The 2006 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony was, by all accounts, something a mess. Blondie feuded onstage over which former members would be allowed to perform, and the Sex Pistols boycotted the whole thing. In the middle of it all was a jazz trumpeter, inducted fifteen years after his death.
At first glance, Miles Davis in a rock hall of fame looks like a category error. In practice, the category was the problem, not the musician. By 2006 his influence had spread so far beyond jazz — into rock, funk, fusion, electronic music and hip-hop — that no single genre could reasonably claim him, and the Hall’s decision felt less like a stretch than a long-overdue admission. In fact, he was inducted in his first year of eligibility—a sign of just how widely his influence was recognised beyond jazz.
Few twentieth-century musicians changed the direction of modern music as many times as Miles Davis did, and by the time the Hall got round to him, most of those directions had already been absorbed into the rock world it was built to celebrate.
The induction also produced one of the best speeches the Hall has hosted. If you know Miles mainly through Kind of Blue, you might picture a cool, remote figure who gave little away. Herbie Hancock, who inducted him, remembered something more useful: the working bandleader.
His best story (taken from the video below) concerns a night when Hancock, still in his early twenties and playing in Miles’ quintet, hit a badly wrong chord in the middle of one of Miles’ solos. Miles paused, then played notes that made the wrong chord right. He didn’t treat it as a mistake, Hancock explained — he heard it as something that had happened, part of the reality of that moment, and took it as his responsibility to find what fit. Hancock has said the lesson stayed with him for the rest of his career, and that it applied to considerably more than music.
There’s an irony to the induction worth pausing on. Miles helped define modern jazz in the 1950s and 60s, then spent the following decade looking past it.
By the end of the 1960s he was listening hard to Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and James Brown, absorbing their rhythms, their amplified sound and their audiences, and reworking all of it into something that belonged to nobody else. Hancock has admitted that Miles’ record collection changed his own listening habits: he was a jazz and classical purist until he noticed Hendrix and Beatles sleeves lying around, and figured that if Miles thought it was worth hearing, it probably was.
The records that came out of that period — In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, On the Corner — alienated plenty of jazz fans on release, and some critics accused him of abandoning the music altogether. History has been kinder. Those same albums are now among the most influential ever made, cited by jazz musicians, rock bands, producers and hip-hop artists alike, and the list of sidemen who passed through his electric bands — John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Herbie Hancock again — reads like a founding roster of 1970s fusion. Miles didn’t cross genres so much as ignore the fences everyone else insisted were there.
That restlessness ran through his whole career, not just the electric years. He helped shape the birth of the cool alongside Gil Evans at the end of the 1940s, was central to the development of modal jazz on Kind of Blue a decade later, and then drove his second great quintet — Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams — into territory acoustic jazz hadn’t touched.
Each time audiences and critics settled into the new sound, he abandoned it for something else. Most artists spend a lifetime perfecting one musical language; Miles seemed more interested in inventing the next one, which may be why musicians from every corner of the industry still treat him as the standard measure of artistic nerve.
Writing in the Hall’s induction programme, the historian Ashley Kahn called him “a force of nature,” and it’s hard to improve on that — not for the trumpet playing, or even the bands, but for the flat refusal to become a museum piece. Whenever the musical world thought it had him figured out, he was already somewhere else.
If you’ve never heard Hancock’s speech, it’s worth seven minutes of your day. Two decades on, it still does what the best tributes do: it swaps the untouchable icon for the man who pushed, frustrated and transformed the musicians around him. And it goes some way to explaining how a jazz trumpeter ended up in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — in the same class as the band that refused to turn up.
