Album #1 of 133 Albums Before In the Court of the Crimson King that Every Progger Should Know.
Released 17 August 1959.
A1. So What (8:56)
A2. Freddie Freeloader (9:32)
A3. Blue In Green (5:27)
B1. All Blues (11:34)
B2. Flamenco Sketches (9:32)
Personnel:
Miles Davis, trumpet and leader
Julian Adderly, alto saxophone* (Courtesy of Riverside Records)
John Coltrane, tenor saxophone
Wyn Kelly, piano** (Courtesy of Riverside Records)
Bill Evans, piano
Paul Chambers, bass
James Cobb, drums
*Julian Adderly lays out on Blue in Green.
**Wyn Kelly only on Freddie Freeloader; Bill Evans on all other tracks.
Irving Townsend, producer
Recorded March 2 and April 22, 1959.
If you're a jazzer who stumbled upon this post, please be forewarned that I'm looking at this album through the lens of a Progressive Rock enthusiast. I'm primarily interested in lines of influence, and so many of my favorite musicians have had something to say about Kind of Blue.
Although there are other rock and roll, gospel, country and blues forebears of importance to progressive rock, the Kind of Blue album has a lot to recommend it as the ”first volley” of influence on the attitudes and aims that spurred a particular kind of progressive ambition in certain segments of non-academic (aka “popular”) music. Take into account the mindset of Miles Davis, and you might begin to see why -
"I wanted them to go beyond themselves. See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that - but he’s got to think differently in order to do it. He has to use his imagination, be more creative, more innovative; he’s got to take more risks. He’s got to play above what he knows - far above it - and what that might lead to might take him above the place where he’s been playing all along, to the new place where he finds himself right now - and to the next place he’s going and even above that! So then he’ll be freer, will expect things differently, will anticipate and know something different is coming down. I’ve always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that’s when great art and music happens." - Miles Davis - Miles: The Autobiography. P. 220
At some point, just about everybody with a passing interest in music has owned a copy of Kind of Blue. Perhaps no other album outside the rock genre has had a more pronounced impact on rock music in general. There’s a clear line of influence onward through Jimi Hendrix.
"Jimi liked what I had done on Kind of Blue and some other stuff and wanted to add more jazz elements to what he was doing. He liked the way Coltrane played with all those sheets of sound, and he played the guitar in a similarly way.” - Jimi Hendrix: Musician by Keith Shadwick, p. 207
Which brings up a guy who could almost be the patron saint of progressive music, John Coltrane. His unconventional approach baffled even his bandmates. Miles tried to describe Cannonball Adderley's first impression of Coltrane:
"That first night in Chicago [December 1957], we started off playing the blues, and Cannonball was just standing there with his mouth open, listening to Trane playing this way-out shit on a blues. He asked me what we were playing and I told him, “the blues.”
"He says, “Well, I ain’t never heard no blues played like that!” See, no matter how many times he played a tune, Trane would always find ways to play it different every night. I told Trane after the set to take Cannonball in the kitchen and show him what he was doing. He did, but we had substituted so many things in the twelve-bar mode that if you weren’t listening when it started off, where the soloist began, then when you did start to pay attention, you might not know what had happened." - Miles: The Autobiography, pp. 221-2
If Miles had done nothing but to provide a platform for Coltrane’s development, that would have been enough:
“Coltrane told Valerie Wilmer that Miles gave him “an appreciation for simplicity,” and that before joining his band he used to dream of playing tenor saxophone the way Miles played trumpet. “But when I joined him,” he explained, “I realized I could never play like that, and I think that’s what made me go the opposite way” - toward mosaics of sixteenth notes, toward stacking chords on top of chords.” - Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, p. 37
So how about subsequent prog influences? To jump a decade ahead - looking into the most futuristic strains of progressive rock, we can attribute John Coltrane’s work with Davis to the musical impetus that inspired Christian Vander to create Magma.
“A record like Kind of Blue by Miles Davis is a state of mind. [ …] I continue to be influenced by my masters: Coltrane in the first place. The construction of his music is extraordinary. Those who listen to it superficially do not realize it. But if Coltrane will always be a master for me, he does not influence my writing. It’s his approach that inspires me." - Christian Vander. (http://www.longueurdondes.com/2019/06/18/magma/)
The direct influence on the style of guitarist Allan Holdsworth (who besides his solo work was a member of Gong, Soft Machine, UK and Bruford) is well documented.
