Miles Davis at 100: the restless creativity of a jazz icon

Miles Davis reputedly once said “a legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I’m still doing it”. He died in September 1991, aged 65, and no doubt his style and influence would be even harder to pin down had he continued doing it into old age.

2026 marks Davis’ centenary year, and the music world is acknowledging 100 years since the arrival (on May 26, 1926) of one of the most restlessly transformative figures in the history of recorded music. A trumpeter and bandleader who didn’t just reflect the times but consistently anticipated them, dismantling his own sound the moment it showed signs of becoming predictable.

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Davis was at the forefront of jazz innovation for almost five decades, pivoting from bebop to cool jazz, hard bop to modal, from electric fusion to a funk-inflected experimentalism that alienated some of his old audience and captivated an entirely new one.

His 1959 album Kind of Blue, with its relaxed, spacious affect, is often referred to as his masterpiece and remains the best-selling jazz record of all time. Sketches of Spain, his Gil Evans collaboration released the following year, is, by contrast, rhythmic and cinematic with rich orchestration.

In further stark sonic contradiction, 1970’s Bitches Brew, a studio experiment assembled from fragments and tape edits by producer Teo Macero, resembled nothing that came before it and anticipated electronic music, hip-hop production and dance culture decades in advance. Doo-Bop, recorded just before his death with hip-hop producer Easy Mo Bee, predicted the jazz-inflected nu-soul sound of the mid 90s.

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What connected all of these phases seems to be a deep impatience with repetition and a reluctance on Davis’s behalf to be pinned down as just one thing. He was famously difficult to work with, a tough combination of dictatorial and laconic, expecting the musicians he worked with to read his subtle expressions and keep pace.

Many of the greats cut their teeth in his bands, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin and Keith Jarrett among them. He famously pulled influence from cultural markers far beyond music and encouraged his peers to do the same; fashion, architecture, the brutal paintings of Francis Bacon all influenced his ever-evolving sound.

Leeds-born trumpet player, producer and multi-instrumentalist Emma-Jean Thackray is a Mercury Prize nominee whose 2023 album Weirdo marked one of the most distinctive artistic statements in recent British music. She has spent much of early 2026 performing Dear Miles: A Love Letter, her live tribute to Davis, at sold-out shows at Ronnie Scott’s in London.

“Miles helped me to understand the kind of artist I wanted to be,” she tells me. “I came across his music by accident at 13 or so and I already knew I wanted to be an artist, I knew from a toddler, but I didn’t know exactly how.

“I knew about different pop and rock music, I knew classical, but those spaces didn’t feel exactly right for me. Hearing Sketches of Spain at 13 blew my mind wide open and I realised there was a different musical direction I could go.”

Thackray’s show takes Davis’s electric period in the early 1970s as its primary source material. “That’s the era that speaks to me the most,” she says.

“They’re the records I pull out and listen to the most at home, and where I still find new things in every single listen. The way they’re improvising as a group is truly magical. It’s so groove-based yet free.”

Other centenary celebrations have included Grammy-nominated trumpeter Theo Croker’s Miles Davis Mixtape at the Southbank Centre, while across the Atlantic, Montreux Jazz Festival Miami dedicated its opening night to Davis in February, featuring the Miles Electric Band led by his nephew and former drummer Vince Wilburn Jr.

The Miles Davis Estate is planning a series of archival releases and a forthcoming feature film, Miles & Juliette, starring Damson Idris as Davis and directed by Bill Pohlad. US drummer Gregory Hutchinson, known for his work with Joe Henderson, Betty Carter and Roy Hargrove leads a tribute album, Kind of Now: The Pulse of Miles Davis, released this month. 

Thackray’s Dear Miles continues to tour through the spring, with dates at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival in May before heading to Japan. On the question of his broader legacy, Thackray is unambiguous.

“He was at the forefront of American music for most of the 20th century. He never stood still and as soon as he got a sound that he wanted he changed everything and that’s what I love about my biggest inspirations.

“People like Björk, Madlib, Prince, Miles, Jackson Pollock. They ripped up their own rulebooks and were never satisfied.”

It seems fitting that she and the other artists celebrating 100 years of Miles Davis continue to propel his sound into the future.

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