Miles Davis’ legacy, represented by every Wikipedia page that mentions him
This year, Miles Davis would have turned 90 years old. 25 years after his death, he’s still synonymous with Jazz, but you can find his fingerprints on so many other ideas.
Let’s examine his legacy by sorting through every Wikipedia page (in English) on which he’s mentioned. This approach not only highlights his recordings and collaborators, but also wraps our arms around everything else, such as mentions in Kendrick Lamar’s “influence” section and the “notable usage” section for Motherfucker.
The Lasting Mark of Miles Davis
The 2,452 Wikipedia Pages on Which Miles Davis Is Mentioned
Circle Size: Among Pages on Which Miles Appears...
Page is mentioned less frequently
Page is mentioned more frequently
To create this list, we combed Wikipedia for every English page that links to the Miles Davis entry, which is about 2,452 articles across hundreds of topics. A few highlights:
Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign
Lady Gaga’s Miles Davis trumpet tattoo
A subgenus of trilobites called Milesdavis eldredgei (named after Miles Davis)
Pages like these give us a wider, more comprehensive view of Miles’ impact on culture. His Wikipedia page is an amazingly condense synopsis of Miles’ life, but it only links to about 10% of the dataset. ← the Miles Davis Wikipedia entry links to pages highlighted in red
Let’s get a better understanding of the 2,452 pages that mention Miles Davis. Here’s a breakdown by category:
people - 1,005 pages, 41% of total
recordings - 859 pages, 35% of total
places - 96 pages, 4% of total
Everything Else - 492 pages, 20% of total, which includes everything from a beer named after Miles to the entry for the Space Music genre
The People pages include typical jazz icons such as John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Herbie Hancock, but also contemporaries (James Baldwin, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix) and influencees (including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead, Joni Mitchell).
Recordings are the next largest category, which includes anything you can listen to: tracks, albums, compositions, and compilations. Most of these are in Miles Davis’ discography or involve him in some way. Other recording pages include To Pimp a Butterfly (Kendrick Lamar was influenced by Miles), 2001 (Dr. Dre was compared to Miles Davis by critics), and Ready to Die (Biggie sampled Miles on a track).
Other is a catch-all category for everything else. We grouped references on pages for companies (Columbia Records), books (On the Road, which references Miles in the plot), TV shows (Miami Vice, Miles guest-starred), cultural references (Beatnik, cool), music theory (Harmonization, Coltrane Changes, Contrafact, Duophonic), genres (Bebop, Funk, Salsa) and other random pages (drug user, french horn).
So that’s where Miles Davis is mentioned. Let’s now look at how he’s mentioned.
How miles is referenced
Mentions of Miles Davis on Wikipedia, by Page’s Section and Era*
all sections
life and career
history
opening section
credits
influence
Pre
1935
Miles' Death
Kind of Blue
The New Sounds
Bitches Brew
First, we sorted the Wikipedia pages by year, which gives us a better sense of how Miles was referenced throughout his career (*for pages without an obvious year, we ignored it or used birth-year if it was a person).
We expected Wikipedia pages to increase in the years in which Miles released an album (Wikipedia pages are often created for each track and entries are added to collaborators’ career’s section). But references to Miles continue well after his death in 1991 (though Wikipedia certainly favors contemporary topics).
Next, we aggregated each Miles Davis reference into categories. For example, the Greenwich Village page mentions Miles Davis’ role in the neighborhood’s history. The anecdote on D'Angelo’s Brown Sugar page references his early exposure to Miles Davis via his mother – a clear instance of influence.
We also broke-out Miles Davis references in the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia pages, which suggests he was intimately related to the topic.
Here’s a breakdown of the pages:
life and career - 315 pages with at least one mention in this context
history - 175 pages
opening section - 408 pages
credits - 482 pages
influence - 286 pages
Let’s take a closer look at the influence category, where Miles is referenced as an influence, for example, on the pages for Radiohead’s Kid A and Wilco.
To simplify things, we'll focus on people and recordings, while also removing 265 obscure pages (under 50,000 visits last year)
Let’s take a deeper look at the influence section, examining each of the individual 396 dots. To simplify things, we'll focus on people and recordings, while also removing 50 obscure pages (under 50,000 visits last year).
Who Miles Influenced
Mentions of Miles Davis on Wikipedia as an Influencer of a Person or Recording
1935
2016
Here are the exact quotes from each of the 57 Wikipedia entries of people and recordings that were influenced by Miles Davis.
Highlights include: Carlos Santana, Brian Eno, Flea, Rick James, Prince, Skyzoo, Kendrick Lamar, Radiohead, and Lana Del Ray.
