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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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