Eric Nisenson - The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece

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Contents

Introduction

In 1959 Miles Davis recorded his sixth album for Columbia Records, a small group session that would eventually be titled Kind of Blue. More than forty years after its release, it is still one of the most-sought-after recordings in the country; in fact, as late as 1998 it was the best-selling jazz album of the year. In both Rolling Stone and Amazon.com end-of-the-century polls, it was voted one of the ten best albums of all timein any genreand it is the only jazz album ever to reach double-platinum status. Yet its popularity is not the only extraordinary thing about Kind of Blue. In addition to being an incontestable masterpiece, it is also a watershed in the history of jazz, a signpost pointing to the tumultuous changes that would dominate this music and society itself in the decade ahead.

Beyond its historical significance, this album is for many listeners the record that lit their passion for jazz. I was one of them. Kind of Blue is the album that made me fall in love with jazz when I was about fifteen years old. It was not the first jazz album I had ever heard. It was not even the first Miles Davis album I had ever heard; that was Round About Midnight, which I greatly enjoyed. But my reaction to Kind of Blue was of an entirely different order. I was immediately fascinated, even obsessed with it. The music stayed with me and seemed to follow me wherever I went, singing to me in the far reaches of my mind. As I sat in my math class, the memory of Miless incomparable solo on Freddie Freeloader kept me from being bored to tears. John Coltranes solo on Blue in Green would haunt me while I was strolling down the hall to biology class or while walking my dog. I could not get the music out of my mind. And after a lifetime of listening to jazz, I find that this fascination still lingers. Very few experiences remain so vividly with us from the time we are kids to the later years of our lives. But my love for Kind of Blue has remained a constant in my lifeas it has, apparently, for many others.

It was not simply the beauty of the music that moved me; I was engulfed by the dark, melancholy mood of the album, a mood leavened by a kind of cool joy or sad irony that seemed to be an illustration of the old blues line laughing to keep from crying. Although I have listened to Kind of Blue countless times over the yearsso much so that I know every note by heartwhen I play it now, I still have the same visceral response that I had as a boy.

Even the albums liner notes fired my imagination. Bill Evanss perceptive comments, in which he compares the spontaneity of jazz improvisation to a type of Zen painting, intrigued me and gave me the first clues to the mysterious process by which a jazz piece comes into being. Creating music spontaneously, right now, here in the moment, seemed a thoroughly magical idea, expressing an act as profound as the Zen Buddhism that I had become increasingly interested in at that time. (I would sit in study hall and, instead of doing my homework, attempt to meditate and reach satori, floating in my mind far away from the gray halls of my high school. Unfortunately, I never reached satori.)

Like Zen, the music of Kind of Blue seemed both simple and profound. For me as a young person, it was like a gateway to the world of adult emotionsnot just any adult emotions but those that speak to the ambiguities and tragedies of life. Kind of Blue reflected not only hard-lived experience but also the discipline of contemplation. This was, I thought, music created by people who knew the meaning of pain, hunger, fear, great sadness, and irrepressible joy. Moreover, it was music that seemed to express an awareness of death. I cannot point to anything specific to support this last observation. But throughout the album, I heardand still hearan awareness of mortality and a deep knowledge of the exigencies of living. Yet despite the undercurrent of melancholy in the music, I also felt an affirmation of life in the face of death; and these are emotions that were foreign to me as a boy. Through repeated listenings to the album, I began to glimpse something of the complexity of these emotions. Thus, for me, Kind of Blue was one of the stepping-stones toward emotional maturity as well as simply another beautiful piece of music.

Sadly, describing something as beautiful no longer carries any special weight. The overuse of words such as beautiful, profound, or awesome has impoverished our language. Commercials routinely invite us to buy products that are beautiful: products as disparate as margarine, eyeglass frames, SUVs, instant coffee. But the unmistakable beauty of Kind of Blue rests on two qualities of great depth: the splendor of its sound and the starkness of its hard-won truths. Kind of Blue is further proof of Keatss statement that beauty and truth are inseparable.

Jazz has been called the imperfect art, and there is much validity in that description. After all, any art form that is largely created spontaneously, in the moment, might have a number of fine qualities, but perfection is usually not one of them. And so it is with Kind of Blue a flawed masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless. Miles once complained that record companies should release jazz albums with all the mistakes included instead of editing them out. With Kind of Blue he realized his wish; the album was released, imperfections and all, without a single edit.

The diversity of musical sensibilities of the jazzmen who play on Kind of Blue is impressive: Miles Daviss terse lyricism, John Coltranes intense spirals of sound, Bill Evanss introspective romanticism, and Cannonball Adderleys ebullient funk. I used to think that Adderley was the most noticeable flaw in this album, but I have completely changed my mind. The album would have been far less compelling without Cannonballs bluesy joie de vivre; the listener can almost hear him saying to the others, Hey, lighten up, you guys! The older I get, the more I understand that this sensibility is at least as profound as the darker moods expressed by the other musicians (though Wynton Kelly, who spells Evans on the blues Freddie Freeloader, had a style close to Adderleys spirit).

That the sessions were something of an experiment only adds to the mystery of the albums brilliance. None of the players saw the pieces Miles planned to use until the actual sessionswith the exception of Bill Evans, who composed at least one of the tunes and probably collaborated with Miles on one or more of the others. And the tunes themselves were experimental. Instead of being based on chords, modes were used for their tonal organization. This was not the first time modes had been used in jazz or even the first time this particular band had played a modal tune. On Milestones, the small group session that preceded Kind of Blue, the title track was modal (the front line of that band was the same, but the drummer was Philly Joe Jones and Red Garland was the pianist, at least for part of the session). But that single tune was hardly preparation for the experimental pieces that Miles and Evans brought to the Kind of Blue sessions. This album would prove that jazz could find a tonal path apart from the European harmonic system that had been such a constant throughout music history, and it would give improvisers a new and unprecedented melodic freedom.