Everything changes....
Take Miles Davis for example..
When he was making "Birth of the Cool" he was already heading into the direction of playing fewer notes and less interesting hard bop, while youngster Dizzy and similar were on the horizon ready to blast out the super runs and the amazingly intellectual "riffs".
At some point Miles decided...>"no more high notes for me"...
Sometime after, Miles was barely blowing his horn, possibly trying to do a bad imitation of Chet Baker ???... He would stand there onstage, seemingly in a haze, red satin pants glaring, horn pointed dumbly at the floor, the band ripping into the music while Miles would blow one note, 2 notes, to try to establish a "mood".
(excuse me, while i yawn = must be my mood.).
But what he established was nothing......Just Miles standing there, band ripping, while he choked out a note or 2 that usually had intonation issues.
At some point even later on in his "i am music", career, his horn's tone always sounded like it had a severe valve leak that he was too lazy to get repaired.
"Hummm, well i think i need to get my horn fixed but hand me that needle and spoon first...wait, its 2 weeks later......and the gig was last week....."...""""
People harp and clang and spurt about "Bitches Brew", and i would not own that or listen to it, if i was forced to do it OR jump into a black hole.
(see ya at the bottom).
That album is, imho, <YUK>, and of course Miles fans fawn over it, as if its the sunrise and the purple mountain majesty of all music.
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Well you made your opinion quite clear, and I understand that you don't like what Miles Davis did from Bitches Brew onwards, and possibly even In A Silent Way, however dismissing his playing as early as 1948 is quite harsh. You also seem to have a confused knowledge of the history of jazz. At the time of Birth of the Cool (1948/49) Dizzy Gillespie wasn't a youngster, he was a senior figure in jazz. Dizzy started his career in the thirties and by the late 40s his reputation was well established, having birthed what is called bebop with Thelonious Monk and others. At this time Miles Davis had started his career 2 years earlier, in 1946, which put things back into perspective.
Miles Davis wasn't "heading in the direction of playing fewer notes" in the late 40s, he had always played like that. He was perfectly capable of playing virtuosic lines (if that's what you mean by "intellectual riffs"), but didn't want to. There are recording evidence of his capacity to play a lot of notes and first hand reports by the likes of Freddie Hubbard.
Concerning the high notes, the idea that Miles Davis consciously stopped playing high notes at some point is widespread but false and originated in the content of some interviews from the late 50s being transformed over the years. When you listen to Davis' recordings across his career, he actually progressively played higher and higher, not Gillespie or Faddis high but beyond the conventional range of the trumpet. You can hear Davis reaching G above high C in many of his recordings during the late 60s and 70s. And if you'd wish to go beyond your dislike of Davis' music of that period you would hear that he was playing quite a lot and sometimes very fast runs. Also remember that he started playing the trumpet with a wah-wah pedal, I think, from the early 70s. You don't play the same with that kind of gear.
It's true that he would sometimes suddenly play one or two notes, but if you listen carefully you understand that, that was a signal to provoke some change in the music. it's actually very clear in the filmed performance at the Isle of Wight (DVD Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue). Bebop-based music is following chord changes, when you improvise, you just play the changes and go back to the beginning. From the mid-60s with his Shorter-Hancock-Carter-Williams band, Miles Davis started to go towards improvisations that were not as cyclical. There were still changes, but they would change and extend them rather than going back up after 16/24/32 bars. When you improvise more "freely" like that, you need sonic devices to communicate the changes you want to your bandmates. Either that, or you turn your back to the audience so that your band mates can see you.
This: "possibly trying to do a bad imitation of Chet Baker", is just nonsense, Chet Baker, was the one imitating Miles Davis' 50s playing (I'm saying that and I admire Chet Baker very much), and Baker's approach would certainly not have worked for the music Davis' was doing in the late 60s and 70s.
As for his sound, it has always been quite consistent from the late 50s onwards, getting actually more powerful with the years while retaining his flugelhorn-like qualities. That's the sound he wanted, breathy, warm, round (which is the sound that Chris Botti emulates by the way), which was in part the result of playing a very deep mouthpiece, even deeper than cornet mouthpieces. With these kind of mouthpieces it takes more time to build the chops to get the very high notes, which might explain why he only got there in the mid 60s.
Bitches Brew is one of the great milestones of music whether you like it or not. You don't have to listen to it, but that doesn't take away how important it is, and how enjoyable it is for some people, myself included. When I was a teenager in the 80s, I completely rejected Miles Davis' music after he'd gone electric. I hated what people call jazz-rock. That was the result of ignorance and prejudice (I'm not saying you're prejudiced, I'm talking about me, let's be clear. You are entitled to your opinion). I was judging Miles Davis' music without having listened to it properly and was just regurgitating what critics and magazines were saying at the time.
I discovered Miles Davis' music chronologically, and when I had finished listening to his music up to the late 60s, I realised that I really enjoyed Filles de Kilimanjaro, and In a Silent Way, and then Jack Johnson. I decided to give Bitches Brew a go, even though I was persuaded I would hate it, and was blown away by it, whereas a lot of my friends were dismissing it as commercial (which is nonsense, hardly top 40 material is it?). I then continued chronologically and I now enjoy all Davis' career for different reasons. It's a shame I didn't realise that early enough to go and see him play before he died (I was still in my hardcore acoustic phase).
I saw Botti touring with Sting, he did a fairly good job, it's difficult to come after Branford Marsalis. He's a very good trumpet player and it's a shame that he went into easy listening, but his accountant must be happy. To each their own, as we say, You yawn at Bitches Brew, I'm bored by Botti's music. I nevertheless respect and appreciate his qualities as a performer and trumpet player (he's not the kind to play fast runs either, if you've noticed).
Cheers, Pierre
Edit: sorry for the lengthy post
