13 May Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
Long held as the jazz album that even non-jazz fans will own, at the time of its release Kind Of Blue not only changed the way people regarded Miles, it changed the very face of music itself. It was recorded on March 2 and April 22, 1959, at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York City, and released on August 17 of that year by Columbia Records.
The album features Davis’ ensemble sextet consisting of saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb, with former band pianist Bill Evans appearing on most of the tracks in place of Kelly. In part owing to Evans joining the sextet during 1958, Davis followed up on the modal experimentation of Milestones by basing Kind of Blue entirely on modality, departing further from his earlier work’s hard bop style of jazz.
It has been consistently rated not just as one of the greatest jazz albums but as one of THE greatest musical statements of the 20th century. Its 46 minutes of improvisation and sophistication remain peerless.
The Background
By late 1958, Davis employed one of the most acclaimed and profitable working bands pursuing the hard bop style. Long-serving bassist Chambers had been with the band from its beginning in 1955; alto saxophonist Adderley had joined in the fall of 1957, with tenor saxophonist Coltrane returning at the beginning of 1958; pianist Evans had replaced Red Garland in April 1958, but quit in November to be replaced in turn by Kelly; and drummer Cobb had been hired in May 1958. The Davis band played a mixture of pop standards and bebop originals by Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Tadd Dameron. As with all bebop-based jazz, Davis’s groups improvised on the chord changes of a given song.
In 1953, the pianist George Russell published his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, which offered an alternative to the practice of improvisation based on chords and chord changes. Abandoning the traditional major and minor key relationships, the Lydian Chromatic Concept introduced the idea of chord/scale unity and was the first theory to explore the vertical relationship between chords and scales, as well as the only original theory to come from jazz. These insights helped lead the way to the “modal” approach in jazz.
Davis was one of many jazz musicians growing dissatisfied with bebop and saw its increasingly complex chord changes as hindering the potential creativity in Russell’s ideas. He implemented his first modal composition with the title track of his studio album Milestones (1958). Satisfied with the results, Davis prepared an entire album based on modality. Pianist Evans, who had studied with Russell but had departed from the Davis group to pursue his own career, was drafted back into the new recording project, the sessions that would become Kind of Blue.
In these sessions Davis and his group took the idea of modality and developed it to an astounding degree. Its smoky evocation of late night ambience is a byword for laid back elegance. It uses the blues but transmutes those seventh chords into something that still sounds modern 50 years on. Quite simply, the sonic space it creates sounds like the coolest place on the planet.
Key to the album’s deceptive ease is the band that Miles had assembled. Honed to perfection were the sextet of saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, drummer Jimmy Cobb, bassist Paul Chambers and pianist Bill Evans (replacing regular Wynton Kelly on all but one track – “Freddy Freeloader”). All players were to have legendary careers, but it was Coltrane who took Miles’ modal template and went furthest with it, with spectacular results.
Dispute still rages as to the role Evans had in the compositions (many regard him as at least a co-author, and he was an acolyte of George Russell’s) but what we do know is that on the two recording dates that spawned this masterpiece, Davis, as usual, just laid out the song structures for the musicians on the day with no rehearsal (though “So What” and “All Blues” had been played live prior to this). From the opening murmur of the piano on “So What” to the final sad mute on “Flamenco Sketches”, it never falters, despite its meandering pace. Even more miraculous, it never wears thin from repeat plays. If Quincy Jones claims to play it every day so should you.
All in all, the album is filled with performances that still crackle with vitality. Few albums of any genre manage to work on so many different levels, but Kind of Blue does. It can be played as background music, yet it amply rewards close listening. It is advanced music that is extraordinarily enjoyable. It may be a stretch to say that if you don’t like Kind of Blue, you don’t like jazz, but it’s hard to imagine it as anything other than a cornerstone of any jazz collection.