Miles Davis played the blues on his first recording date-in late April 1945, a month before his nineteenth birthday. On these recordings, he performs as a sideman in a sextet accompanying the dancer, comedian, and rhythm-and-blues singer Rubberlegs Williams. 1 Three of the four pieces they recorded were twelve-bar blues. One of them, a tune called ''Bring It on Home,'' features a straightforward R&B style whose standard harmonic palette serves as a foundation for a conventional poetic structure of AAB verses and a bereft lover's plea for the return of ''my woman and my used-tobe.'' Behind the vocal, Davis plays a muted obbligato that sounds so far away from the center of musical action that he might be in a neighboring practice room. A close listening reveals a musician steeped in bebop gestures, including scurrying doubletime passages and upper extensions of chords, such as major sevenths and ninths, that stand outside conventional rhythm and blues playing of the period. 2 In short, the recording contains the seeds of a creative tension that charged Miles Davis's entire career.The recording session took place around the time Davis's Juilliard cohorts were studying for final exams. Davis himself, however, had effectively dropped out from his formal schooling. It was not as if he couldn't handle academic challenges. Davis's biographer, John Szwed, saw the first-semester's report card at a public exhibit at Juilliard. The record shows that Davis earned a solid B average-despite a D in music history-in a varied curriculum that balanced applied and academic studies. 3 Although some of his biographers, and even Davis himself, later belittled what the school had to offer, he had taken his Juilliard studies seriously at first, and he despised what he later called the ''ghetto mentality'' of his jazz peers who disdained classical scores and music theory as oppressive symbols of white culture. 4 , between his Juilliard teachers-whom he claimed ''weren't teaching me nothing''-and his attitudes toward music learning, including music theory and the library scores he borrowed (from ''all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Prokofiev''). These statements appear on the same pages of the autobiography.

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