Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (Lega

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Kind of Blue at 50

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 to blues 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

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NEWPORT, JULY 1958 Bill Evans/Jimmy Cobb/Paul Chambers/ 4Cannonball Adderley/Miles Davis/John Coltrane

Jimmy Cobb—a veritable postbop summit. All were current members of Davis’s sextet, except for Evans, a recent alumnus brought back specially for this project (Kelly, his replacement, plays only on “Freddie Freeloader,” a funky little thing that’s as close as Kind of Blue comes to an uptempo tune— and its slightest, though it would be a highlight of almost any other jazz album then or now). The two recording sessions for Kind of Blue, the first on March 2, 1959 and the other seven weeks later on April 22, took place in the nick of time: it’s impossible to imagine Davis, Evans, Coltrane, and Adderley coming together so harmoniously a year or two later, by which point each had become not just leader of his band but practically founder of his own school. Davis was an unorthodox bandleader. Though he often created contrast and variety by drawing on traditional methods such as gradual or sudden shifts in rhythm and dynamics, his favorite strategy involved bringing together sidemen who were fundamentally different from one another in temperament and musical sensibility, and leaving the rest to chemistry. He and Coltrane were diametrical opposites: Davis spare and confidential, drawing you in for fear of missing something; Coltrane aiming for spiritual transcendence with an unending downpour of notes. (They were philosophical opposites as well: Davis, admired for the stylish lines—and presumed high cost—of his custom-tailored suits, his

THE PLAZA, NYC, SEPTEMBER 1958 Bill Evans/Paul Chambers/Miles Davis/John Coltrane

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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

sports cars, and his women, was a materialist; Coltrane a protomystic.) Adderley and Evans sounded exactly the way they looked, as if confirming that day’s prevalent stereotypes regarding differences between black and white conceptions of jazz. Adderley was fleshy and gregarious, a motivating force in the emerging “soul jazz” movement drenched in the Baptismal waters of the black church; even his ballad solos danced the hucklebuck, inviting listeners to do likewise. Evans, the band’s only white face, was shy and withdrawn; he wore glasses and sat hunched over the keyboard as if trying to disappear into it. His friend the composer and modal guru George Russell, who’d recommended him to Davis, once described Evans as looking like a “nonperson.” There is a way in which Kind of Blue marked another attempt by Davis to reconcile what were then widely regarded as opposing black and white styles of jazz, much as he’d done ten years earlier on Birth of the Cool. Jimmy Cobb has said that to him the album sounds as characteristic of Evans as it does of Davis—that he assumed the concept behind Kind of Blue grew out of the way the two played together. Along with the shaded attack both favored, they shared a similar respect for the part played by silence in determining the character of a musical phrase. Two of the compositions in particular exhibit Evans’s undoubted influence, even though all five pieces on the LP were credited solely to Davis (accepted on face value, it was the first of his albums exclusively devoted to his own tunes). “Flamenco Sketches” is a paradox: all yearning melody from beginning to end but with no actual melody as such—just a series of five modal scales on which each of the soloists was instructed to improvise one after the other. (The curving, two-note opening phrase of Davis’s solo on the released take, which listeners might perceive as the beginning of the tune’s melody, isn’t heard on the earlier take included here, nor does it appear on any of the false starts on the 7

April 22 session reel.) The part of “Flamenco Sketches” we can guess was written, or at least agreed on beforehand, is Evans’s somber piano intro, identical to his own “Peace Piece,” which he’d recorded the previous December (together with Leonard Bernstein’s “Some Other Time,” the show tune on whose intervals it was based). And Evans later staked a co-credit to the gorgeous, unresolved ballad “Blue in Green,” which sprang verbatim from his introduction to “Alone Together” on an earlier recording of that standard by Chet Baker. “Blue in Green” is Evans right down to the slow spin of its lower chord voicings. But as Gerald Early observed in Miles Davis and American Culture (2001), “Davis had the three instincts necessary for genius: he was an opportunist; he was not afraid of talented people, even if, in some particular area, they were more talented than he; and he had supreme confidence in his ability to make anything he’d try work.” … And to make it his own. Regardless of who authored the two pieces in question, Davis was clearly their auteur—a point Evans offers testimony to in his original liner notes to Kind of Blue, when he tells us “Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates …” Years later, in his 1989 autobiography, Davis would say that with Kind of Blue he was trying to evoke the sound of a gospel choir he’d once heard while walking at night on a dark road in Arkansas and the sound of a thumb piano that had struck his fancy during a performance by an African dance troupe. If the piece that best calls to mind that dark Arkansas road is the perambulating “All Blues” (in 6/8—what musicians call a double waltz), the strongest hint of the thumb piano is in the two-handed trill repeatedly played by Evans near the beginning, which by all accounts was impromptu. Evans and Davis were certainly on the same wavelength, and the pianist certainly contributes more than a sideman’s share of Kind of Blue’s air of pensive melancholy. In addition to which, his eloquent liner 9

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 calland-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. 14

