Davis played on some of Parker's finest sessions but he was something of a tentative, even ambivalent, bopper, because he couldn't play as high or as fast as Gillespie. He was searching for a mellower, less frenetic approach to bop, and found it in "cool" jazz, a style he developed in the late 1940s with the Canadian-born orchestrator Gil Evans. So fervently did he believe in his own vision that, at twenty-three, he turned down an offer from Duke Ellington.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Davis assembled bands that were notable for their startling contrasts of personnel, like the pairing in his late 1950s sextet of John Coltrane, a tenor saxophonist with a furiously probing gnarled style, and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, a buoyant, sweet-toned alto player who always sounded as if he'd just gotten out of church.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Davis assembled bands that were notable for their startling contrasts of personnel, like the pairing in his late 1950s sextet of John Coltrane, a tenor saxophonist with a furiously probing gnarled style, and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, a buoyant, sweet-toned alto player who always sounded as if he'd just gotten out of church.
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