John F. Szwed - So What: The Life of Miles Davis

In the decades after he first appeared on the mid-1940s New York jazz scene, the mercurial trumpeter Miles Davis's spare, lyrical playing and enigmatic personality came to represent the sound and the face of modern jazz. His life, full of contradictions that included passionate relationships with women followed by swift rejection of them, and his frequently combative relationships with his musicians, is chronicled in Yale professor John Szwed's comprehensive biography, SO WHAT. Szwed follows Davis from his St. Louis upbringing to his first hesitant recordings with Charlie Parker in the mid-1940s, and the epochal tracks that Davis cut with arranger Gil Evans, which became the BIRTH OF THE COOL album. He chronicles both the musician's cocaine and heroin abuse and his later intolerance for drug use by others, and Davis's most innovative period, from the late 1950s to the early '70s. He also traces Davis's harrowing, drug-related decline during the '80s, when he was rescued from near-death by the intervention o