Bill Evans’s liner notes from the original 1959 LP release

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, and this version of “On Green Dolphin Street” is similar in overall design to one recorded by Jamal a few years earlier, right down to the throbbing bass pedal point and the tagged drum rhythms. It’s yet another example of Davis embracing another artist’s vision and making it unmistakably his own. Modes or no, the pieces on Kind of Blue were meant to serve as springboards to improvisation, and did they ever. Evans introduces jabbing voicings new to jazz piano on “So What,” and Coltrane worries the notes of each scale as prayerfully as beads on a rosary on “Flamenco Sketches.” As for Davis, his solo on “So What” is as incisive as any he ever recorded—a source book not just for fellow jazz improvisers but also for a younger generation of jazz composers (including Wayne Shorter, whose 1967 “Prince of Darkness” springs into action on a phrase borrowed from this solo). But an interesting way of hearing Kind of Blue is from Cannonball Adderley’s point of view. Although Adderley was musically the best educated of the album’s four major soloists, he didn’t take as naturally to modes as Coltrane did once introduced to them. Yet he acquits himself admirably: on “Flamenco Sketches,” when he begins his final chorus by quoting the melody to “So What” verbatim—but at ballad tempo—you realize the final mode

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being introduced is the same one used on the earlier piece (Dorian), and along with a sense of 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

does, a full half-century after the fact. The album’s enduring mystique is one it shares with its creator. Miles Davis is often said to have anticipated every new direction in jazz after bebop, from cool in the late 1940s to fusion in the early 1970s. But just as important, he also had an uncanny knack for being at the nerve center of cultural trends—for giving the impression of letting the cultural moment rush up to keep pace with him. With help from Evans, Davis captured the mood of uncertainty that prevailed in bohemian and intellectual circles at the end of the 1950s—a time when the artists and audiences who were most committed to the modernist ideal of ongoing

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

progress in the arts were also reading the Beats and J.D. Salinger and pondering Zen Buddhism’s riddles of blissful acceptance of things as they are. Maybe Kind of Blue’s secret is one peculiar to only the greatest and most enduring works of art: it continues to speak to us so forcefully today because it seems so much a creation of its own time. In that sense, it is itself something of a riddle—an album we could go on enjoying and thinking about for another fifty years, or another thousand, without ever fully penetrating all of its mysteries. FRANCIS DAVIS, June 2008

The winner of five ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards

for Excellence in Music Journalism, Francis Davis is a Contributing Editor of The Atlantic and jazz columnist for The Village Voice. His books include The History of the Blues and

Jazz and Its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader.

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CD TWO

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

1. On Green Dolphin Street

(A) 9:48 (Bronislaw Kaper-Ned Washington) EMI Feist Music/Patti Washington Music/Catharine Hinen ASCAP

– studio sequence 2 (C) 1:09*

15. All Blues

– studio sequence (C) 0:18*

*previously unreleased

5:30 pm) at Columbia 30th Street Studio, NYC. Producer: Irving Townsend. Recording engineer: Fred Plaut

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 Adderleyalto 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

– studio sequence 1 (C) 0:42

14. Flamenco Sketches

(C) Miles Davis-trumpet, Cannonball Adderleyalto saxophone, John Coltrane-tenor saxophone, Bill Evans-piano, Paul Chambers-bass, Jimmy Cobb-drums. Recorded on Wednesday, April 22, 1959 (2:30 to

(D) Miles Davis-trumpet, John Coltrane-tenor saxophone, Wynton Kelly-piano, Paul Chambersbass, Jimmy Cobb-drums. Recorded in concert at the Kurhaus, Den Haag, Holland on April 9, 1960

Legacy Edition produced for release by 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 Triana, Sony Studios and Battery Studios Project Director: Nell Mulderry Legacy A&R: Steve Berkowitz Art Direction: Howard Fritzson Design: Ron Kellum Packaging Manager: Jeremy Holiday

Photography: Page 1: Jay Maisel; pages 2, 3, 5, 6 (top left photo), 7 (top photo), 12, 13, 16-21 : Don Hunstein/Sony Music Archives; pages 4 & 11: Vernon Smith; pages 6 (top right), 7 (middle & bottom photos). 8, 23 & 24: © Chuck Stewart; page 6 (bottom photo): Beuford Smith/Cesaire; page 10: Frederick Plaut from The Frederick and Rose Plaut Archives in The Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University Many thanks to Miles’s family and supporters: Cheryl Davis, Erin Davis, Vince Wilburn, Jr, Darryl Porter; Sandy Friedman, Lori Lousararian and Karen Sundell of Rogers & Cowan; Jeff Biederman of Manat,Phelps & Phillips; David Renzer and the Universal Music Publishing family; Stephen B. Ratner CPA, Audrey Ratner and staff of Ratner Lynn & Company, LLC. Special Thanks: Rico Alcock, Adam Block, Mariner Brito, Greg Brunswick, Tom Burleigh, Andy Cahn, Jimmy Cobb, John Conroy, Tom Cording, Channing Delph, Anthony Ellis, Brad Gallant, Sam Gomez, Randy Haecker, Bob Hoch, Dave Howlett, John Ingrassia, Joel Kendall, Lyn Koppe, Chris Lenz, Marisa Magliola, Elizabeth McShea, Eric Molk, Jacqueline Powers, Christian Ruggiero, Jeffrey Schulberg, Michele Scott, Steve Sterling, Scott van Horn, Russ Wapensky, Widya Widjaja, and Che Williams

(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.

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Producer: Irving Townsend. Recording engineer: Fred Plaut

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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); Originally Released 1959 (CD One, Tracks 1-5; CD Two, Tracks 1-3). All rights 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 10022-3211 / “Columbia,” W, “Legacy” and l Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. Marca Registrada. / WARNING: All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws. 22

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