If you tuned into "Morning Edition" this, well... morning, you may have heard an eye and ear-opening story on how jazz trumpeter Miles Davis' playing style influenced a generation of players in the rock and jazz fusion worlds. Everything from Santana to Dead-head style jam bands. Several writers are assessing Davis' considerable musical legacy on the occasion of him being inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. Jazz chronicler Stanley Crouch has this chewy set of observations about where Miles came from as part of an essay titled "Miles Davis, Romantic Hero" in today's Slate:

Davis became a matinee idol in the mid-1950s when dark-skinned men were beginning to break through the barriers that kept them from being seen in romantic roles or thought of as superb interpreters of love songs. Davis shared this moment with Sidney Poitier and Nat Cole, but his persona included something that neither of theirs did. Following Charlie Parker, in whose band he did some of his earliest work, Davis was moody. He gave the impression that he was not even interested in being known, especially by white folks. The trumpeter was not given to any aspect of the minstrel tradition that has dogged the Negro artist for over a hundred years and has most recently restated itself in the jigaboo antics of rap videos... It was not that Davis did not smile as much as the fact that Davis, like Parker, did not consider smiling part of his job.

Read on in the essay of how Miles did manifest emotion and personal revelation -- from wounded to reverential to sexually intimate -- in the only way it really mattered. He became a cultural idol as a result.