Though they are no longer on this earth with us; their style, their art, their accomplishments & memory lives on. These icons of the jazz world were more than just musicians, they were true icons that overcame adversity and changed the world as we know it. For many of us, their art still speaks to us from a bygone era. These gentlemen were the coolest of cool.

Miles Davis

“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”

Music, like water, finds its own course- ever flowing, seeking what is new and modern. Water is self-propelled; in music, there are those who arrive, push sound and style forward, and, for a few years, define the latest wave and deliver the newest of the new.

Miles Dewey Davis III- trumpeter, visionary, and eternal modernist- was a force of nature. With an ear that disregarded categories of style, he sought out new musical worlds, and generation followed in his footsteps.

“Don't play what's there; play what's not there.”

Nat “King” Cole

“The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it.”

Nat King Cole did plenty to justify his nickname. He was a true superstar (even before the word was coined) whose enormous appeal transcended boundaries of race, age, gender and musical preference.

Landing eighty-six singles and seventeen albums in the Top Forty between 1943 and 1964, he recorded ballads, jazz instrumentals, foreign language songs, Christmas carols, pop standards and what might now be termed pop rock.

“If you smile through your fear and sorrow, smile and maybe tomorrow you'll see the sun come shining through for you.’

Sammy Davis Jr

“I'd learned a lot in the Army. I knew that above all things in the world I had to become so big, so strong that people and their hatred could never touch me.”

For a staggering 60 years, from his debut as a four year old child star in the late 1920’s to his untimely death in 1990 at the age of 64, he more than justified his title of ‘Mr Entertainment’ and when he wasn’t inspiring headlines on stage he was making news of it, as a founder member of the Rat Pack with fellow superstars Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

The first half of the 60’s saw Sammy swinging with the rest of his pals in Vegas, the likes of which have never been seen by the world since. Adored the world over, he was now labelled The Greatest Entertainer ever. A title that he took very seriously and made it his business to reinforce with every single performance.

In this decade of change he helped elect Kennedy as president only to see him assassinated along with his friend Martin Luther King. He married May Britt, a Swedish born actress only to battle prejudice all over the US where interracial marriage was forbidden by law in 31 states.

1964 saw Sammy star on Broadway with Golden Boy for which he received a Tony Award. Dubbed the hardest working man in show business, Sammy often joked “I don’t think I ever had a chance to sit down in the 60’s”.

“The ultimate mystery is one's own self.”