Jazz News: Miles at 100 around the world, and in still life
This is Jazz News, a look at what’s news in jazz, music, and the arts.
Miles Davis centennial is a global affair.
Basically, every jazz festival anywhere in the world held in 2026, college jazz programs, regional jazz advocacy groups, city-wide orchestras and small-town bands alike have tributes to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, remembrances, discussions, examinations, reinterpretations, re-imaginings, roundtables, rap sessions, reflections, rendez-vous, recollections, attacks and retractions, reactions, remonstrations, recountings and regurgitations, refreshing reassessments, renegade reapplications, but NO regrets. (You know Miles didn’t roll like that. He didn’t care what a m*****f***** thought.)
Several bands are touring with tributes to Miles Davis. John Beasley, who played with Miles in the late 1980s, has the “Unlimited Miles” tour visiting venues around the world, including the Denver Jazz Fest last month.
This past weekend, the Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York presented a couple of concerts centered on the collaborations with Gil Evans, including “Miles Ahead,” “Porgy and Bess,” and “Sketches of Spain.”
Over the weekend, Denver’s The Parrisian paid tribute to Miles Davis, with a set of his modal classics and some electronic Miles.
In his birthplace of Alton, Illinois, this weekend, a Miles Davis festival kicks off on the 22nd around the Miles Davis statue on West 3rd Street, near the banks of the Mississippi River. The statue is one of the very few Miles statues that depict him at around 30 years old, lost in song in the classic “lean back” pose. On Saturday, May 23, sculptor Preston Jackson will be on scene, with music at Post Commons by Tim Jardin’s band and Anthony Wiggins.
Source: Riverbender/News/Miles Davis Jazz Festival & Kick off/100th Birthday
Around St. Louis, the town that incubated a young Miles Davis, the community arts organization Jazz St. Louis is hosting lectures and student performances, and beginning on May 26, they feature a week of events, including a four-night birthday concert with Terell Stafford and Tim Warfield celebrating Miles and Trane, and a two-night immersion into Bitches Brew with pianist Adam Maness.
Source: Jazz St. Louis/Miles in May
On his birthdate, National Sawdust, a venue in Brooklyn, hosts “The Voice of Miles: A Symphonic Celebration.” The co-production of the Davis estate and Park Avenue Artists collective transforms the documentary “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool” into an immersive, live orchestral event where film excerpts and live performance interlock in real time, so audiences hear Miles’ trumpet surrounded by a full orchestra.
Source: National Sawdust/The Voice of Miles: A Symphonic Celebration
The Apollo Theater hosts “Muted Genius: Miles at 100” at Carnegie Hall on May 29, a screening of “Electric Miles: Kind of Blue” from his 1970 Isle of Wight concert, plus a conversation with drummer-nephew Vince Wilburn, Jr., saxophonist Antonio Hart, and academics.
Source: Apollo Theatre/Muted Genius
Sonoma, California’s Music in Place program is bringing in Tom Scott for their Miles tribute on May 30.
Source: Music In Place/Miles Davis at 100: A Centennial Celebration
In Paris, Terence Blanchard and Ravi Coltrane will pay musical tribute to Miles and Trane on 29 June at The Grand Rex.
Later this summer, the Newport Jazz Festival marks the Miles Davis and John Coltrane centennials with a set led by Kamasi Washington and Chief Adjuah.
Miles at 100 tribute concerts extend into 2027 as well, featuring Brian Blade in the “Birth of the Cool Nonet,” and surviving Miles Davis alumni in the Miles Electric Band with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Miles in still life
Denver-based sculptor Ed Dwight’s bust of Miles Davis resides in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The bust from 1990 is currently not on display.
Ed Dwight’s bigger-than-life-size sculpture of Miles – with braided hair and big sunglasses - is now in a private collection in New York. And there remains a statue of “Miles Live” for sale on the sculptor’s website: Ed Dwight, Sculptor & Historian.
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