The Guardian view on 100 years after Miles Davis’s birth: why he still shapes modern music | Editorial

The trumpeter, composer and band leader still towers over jazz because he treated reinvention not as a betrayal, but as necessary for its survival The space reserved for Miles Davis in the pantheon of 20th-century music is not simply because he mastered jazz, but because he refused to let it stand still. As musicians and fans mark the centenary of his birth , Davis’s work still feels limitless. “I always thought that music had no boundaries,” he wrote in his 1989 autobiography, “no limits to whe