MILES DAVIS ***** ALBUMS

*****ALBUMS: 4) KIND OF BLUE

“Has come to be regarded as a go-to jazz album”

MILES DAVIS: Based on modality rather than Hard Bop, KIND OF BLUE (1959) (Columbia) (Sextet) (New York) was recorded over two sessions on 2^nd and 22^nd April?, 1959 and released on 17^th August, 1959.

TRACKS: So What, All Blues, Freddie Freeloader, Blue in Green, Flamenco Sketches

MUSICIANS: Miles Davis, trumpet; John Coltrane, tenor sax; Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley, alto sax; Bill Evans/ Wynton Kelly, piano; Paul Chambers, bass and Jimmy Cobb, drums.

KIND OF BLUE is, to most, the most famous jazz album in the history of the genre, even garnering acclaim among mainstream listeners and radio stations to finally make jazz music into a commercial as well as artistic proposition, selling over 5 million copies and counting. In keeping with Davis’s customary working routine, there was little rehearsal and little aforethought was possible for the supporting musicians who were only let into the ‘secret’ by sketches of melody lines and scales to practise improvisation around, the soloists using pre-arranged signals to ‘pass on the baton’. So What is an immediate classic, its hook, or riff, sticking in the memory in the same way as a number one pop song, and, in jazz parlance, a ‘call’ from bassist Paul Chambers to be answered by the other musicians. Davis’s trumpet solo to become standard textbook material for aspiring jazz musicians. All Blues, a G minor 12-bar blues has a piano introduction thought to be inspired by Davis favourite Ahmad Jamal’s Autumn Leaves, as played on Portfolio of Ahmad Jamal. Davis’s muted trumpet and Chambers’ bass join in, with each soloist free to play for as long as they wanted on each mode in this order: Coltrane, Adderley, Evans, returning at last to Davis., the interplay between the trumpeter and his pianist quite remarkable. Freddie Freeloader is a 12-bar foot-tapping blues, full of ‘joie de vivre’. Wynton Kelly given the piano stool, in recognition that he was to replace Bill Evans in the group (Later than he thought as he was not expecting to see Evans at the session) and distinguishing himself, demonstrating his technique with a fine solo in runs of notes and block chords. Blue in Green was the most challenging for the band to execute a perfect take. This time the musicians were allowed to alter a preset chord progression during their improvisations. As Davis wrote everything, although Blue in Green  and Flamenco Sketches were co-written with Evans who had already recorded the opening to Blue in Green with the Chet Baker Sextet two months previously as a preface to the piece, Alone Together. * Flamenco Sketches was based on Evans’ own Peace Piece on his Everybody Digs Bille Evans! Album in 1958 and Davis brought in his own ideas for the development of the piece. The critical reception to Kind of Blue was positive and at times euphoric, Downbeat magazine referring to the “beautiful soul” of the album.

Of course it is impossible to definitely identify the best of anything in art and in some ways Kind of Blue was an unlikely candidate. It is so laid-back for one thing, exacerbated by side one being mastered at the wrong speed by an Ampex 3-track running fractionally slow, an error corrected in the Columbia Mastersound audiophile CD release in 1993. Also, it deviates little from the blues and it is easy to find other Davis albums that have more ‘colours in their rainbow’. But there is no denying that it is the very accessibility of it that gives Kind of Blue such a wide appeal, guaranteeing that it would have a better chance of appealing to fans of rock ‘n’ roll, pop and later rock music who were not necessarily jazz fans. Anyway, it is a moot point as to what anyone’s favourite or ‘best’ album is, that is purely for the individual, and, given the diversity of Davis’s work, or any music for that matter, there is no objective formula by which to gauge which is the ‘better’ album as one is not comparing like with like. One key to Kind of Blue’s success, apart from its accessibility and the wonderful musical ability of its proponents, is down to where it was recorded- it has a ‘sound’. This is down to the fact that a deconsecrated Armenian Orthodox church on 207 East 30^th Street had been converted into a studio and had wooden floors, unvarnished and unscrubbed, to preserve resonance, with a ceiling 100’ high, untouched plaster walls and an echo chamber in an old concrete storage room.

It is interesting that very little of the music from Kind of Blue was to be incorporated into Miles Davis concert set lists and the version of So What on the LP recorded live in the Black Hawk Club in San Francisco the following year is so fast and transmogrified that it is difficult to recognise it in the same way as the classic opener on this legendary album. The speed, at around 60 bars per minute, was nearly doubled in performances of the piece at Carnegie Hall on 19^th May, 1961 and would reach 80 bars per minute in some performances.

In this sense KIND OF BLUE may be thought of as somewhat of an anomaly, a one off in a closed environment in which musicians were given unparalleled scope masterminded by a grand master of design. In short, it clicked, the sound was right, the chemistry was right and time was right as the sixties waited around the corner, and while there was no guarantee that the ‘experiment’ was a success, it most certainly was. In the UK the album was released on the Fontana label (a Phillips imprint) in February, 1960 (mono) and May, 1960 (stereo). The interest in Kind of Blue would spark heralded a prodigious release of LPs and EPs in the UK in 1959/60 and continues to this day with a plethora of re-issues and re-appraisals.

*Evans would later record Blue in Green on his Portrait of Jazz album.