Man in the Green Shirt

A biography of the influential jazz musician Miles Davis. This book takes the musician's green shirt as an emblem of his originality. It is illustrated throughout with photographs from many phases of his career. The author has previously written "Dylan: A Man Called Alias".

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It was the green shirt. Charlie Parker had the headlong genius, Thelonius Monk had the beatnik weirdness, and Charles Mingus had the rebel soul. But only Miles Davis had the green shirt. There it was on the cover of "Milestones", one of a handful of late-fifties albums that turned him from a gifted bebop musician into a figure of godlike potency. That shirt, the green shirt with the perfect button-down collar, symbolised the taste of the eternally elegant outsider and was as good an emblem as any of Miles Davis's intextinguishable need to be the coolest man on the planet. That he succeeded became clear when he died in September 1991, aged 65. For many people around the world, great musicians as well as anonymous fans, this really did seem like the day music died. Having survived the deaths of Armstrong, Ellington, Parker and Coltrane, the creative momentum of the century's most vital musical language suddenly seemed to be stalled by the departure of one man. Jazz people had followed him from Ivy League suits to silks and velvets, from the suave sophistication of "My Funny Valentine" to the wild funk of his electronic bands.
This tells the story of a musician who transcended his idiom in much the same way that Picasso transcended painting. This story of the middle-class son of a St Louis dentist who became a teenage bebop apprentice on 52nd street and ended up a restless veteran who spent his final years collaborating with the likes of Prince and investigating the possibilities of rap, is the tale of an incomparably influential artist.