50th Anniversary
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Not mine. Today is the 50th anniversary of the release of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. Slate's Fred Kaplan has a pretty good article on why this was such an important album, but he leaves out a key point.
With the exception of Flamenco Sketches, every cut on that album was the first time the song had been played through from beginning to end. While modal playing allowed for a wider expanse for improvisation within the concept of scales, it also opened up import possibilities for the entire process of performing a piece of music. The freedom wasn't limited to just the soloist. With a sufficiently talented group of musicians, the ideas expressed on Kind of Blue allowed for a form of collective improvisation. The soloist was no longer the only person making up the music as the performance went along.
This wasn't just freedom. This was Martin Luther King Jr. type freedom.
Locating MOG account...
Comments (6)
True,true about the freedom..I've been thinking about that quest for freedom (musical and racial) that was embodied by jazz around this time and how it ultimately led, as the writer pointed out to the "death" of jazz as a popular music vehicle, right around the passage of civil rights legislation. It certainly doesn't diminish how great KOB is.
Indeed. At that time, art and classical music were often uninhibited enough to try out total freedom, a strategy which can generate new ideas but always needs a wise editor. Jazz took up that aesthetic total freedom torch as well, and this beautiful track was one good inspiration for it. It was rock's turn next.
It was the embodiment of the further separation of music and players from audience..
Oh lord yes. A must have in any collection of vital American Music. The sparks thrown off by that landmark recording are still igniting imaginations & explorations a half-century later. If anything...it better now....or maybe i've grown into it...either way....
A great post!!
August 17, 2009 marks exactly fifty years from the day Columbia Records released the Miles Davis album, "Kind of Blue". "So What?" one might ask. Well, there are many great albums from the Age of Vinyl, but "All Blues" are not the same. Some music has the horsepower to affect and alter it's listeners, to move them mentally and emotionally, and to transform them.
One afternoon on the sidelines of the soccer pitch, at least fifteen years ago, I was talking to the son of a friend of mine. Though this young fellow was in college at the time, I had known him since he was in grade school. Beside refereeing youth soccer games, he had been in a garage rock band since high school. "My Dad told me you listened to jazz a lot," he says, "but I don't know much about it. People say it's pretty deep. What should I listen to so I can get into it?" "Get a copy of the CD "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis," I told him. "It's easy to find. They probably have it at Wal-Mart. Drink two glasses of wine and sit in the dark with headphones on, at one o'clock in the morning. Listen to Miles talk on trumpet, Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, John Coltrane on tenor sax, and Bill Evans on piano. Do this three times. You will be turned on to the music."
I knew this because that's how I got hooked on jazz. (Well...I didn't have the wine.) The Columbia Record Club sent me a copy of the "Kind of Blue" album when I was thirteen years old. As I lay in bed listening to it in 1960, the music transported my mind from suburban New Jersey to a smokey jazz club in Greenwich Village, where I could hang out with Maynard G. Krebs, and talk to girls with blonde ponytails, wearing black turtleneck sweaters. From that point on, I began to construct an aura, a shell, of iconoclastic coolness, or so I imagined.
Anyway, about six months after my conversation with this young guy, I ran into his father, Claude, who tells me a tale of woe about how their oldest son is driving both his wife and him nuts. (I knew this to be a very short ride.) "That crazy kid," he told me, "changed his major at the University, from Business Administration to Music. He says he wants to become a jazz musician!" Shaking his head and rolling his eyes, Claude went on to ask, "Do they still have those?? I thought they were all dead by now!! Where does he get these crazy ideas???
What could I say? I didn't tell him. Two years later I heard Claude Jr. was playing bass on weekends in a piano trio, in a bar just off the expressway. It wasn't me, or what I had said to him. It was Miles. Like the Pied Piper in the fairy tale, his recorded sound (particularly in his golden period from 1955 to 1965) kidnaps the listener's ear. Looking back from a fifty year view, the "Kind of Blue" album remains a masterpiece of the twentieth century.
Hey Geez, that's a great tale. Thanks for sharing it and coming aboard.