Miles Davis – Du bebop au hip-hop par Luca Cerchiari

Italy is a land of musicologists, at least when it comes to jazz.

Personally, I know a few of them quite well: Francesco Martinelli, Luca Vitali, Vincenzo Martorella, Franco Faienz… whose works, unfortunately, have not been translated into French. But now I’ve discovered another one, whom I knew nothing about, and one of whose books has just been translated into French: Luca Cerchiari.

It must be said that his biography of Miles Davis comes at just the right time to celebrate the centennial of the trumpeter’s birth. It must also be said that this particularly substantial biography (over 500 pages), which reads like a novel, is a true departure from Miles’s autobiography (published well before his death) or the biography by British trumpeter Ian Carr, who is, incidentally, a fan of his American predecessor. Indeed, Cerchiarisituates Miles within his historical context by opening his book with a first—and fascinating—chapter titled “African-American Music Between Orality and Writing.” This is followed by ten chronological chapters that explore in detail Miles’s career and his musical and ideological choices, concluding with the trumpeter’s legacy.

Comprehensive, then, but never tedious—and superbly translated by Stéphanie Acquette, who is a musician herself, and it shows !—because Cerchiari never imposes his musical knowledge on us: he shares it with his readers, encouraging them to move beyond simply listening to the music mentioned to a form of analysis that enriches their perception of it.

This comprehensiveness also encourages us to go and listen—or listen again—to the body of work that constitutes the discography of the musician who has most thoroughly explored the various facets of the jazz idiom “From bebop to hip-hop,” as the subtitle of this magnificent biography indicates.

One does not, therefore, emerge unscathed from this reading, and whether you are a novice unfamiliar with Miles Davis’s work, a fan of one of his periods to the exclusion of others, or a die-hard fan and collector of the trumpeter’s entire discography, you will always find in this biography something to satisfy your curiosity and deepen your understanding of Miles’s work and the idiom in which it is rooted, while also introducing you to the trumpeter’s fellow musicians: from Charlie Parker to Marcus Miller, including John Coltrane, Gil Evans, Quincy Jones or Teo Macero. Luca Cerchiari offers us a journey through more than half a century of jazz via the career of one of the musicians who has contributed most to shaping the sound of these past decades—not as a celebration of a “genius,” but by delving deeply into the musical body of work and its socio-historical context to shed light on its many facets.

A truly beautiful book, a must-read for everyone.

Miles Davis – Du bebop au hip-hop by Luca Cerchiari (translation into French Stéphanie Acquette) Editions Frémeaux & associés. May 2026.