Honoring Miles, once again!

Miles Davis was celebrated in two recent concerts, as Mike Zwerin reports who himself had played with the trumpeter on the legendary "Birth of the Cool" recordings from 1949 ( Bloomberg.com ). Jazz at Lincoln Center looked at "The Many Moods of Miles Davis" with bands led by Nicholas Payton and Marcus Miller. At the Iridium a "Four Generations of Miles" band featured the former Davis sidemen George Coleman, Mike Stern, Buster Williams and Jimmy Cobb. Hearing both concerts, Zwerin feels "that jazz music has not really advanced all that much since Davis's death in 1991". And: "Davis had been so rooted in the principles of change and unpredictability that even musicians doing their best to sound derivative could not help but remain contemporary."