The Legacy of Miles & Coltrane
- Jul 21
- 14 min read
Updated: Jul 24
Two of today's Jazz artists have a lot to say about the music and its legends
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
May 2026
There is no shortage of events marking the 100th anniversary of the births of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. The two jazz giants, who played together extensively in the late 1950s, are being celebrated worldwide with countless tributes, performances, and retrospectives.
That includes the Berkshires, which boasts a vibrant and deeply rooted jazz scene. From small clubs to large concert halls, the sounds and techniques of Davis and Coltrane are woven into the music played here. You can hear it in the tunes of two prominent jazz artists who are coming to the Berkshires this summer: trumpeter Ingrid Jensen and saxophonist Branford Marsalis. It’s undeniable. Their music carries the legacies of Davis and Coltrane.
In this article, we did our own centennial deep dive by talking with Jensen and Marsalis, as well as jazz historian John Gennari, author of The Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life.
The Branford Marsalis Quartet will perform at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington on Friday, July 24. Marsalis significantly contributed to Davis’ 1983 album, Decoy, as well touring with Davis during that time period. The NEA Jazz Master and Grammy® Award winner is equally at home playing concertos with symphony orchestras and sitting in with members of the Grateful Dead. The core of his musical universe, though, is the quartet.
Celebrated Canadian jazz trumpeter Ingrid Jensen will play on Sunday, July26, at Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall for “TLI Jazz: 100 Years of Miles and Coltrane featuring the Ted Rosenthal Quintet.”She and saxophonist Jimmy Greene will join Rosenthal’s trio. A Berklee College of Music graduate, Jensen is on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music and is a founding member of the all-female supergroup Artemis.
“There’s a certain spirit that everyone affiliated with Miles recognizes, that this art form is extremely sacred,” Jensen told me before Artemis performed this spring at the Clark. She had just recorded with saxophonist George Coleman, who played in the Davis quintet between 1963 and 1964. “Everything has a deep emphasis on understanding the history and where the music came from through Africa, through African rhythms, but also through all of the influences that have developed in the United States, in this melting pot. If you look at his bands and you look at all his people who he hung out with, who were in his influences, it was extremely open- minded and culturally limitless.”
John Gennari, a University of Vermont professor, cultural historian, and acclaimed author specializing in jazz studies, will visit The Mount in Lenox on Sunday, August 16, as part of the program “The Barbers and The Barn: Music Inn in the 1950s.” It includes a performance by Ron Ramsay and Samantha Talora and a conversation exploring the legacy of jazz in the Berkshires. Gennari will talk about the musicians who were at the Jazz Barn.
A LOOK BACK WITH MILES
The Berkshires has its own importance in jazz history. Davis stands out not only because he revolutionized the music genre; he also visited the area at least a few times. Some accounts are well-documented; others are stories passed down by word of mouth. They conjure up images of Davis walking through a field in the middle of the night, playing his trumpet to a handful of folks who were around; or performing jazz-rock fusion with his septet in front of thousands of fans at a venue reserved for classical music.
There is no evidence that Coltrane came to the Berkshires, even though he partnered with Davis from 1955 to 1960, the time period when Davis visited Lenox. Their relationship was marked by tension, including Davis firing a heroin-addicted Coltrane in 1957, and then rehiring him after he got clean, leading to masterpieces like Kind of Blue. Coltrane, who died at the age of 40, was known for his technical innovation, spiritual depth, and boundary- pushing improvisation. The artistic genius of Davis, who was dubbed “The Prince of Darkness,” was marked with a volatile side that defined many of his personal relationships, well-documented by his former wives, his own admissions, biographers, and musical collaborators.
The first time Davis traveled to the Berkshires was on August 30, 1956, to catch
a concert that evening at the Music Inn and, in the course of things, found himself sitting next to stride piano master Willie "The Lion" Smith. The music venue and educational center was active from 1950 to 1979 and featured the Music Barn, where iconic jazz, folk, and rock artists performed.
That particular show was recorded and later released as a live album, Historic Jazz Concert at Music Inn (Atlantic 1298). Davis didn’t play on it, and that might be because he was making his comeback after overcoming heroin addiction and in the midst of studio sessions that produced four albums: Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’ on the Prestige label featuring Coltrane, Red Garland (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), and Philly Joe Jones (drums). While fulfilling his remaining obligations with Prestige, Davis signed with Columbia Records and released ’Round About Midnight in March 1957.