"I remember when I first heard those Miles Davis records that had Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane on them. It was fascinating to me. Coltrane’s playing in particular was a major revelation. I loved Cannonball also, but when I listened to him I could hear where it came from, I could hear the path that he had taken. But when I heard Coltrane, I couldn’t hear connections with anything else. It was almost like he had found a way to get to the truth somehow, to bypass all of the things that as an improviser you have to deal with. He seemed to be actually improvising and playing over the same material but in a very different way. That was the thing that really changed my life, just realizing that that was possible. I realized then that what I needed to do was to try and find a way to improvise over chord sequences without playing any bebop or without having it sound like it came from somewhere else. And it’s been an ongoing, everlasting quest.” (https://jazztimes.com/features/profiles/allan-holdsworth-one-man-of-trane/)
Then there's Steely Dan, who wore their jazz influences openly. Donald Fagen -
"I had mentioned a Coltrane album to another piano player at school, and he said ‘Heard it? That’s the Bible, man.’ That’s the way people felt about Kind of Blue. It essentially became the Bible about six months after it came out… I was really an amateur player in high school and at the level I was starting at, I couldn’t play the repertoire of standards, they were too hard to play or improvise at fast tempos. I could play “So What,” though, and “All Blues.” It was a great learning thing for players that were not coming out of maybe a formal point of view, from a formal background. If you met other musicians, that’s what they’d play to see how good you were, because everyone knew the tunes." Ashley Khan, p. 179.
Davis’ and Evans’ integration of classical music tonalities and approaches foreshadows progressive rock’s “pretensions” to seriousness. The original 1959 Down Beat review of Kind of Blue noted “the mark of the Impressionists and touches of Bela Bartok.”
Keith Emerson seems to have had a particular admiration for Bill Evans, lifting the head tune of Evans’ 1962 tune “Interplay” for use in the middle of the “Blues Variation” section of Pictures at an Exhibition.
Miles Davis’ attitude toward assembling a band, his attitude toward moving from one idea to the next, and his way of laying new concepts in front of talented musicians to see how they solved musical problems, all form a template for the way Robert Fripp moved from one creative and professional situation to another in the 60s and 70s.
“...Miles, along with Duke Ellington, in terms of looking for models of how you strategize with a band, have been there constantly in the background for me. Not the Beatles as a construct for a group, not Led Zeppelin, not the Floyd. My guides have always been Miles and Duke.” - Robert Fripp, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/robert-fripp-interview-king-crimson-tour-david-bowie-kanye-west-820783/
The same way of constructing and reconstituting bands seems to be characteristic of Frank Zappa. Never mind that he got the cold shoulder from Miles when they met in person:
"q: Do people like Miles Davis know about you and your music?
fz: Well, i met Miles Davis in 1962 in a jazz club in San Francisco called the Black Hawk. I really liked his music and I went up to him and introduced myself to him and he turned his back on me and so I haven't had anything to do with him or his music since that time.
q: In 1962, though, you hadn't recorded anything.
fz: That's okay, he had his chance. I don't treat people that way."
- RockBill Magazine, Nov. 1984.
One thing Kind of Blue offered relative to the other jazz of its time was a greatly decreased quantity of chord changes. Progressive rock is known for its excesses - over-extended songs, complicated rhythms that change too often, multifarious chords. So how is it possible to be more progressive with less chords? The answer is in the man who influenced the compositional approach on this album, composer and theorist George Russell. Is there a more proggy title for a book than "The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization"?
"[He wrote] the book in the early 1950s, while laid up for sixteen months with tuberculosis. Even before the book appeared, Russell had already talked with Miles about modes -- in the late 1940s, by his own account… soloing within a mode for longer stretches of time, they wouldn’t have to keep jumping through chord changes and reorienting themselves harmonically; they could go further in one direction, develop their ideas at greater length." - Ben Ratliff - Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, p. 46.
Miles described in his autobiography the effect this way of thinking had on him:
"What I had learned about the modal form is that when you play this way, go in this direction, you can go on forever. You don’t have to worry about changes and shit like that. You can do more with the musical line. The challenge here, when you work in the modal way, is to see how inventive you can become melodically. It’s not like when you base stuff on chords, and you know at the end of thirty-two bars that the chords have run out and there’s nothing to do but repeat what you’ve done with variations. I was moving away from that and into more melodic ways of doing things. And in the modal way I saw all kinds of possibilities." - p. 225
Rod Argent’s tale about meeting Pat Metheny is indicative of the kind of influence Miles’ “modal” approach had on rock artists, and then back again to influence jazz through the rock filter -
"I remember going to see Pat Metheny when he was just emerging, and I was amazed he knew who I was. He told me that She's Not There was the record that offered him a way into what he wanted to do, because of all the modal stuff I'd used. I was completely speechless, and thought, 'there's no modal stuff in there!' But I played it, and I realized I'd been doing it intuitively because I'd been listening to so much Miles Davis!"
Guitarist Alex Skolnick notes about "So What":
"It was a very ground-breaking recording at the time, because most of the jazz recorded up until this period had common chord progressions, mainly either the ‘Blues’ progression or what’s known as the ’Rhythm Changes’ progression, where chords move frequently, but here the chords were held for much longer periods of time, which had never been done in jazz and which influenced a lot of rock music too."
In his biography, Miles Davis indicates that he failed to make Kind of Blue the kind of album he wanted it to be. It would have been even more progressive, with clear indigenous African elements. Having been entranced by the musical accompaniment of a performance of the Ballet Africaine incorporating thumb piano, and enchanted by a memory of gospel music flowing from church doorways in nighttime Arkansas, he tried to capture a new feel.
