The Associated Press announced today that Don Cheadle will play jazz pioneer Miles Davis in an long-planned, upcoming biopic. BiFrost will finance and produce the film, called Kill the Trumpet Player. Cheadle, who will also be making his directorial debut for the film, and Steven Baigelman wrote the script. Cheadle has been trying to make the film for years, and production is finally set to begin in June.
According to the report, the film will center on Davis' temporary retirement and re-emergence into music in 1979. Ewan McGregor will co-star as a Rolling Stone reporter, and Zoe Saldana will play Davis' former wife, Frances. Herbie Hancock will be involved in the film's production as well.
In 2011, Cheadle, who is a jazz musician himself, spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the film saying, "It's not a biopic, per se. It's a gangster pic. It's a movie that Miles Davis would have wanted to star in. Without throwing history away, we're trying to shuffle it and make it more cubist. The bulk of it takes place in '79, in a period where he actually wasn't playing. But we traverse a lot of it his life, but it's not a cradle to grave story."
Davis died in 1991 at the age of 65. He was inducted in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006 for being one of the key players in jazz history.
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