Glass Ceilings, not just hovering over women's heads.

Miles Davis had many of the same struggles as other jazz musicians of his time; he did drugs, struggled as an artist, and had to continuously push racial boundaries. One of the struggles he mentions continuously through his Auto Biography is white jazz critics. Critics put down every new development in Jazz until it became popular, then they would claim to be the ones who discovered it. This struggle with white critics is a reflection of larger pressing racial issues. As the African American population gained more and more freedoms the White population tried to maintain more and more control. As jazz became more and more popular white musicians went from disregarding jazz and not even music, to playing it themselves, and they went from condemning jazz musicians to claiming to be the ones that discovered them. Davis discusses this when talking about the beginning of bebop, 

“After bebop became the rage, white music critics tried to act like they discovered it-and us-down on 52nd Street. That kind of dishonest shit makes me sick to my stom-ach. And when you speak out on it or don't go along with this racist bullshit, then you become a radical, a black troublemaker. Then they try to cut you out of everything. But the musicians and the people who really loved and respected bebop and the truth know that the real thing happened up in Harlem, at Minton's.” (pg. 56)
Not only did critics try to take claim for what wasn't theirs, but they would ruin the images of any artist who tried to argue. African American artists were constantly under the thumb of white society, but it they tried to ask for equality they were looked down on as radicals, stuck under the glass ceiling of racism but pressed right up against it.

I sang in a jazz choir in high school and was very interested in the culture and music. I sang countless jazz songs and studied the style but I never realized how large a part racial issues played. I never really thought about jazz as the scene of a racial struggle. I also assumed that jazz was always cool. I never thought it was looked down on by classically trained musicians and critics. The image you get from seeing Louis Armstrong sing with Barbra Streisand in Hello Dolly, hearing Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra songs in every wedding playlist and romantic movie, and looking at art deco style paintings of jazz bands, is that Jazz artists were the trendsetters and icons of their time. This they were, but this was in spite of constantly pushing against the glass ceiling of racism. With this in mind, the development of jazz is that much more impressive.