The career of trumpeter Miles Davis was one of the most astonishingly productive that jazz music has ever seen. Yet his genius has never received its due. The impatience and artistic restlessness that characterized his work spawned one stylistic turn after another and made Davis anathema to many critics, of “cool” acoustic jazz for ever more innovative sounds.
Having begun his career studying bebop, Davis pulled the first of many stylistic surprises when, in 1948, he became a member of an impromptu musical think tank that gathered in a New York City apartment. The work of this group not only slowed down tempos and featured ensemble playing as much as also became the seedbed for the “West Coast cool” jazz style.
In what would become a characteristic zigzag, Davis didn’t follow up on these innovations himself. Instead, in the late 1950s he formed a new band that broke free from jazz’s restrictive pattern of chord changes. Soloists could determine the shapes of their melodies without referring back to the same unvarying repetition of the rhythms, no matter how jazz-like, are always understated, and the instrumental voicings seem muted.
Davis’s recordings from the late 1960s signal that, once again, his direction was changing. On Filles de Kilimanjaro, Davis’s request that keyboardist Herbie Hancock play electric rather than acoustic piano caused consternation among jazz purists of the time. Other albums featured rock-style beats, heavily electronic instrumentation, a loose improvisational attack and a of fierce polemics by purist jazz critics, who have continued to belittle his contributions to jazz.
What probably underlies the intensity of the reactions against Davis is fear of the broadening of possibilities that he exemplified. Ironically, he was simply doing what jazz explorers have always done: reaching for something new that was his own. But because his career endured, because he didn’t die young or record only difficult to definitively rank Davis in the aesthetic hierarchy to which they cling.
What this question is testing
Your task
Pin down exactly what the question asks about the passage — a detail, the author's view, the structure, or the main point — before looking at the choices.
Common trap
Answers that restate a true detail from the passage but don't answer the specific question being asked.
Winning move
Anticipate the answer in your own words from the passage, then find the choice that matches that prediction.
Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.