Terry Riley
Riley also cites John Cage and the really great chamber music groups of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, and Gil Evans as influences on his work, demonstrating how he pulled together strands of Eastern music...
Don DeLillo
...DeLillo has also cited the influence of jazz music – guys like Ornette Coleman and Mingus and Coltrane and Miles Davis -and postwar cinema: Antonioni and Godard and Truffaut, and then in the '70s came the Americans,...
Steve Reich
Other important influences are Kenny Clarke and Miles Davis, and visual artist friends such as Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra.
Roy Harper
Harper's earliest musical influences were American blues musician Lead Belly and folk singer Woody Guthrie and, in his teens, jazz musician Miles Davis.
Duane Allman
During this period two of his stated influences were Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
Carlos Santana
...more jazzy, ethereal elements in the music, which were influenced by his fascination with Gábor Szabó, Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders, and John Coltrane, as well as his growing interest in...
Paco de Lucía
According to Gerhard Klingenstein, top jazz musicians who appeared at the festival (i.e. Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk), profoundly influenced de Lucía, and sparked a fascination for jazz that re...
Tim Buckley
...of Albany; at five years old he began listening to his mother's progressive jazz recordings, particularly Miles...
Brian Eno
In 1981, after he returned from Ghana and before making On Land, Robert Quine played him Miles Davis' 1974 track He Loved Him Madly, a melancholy tribute to Duke Ellington influenced by both African music and Karlheinz Stockhausen: as Eno stated in the liner notes for On La...
Donald Fagen
...Fagen regularly took the bus to Manhattan to see Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis...
Lester Bangs
His interests and influences growing up were as wide-ranging as the Beats (particularly William S. Burroughs), jazz musicians like John Coltrane and Miles Davis, comic books, and science fiction.
Rick James
James' mother would take him on her collecting route, and it was in bars where she worked that James got to see performers such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Etta James perform.
Philip Bailey
...in a local R&B band called Friends & Love Some of Bailey's early influences included jazz musicians such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Max Roach, the Motown sound, in particular the music of Stevie Wonder and he...
Verdine White
He grew up listening to recordings of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and other jazz musicians.
Flea (musician)
Flea credits his continued interest in music to jazz performers like Jaco Pastorius, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie.
Al Jourgensen
Jourgensen was raised in Chicago, Illinois and Breckenridge, Colorado, and was a fan of artists such as...Miles Davis.
Prince (musician)
...and started playing original music influenced by Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown, Earth, Wind & Fire, Miles Davis, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, and Todd...
Cindy Blackman
"My dad was into jazz – Miles Davis, Ahmad Jamal, people like that. Blackman's first introduction to the drums happened when she was seven years old in her hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio and attending a pool ...
Joni Mitchell
In accepting the award, Hancock paid tribute to Mitchell as well as to Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
Richard Wright (musician)
Wright's main influence was jazz, particularly Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
Wayne Coyne
Coyne does this to pay homage to a famous picture of Miles Davis who, after a performance, had blood on his suit because a police officer had beaten him during the show.
Chris Botti
He started playing the trumpet at nine-years-old, and committed to the instrument at age 12 when he heard Miles Davis play My Funny Valentine.
Lenny Kravitz
Kravitz's other musical influences at the time included Fela Kuti, Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye, Pharoah Sanders and Miles Davis; John Lennon and Bob Marley proved later to be influential as well.
Sly and the Family Stone
Miles Davis was similarly inspired by the band and worked with Sly Stone on his recordings, resulting in On the Corner; the sartorial and band lineup changes hallmarked jazz fusion.
King Crimson
Loosely influenced by Miles Davis's orchestral collaborations with Gil Evans and Homer's Odyssey, the album also showed signs of a split in styles between Sinfield, who favoured the softer and more textural jazz...
Kyle Eastwood
...to his biography with Hopper Management, Eastwood grew up listening to records by jazz legends such as Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, and the Stan Kenton Big Band with his parents, both jazz...
Myles Kennedy
He has also cited other jazz players John Coltrane, Al Green, Mike Stern, Miles Davis, Otis Redding, Frank Gambale, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, and Curtis Mayfield as early influences.
The Allman Brothers Band
While Betts commented that he was interested in artists such as Howard Roberts prior, Jaimoe really fired us up on it, introducing his bandmates to Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
The Soft Parade
I loved Cannonball Adderly and Miles Davis and John Coltrane...But what Al Kooper did with Blood, Sweat and Tears illustrated how those same ideas could successfully be applied to rock and roll.
