Known for his gorgeous, lyrical tone as a trumpeter, Miles Davis was also the most radically innovative jazz artist of the post-war era. After working with Charlie Parker in the late '40s, Davis launched his prolific career as a bandleader. In the '50s, he pioneered cool jazz and hard bop, and the lush improvisations of 1959's Kind of Blue launched a modal jazz revolution. Pushing the complexity of acoustic jazz to its limit in the early '60s, he pioneered jazz fusion on 1970's Bitches Brew, mixing jazz, rock, and funk into a fiery electric sound he'd explore until his death in 1991.