the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox in San Francisco.
Both Davis and Coltrane accrued street cred from the multiple generations of rock bands, singer-songwriters, rappers, producers and others who cited them as favorites and influences, among them: the Byrds, Grateful Dead, MC5, Joni Mitchell, Carlos Santana, J Dilla, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), John Legend.
Searching for the new
Davis and Coltrane were prophets in their day and ours. Each remade modern jazz fundamentals in their own image, disseminating their vision through nightclub performances, concerts, and recordings. They led landmark ensembles resembling laboratories stocked with some of the finest musical minds of their time, players who connected on a cellular level of craft, chemistry, creativity, adventure, originality, emotional expression, groove, and swing.
Students in and out of conservatories have for decades studied their music like scripture. A huge swath of the jazz mainstream—the common-practice language governing improvisation, rhythm, harmony, melody, form, repertoire, group interaction, even the literal sound of the trumpet and saxophone—is still defined by what Davis and Coltrane played with their groups in the 1950s and ‘60s. (This includes the roughly five years Coltrane spent as a sideman in Davis’s band between 1955 and 1960.)
Davis and Coltrane model careers that define jazz as a never-ending quest for new avenues of expression. They each reinvented their music myriad times, sometimes radically. The mythology of jazz elevates the relentless drive to innovate as a sine qua non, and Davis and Coltrane stand as primary architypes, although this is by no means the only path to enlightenment or immortality.
After forging new ground, many jazz pioneers have concentrated on refining their artistic victories rather than willfully seeking new stylistic mountains to conquer. Examples include heroes as diverse as trumpeters Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, pianist Bill Evans, and drummer Art Blakey.
But Davis and Coltrane, no less than Stravinsky and Picasso (and Duke Ellington for that matter), were wired differently. For them, artistic growth demanded shedding styles the way snakes shed their skin. The modernist charge to make it new coursed through Davis’s veins. He described his obsessive need to change as a curse; the blessing for the rest of us is that Davis, as he once put it, changed music five or six times.
Coltrane’s headstrong experimentation and practice regime—he sometimes fell asleep with the horn in his mouth—was the result of an intrinsic need to dig as deeply as possible to see how much more there was to discover, not only about music but about himself. He linked self-knowledge, musical evolution, and spiritualism into a homegrown cosmology that blended strains of Western and Eastern religions and saw the unity in all things.
Every new stylistic shift in Davis and Coltrane’s music either opened a new chapter in jazz history or made defining contributions to important developments already under way.
Miles Ahead
After apprenticing in the mid-1940s with alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, the Prometheus of bebop, Davis inaugurated the so-called Birth of the Cool by leading a series of record sessions in 1949-50. He fronted a gossamer nonet that featured meticulously orchestrated arrangements by Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, and others. The music turned down the temperature of bebop; it simmered rather than boiled. Though recorded in New York, Davis’s records created a blueprint for West Coast cool jazz, which emerged in the 1950s. They also foreshadowed the trumpeter’s majestic and beloved orchestral collaborations with Evans, Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), and Sketches of Spain (1959-60).
Lacking an explosive technique, Davis developed a nuanced style in which he created maximum feeling with minimum fuss. He played far fewer notes yet always seemed to land on the most expressive ones. He solidified his influence as a sound innovator, creating a new sonic template for the trumpet—dark, intimate, smokey, introspective (especially with the Harmon mute) yet girded by deceptive strength, with little vibrato and redolent of a plea for truth and beauty in a world gone mad.
Davis formed his First Great Quintet with Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones in 1955. Fueled by the tightest, hippest rhythm section in jazz, the band was at the forefront of hard bop, a stout and extroverted reaffirmation of the African American values of blues and swing: a counter-reformation to the cool jazz that Davis had inspired in the first place. The group towered over its era, especially when it grew into a sextet in 1958 with the addition of alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. The records? Start with Milestones, Relaxin’, and ’Round About Midnight.
With Kind of Blue, Davis codified modal jazz—improvisation based on static harmony and scales rather than the recurring chord cycles of bebop. He also doubled down on melody and an existential lyricism with an assist from the poetic Ravelisms of his new pianist, Bill Evans. The simple, 32-bar structure of “So What,” for example, is 16 bars of D minor, followed by 8 bars of E-flat minor and a final 8 bars of D minor; Davis’s improvised solo, one of his most memorable on record, is pure song. The LP’s alluring vibe, sophisticated simplicity, and all-star cast makes it nearly every critic and fan’s No. 1 recommendation for newcomers to jazz.
Modalism would become a foundational sound of 1960s jazz; Coltrane was a prime exponent. Davis himself left the development of modal ideas largely to others until his Second Great Quintet coalesced in 1964 with a new generation of innovative sidemen: saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams.
The quintet transformed familiar standards and penetrating originals into cubist abstractions of harmony, rhythm, and group interaction. The balance of freedom and form on records like Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, and Nefertiti remade the idiom. Davis’s trumpet playing grew increasingly aggressive. Where he was once said to sound like a man walking on eggshells, he was now able to power his way through high and fast passages with the potency he brought to ballads.
In the late ‘60s, Davis’s ears turned toward electric instruments and amalgamations of jazz, rock, soul, funk, and eventually even European avant-gardist Karlheinz Stockhausen. Bitches Brew (1969), a mysterious sprawl of billowing densities, launched the jazz fusion era. Starry plugged-in bands of the ‘70s such as Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever sprouted from its roots. Davis’s electric period, a diverse progression of bands and ideas, from the brilliant to the banal, lasted the rest of his life, save the five years he was off the scene from 1976-1980.
