Over the course of his long career, Miles Davis went from the embodiment of traditional jazz to its antithesis, becoming a psychedelic free-form musician bent on dragging the world along with him. “But Davis was always more than a mere trumpet stylist with an eye for a trend. He was a conceptualist, with a clear vision of how jazz works and how it should relate to the popular pulse. He pulled around him a succession of musicians, arrangers and producers who understood jazz to be a collective process, making him, if nothing else, an organiser of great innovative bands. Indeed, it was not until the 1980s that the trumpet sound and phrasing techniques he had been honing and experimenting with for decades became ubiquitous.”