The presence of Davis and other prominent artists at the Music Inn in 1956 helped define a new, sophisticated image for jazz musicians that went hand-in-hand with stardom. There’s a photograph of Davis, then 30 years old, sitting with Smith, who was 62, which can be found in Gennari’s The Jazz Barn. “The two of them sitting side-by-side is interesting in and of itself,” says Gennari, “because one of the points of the roundtables and then the concert was to bring together the older generation of musicians and the modernists and to try to heal the riffs and factionalism that had developed among the pre-bebop, traditional players and the bebop and post-bop, cool and progressive musicians that are in the forefront in the 1950s.”
Roundtables at the Music Inn ran from 1950 to 1955 under the direction of Marshall Stearns, and in 1956 were led by John Lewis and other musicians. One way of healing the traditionalist/ modernist fracture was by having Stearns and Gunther Schuller teach jazz history courses that covered the whole spectrum of the music’s evolution, according to Gennari. As far as Gennari can tell through extensive research, Davis did not participate in the roundtables.
In 1957, Davis was scheduled to play with Lewis and The Modern Jazz Quartet for Music Inn’s last concert of the season. Stan Getz also was on the bill, but both canceled with a month to spare. They were replaced by Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Stitt, and the concert was well-attended despite the Davis/ Getz no-shows. Legend has it that around midnight, out of nowhere, Davis rolled in. “He played for all the kids, the staff and whoever was around in the fields,” according to an interview with Music Inn co-founder Stephanie Barber. “He went out into the fields and gave them a 2 a.m. concert.”
Davis was scheduled to play again in 1959, the very same week that Columbia was to drop Kind of Blue, widely regarded as the greatest jazz album of all time. It was going to be the last stop of his national tour. Bill Evans, the pianist who had played on all but one of the tracks of the album, was teaching at the Lenox School of Jazz. He had a tape of the session and played it for the faculty and the students. They were blown away.
Then Davis canceled yet again. This time, saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, also part of Davis’ touring group that summer, showed up at the Music Inn seemingly on his own, perhaps not knowing his boss had canceled. The story goes that he wanted to get something to eat and coaxed a couple of the School of Jazz students to take him into Lenox to a restaurant that served fried chicken. Saxophonist/clarinetist Ted Casher, then a student, recalls that Adderley had ordered eight “small fryers” and proceeded to eat them all. “It was a gastronomic event,” recalls Casher in an interview.
Meanwhile, an announcement was made to the crowd thatDavis would not be appearing, and refunds were offered. A concert still took place, hastily organized to feature Evans and other faculty members, including Jimmy Giuffre, Herb Pomeroy, and Jim Hall, along with students bassist Mona Neves and drummer Paul Cohen. Once returning to the Music Inn, Adderley may have skipped the concert altogether to hang out with another faculty member, Bob Brookmeyer, who had turned down playing that night because of an arrangement he was writing in his dorm room. “’Ball came by and we played and we talked for a while,” Brookmeyer said in an interview.
ELECTRIC MILES AT TANGLEWOOD
Tanglewood picked up the legacy of jazz in the Berkshires.The iconic photograph of Davis by David Gahr that showed upon the cover of his Jack Johnson album was from his performance at Tanglewood on August 18, 1970. Davis and his electric fusion band— Keith Jarrett (organ), Gary Bartz (saxophone), Chick Corea (electric piano), Dave Holland (bass), Jack DeJohnette (drums), and Airto Moreira (percussion)—were on the same bill as The Voices of East Harlem and Santana. It was the last of a series of four rock concerts called The Fillmore at Tanglewood produced by Bill Graham.
When Davis didn’t show up on time, his band went on stage without him and started the first song. Graham was pacing around and cursing. Then Davis pulls up to the edge of the Koussevitzky Music Shed in his Maserati convertible, grabs the trumpet sitting beside him on the front passenger seat, walks on stage, and starts playing. Most of the material they performed was from the newly released Bitches Brew. (There’s an audio of that concert on YouTube that is widely considered one of his best live recordings.) Later that month, Davis and his band flew in by helicopter to perform his largest-ever gig at the Isle of Wight Festival in England in front of an estimated 600,000 people.
