You could sum up Miles Davis’s attitude toward liner notes, discographies, and jazz criticism in general with three words: "Don’t read: listen." Miles didn’t like including liner notes with his recordings. But words love jazz. At least since the hard-bop era of the ’50s, jazz albums have been covered in words (though the practice has abated somewhat lately, with marketers trying to move jazz once again closer to pop). As in classical music, liner notes were used to demystify but also to validate. What better way to establish the seriousness of jazz than to expose its technical content? But Miles didn’t even like listing personnel. Names of people were just another way to name — to label — the music, to predetermine how it will be heard.

The paradox is that Miles remains one of the most-written-about artists in the history of jazz. A casual scan of Amazon turns up 11 biographies of one form or another (including memoirs) since his death in 1991, at the age of 65. And that’s not counting critical monographs and other detailed studies of his music, or the shelf full of books that preceded his death.

But to judge by the evidence of the new biography So What: The Life of Miles Davis, by Yale professor John Szwed (Simon & Schuster, 488 pages, $28), and several other recent books on jazz, there’s still plenty to read, and plenty to write. And if handled well, prose can actually bring us closer to the music, make us want to listen more — to music we haven’t heard, to music we thought we knew.

Of course, there’s another reason, too. "Biographies are about behavior," John Leonard argued in a piece about the Miles-like mythic Bob Dylan. "Caring about the music is what makes our interest in the behavior more than merely prurient."

Szwed gives us the whole boatload of Miles bad behavior — but there’s little here to scandalize those who have already read Miles: The Autobiography (Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1989). He’s still slapping around the bitches he already told us he slapped around (including his wives Frances Taylor and Cicely Tyson). And there’s the mountains of white powder he snorted, the predictable Behind the Music cycle of self-medication, the endless series of ailments — sickle-cell anemia, diabetes, gallstones, broken bones, ulcers, chronic walking pneumonia, degenerative bone ailments that required numerous hip surgeries, and strokes. And there’s the late-’70s five-year "retirement," when Miles holed up, paranoid and drug-addled, in his West 77th Street townhouse, like, Szwed writes, "Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard."

How does all this help explain the music? Probably no more than it ever did. The reconciliation of the brutal, manipulative narcissist with the tender rhapsodist, the creator of one of the most recognizable instrumental voices in jazz, and an indelible body of work, remains confounding. Except that, nasty behavior aside, one loyal friend after another testifies to Miles’s "shyness."

But Szwed doesn’t merely dish the obligatory dirt. Consolidating previous research, and conducting his own interviews with musicians, friends, wives, and children, he comes up with a portrait that feels true to the man and the artist. Davis’s insecurities — his "shyness" — were real, and they accounted for both his brutishness and his tremendous ambition. But Szwed uses the context of the life, the behavior, to give us a fuller sense of the artist at work. The author’s reconstructions of various recording sessions, of the marketing strategies that along with Miles’s own talent and savvy propelled him from Charlie Parker sideman to icon (the face of jazz as well as the image of cool), are revelations. Again and again, Szwed reveals Miles’s astonishing musical intelligence and intuition — his ability to tailor arrangements to a given group of musicians, to edit other musicians’ compositions instantaneously, to "correct" another player’s mistake on stage by supplying just the right complementary note with his horn.

And of course there are the famous Miles epigrams. To John Coltrane when Trane complained that he had trouble ending his solos: "Try taking the horn out of your mouth." To John McLaughlin at the In a Silent Way sessions: "Play like you don’t know how to play." To saxophonist Dave Liebman: "Finish before you’re done." And, speaking in anticipation of untold hundreds of would-be jazz renegades, to Wynton Marsalis: "So here’s the police."

Szwed confirms the image of Miles as supremely in command of his music even when his life was chaos. But he also confirms another cliché of genius: that Miles was always able to see the music simultaneously whole and in all its parts, including his own role as soloist. On stage he was composer, arranger, conductor, performer — and doing it all on the spot.

Szwed even gives Miles a touching reprieve, as the physically crumbling master feels the end is near and begins to get in touch with his old friends and to look back for the first time. And there’s a bit of haunting poetry when Miles lists his ailments to an interviewer from Le Monde and complains that he has "no stomach left. . . . I no longer have eyes, nothing. Just a face . . . severe, straight, like the face of my mother."

ASHLEY KAHN comes at the jazz biography from another angle. As he did in Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (Da Capo, 2000), Kahn gives us the biography of a single work. In A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Work (Viking, 293 pages, $27.95), he takes us into the minutiae of the recording process — but like Szwed, he has a knack for putting the work in the context of the artist’s life, and that life in context of the history of jazz and of African-American history itself. We see how jazz records were marketed to college students; we experience Coltrane’s well-documented religious awakening, and we’re taken through the preparation, both musical and spiritual, that led to the creation of this 1965 recording.

