Why Miles Davis Stopped Playing Music for Five Years

Davis played an appearance at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City on July 1, 1975, as part of the Newport Jazz Festival. After that show, he cancelled all upcoming tours and didn’t step on a stage again for six years.

It came to be known as his “silent period”, between 1975 and 1980. What happened, and why did Miles stop playing music? We’ll give you the details here.

While it was abrupt and unexpected, it didn’t come out of nowhere. Miles had suffered a broken hip and a complicated surgery that left him in terrible pain, and he suffered from other health issues.

But as important as anything else, Miles said he felt spent, creatively and personally. He thought he’d taken Jazz Fusion everywhere he could take it, and felt like he had nowhere left to go with the electric sound he’d popularized.

Finally, Davis was suffering from substance abuse issues. “Cocaine was my mistress,” he said, “I didn’t have no more interest in music. I was just tired of it, tired of the business, tired of the people.”

“I just sat in that house for almost five years… I didn’t even look at a trumpet. I didn’t want to hear music. I didn’t want to see nobody.”
– Miles Davis

During these years, Miles lived reclusively in his brownstone on West 77th Street in New York City. He rarely left, and while he entertained a revolving door of guests, he kept notoriously private, keeping curtains drawn and living in darkness.

In his own words from Miles: The Autobiography, Davis was very candid about his experience: “Sex and drugs took the place music had occupied in my life until then and I did both of them around the clock.”

In his autobiography he explained honestly that he had to “get the horn out of my system” because it had been his master since he was a teenager, and he just wanted to be “Miles” without the trumpet. It is an all-too-relatable sentiment.

Miles credited, in part, his relationship with Cicely Tyson for breaking him from his dark spiral and engaging him in music again. And his family…

Miles’ nephew Vincent Wilburn Jr. was a young musician and began coming to the house with his band to rehearse, at the behest of his mom, Miles sister Dorothy. After hurling musical criticism at the young, ambitious artists for a while, Davis was finally annoyed into playing a phrase on his trumpet to show them how it was done.

…And to his surprise, he’d lost his Embouchure, the toning of the muscles in a horn players’ lips that are necessary to play trumpet, and are developed over time and practice.

Miles Davis couldn’t play trumpet.

But the realization of this loss motivated the jazz legend, rather than discouraged him, and he began practicing his trumpet again in secret to regain his strength.

Miles’ label had also given him a number of advances on future albums, and after five years label coercion to return was ratcheting up.

So in a four-day engagement starting June 26, 1981, Miles Davis made his “comeback” at Kix, a small club in Boston. It was an electric and high-pressure event where he debuted a brand-new, younger band.

He also rejoined with longtime collaborative producer Teo Macero, which helped pull him back into his familiar recording environment.

But what Miles did NOT want to do was go back to the music he’d abandoned.

“I had to learn how to play the trumpet all over again… I had to find a new way to blow.”
– Miles Davis

Influenced by the soul-driven Pop & R&B of the early 80s like Michael Jackson and Prince, Miles found himself playing a simpler and more melodic sound than ever before.

And he recruited the young band that his nephew had put together to record some of the songs with him.

THE MAN WITH THE HORN was released in July, 1981 and had a more pop and funk influenced sound.

Over the following decade until his death in 1991, Miles would release nine more acclaimed studio albums, and three live albums. Throughout all of them, he never stopped changing & innovating his sound.

Next, discover why Miles Davis stopped playing “Kind of Blue” Live

The Fascinating story behind “Miles’ “Kind of Blue”, the best selling jazz album of all time

Here’s Miles Davis’ “The Man With The Horn” from 1981: