So What: the life of Miles Davis by John Szwed

Was the king of cool just a mixer of other people's sounds? Brian Morton revisits a jazz legend

Some book titles are hostages to fortune. A little more than a decade after Miles Davis's death, it is tempting to add a rhetorical question mark and take John Szwed at his unintended word. Since 1991, jazz has plunged on, re-examined its own history, continued to broker alliances with other forms of music, and against all odds consolidated its strongest market position for two generations. Even though every second horn player you hear has borrowed something of Davis's frail, muted tone and minimalist, almost painterly approach, jazz trumpet has also moved on. So how relevant does Miles actually seem in 2002?

There has certainly been no stint in market interest. Miles compilations, such as the exhaustive Montreux live box, continue to appear, alongside such anthologies as Romantic Miles, Cool Miles, Mellow Miles (though not, so far, Antagonistic, Dismissive and Self-Destructive Miles). Even record buyers who don't usually stray far beyond Haydn and Mozart or Nirvana and Robbie treasure the classic Kind of Blue. Forty years on, that album is still doing more than brisk business, despite a weird discographical history that has seen it released at the wrong speed, with misspelt credits and with transposed track titles.

One of the many intriguing aspects of Szwed's revisionist approach is the suggestion that, like Birth of the Cool before it, Kind of Blue is only somewhat problematically Miles's album at all. Even he referred to its contents as "Moe's music": a reference to Bill Evans, one of the two pianists on the record. Listening to it again today, it's a convincing and inescapable suggestion. Throughout his career, Miles relied on collaborators – Bill Evans, arranger Gil Evans, producer Teo Macero – to the degree that his own profoundest role is curatorial and iconic rather than as a sole begetter.

On the other hand, Szwed finally torpedoes the notion that the young Miles struggled with the fierce and combative idiom of bebop. Anyone who actually listens to the trumpeter's early recordings has to recognise that he is more than technically competent.

Temperamentally, he was less so. Szwed portrays a man who, having enjoyed every social and educational advantage in early life, found the vagaries of "the jazz life" (a euphemism that embraces drug abuse) exceptionally challenging. Arguably, had Miles not enjoyed the continued support of his dentist father, he might well not have survived.

Equally, had he continued to follow the path laid out for him in youth, he might have emerged as a significant classical player and composer. Not so very many African-Americans enjoyed a Juilliard School education.

It seems strange at this distance that of all the facets offered by the protean Davis, his previous biographers should have presented such a narrow range. The prevailing mythology casts Miles as an aery sprite, graceful, hypersensitive and only combative when at bay. Ian Carr's life is an exercise in hagiography, albeit driven by the profoundest musical understanding. More recent studies have done little to shift the consensus. Eric Nisenson re-orders Carr's priorities, while Paul Tingen, concentrating on electronic experiments that followed In A Silent Way, dresses the whole story up in Zen robes.

John Szwed, author of a brilliant study of the equally mercurial Sun Ra, attempts balance above all. He delivers a portrait of an artistic life in which circumstance always outweighs vision. Miles's health, the state of the music business, the vagaries and ambitions of his playing partners all the way from Charlie Parker and John Coltrane to Joe Zawinul and Marcus Miller: all are sensibly deployed in the story. Szwed makes no substantial claims as a musicologist and on occasions his knowledge of the music seems a little forced. But he does instinctively understand the complex dynamics of jazz performance, and his account of the making of Kind of Blue in 1959 is wholly convincing. That album's signature track "So What?" no longer seems the distillation of Miles's idiosyncratic vision, but rather a collision of disparate influences.

I met Miles twice, both times largely by chance. We spoke not about music, but about art; painting had become an obsession in later years, feeding a critical nostrum that Miles could be regarded as a latter-day Picasso, promiscuously painting, sculpting and collaging in sound. It works as a metaphor, but Szwed is on hand to remind us that at every stage in his career, Davis was driven by powerful musical impetus: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Hendrix and Sly Stone; latterly and somewhat incongruously, the new aesthetic of hip-hop.

It's ironic that his least musicological biographer should have offered the most convincing account of his musical growth. Even so, the book doesn't quite dispel the shrug in its title. Miles Davis's hostility to the term jazz increasingly looks like a wish that the music should be co-terminous with his own life: that "jazz" would die when he did. Instead, it has moved confidently on.

The sixth edition of Brian Morton and Richard Cook's 'Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD' has just been published