Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (Lega

8/18/2019 Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (Lega

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N TERMS OF WHERE IT FALLS IN JAZZ HISTORY, Kind of Blue

is celebrated for being the album that popularized improvising

on modes—that is, improvising on the sparest and starkest of

scales as an alternative to bebop’s dense thickets of chord

changes. But this hardly explains the album’s hold on three

successive generations of listeners. Kind of Blue is as much a

“mood” album and as much a beginning-to-end “concept” album as

any of Frank Sinatra’s 1950s Capitols, even if its mood is more

abstract and the exact concept tough to pin down. At heart it’s also

a blues album, even though only two of its five pieces conform toblues structure (the others are blues-inflected). But part of it is

simply Kind of Blue ’s line-up: Besides Miles Davis, the personnel

includes John Coltrane (then in his second stint with the trumpeter)

and fellow saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, the pianists Bill Evans

and Wynton Kelly, the bassist Paul Chambers, and the drummer

NEWPORT, JULY 1958

Bill Evans/Jimmy Cobb/Paul Chambers/

Cannonball Adderley/Miles Davis/John Coltrane

IJimmy Cobb—a veritable postbop summit

Evans, a recent alumnus brought back sp

“Freddie Freeloader,” a funky little thing t

and its slightest, though it would be a hig

recording sessions for Kind of Blue , the fi

April 22, took place in the nick of time: it

Adderley coming together so harmoniously

just leader of his band but practically fou

Davis was an unorthodox bandlea

on traditional methods such as gradual orinvolved bringing together sidemen who w

ment and musical sensibility, and leaving

opposites: Davis spare and confidential, d

for spiritual transcendence with an unend

well: Davis, admired for the stylish lines—


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RIGHT CLOCKWISE:

Bill Evans and Miles Davis/Jimmy Cobb/Cannonball Adderley/

Paul Chambers/Wynton Kelly

BELOW: BIRDLAND, NYC, 1959

Jimmy Cobb/Cannonball Adderley/Paul Chambers/John Coltrane

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notes—titled “Improvisation in Jazz”—cued listeners to hear the

album as the very essence of jazz, an unmediated exercise in

spontaneity.

Contrary to what Evans’s notes imply, it has never been uncommon

for jazz musicians to be asked to sight-read and improvise on new

pieces at recording sessions. No, what was different about Kind of

Blue was that the musicians were required not just to interpret new

compositions but also to improvise following largely untested

procedures. And Evans identifies what was musically visionary about

the album in the final graph of his notes, when he alludes to modes.

Modes were still tricky business for jazz musicians in 1959.

There is a session photograph showing the items on Cannonball

Adderley’s well-fortified music stand: his mouthpiece, a box of

reeds, a pack of Newports, a sugar substitute, a bottle of Bufferin,

and a lead sheet for “Flamenco Sketches” outlining its five modes.

Adderley suffered from migraines, but he might have needed the

Bufferin in any case. More than any of the others, he was venturing

into unchartered territory, and there are moments on Kind of Blue

RIGHT: 30TH STREET STUDIO, NYC, JUNE 1958

Miles, Coltrane and Evans at Michel Legrand’s

Legrand Jazz session

BELOW: Cannonball Adderley’s music stand


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when even the intrepid Coltrane sounds as though he’s treading

carefully. This wasn’t necessarily to his disadvantage: Coltrane

benefited from a little slowing down at this point in his career, just

as Adderley needed a safeguard against glibness. In fact, a good deal

of tentativeness on the part of everyone but Davis and Evans is one

of Kind of Blue ’s most beguiling aspects. It comes across as

passionate deliberation; and in “Flamenco Sketches” as each soloist

finishes juggling the notes of one scale and moves on to the next,

what might have sounded mechanical instead becomes fraught with

suspense. It all results in this music still seeming as if it’s being

created in the moment five decades after the fact.

In his notes, Evans compares the music on Kind of Blue to a

form of Japanese medieval painting in which “an unnatural or

interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the

parchment,” and in which “erasures or changes” are therefore not

permitted. The reference captures Kind of Blue ’s artful simplicity, its

waterfalls of ideas, its immediacy—in a word, its Zen. The best

musical illustration of what I mean is “So What,” which begins with

a questioning, out-of-tempo and tonally ambiguous piano-and-bass

prelude which the tune’s subsequent interpreters—beginning with

Davis himself when he added it to his live repertoire—have tended to

skip in favor of going straight to the main theme. The introduction is

said to have been ghosted by Gil Evans, a frequent Davis collaborator

whom the trumpeter also kept on retainer as a studio troubleshooter.

“So What” eventually becomes a jaunty semi-blues pivoting on call-

and-response between Chambers’s bass and the three horns—

despite its half-step up on the second eight, a finger-snapper

altogether not much different from soul-jazz tunes of the period,

including the following “Freddie Freeloader.” But as the memory of

that austere opening lingers in the mind, “So What” could be the

sound of one finger snapping.