At 43 years old, Davis was listening to and hanging out with Jimi Hendrix, who performed that same year on the Isle of Wight Festival. He admired Hendrix’s groundbreaking style. He also was dressing in a way that’s heavily influenced by the rock counter culture. If you listen to the Tanglewood performance, Miles sounds atonal, hitting notes that would definitely have no place in something like Kind of Blue. “The people who break with Miles in that period call him a sellout and that he was going after the youth audience,” says Gennari. Davis, who died at the age of 65, was always trying to move the dial forward. His career is defined by constant reinvention across several distinct phases: bebop (1940s), cool jazz (Birth of the Cool), hard bop (Walkin’), modal jazz (Kind of Blue), post-bop (Miles Smiles), and electric fusion (Bitches Brew), spanning from the 1940s to the 1990s.
MARSALIS & MILES
Branford Marsalis played with Davis in the 1980s, describing him as “Funny. Brilliant.” Along with performing, Marsalis is currently artistic director for the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music in New Orleans and teaches at North Carolina Central University.
“He put me through a tiny little test when I first went in the studio, which I passed. It was kind of amusing,” Marsalis laughs. “The short version is, when I walked in, he says, ‘Don’t come in my house unless you knock first.’ The studio door is three feet thick. So I knocked twice, and then I went home. He called me later that afternoon and said, ‘What happened?’ I said, ‘I knocked on the door, man. You clearly weren’t home.’ And then he laughed and said, ‘Come back tomorrow.’ I think he wanted to see if he would come out two hours later and I’d be sitting in the lobby saying, ‘Where were you, man? I waited.’ He would have treated me differently hadI been one of those people.”
What was it like playing with Davis? “There are two things he did,” continues Marsalis. “If I was playing something, and he said, ‘Don’t play that,’ and I instinctively, out of deference to him, said, ‘Okay, what should I play?’ He said, ‘Not that.’ And then the second thing is, he gave me a sequence of chord changes and said, ‘Learn these.’ I started working on them—he was right there—and I learned them. Then he says, ‘Okay, now, forget about that and play the song.’ I’m 24 years old and insecure, and I started looking at the paper. He did one of those double- finger whistles that I can’t do. Then he walks over, grabs the paper, crinkles it up, throws it on the floor, and says, ‘Okay, play again.’
“What I realized after that session is that written music is a reference point. Once you understand what that is, you have to create a sound for that reference point. So, what he wanted me to do was to play the sound of the music, not the literal music. It’s no different than learning a play in theater. Suppose your goal was that I’m going to learn every word in this, and I’m going to speak those words with sparkling elocution. My diction is going to be perfect. And then you do it, and they say, ‘Well, when are you going to start acting?’ The words are the beginning of the process, and then you have to internalize the words, and then you have to turn those words into a character that an audience will believe, and then you have to deliver it. Music is no different. You have these notes on a page or chords on a page. So you’re playing and you’re learning, but you should also be learning, in my view, what it sounds like. Then when you understand what it sounds like, you play to the sound.”
In other words, playing music is about learning something, setting it aside, and interpreting it in your own way. Equally important, he adds, is the community of musicians when you’re on stage.
“A jazz group should be no different than a string quartet,” Marsalis says. “There needs to be that kind of intellectual and emotional interaction. Oftentimes, there’s neither. There’s a bunch of really smart people who have learned their solos or learned what it is they can play, and then they don’t even make eye contact with one another. They’re not together.”
The audience doesn’t question it because most people are hearing with their eyes, Marsalis says. “Two big comments I get from people after the show: ‘It’s really amazing watching you guys communicate with one another. You can just see that y’all are enjoying and having a great time, and y’all are constantly looking at each other,’ which means that they go to a lot of concerts where people don’t do that. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be amazing. It would be normal.”
THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ LIVES ON
Although trumpeter and educator Ingrid Jensen never knew Davis, she saw him live four times. She also spent a lot of time with Herbie Hancock and learned about Davis from him. And she was able to hang out with Wayne Shorter a fair amount and get stories from him firsthand. She could feel that spirit of Davis by being in their presence and playing with them, and she hopes that she is sharing with her students what she has accumulated over time.
“It’s a community thing,” she says. “They say this music is from the street. You can’t teach someone how to improvise. It’s more of the humility that hopefully is translated through those of us who are the elders now; this takes a long time to get good at.”