“So I wrote about five bars of that and I recorded it and added a kind of running sound into the mix, because that was the only way I could get in the sound of the finger piano…
“When I tell people that I missed what I was trying to do on Kind of Blue, that I missed getting the exact sound of the African finger piano up in that sound, they just look at me like I’m crazy. Everyone said that record was a masterpiece - and I loved it too - and so they just feel I’m trying to put them on. But that’s what I was trying to do on most of that album, particularly on “All Blues and “So What.” I just missed.” - Miles Davis - Miles: The Autobiography, pp. 234 and 235
The producer of Kind of Blue, Irving Townsend has to be one of the most unsung (untrumpeted?) figures in jazz. You’d think he would be revered as the man who captured a sound that has enchanted generations, but no, Wikipedia can’t even bother with the exact date of birth and death. The list of musicians he produced is phenomenal: Billie Holliday, Duke Ellington, Wayne Shorter, Mahalia Jackson. Going by the between song banter on the master tapes, you can safely Ignore accounts that try to paint Teo Macero as being on-site with equal influence. Townsend is clearly directing the proceedings and coaching the band to get the sound.
Ashley Kahn says in his book “The initial sound heard on the master tape of the first Kind Of Blue session is producer Irving Townsend's Massachusetts twang. Townsend had inherited the role of producer for Miles after the successive departures of George Avakian (to Warner Brothers Records) and Cal Lampley (to RCA Records) the year before. In a few months, he would take over West Coast production duties for Columbia Records, passing the baton to Teo Macero, the newcomer who would remain Davis's primary producer at Columbia for many years.”
THE ALBUM TRACKS:
“So What,” composed by Miles Davis, is an experiment. It uses familiar dimensions to contain the floating somnolence of modal playing. It is in the 32-bar AABA form, the basic structure of American popular song. Each part of the AABA is a single scale or chord, if you like), each lasting 8 bars. It runs at easy medium tempo, and the implications of the mode mean that the player has more room to stretch without going outside of tonal harmony. He isn’t being pushed along by the chord changes.” - Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, p. 51
"So What"’s impressionistic piano introduction with bass, apparently a Gil Evans construction, has an air of mysticism to it that will be a common feature in later progressive music.
It’s hard to ignore that "Freddie Freeloader"’s head chords echo the “So What” descending major 2nd. Intentional or not, it’s a gorgeously unassuming bit of cyclic thematic development.
The first side ends with the bittersweet and profound ballad Blue in Green.
A gently swaying figure opens "All Blues" on side two. Evans’ double trill of alternating fourths trill provides an ambling stitchwork tying together the intriguing harmonic shifts instigated by the head’s modal construction.
The final track, "Flamenco Sketches" has only the slightest hint of Spanish tonality in one of its modes. Mostly it floats in a heavenly way through a group of moods, casting polychromatic sonics on the wall of whatever room you happen to be in.
THE BONUS TRACKS:
With a classic album like this, there have been dozens of reissues and attempts to dig up old studio reels, compile related material and various other ways of making a little more money off of something that's generated bank vaults full.
Tracks in the 40th anniversary "Legacy Edition" Kind of Blue release from 2009 fall into a handful of different categories -
1) An alternate take of "Flamenco Sketches", a little more ephemeral and with a less conclusive ending than the master release;
2) Studio outtakes of banter and false starts from the session date, some of which was released on The Complete Columbia Recordings of Miles Davis and John Coltrane 1955-1961 in 2000. It's fun to hear the ebb and flow of professional tension between Davis and producer Irving Townsend.;
3) A 1958 session that precedes the Kind of Blue recording by 10 months, but features largely the same lineup, featuring wonderful versions of "Fran Dance" (including an alternate take), "On Green Dolphin Street" and "Stella By Starlight", from the 1959 release Jazz Track;
4) Love For Sale from that same 1958 session, released on a 1975 Columbia compilation called Black Giants.
5) The gem of the release - A hyperspeed Netherlands live recording of "So What," bootlegged in the 70s. Jimmy Cobb's super-tight, up-front kick drum on this recording is unusual and cool. Coltrane is amazing on this recording, spinning out massive, elaborate runs with seemingly endless breaths. It's really impressive and I would think could serve as a signature example of his most earthshaking and inspired playing. It's the kind of thing that triggered a great Miles quote -
"Coltrane says to Davis that he can’t figure out a way to stop his solos. Davis retorts: “Why don’t you try taking the horn out of your mouth?” - Ben Ratliff - Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, pp. 121-122
LINK TO DISCOGS FIRST RELEASE RECORD.
GREAT REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS AND ONLINE ARTICLES:
This is one of the better short overviews of the album I’ve read.
Another nice overview with some contemporary review excerpts.
ESSENTIAL YOUTUBE VIDEOS:
2004 The Making of Kind of Blue
Miles Davis interview about Bill Evans
Polyphonic: How Miles Davis Changed Jazz
A BOOK TO READ:
Kind Of Blue: The Making Of The Miles Davis Masterpiece by Ashley Kahn
This is not just a great play-by-play of the session, but also an exploration into the recording industry culture of the late 50s and how it set the stage for musical innovation.
Please note: This blog post is subject to change as I learn more great stuff about Kind of Blue!
