Steve Jobs was a geek: he hacked phones, built computers, and wrote code. But he was also an artist: he studied calligraphy, dated Joan Baez, and actually understood what could make a phone sexy. He was a hippie: who else drops out of Reed? But he was an authoritarian, too. He knew what you wanted better than you did, and he was going to give it to you.

These yin-yang couplets explain some of his genius and success. So, of course, does his idealism. (He famously once asked a Pepsi executive whether he wanted to spend his life making sugar water.) And then there was the death sentence he lived under. Being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004 gave him a new way of looking at things. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” he told the Stanford class of 2005. That was, not coincidentally, two years before he launched the iPhone.

People keep asking who the next Steve Jobs will be, or who the last one was. I can’t think of an example from business. But I can think of one from music: Miles Davis. Like Jobs, he was a showman who was also intensely private. Like Jobs, he was an authoritarian who brought people together. Miles was joined by Bill Evans and John Coltrane; Jobs was joined by Jonathan Ive and Tim Cook. And like Jobs, Miles changed his field over and over again. Jobs created the first graphical user interface, the mouse, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Davis created modal jazz and fusion, and he helped transform bebop. Listen to “Birth of the Cool,” “Sketches of Spain,” “Kind of Blue,” “Bitches Brew,” and “A Tribute to Jack Johnson.” What do they have in common? Not that much—except that they are all awesome, they were all innovative, and they were all endlessly copied. Lots of people have one great idea; very few people have five. (Everyone, of course, also has bad ideas. Miles had “Doo-Bop”; Jobs had the Apple Lisa.)

O.K., so who will be the next Steve Jobs? I doubt it will be Mark Zuckerberg. He gives every indication of being the next Bill Gates: a smart dude who has one great idea at the right time, builds a monopoly, and then keeps it by releasing stuff that’s good enough but never great. I can say this for sure: the next Jobs won’t be someone trying to be Jobs. You can’t be a great innovator by imitating. So it won’t be someone who changes design a little bit more in the way that Apple has changed it—by making a phone just that much sleeker, a box that much whiter, or a tablet that much faster. It will be someone who sees something we need before we know we need it. Most of the three million Miles Davis tribute albums are lame.

Maybe it’s Miles who can give the most appropriate quote about what Steve Jobs did: “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”

Photographs: Left, by Herb Snitzer/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images. Right, by Ted Thai/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.