She often includes music by Davis in her performances, or a tune that she’s written that is influenced by him. She leans more towards jazz of the late ’60s and ’70s, that spirit of anti- establishment and music not being so locked in. “Everybody can play this music; it’s whether or not you’re going to approach it with that fearlessness and big, open spectrum of creative possibilities combined with technique,” she says. “Miles could play the shit out of the trumpet. He practiced classical trumpet; he learned how to play the instrument really well so he could forget about it. He learned how to box so he didn’t have to think about his body. He was a great example of this high level of mastery without it being something that is looking studied. Life was his study—all his life experiences and all the people.”
Another of her mentors was Clark Terry, who, like Davis, grew up in St. Louis. He taught her to search out who she is and not try to copy someone. “We always check on our mentors and check out our heroes and learn from them. We absorb it and then, like a good meal, hopefully you digest it and you remember it, but you don’t try to recreate it exactly.”
She plays trumpet because she heard Kind of Blue when she was a kid and was determined to figure it out. “People like Clark Terry and Herbie Hancock, I can see how important carrying on the language was to them,” she says. “They are really great teachers and really great mentors to younger players because they didn’t want this language to disappear. What I hope I carry on is channeling that originality of concept in my own playing. When I hear and I play together with people, when I hear ideas that I feel are real and honest, I work them out live in front of a bunch of people in the moment, and hopefully the people I play with these days— Artemis and my own band—are all in that same mentality. It’s like, okay, what’s going to happen tonight based on this melody, these chords in this form? Who knows? Every performance is different, and we are bringing different life experiences to that moment. And there’s the energy of the crowd and there’s the energy of the world.”
Jensen is looking forward to playing at Tanglewood with Rosenthal and Greene. “We’ll play Miles Davis and John Coltrane and put our vibe on it.”
When Marsalis performs with his quartet, like he will be at the Mahaiwe, they’re interacting with on another and aren’t afraid to let the audience in on that. “We’re confident that we have the ability to play 80 years of music, as opposed to the music that we started learning when we were teenagers, or when we were 20,” he says.
“What I’m looking for when I’m performing a concert are songs that have strong melodies—tempo diversity, sonic diversity, a lot of dynamic range so everybody in the audience can find at least two songs and say, ‘I like those two songs.’ Some of it is a little adventurous for the adventurous people; some of the really traditional stuff is for the traditionalists. It works well. We’ll play a Coltrane song and back announce it and say, ‘That was John Coltrane.’ It’s our responsibility as musicians to present an audience with a show that they have the capacity to enjoy, given what the audience is. We’ll play a show and say the names, but it’s more about the quality of the songs. If it is a smooth jazz audience, we’d be in trouble.”
Marsalis was approached by his record company to release a tribute to Coltrane. He had already done A Love Supreme: Live in Amsterdam, the highly acclaimed 2004 album with his quartet performing Coltrane’s 1964 masterpiece suite in its entirety. He consulted with his quartet, and they landed on doing a recording of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. They needed a singer, and Marsalis immediately thought of Dianne Reeves. When they were in the studio, they could only record two songs on the first day because of an administrative snafu. Marsalis went back to the hotel room frustrated. The next day, they recorded two more songs, and Reeves surprised everyone when she said they were going to finish everything right then and there. “So she sang five songs on the second day straight through, nailed it, and kept it moving,” says Marsalis. “It was just like the old days. That’s the kind of spirit that I want: Musicians who are not afraid to play music.”
It’s always presumed that jazz music comes out of a state of rebellion or resistance. Coltrane’s songs went naturally against the grain, Marsalis says. “He was a very smart and very internalized person, and he was always working on things.” That includes the “Giant Steps” sequence (1959) that revolutionized jazz.
“Musicians today dream of doing something like that, and they would ride that off into the sunset,” says Marsalis. “He did it for two years, and then he went back to find something else. He was always a searcher, and I don’t think what the critics felt about it bothered him one whit. He was in this space where he was an explorer, and he needed the right people to be around him.”
Where modern musicians talk a lot about harmony, patterns, and scales, older musicians are all about listening, says Marsalis. Your ballad playing is bad? Listen to Ben Webster. You want to play like Coltrane? Listen to Johnny Hodges.
When he and his brother were kids and went to North Sea Jazz Festival, there was a table with Art Blakey, Betty Carter, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, and Roy Haynes all sitting around, talking. “They were not sorry about anything,” says Marsalis. “They lived their lives with a certain certitude. Any mistakes were just incorporated into the general vibe.” He turned to his brother and said, “Man, this is the vibe we have to have when we play.”
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