Miles Electric Band: Celebrating Miles Davis at 100

Two months after Big Ears 2026 begins, the world will celebrate the centenary of Miles Davis, who repeatedly revolutionized not just jazz but also the way we hear music and possibility every day. More than three decades after his death, Davis remains a lodestar of creative inspiration, of seeing the way things have been and imagining what they may still be. And so it goes, too, for the Miles Electric Band, an amoebic consortium of people who not only played with Miles in that fertile period of fusion and amplification but also those who continue to push in the same new directions he pursued. “My concept,” founder Vincent Wilburn, Jr. once explained, “was to take what Miles was doing and put it in a new space and time.”

In 2023, M.E.B. released That You Not Dare To Forget, a trans-generational collage where players like bassists Ron Carter and Marcus Miller met the likes of guitarists Vernon Reid and John Scofield. They worked around unreleased archival excerpts of Davis’ actual playing, plus modern trumpet masters like Jeremy Pelt and Joe Romano. Wilburn helmed the sessions alongside legendary drummer Lenny White, a key player on Bitches Brew. To celebrate Davis’ impending birthday, Wilburn gathers a new iteration of M.E.B. at Big Ears 2026, the lineup a testament to the band’s mission. Bassist Darryl Jones, who played with Davis before joining The Rolling Stones, meets the likes of DJ Logic, Jean-Paul Bourelly, and Robert Irving III. As Wilburn has said, it is, indeed, “like an all-star game.”