Trout Mask Replica
...out to show dem from Steve Reich's Come Out used in Moonlight on Vermont, or a melodic fragment from the Miles Davis recording of Concierto de Aranjuez used as the basis for the bridge of Sugar 'n...
Keith Jarrett
Early improvised solo pieces were recorded live under the guidance of his second mentor Miles Davis at Washington's music club The Cellar Door in December 1970.
At Fillmore East
The performance begins with a long, laconic intro by Betts employing volume swells, reminiscent of the dreamy trumpet used to open songs on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (1959).
Jonny Greenwood
His jazz favourites include Lee Morgan and Miles Davis.
Billy Preston
Miles Davis's album Get Up with It (1974) features a track called Billy Preston in his honor.
Jon Foreman
Foreman cites Elliott Smith, U2, The Police, James Taylor, The Beatles, Radiohead, Bach, Ronny Jordan, Miles Davis, Keith Green, Nirvana, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin as some of his musical influences.
Derek Trucks
...who influenced his early style, but has since been inspired by John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Albert King, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, Wayne Shorter, Toy...
Jamie Cullum
Cullum draws his inspiration from many different musicians and listens to an eclectic mix of music from Miles Davis to Tom Waits and many more.
Rico Love
Influences: Kelly, Queen, Smokey Robinson, Elton John, and Miles Davis.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
The band's influences include Defunkt, Parliament-Funkadelic, Jimi Hendrix, The Misfits, James Brown...and Miles Davis.
Melody Gardot
She has been influenced by such blues and jazz artists as Judy Garland, Janis Joplin, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz and George Gershwin as well as Latin music artists such as Caetano Veloso.
Radiohead
The jazz of Charles Mingus, Alice Coltrane, and Miles Davis, and 1970s krautrock bands such as Can and Neu!, were other major influences during this period.
Kendrick Lamar
Lamar professed to having been influenced by jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and Parliament-Funkadelic during the recording of To Pimp a Butterfly.
Kat Dahlia
Dahlia cites artists BB King, Miles Davis, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Bob Marley, Frank Sinatra, and Celia Cruz as musical influences.
Out of Sight
He drew upon several influences, including Lalo Schifrin, Quincy Jones, Dean Martin, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Willie Bobo.
Dej Loaf
Growing up, she often listened to music with her parents and grandmother, ranging from 2Pac to Rakim to Miles Davis. Her father was killed when she was four years old.
Wilco
Tweedy and O'Rourke enjoyed free jazz artists such as Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and Derek Bailey; they also listen to mainstream jazz by artists such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
Ill Communication
The Beastie Boys were influenced by Miles Davis' jazz rock albums Agharta and On the Corner while recording Ill Communication.
St Germain (musician)
Bob Marley, Toots & the Maytals, Miles Davis and Kool and the Gang are among Ludovic's early influences.
Switchfoot
Guitarist Drw Shirley cites U2, Miles Davis, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Tommy Walker, Phil Keaggy, Michael Jackson, Dave Matthews Band, and the Brand New Heavies, while bassist Tim Foreman pays tribute to Stevie Wonder.
OK Computer
The jazz fusion of Miles Davis (left, in 1986) and political writings of Noam Chomsky (right, in 2005) influenced OK Computer.
The Mars Volta
Influences: they cited artists/bands such as King Crimson, Can, Led Zeppelin, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Larry Harlow, Miles Davis...
Joey Alexander
...Evans and Herbie Hancock among his main musical influences, and also particularly admires Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis, Brad Mehldau, Lee Morgan, Horace Silver and McCoy...
Eric Foreman
Foreman is a fan of jazz music, first shown in the episode Who's Your Daddy?, when Foreman makes a Miles Davis reference, and later in the episode Insensitive, where he plans to attend a jazz festival.
Mark Salling
On October 25, 2010, Salling released a rock/jazz album entitled Pipe Drams, which was inspired by Alice in Chains, Nine Inch Nails, Miles Davis, and Herbie Hancock.
Cheek to Cheek (album)
Two days after her performance at the school, Gaga showed a new tattoo of a Miles Davis trumpet she had gotten earlier.
Lana Del Rey
She revealed that the album would contain fourteen tracks, describing the songs with a muddy trap energy and some inspired by late-night Miles Davis drives.
To Pimp a Butterfly
Lamar professed to having listened often to Miles Davis and Parliament-Funkadelic during the album's recording.
The Miles Davis Estate and Legacy Recordings/Sony Music graciously helped make this article possible (lots of other content to celebrate Miles’ 90th is available here). They’ve also put together a couple playlists to get your Miles groove on: Apple, Spotify.