It was the green shirt. Charlie Parker had the headlong genius, Thelonius Monk had the beatnik weirdness, and Charles Mingus had the rebel soul. But only Miles Davis had the green shirt. There it was on the cover of Milestones, one of a handful of late-fifties albums that turned him from a gifted bebop musician into a figure of godlike potency. That shirt, the green shirt with the perfect button-down collar, symbolised the taste of the eternally elegant outsider and was as good an emblem as any of Miles Davis's intextinguishable need to be the coolest man on the planet.