Legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, pictured here in 1959, is the subject of a new exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In the dozens of photographs of Miles Davis currently on display at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), the iconic trumpeter rarely smiles.

'He was very, very conscious of his image. He didn’t want to be an object, to be ghettoized.'

— curator Nathalie Bondil on late jazz trumpeter Miles Davis

“He was very, very conscious of his image. He didn’t want to be a cheerful Uncle Tom figure. He was the first pop star of jazz,” explains Nathalie Bondil, the MMFA’s charismatic director, who brought the Paris exhibit We Want Miles: Miles Davis vs Jazz to Montreal for its North American debut.

“He wanted to impose his own image. He didn’t want to be an object, to be ghettoized.”

While Davis (1926-1991) controlled his media persona, he cut loose when he played. In designing this exhibit, the curators rightly understood that the only way to convey his genius was to immerse viewers in his music.

A detail from Live, a painting by Mati Klarwein, used as the front cover of Davis's 1971 album Live/Evil. (Galerie Albert Benamou/MMFA)

“We wanted his music to be at the centre of this show. This is a radical shift for us,” says Bondil, dressed head to toe in black, including a satiny shirt and a faux fur vest. (The natty Davis would surely have approved of Bondil’s style.)

The rigorously curated We Want Miles soundscape, which was originally developed by scholars at France’s Cité de la Musique, continues Bondil’s controversial and highly publicized exploration of pop art and music. The MFFA’s new director first blasted her vision through the museum’s hallowed halls in 2008 with the highly successful Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol’s Work, and continued the next year with Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John and Yoko. “Music helps us to interpret art. And for Miles, the process of creating music was the centre of who he was,” says Bondil.

We Want Miles divides his life into eight periods – and a dizzying 25 “themes.” There are 350 works of art, including some mediocre paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and extraordinary portraits by Annie Leibovitz, Irving Penn and Anton Corbijn. The museum has also organized a series of lectures, concerts, workshops and film screenings dedicated to Davis’ life. Also on display is an immense, multi-coloured tile sculpture of Davis by artist Niki de Saint Phalle; a selection of his flashy designer waistcoats; numerous musical scores; album covers; family photographs; Louis Malle’s 1957 film Frantic, for which Davis wrote the score; and a number of the musician’s not very interesting paintings and drawings. Thankfully, the sound of jazz guides the viewer through the at times exhausting cacophony of material amassed to honour Davis’s life.

Miles Davis in a pool, 1988, by Anthony Barboza, part of the We Want Miles exhibition. (Anthony Barboza Collection/MMFA)

The curators transformed an entire wing of the MMFA into a series of dark, carpeted spaces — perhaps to recreate the sensual atmosphere of a smoky jazz hall. The moment I entered the exhibit, the photographs and music from the St. Louis jazz clubs in which Davis started out transported me to the early 1940s.

Within the main exhibit are a number of smaller listening rooms – Bondil refers to them as “sourdines,” the French word for the dampers musicians use to mute the sound of their instruments. The sound engineers who mounted the exhibit were clearly an obsessive lot, and their commitment to Davis’s music is obvious in the intimate, comfortable sourdines, which feature surround sound and plush circular couches to stretch out on.

“Music is experienced differently than art,” says Bondil. “It takes much more time. We wanted to allow for that.”

And that’s what this exhibit requires: time. While it’s possible to whiz through We Want Miles by glancing at the photos and video footage and reading digestible bits of jazz history, its set-up also invites us to lounge around. I could have spent days there.

The statue Miles Davis, by Niki de Saint-Phalle, is part of the museum's exhibition. (Jean-Francois Briere/MMFA)

In each sourdine, we are immersed in the music of a specific period in Davis’s career: the be-bop he learned from playing with Harlem jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the mid-1940s; the smooth, orchestral sounds of The Birth of Cool (1957), which he developed with long-time collaborator Gil Evans; the electric jazz-rock album Bitches Brew (1969), the sessions for which took place a week after Woodstock; and the funk-inspired album On the Corner (1972), his attempt to draw in young blacks attracted by the sound of Sly Stone and James Brown.

Davis was continually confronting jazz and therefore changing its form, writes the chief curator of the show, the Cité de la Musique’s Vincent Bessières. “He set out on a new course every five years….he lost his audience. Found another, lost that one – and won over yet another. When Miles shed his skin, you just had to keep up with him.” Bessières writes that even after dedicating years of his life to mounting the show, the jazz great remains a mystery to him.

In 1975, at nearly 50, the hard-living Davis withdrew from the spotlight. His personal life was a mess and his health was failing. The master of reinvention resurfaced in 1981 with Man with the Horn, which featured a line-up of younger players, including guitarist Mike Stern and bassist Marcus Miller. Man with the Horn was his first album to skirt the top 60 on the Billboard album chart since Bitches Brew (1969). In 1985, Davis released You’re under Arrest, an album that included two ballad covers that would be staples of his performances for the remainder of his career: Michael Jackson’s Human Nature and Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time.

I Can U Can't, a 1990 painting by Miles Davis. (Alex Krassovsky/MMFA)

“He renewed himself with different types of music: Classical music, rock music, funk. He was drawn to Prince, to Michael Jackson,” says Bondil. “Through his career we see the trajectory, the history of black music in the U.S. In a way he incarnates that story.”

Confronted with the dozens of images of Davis lining the exhibit's walls, I was struck by how consistently stern, macho and powerful he looked. Often referred to as the Prince of Darkness, Davis developed a persona in opposition to the image of the smiling, ingratiating jazz player offered to white audiences by Louis Armstrong in the 1930s. (Davis was fond of telling journalists not to ask him any stupid questions.) Through his stance, his attitude and his clothing – from his well-tailored suits to his outrageous lamé capes – Davis projected the image of a proud, free yet arrogant black musician.

“He was not born a poor man. He came from a bourgeoisie family and he was very racially conscious. He refused to identify himself in terms of how white people perceived him,” says Bondil.

On the same floor as the We Want Miles show is an exhibit about another strong and flamboyant history maker, Napoleon. As we walked by it, Bondil mused that perhaps Davis, who had a penchant for elaborate clothing, would have enjoyed wearing one of the emperor’s distinctive hats.

“But he probably would have refused to wear someone else’s hat, even if it was Napoleon's. Miles would have made his own version, in his own style.”

We Want Miles: Miles Davis vs Jazz runs to Aug. 29 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Patricia Bailey is a writer based in Montreal.