I would go to the library and borrow scores by all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Prokofiev. Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery (quoted in Crouch 35).
The major difference, of course, was the audience to whom he was speaking. Impressing a reporter from Rolling Stone with his poses and essential 'blackness' was one thing. Creating a portrait of himself and his broad range of formative influences was another.
But Miles Davis was noted for his abruptness and his confrontational and dismissive style--in personal relations and in musical matters, at least as far as his response to other people's musical expectations of him. Just as he appears to turn about suddenly on questions of race and music, Davis also made some of the sharpest turns in music history and became one of the most influential men in jazz. His early career took place in the context of bop and only a short time after arriving in New York at the age of 18, he was playing with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro and the other major players, rapidly becoming an important player himself. He began leading his own groups but in 1948-50, under the influence of Canadian writer/arranger Gil Evans, he began his famous nonet which produced the sessions that later became known as The Birth of the Cool (1949). This was nearly a hundred degree turn in his music as he "slowed down tempos and featured ensemble passages as much or more than solos" (Santoro 601). This ran so directly counter to speed- and solo-mad bop that he was accused of betraying the music. His response to the demand that he continue as he had begun was to say that was "stupid." But this was to be only the first of a whole "series of watersheds," many of which generated considerable controversy (Santoro 601).
His turn from cool jazz, which he soon left (and which was to be developed by mainly white, West-coast musicians), was toward hard bop--yet another innova...