Bill Evans’s liner notes from the original 195


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On the exciting live version of “So What”

included on CD Two, recorded in the Netherlands

on April 9, 1960, the intro is gone, the tempo is

faster, and both Davis and Coltrane stretch out

more than they had in the studio a year earlier.

But the real difference is the greater bounce

Wynton Kelly gives the tune, in place of Evans

on piano.

CD Two’s other “bonus” tracks are the

only other studio sides we have by Davis’s sextet

with Coltrane, Evans, and Adderley—“orphaned”

performances recorded almost a full year before

Kind of Blue but held back until a few months

after it, which has resulted in them being

unjustly overlooked. (All but “Love for Sale” and

the alternate take of “Fran-Dance”—a

flirtatiously pouting piece taken from the nursery

rhyme “Put Your Little Foot Right Out” and

clearly dedicated to Frances Taylor, a dancer who

was then Davis’s wife—first appeared on the

1959 Jazz Track , opposite Davis’s music for

Ascenseur pour l’échafaud .) Splendid in their

own right, these performances show Davis

already thinking along the same melodic lines as

on Kind of Blue . “On Green Dolphin Street” is

especially pleasing for the way that Evans, under

the horn solos and following a piano introduction

both elegant and harmonically mysterious, joins

with Chambers and Cobb in translating meter

and syncopation and pulse into tingling physical

sensation. One of Davis’s passions around this

time was the music of Ahmad Jamal’s trio

this version of “On Green Dolphin Street”

similar in overall design to one recorded b

Jamal a few years earlier, right down to th

throbbing bass pedal point and the tagged

rhythms. It’s yet another example of Davis

embracing another artist’s vision and mak

unmistakably his own.

Modes or no, the pieces on Kind of Blue w

meant to serve as springboards to improvi

and did they ever. Evans introduces jabbi

voicings new to jazz piano on “So What,”

Coltrane worries the notes of each scale a

prayerfully as beads on a rosary on “Flame

Sketches.” As for Davis, his solo on “So W

is as incisive as any he ever recorded—a s

book not just for fellow jazz improvisers b

for a younger generation of jazz composer

(including Wayne Shorter, whose 1967 “P

of Darkness” springs into action on a phra

borrowed from this solo). But an interesti

of hearing Kind of Blue is from Cannonba

Adderley’s point of view. Although Adderle

musically the best educated of the album

major soloists, he didn’t take as naturally

modes as Coltrane did once introduced to

Yet he acquits himself admirably: on “Fla

Sketches,” when he begins his final choru

quoting the melody to “So What” verbatim

at ballad tempo—you realize the final mo


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being introduced is the same one used on the earlier piece

(Dorian), and along with a sense o f this music’s inner workings,

you gain a sense of Adderley’s quick wit and musical integrity.

Once Davis showed the way—before quickly moving on, as had

become his custom—modal became something every musician

had to try, just to keep up (if a blues-and-bebop diehard like

Cannonball could get with the program, anybody could).

Beyond jazz, Kind of Blue ’s longterm influence has been

enormous. Beginning with the Byrds, the Doors, Carlos Santana,

and the Allman Brothers, most rock improvisation has been

modal. What Davis did in 1959 (and what Coltrane did

subsequently, by introducing non-Western scales) helped set the

stage for minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Philip

Glass. And if a certain horn riff on recent hits by Amy Winehouse

and Christina Aguilera strikes you as familiar, that’s because

their producer Mark Ronson borrowed it from James Brown’s

1967 hit “Cold Sweat”—a riff that the tune’s composer, Pee

Wee Ellis, freely admits to lifting from “So What.”

Kind of Blue is a classic among classics, the

culmination of a golden era in jazz and a signpost to much that

has taken place in music since. But while there are any number

of albums from its era and later that we can listen to now and

appreciate as daring and innovative for their time, somehow

none of them excites the imagination quite the way Kind of Blue

does, a full half-century after the fact. Th

mystique is one it shares with its creator .

said to have anticipated every new directi

from cool in the late 1940s to fusion in th

just as important, he also had an uncanny

nerve center of cultural trends—for giving

letting the cultural moment rush up to kee

With help from Evans, Davis capt

uncertainty that prevailed in bohemian an

the end of the 1950s—a time when the a

who were most committed to the moderni

progress in the arts were also reading the

and pondering Zen Buddhism’s riddles of

things as they are. Maybe Kind of Blue ’s

only the greatest and most enduring work

speak to us so forcefully today because it

creation of its own time. In that sense, it

riddle—an album we could go on enjoying

another fifty years, or another thousand, w

penetrating all of its mysteries.

FRANCIS DAVIS, June 2008 The winner of fivfor Excellence in Music Journalism, Francis Davis is a C on

and jazz columnist for The Village Voice . His books includ

Jazz and Its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader .


