Conference Agenda

Known today as one of the vanguards of jazz, Wynton Marsalis gained fame in the early 1980s as a trumpet prodigy in jazz and classical music. Like many, Marsalis looked up to Miles Davis, who had been at the forefront of jazz trumpeting for decades. By the 1980s, Davis was well into his controversial “electric era,” where he pushed his music on through funk, rock, and pop, a turn that Marsalis disapproved of. Due to their fame and conflicting interests, Davis and Marsalis often spoke and spat about each other through popular interviews and magazines. In 1986, Marsalis eclipsed Davis as “trumpet player of the year” in DownBeat (Lange 1986). Despite their media feud, Davis and Marsalis interacted in person only once. At the 1986 Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Marsalis uninvitedly walked on stage and played during Davis’s performance.

The circulation of accounts and responses to the 1986 “encounter” has contributed to a convoluted cartoon that does not represent what might have actually happened (Marsalis 2015). These popular receptions are based on a conflict between so-called jazz traditionalists (like Marsalis) and so-called jazz evolutionists (like Davis). Several scholars write about jazz in terms of this tradition-evolution dialectic: as a “changing same,” (Baraka 1963) an “entire…avant-garde movement” (Washington 2004), or an “intratextual discourse” (Barzel 2012). However, the nature of the Davis-Marsalis conflict is far more complex.

In this paper, I investigate how Davis and Marsalis each fail to represent this dialectic and are ideologically self-contradictory. Drawing from jazz critics, newspapers, interviews, Davis’s autobiography, Maraslis’s biography, and academic scholarship, I assemble the material and ideological histories of their feud, their meeting, and the conflict’s legacy. In 1986, Davis and Marsalis are at odds, but across timelines, there is harmony in their ideologies and aesthetics. For example, in a 1986 interview, David Murray heard a 1964 Davis recording and confused it for a Marsalis performance, incorrectly parsing subtleties between the two (Mandel 1986). Through lenses of ideology, class, genre, and respect, I disentangle the histories and legacies of this conflict to complicate and reinterpret this notorious moment in jazz history.