Daily · Dreamtime

Miles Davis, who flirted with rock from the late 1960's on, will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tonight. The view of the trumpeter as rock star is not shared by all.

Davis, who died in 1991, was finally unsentimental about jazz, yet he respected many of its forms. With rock he could be more instinctive, brusque, shocking, mystifying, wasteful. With "In a Silent Way," from 1969, he did want his music to sound "like rock." He said as much in his 1989 memoir, though at the time he was fantastically dismissive about the issue. ("What's a rock 'n' roll band?" he sneered at a journalist in 1970. "The only rock I know is the rock of cocaine.")