Perhaps what’s most interesting is the way A Love Supreme was originally received — by those college students and by other jazz musicians. Saxophonist Frank Lowe heard the album as a kind of "urbanized" spiritual. Producer Joel Dorn, who was a jazz DJ in Philadelphia at the time, recalls, "There was a spiritual response. . . . It wasn’t just the record — Giant Steps and My Favorite Things were big jazz records, and established Trane as a legitimate giant — but he became this spiritual slash political slash iconic something."

That "iconic something" is what New York Times critic Ben Ratliff has a clear bead on throughout his remarkable Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings (Times Books, 271 pages, $16). Ratliff is refreshingly unbuttoned here outside the pages of journalism’s great Gray Lady. And he cheats on the unstated rules of such "list" books. An entry from his "100 most important recordings" can be a single out-of-print album or an eight-CD set. Listing in chronological order, he admits to favoring post–World War II recordings, and you can argue from here to Miles’s house about the inclusions and omissions.

But the joy is in each of these 800-word essays. Like Miles, Ratliff has a genius for seeing a work simultaneously in detail and in its historical context. His descriptions enliven technical detail with metaphor, and the life of the artist with pithy storytelling, salty, enlightening personal prejudices, and a keen historical and musical awareness. Coltrane’s Live in Japan is "a landmark of terrifying stamina." In "China Boy," Benny Goodman’s "ascent into the high register is palpable, like a time-elapsed film of a tree shooting out of the ground." Of the Chet Baker 1955 Paris recordings, he writes, "That strange drifting feeling, as if tonality is all relative and the established rhetoric of exits and entrances is for squares, meant only one thing in the 1950s: heroin."

Yes, Ratliff understands jazz history as "a series of great stories," but he also has a sense of what those stories mean. Throughout these 100 essays, he argues that the most vital jazz often compels us to ask what jazz is. And he sees the music in a continuum of high and low culture. Of Parker’s recordings with strings, he asks, "But what is jazz if not a complete confusion of popular and esoteric, highbrow and middlebrow and even lowbrow?" Considering the career of Pat Metheny, he says, "There’s a rare dualism here — the narrow, academic, chess-club concentration of the Boston guitar school and Metheny’s natural disposition toward making music that sounds popular." He also has plenty of heart, as when he writes about Betty Carter that "she made you feel her commitment to the idea that all successes are hard-won, and you were flattered that such an imposing person was working so hard for your benefit."

ALL UNHAPPY JAZZ STORIES, though, are unhappy in their own way, and there probably aren’t any sadder than that of Nelson Riddle (1921-1985). Riddle made his name as an arranger for Nat "King" Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney (with whom he had a lengthy affair), Linda Ronstadt (on her "standards" recordings of the early ’80s), and, most famously, Frank Sinatra. And as an arranger, he was a second banana in every way. He was a passable jazz trombonist and an unprolific original composer; his specialty was orchestrating other people’s music. He began as a big-band arranger, but his genius was in setting songs for singers, and nowhere can you hear that better than on Sinatra’s "I’ve Got You Under My Skin," where Frank’s voice is carried from one peak to another, a beautifully arranged brass chorus leading to Milt Bernhart’s now legendary trombone solo.

But the arranger’s job is a thankless one, as Peter J. Levinson writes in September in the Rain: The Life of Nelson Riddle (Billboard Books, 320 pages, $21.95). Such journeymen were paid by the piece, or they worked as house arrangers, cranking out material on demand, often trying to turn sows’ ears into silk purses. The crooner Al Martino recalls of Riddle, "When he wrote for me, the tunes were nowhere as good as his charts."

Levinson drums up a song for his unsung hero, but Riddle comes off as a moody alcoholic, as responsible for his travails as anyone. When Sinatra moves on to find other arrangers, other sounds, it seems a natural part of his own artistic search. But Riddle takes it as a personal injury. A weak orchestra conductor, and never able to find his niche as a composer of soundtracks, he toils in a purgatory between fame and obscurity. Levinson’s last biographical subject, Harry James, had his own unhappy demise, but at least he compelled as a one-time jazz-pop superstar. The author’s next subject, who will complete this "swing trilogy," is big-band leader Tommy Dorsey. Levinson’s valuable, dogged research may not be uncovering lives as compelling as Davis’s, but like Szwed, Kahn, and Ratliff, he changes how you listen.