Music - Richard Cook cuts the coolest jazzman down to size

Miles Davis has been dead for ten years, yet he hovers over jazz like a ghost who won't go away. For someone who didn't suffer fools gladly at any time in his life (and particularly white ones), it is a curious posthumous fate: the baleful anti-socialite trumpeter, summoned back into the conversation every time someone starts to debate the future of the music - as in "Oh, if only we had someone like Miles to show us the way".

The cult of Miles Davis is to jazz what The Beatles are to rock: a mixed legacy, endlessly recycled for audiences too lazy to seek musical satisfaction further afield. If you have a token jazz record at home, chances are it will be Kind of Blue - his epochal 1959 session, which is supposed to have ushered in "modal" jazz - or the equally invulnerable Sketches of Spain, a sequence of transcriptions of neoclassical pieces arranged by Gil Evans for a studio orchestra, with Davis as the soloist. Like Revolver and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, these records are so timeless that they seem to evade criticism. Even better, they are art music, not sullied by the deep-seated cynicism that attends the rock business. If he had never cracked another note, Davis would have assured his immortality with these sets.

But he went on - and on. He began as a tyro bebopper, emigrating to New York from his St Louis home and seeking out the fast company of Charlie Parker. His association with Parker must have got Davis through many doors early on. (Years later, Davis told me: "After he died, they asked me to say something nice about Bird. I said, 'Fuck Bird'.") At the end of the 1940s, toying with how best to put his limited technique into an effective setting, Davis came up with a short-lived band whose modest recordings have since been dubbed The Birth of the Cool. In the mid-1950s, he established a quintet which had the potential to be the greatest small group in jazz, with the saxophonist John Coltrane as his front-line colleague. However, Coltrane's problems with heroin were so bad that Davis had to fire him. In the end, Davis got him back, in time for Kind of Blue, along with the pianist Bill Evans and the alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley.

Evans, in particular, was an enormous influence on Kind of Blue. For years, Davis claimed credit for arguably the most effective piece on the record, the deep, limpid "Blue in Green", but the tune belonged to Evans. Moreover, the melodious feel of the session, with its basis in certain modes that offered an alternative to chord-based improvising, seems so harmoniously akin to Evans's jazz that he might almost have been directing from the piano. But Davis disliked giving away credit.

Through the Sixties and up to another watershed with the "invention" of jazz-rock, Davis continued to demonstrate his ability to orchestrate rather than innovate. His quintet with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams and Ron Carter established itself as the premier group in jazz performance, and their recordings are superlative documents. Facing up to the challenge of rock's rising supremacy, Davis became ever more inscrutable in his own playing, yet he fed off the brilliance of his young sidemen. Saxman Shorter provided most of the material, pianist Hancock found a position between comping for the band and rendering the most ingenious solos, and drummer Williams, a teenager at the time of his arrival in the group, was part of a revolution in jazz drumming, moving between straight time and the most advanced rhythmical ideas without any apparent strain. If you want to hear the great, creative Miles Davis, this is where to go.

Davis, however, was dissatisfied, as he watched the hitherto teenage rock market begin to turn into a mature, album-orientated audience. With the arrival of Jimi Hendrix, Davis was dismayed: he was no longer the coolest black musician on the planet. At the end of the Sixties, he decided he wanted a piece of that action, and he began to hire a new generation of young bucks: Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette. And so emerged the likes of Bitches Brew, the jazz-rock marathon that set up the great trap into which so many musicians have subsequently toppled: fusion. Davis sat in the eye of this storm with a kind of Machiavellian satisfaction. Armed only with his trumpet, he stood in the middle of what were often vast, noisy groups, and refereed the music with a clutch of choice notes. At the end of his life, he was playing tunes by Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson, which was either a triumph of anti-snobbery or the effect of looking at the Billboard charts for too long.

Better than any other jazz musician of his generation, Davis understood the business of music. He always had an armoury of quotable quotes, such as "I have to change, it's like a curse", which press flunkies have seized on ever since. Although a middle-class black from a family affluent enough to pay for him to go to the Julliard School of Music, nobody was quicker to play the downtrodden artist. Mystique was something he gorged on: as solitary as Garbo, he still craved notoriety. The taciturn, brittle personality only fuelled the interest. The cult of "Miles", his surname falling into neglect, began to narcotise an audience who wanted to get close to the one great jazz celebrity.

In the meantime, Davis frequently lived a life of excess that would tax any rock star. His as-told-to autobiography is an exhausting memoir in which he belittles fellow musicians, critics and almost any woman who ever crossed his path with wearying consistency. (Before the book appeared, I had asked him if there was one in the pipeline: "Ah, the trouble is, I'd have to think about all those bitches.")

Like Frank Sinatra, whose career he closely observed, Davis was clever at being a saint one minute and a cruel despot the next. And, like Duke Ellington, Davis outlived his time. The usual blather that he was always ahead of the game hardly stands up to dispassionate scrutiny: he did little after 1975 - aside from the beautiful Aura, a concerto setting akin to a modern Sketches of Spain - that stands even close to the best of his earlier music, and much of it now sounds as dated as the rest of Eighties pop. The final irony for a man who despised the word "jazz" is that his records have kept the jazz departments of record shops ticking along, even when nothing else has been selling. Because he was Miles, man.

The Miles Davis Story is on Channel 4 on Saturday 14 April at 8pm, concluding on Sunday 15 April at 7.10pm

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