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CD ONE

1. So What (B) 9:22(Miles Davis) Jazz Horn Music Corp BMI

2. Freddie Freeloader (B) 9:46(Miles Davis) Jazz Horn Music Corp BMI

3. Blue in Green (B) 5:36(Miles Davis) Jazz Horn Music Corp BMI

4. All Blues (C) 11:32(Miles Davis) Jazz Horn Music Corp BMI

5. Flamenco Sketches (C) 9:25(Miles Davis) Jazz Horn Music Corp BMI

6. Flamenco Sketches (alternate take) (C) 9:31(Miles Davis) Jazz Horn Music Corp BMI

7. Freddie Freeloader– studio sequence 1(B) 0:51

8. Freddie Freeloader – false start (B) 1:26

9. Freddie Freeloader– studio sequence 2 (B) 1:26*

10. So What – studio sequence 1 (B) 1:53*

11. So What – studio sequence 2 (B) 0:11*

12. Blue in Green – studio sequence (B) 1:56*

13. Flamenco Sketches– studio sequence 1 (C) 0:42

14. Flamenco Sketches– studio sequence 2 (C) 1:09*

15. All Blues – studio sequence (C) 0:18*

*previously unreleased

CD TWO

1. On Green Dolphin Street (A) 9:48(Bronislaw Kaper-Ned Washington) EMI Feist

Music/Patti Washington Music/Catharine Hinen ASCAP

2. Fran-Dance (A) 5:48(Miles Davis) Jazz Horn Music Corp BMI

3. Stella by Starlight (A) 4:43(Victor Young-Ned Washington) Sony ATV Harmony

ASCAP

4. Love for Sale (A) 11:46(Cole Porter) Warner Bros Inc ASCAP

5. Fran-Dance (alternate take) (A) 5:51(Miles Davis) Jazz Horn Music Corp BMI

6. So What (D) 17:28 **(Miles Davis) Jazz Horn Music Corp BMI

**previously released in unauthorized form

(A) Miles Davis-trumpet, Cannonball Adderley-

alto saxophone, John Coltrane-tenor saxophone,

Bill Evans-piano, Paul Chambers-bass,

Jimmy Cobb-drums. Recorded on Monday, May 26, 1958(7 to 10 pm) at Columbia 30th Street Studio, NYC. Producer:

Cal Lampley. Recording engineer: Harold Chapman

(B) Miles Davis-trumpet, Cannonball Adderley-alto

saxophone, John Coltrane-tenor saxophone,

Wynton Kelly (on Freddie Freeloader), Bill Evans

(on all others)-piano, Paul Chambers-bass,

Jimmy Cobb-drums. Recorded on Monday, March 2, 1959(2:30 to 5:30 and 7 to 10 pm) at Columbia 30th Street Studio, NYC.

Producer: Irving Townsend. Recording engineer: Fred Plaut

(C) Miles Davis-trumpet, Cannonball Adde

alto saxophone, John Coltrane-tenor saxop

Bill Evans-piano, Paul Chambers-bass, Jim

Cobb-drums. Recorded on Wednesday, April 22, 1955:30 pm) at Columbia 30th Street Studio, NYC. Producer

Townsend. Recording engineer: Fred Plaut

(D) Miles Davis-trumpet, John Coltrane-te

saxophone, Wynton Kelly-piano, Paul Cha

bass, Jimmy Cobb-drums. Recorded in concert Kurhaus, Den Haag, Holland on April 9, 1960

Legacy Edition produced for release

Michael Cuscuna

Sessions A-C remixed from the original

three-track tapes by Mark Wilder,

Sony Studios and Battery Studios

Mastered by Mark Wilder and Maria Trian

Sony Studios and Battery Studios

Project Director: Nell Mulderry

Legacy A&R: Steve Berkowitz

Art Direction: Howard FritzsonDesign: Ron Kellum

Packaging Manager: Jeremy Holiday


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MORE MILES DAVIS ON COLUMBIA

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON MILES DAVIS CHECK OUT:

miles-davis.com

myspace.com/milesdavis

www.legacyrecordings.com

© 2009 Sony Music Entertainment / Originally Recorded 1958 & Released 1975 (CD One, Track 6; CD Two, Track 4), 1999 (CD Two, Track

5); Originally Recorded 1959 & Released 1988, 2008 (CD One, Tracks 7-15); Ori ginally Released 1959 (CD One, Tracks 1-5; CD Two, Tracks

1-3). All ri ghts reserved by Sony Music Entertainment. 2008 Sony Music Entertainment / Manufactured and Distributed by Columbia

Records, A Division of Sony Music Entertainment / 550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 1002 2-3211 / “Columbia,” W, “Legacy” andl Reg.

U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. Marca Registrada. / WARNING: All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.

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Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (Lega