Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool is a fascinating look at the man behind the legendary music that changed jazz forever. The American Masters documentary by Stanley Nelson features interviews with Davis' collaborators, bandmates, and family members, plus some incredible archival footage that illuminates his visionary career.

Here’s what I learned when I watched Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, which airs on WGBH 2 on Tuesday, February 25 and WORLD Channel on Saturday, February 29.

Early in his career, Davis studied classical music by day and jazz by night in New York City.

Davis attended the famed Juilliard School, where he was trained in music theory and piano. It was during his time in New York that he started exploring 52nd Street, the epicenter of Manhattan’s jazz club scene. He stumbled upon Charles “Yardbird” Parker Jr., and would eventually share the stage and record with him.

His sound was like nothing the world had ever heard before.

"Pleasure," "romance," "beauty," "lyricism." Those are just some of the words used to describe Davis’ sound in the film. Early in his career, Davis won people over by just playing and holding one note on his trumpet. Herbie Hancock described it sounding “like a stone skipping across the pond.”

He spent his formative years in post-war Paris.

Jazz was a new sound for a new era in world history. In the late 1940s, Davis spent time in Paris and met many cultural icons like Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre. It’s also where he could get away from American racism. “Paris is where I understood that all white people aren’t the same… I was living in an illusion of possibility,” Davis says in the film. But he experienced profound disappointment coming home. “It was hard for me to come back to the BS white people put a black person through…I started to drift. Before I knew it, I had a heroin addiction. That’s all I lived for.”

He had a breakout moment at the Newport Jazz Festival.

The second ever Newport Jazz Festival in 1955 provided Davis with a chance to win over legions of new fans. He walked on stage, put his trumpet right up to the microphone and played his way into the history of jazz music. Executives from Columbia Records were in the crowd, and his career took off.

That raspy voice was the result of a medical procedure.

Throughout the documentary, we hear Davis talk about his life and career in his own words — that is, in his distinctly raspy voice. That gravelly voice contributed to his general aura of coolness and mystery. But it was actually the result of an operation he had in 1955 to remove a non-cancerous polyp on his larynx.

He completely improvised the soundtrack to Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. It made the film famous.

Davis was enlisted to create the soundtrack for the 1957 French film, and showed up to record it without doing any preparation. The documentary features some incredible footage of Davis playing his trumpet in front of a screening of the film, playing as he reacted to what was happening to the characters on screen. He had this to say about improvisation: “If you’ve got some great musicians, they will deal with the situation and play beyond what is there and above where they think they can.”

Davis and his wife were basically American royalty.

When Davis first saw dancer Frances Taylor walking on the street, he said to her: “Now that I’ve found you, I’ll never let you go.” They fell in love, got married, and became a stylish couple on the New York social scene, representing glamour, sophistication, and general coolness. Later, Davis advocated that Columbia Records feature more black women on his album covers, and Taylor appeared on Davis’ album Someday My Prince Will Come.

His album Kind of Blue changed the sound of jazz.

In 1959, Davis released Kind of Blue with Columbia Records, and it became one of Davis’ masterpieces. It featured young saxophonist John Coltrane, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, pianist Bill Evans, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb. It was described as inventive, ingenious and incendiary and was an immediate success and launched Davis into mainstream music fame and mystique. “We didn’t want to play with Miles Davis, we wanted to be Miles Davis,” says musician Lenny White about Davis’ rising star.

He became a pro at fusing jazz with all kinds of genres, from flamenco to funk to rock.

Davis’ wife Frances spent time as a dancer in Barcelona, where she became enraptured by flamenco music and dance. She encouraged Miles to listen, and they “were taken by it.” Davis released Sketches of Spain in 1960 and embraced the worldly sounds. “The hardest thing for me to do on Sketches of Spain [was] to play the parts on the trumpet while someone was supposed to be singing, especially when it was ad libbed. I had to be both joyous and sad.”

Toward the end of his career, he expressed his creativity through painting.

Davis created many musical masterpieces, but his painting skills are not as well-known. The documentary gives us a view into how he found time to paint wherever he was — on the road, in the airport, in hotels after shows. Some of his art even appeared on the cover of Amandla.

Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool airs on WGBH 2 on Tuesday, February 25 and WORLD Channel on Saturday, February 29.