Miles Davis - Kind Of Blue

Released - August 1959

Genre - Jazz

Producer - Teo Macero & Irving Townsend

Selected Personnel - Miles Davis (Trumpeter/Band Leader); Julian "Cannonball" Adderley (Alto Saxophone); Paul Chambers (Double Bass); Jimmy Cobb (Drums); John Coltrane (Tenor Saxophone); Bill Evans (Piano); Wynton Kelly (Piano)
Standout Track - So What

As I've said elsewhere, music from pre-1960, while I enjoy listening to it, is a bit of a blind spot for me in terms of really going to the effort to find out more about it. As such, there's only so much I can say about Miles Davis's masterpiece without looking ignorant and ill-informed. Not only that, but given how much has already been said about this album elsewhere, there's really not much I can add from my own relatively poorly informed point of view. Suffice to say that, despite my not knowing a huge amount about it, Kind of Blue has been an integral soundtrack to my life since I was a child, and is a record I'm enormously fond of, as well as being, quite simply, a stone cold classic. My mum was always a big fan of the concept of "dinner jazz," and as such this was one of the records that would often find itself as the backdrop to which family meals would unfold (on our classier days, of course - for a more mundane occasion we'd usually just reach for the Everything But The Girl CDs and start feasting). The concept of "dinner jazz" as background music perhaps does a disservice to the music itself, but it's a testament to this album that it became an object of fascination for me even in such innocuous surroundings. It was probably my first ever encounter with complicated music, with music that wasn't built around short pop song structures but around lengthy extended improvisations. It was music that I couldn't readily understand, but that fascinated me in its unkowability, in how majesterial and stately and refined it was able to sound even when sounding so utterly alien and unfathomable to me.

All this came from the mind of a child who'd been raised on the Beatles and Elton John, of course, so listening to modal jazz for the first time was always going to be a bit of a mindbender. But at the time, Kind of Blue actually emerged from Davis's desire to make things more simple, to refocus his attention on melody and get away from the overly dense chord-based improvisations of be-bop that had dominated jazz music over the previous decade or so. Taking his cue from the development of modality pioneered by pianist George Russell, which built improvisation around scales rather than chords (this is all taken from Wikipedia, so please accept my apologies if any of it is wrong, I haven't bothered to get it corroborated), Davis built song structures that would give freer reign to his band to improvise around them without ever sounding cluttered or thick. From there, it was simply a case of giving the band the barest structures and sketches of what they were going to play and then letting them loose. This is perhaps the greatest miracle of Kind of Blue, that this music, which sounds so measured, so in control and so effortlessly cool, was being played by people who had never seen it before. It's a true testament to the band's tightness and virtuosic talent that this sounds so good with so little preparation, and it's alleged that the entire album was recorded in only six takes. Davis's trumpet swims in and out of focus, leaving ample room for the other musicians to take centre-stage and play with the sketches they've been given, while the rhythm section of Jimmy Cobb and Paul Chambers is an effortless anchor throughout.

For me, the great standout is "So What," its opening strains still to this day summing up so much dinner time intrigue and sophistication that has fascinated me for decades and still does, and Davis's plaintive trumpet playing on "Blue in Green" manages to be heartbreaking without any recourse to words. Davis continued to be a tireless innovator even after contributing this, his great masterpiece, to the pantheon of classic albums. My limited research into Davis has never really led me much further than Bitches Brew, his 1970 album in the midst of his experiments in jazz fusion with guitarist John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. It's an impressive collection, but lacks the sophistication and the haunting sense of majesty of this, his true great statement.

Track Listing:

1. So What (Miles Davis)

2. Freddie Freeloader (Miles Davis)

3. Blue In Green (Miles Davis & Bill Evans)

4. All Blues (Miles Davis)

5. Flamenco Sketches (Miles Davis & Bill Evans)