- [Miles] Music has always
been like a curse with me.
It's the first thing in my life.
Go to bed thinking about it,
and wake up thinking about it.
That's all I live for.
(jazzy music)
- [Man] Miles started very early.
- He looked at things differently,
he saw things differently.
Without a doubt the most
unique person I've ever known.
- He wanted to be an artist
just like Stravinsky.
- [Miles] A lot of the old guys thought
that if you went to
school it would make you
play like you were white.
If you learned something from theory
you would lose the
feeling in your playing.
I wanted to see what was
going on in all of music.
- Julliard in the daytime,
and at night he'd be on 52nd Street.
- He put the bell on his horn
right into the microphone
and changed the whole
world of jazz right there.
- [Woman] He comes up with a style that is
truly reflective of who he is.
He was angry, antisocial.
- But then he starts playing
and people are like, oh.
He just disarms you.
- [Woman] He surrounded
himself with young,
emerging, unknown voices.
- We were kids.
We were looking at every
night going to a laboratory.
Miles was the head chemist.
- He wanted us to live on the stage,
creating in front of the people.
Don't lean on what you know.
What he was looking for is
the stuff that you don't know.
- We didn't just wanna
play with Miles Davis,
we wanted to be Miles Davis.
- Miles's audience was changing,
absorbing what was happening now.
- [Miles] If anybody
wants to keep creating
they have to be about change.
I lost my sense of discipline
and started to drift,
before I knew it I had a heroin habit.
- Miles becomes representative
of a kind of cool
kind of sophistication,
a kind of masculinity.
- Miles and Frances.
I mean, we were a hot couple.
- The elevator opened and there he was.
It was like in a movie
when you meet the vampire
and you know you're gonna
die, and you don't care.
- [Woman] He becomes our black Superman.
- [Miles] All I ever wanted to do
was communicate what I felt through music.