Express Trane to the future
While Davis remained a pacesetter for 45 years, Coltrane packed his innovations into a dozen years, from 1955-67. The swiftness of his development is a miracle. The basic sonic profile of his tenor sax, an ardent and metallic cry, was in place when he joined Davis, but he still sometimes stumbled over his ideas.
Coltrane rebooted his career in 1957: He kicked a debilitating drug habit (as Davis had done several years earlier), experienced a spiritual awakening, and worked extensively with pianist-composer Thelonious Monk, a musical architect of the first order. The focused clarity of the saxophonist’s sound, execution, improvising, and composing on Blue Train (1957) make it a tour de force of hard bop.
In the late ‘50s, Coltrane’s solos became thick and textural. He dissected harmony, stacking chords on top of chords. This led to wall-to-wall, scale-based passages, often asymmetrical, played at supersonic speed. Critic Ira Gitler memorably dubbed these “sheets of sounds.” Back with Davis in 1958-60, Coltrane found the freedom to experiment with his complex harmonic ideas, as well as the nascent modal landscape that promised liberation from the potential tyranny of chords.
Davis knew the dramatic rewards of yin and yang, of showcasing a saxophonist whose brash sound and volubility contrasted sharply with his own economy. He teased Coltrane playfully in print: “He is beginning to leave more space—except when he gets nervous.”
Coltrane worked on both sides of the street. The lickety-split title song on another masterwork, Giant Steps (1959), is a harmonic obstacle course that challenges musicians to this day. Meanwhile, the beautiful melody of “Naima” unfolds over serene and slow-moving chords anchored by sustained bass notes known as pedal points—another inescapable sound of ‘60s modal jazz and beyond.
Other facets of Coltrane’s playing continue to shape the sound and mechanics of today’s saxophonists: multiphonics (playing more than one note at a time); using the overtone series to produce new timbres and vocalized effects including split-tones, and screams; extending his range into the altissimo register high above the conventional limits of the saxophone; helping revive the soprano saxophone; standard-setting technical command; and the literal sound of his tenor as he tamed his early brittleness with additional colors, depth, and resonance
through the 1960s.
Coltrane formed his own quartet in 1960, and the personnel soon solidified as McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. As with Davis’s Second Great Quintet, every member of the Coltrane Quartet was an innovator, and the group’s aesthetic victories, like those of Davis’s band, were foundational to ’60s post-bop and entered the DNA of jazz. The Freedom Principal became paramount.
On epochal records like Impressions, Live at Birdland, Crescent, and A Love Supreme—the latter a suite in four movements inspired by Coltrane’s spiritual beliefs—the foursome breathed as one. The group explored modal harmony and forms, pedal points, and incantatory improvisations that embodied a search for the infinite. A single song might last an hour and include a 30 or 40-minute saxophone-and-drums duet. The quartet’s vehement performances get most of the attention, but Coltrane grew into an exceptional balladeer (“You Don’t Know What Love Is,” “I Want to Talk About You,” “Dear Lord”). He also remained an exceptionally soulful bluesman, who never lost touch with jazz fundamentals (“Bessie’s Blues.”)
By mid-1965, Coltrane, the most influential jazz musician of his time, leaned increasingly into the avant-garde. He pursued a free jazz that dispensed with steady time in favor of volatile rhythm and unrelenting extremes of texture, dissonance, color, and emotion. Recorded with an 11-piece ensemble, Ascension (1965) is an audacious and cacophonous group improvisation lasting 40 minutes.
Before his classic quartet broke up, Coltrane recorded Meditations (1965), a five-movement suite with enfant terrible Pharoah Sanders as a second tenor saxophonist and Rashied Ali as a second drummer. The most rewarding of Coltrane’s late-period ensemble recordings, it exhibits formal unity and poetry that elude much of Coltrane’s other work in his final chapter. The simple written material on Meditations is tonal and melodic; it frames and balances explosive, atonal improvisation.
By early 1966, Coltrane’s final quintet included his wife, pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, Sanders, Garrison, and Ali—though at many appearances, Coltrane invited others to sit in with the group for open improvisations. His final great recording, Interstellar Space, an astounding set of clarified and deeply felt saxophone-drum duets with Ali, was taped in February 1967, five months before Coltrane’s tragic death in July at age 40 from liver cancer.
Where Coltrane might have taken his music had he lived remains sadly unknowable. Many have noted that his death left a hole that has never been filled. Davis’s most adventurous music was clearly behind him at his death at 65, but it’s still enticing to wonder what kind of elder statesmen he might have become had he lived another decade. But enough. We are lucky to have had Davis and Coltrane for as long as we did, and if there is one thing clear about their monumental legacies at 100, it is that their influence will still be with us in force at 200.
Mark Stryker is the writer and producer of the documentary film The Best of the Best: Jazz from Detroit (2025), now streaming on Prime Video). He is also the author of Jazz from Detroit (2019, University of Michigan Press). An updated edition will be published in paperback on Feb. 11, 2026.
Hear Terence Blanchard and Ravi Coltrane celebrate the Miles Davis and John Coltrane Centennial, live in Hill Auditorium, Sunday February 15, 2026.
Tickets start at just $20 (+ fees); $15-20 student tickets available.
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