From Lana Del Rey, John Legend and Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar to the members of Radiohead and guitar legends Carlos Santana, Duane Allman and Jerry Garcia, the number of musicians who have cited Miles Davis and his landmark 1959 album, Kind of Blue , as a prime inspiration grows larger by the year. “It’s a pioneering album that was a turning point in jazz and it’s also a great bridge to classical and world music,” said pianist and Pulitzer Prize-winning opera composer Anthony Davis. “I’m not a hardcore jazz fan, but I love Kind of Blue ,” said Melissa Etheridge.
“Discussing Miles makes you feel like a dime-store novelist talking about Shakespeare,” Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood said in a 2001 interview. “We’ve taken and stolen from him shamelessly, not just musically, but in terms of his attitude of moving things forward.” Since its release on August 15, 1959, Kind of Blue has become the bestselling jazz album of all time – and the most widely acclaimed – embraced equally by jazz and non-jazz artists alike.
Both Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen and A Tribe Called Quest co-founder Q-Tip have called the album “the bible” for music. Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright cited Kind of Blue as a prime influence on the structure and tone of parts of the group’s classic 1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon . Former Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia was such a big fan that he and mandolin player David Grisman recorded three versions of Kind of Blue ’s sublime opening number, “So What”, for their joint 1998 album – also titled So What – which was released three years after Garcia’s death.
Featuring Davis with a peerless line-up – of saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Jimmy Cobb and alternating pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly – Kind of Blue is like nothing else in jazz, then or now. The album was instrumental in encouraging Coltrane to explore increasingly daring new sonic vistas for the remainder of his career. At 46 minutes, Kind of Blue works equally well as the sole focus for contemplative listening, a plush aural cushion for a lunch or dinner – foreground or background – and just about anything in between.
“The beauty of Kind of Blue is that it is this incredible doorway and invitation for anyone to come in and explore this music. But even if you don’t go any further, you will still have a wonderful experience,” says jazz scholar Ashley Kahn, the author of the bestselling 2000 book, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece . “It features an unbelievable, once-in-a-lifetime aggregation of such immortal players and such distinctive songs,” Kahn says.
“Every time they touched their instruments to solo on Kind of Blue , what resulted was timeless. The album transcended its time and its genre.” Kahn has also written two books about saxophone giant Coltrane, one of the key players on Kind of Blue .
Recorded in just nine hours on March 2 and April 22, 1959, Kind of Blue boasts five indelible songs that, to this day, are performed by jazz ensembles around the world – “So What”, “Freddie Freeloader”, “Blue in Green”, “All Blues” and “Flamenco Sketches”. It is an album on which nuance, beauty and impeccably calibrated group improvisations trump the high-octane virtuosity and velocity that came to the fore with the bebop revolution that dominated jazz from the early 1940s to at least the mid-1950s. Gorgeous, unhurried melodies abound on Kind of Blue , which does not have a single uptempo song.
Conventional chord sequences and harmonies are put aside in favour of a modal approach that – much like the ragas that are foundational in the classical music of India – focus on scales, or modes, specifically the eight notes that go from one octave to the next. Davis was introduced to the concept by noted composer and musical theorist George Russell, who spent much of the 1950s quietly exploring the possibilities of a modal jazz approach. It was a game-changing innovation that other artists had delved into.
But they had done so only briefly and tentatively, let alone on an epic, game-changing album like Kind of Blue . “When you go this way, you can go on forever,” Davis told music critic Nat Hentoff in 1958. “You don’t have to worry about [chord] changes, and you can do more with time [signatures].
It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you are. “I think a movement in jazz is beginning, away from the conventional string of chords and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variations. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.
” Those infinite possibilities provided a launching pad for Kind of Blue . But rather than meander here, there and everywhere, the album is a marvel of seemingly opposite musical values: precision and fluidity; focus and surprise; risk and a shared sense of purpose. Accordingly, much of Kind of Blue was created spontaneously as it was being recorded, with Davis providing only bare sketches and ideas of what he wanted his musicians to do.
Almost all the selections on Kind of Blue are first-take recordings, the better to achieve Davis’ goal of having his band members focus on the deeply felt emotions of the songs rather than overthinking them. “It was primarily a one-take which reflects ‘the first thought is the best thought’ aesthetic that comes out of jazz but is really a classic Miles-ian thing,” Kahn says. He adds: “There’s a perfect storm quality to the album: Miles in his prime with a great, once-in-a-lifetime band; first-rate audio engineers; a terrific record label, Columbia, that treated all musicians in all genres equally well and launched Kind of Blue into the world.
“Within two to three years, it was already the bestselling album in jazz, and – a few years after that – was influencing everyone from [pioneering minimalist composer] La Monte Young to the Allman Brothers and, of course, many, many jazz artists.” Had author Aldous Huxley not titled his 1954 book The Doors of Perception , it might have made a good subtitle for what remains to this day Davis’ most widely embraced and acclaimed recording. “The modal music on Kind of Blue opened up a whole world of engagement,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning opera composer Anthony Davis.
An accomplished jazz pianist, he teaches a course at University of California San Diego that focuses on Kind of Blue and four other stand-out jazz albums released in 1959. He is not related to Miles Davis, who died in 1991 at the age of 65. “ Kind of Blue not only looks beyond diatonic harmonies,” Anthony Davis explains, “but also to world music and to classical music, especially the compositions of Debussy and Ravel, who were a major influence on the album.
“Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand provided some of the inspiration for ‘All Blues’ on Kind of Blue . “Plus, the album is incredibly lyrical. Miles’ playing is just so pristine and the solos are so memorable.
So is the contrast between the playing of Coltrane and Cannonball, and Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, whose solos I transcribed a lot when I was a student at Yale. “The cyclical 10-bar structure on ‘Blue in Green’ is very innovative. And the album .
.. speaks in a very clear way.
” That clarity and lyricism had a profound influence on 1970’s “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed”, one of the most beloved songs by The Allman Brothers Band. Its graceful, spiralling melodies, uncluttered rhythms and deeply felt solos owe a major debt to Kind of Blue , as guitarist Duane Allman acknowledged at the time to Rolling Stone writer Robert Palmer. “You know, that kind of playing comes from Miles and Coltrane, and particularly Kind Of Blue ,” Allman said.
“I’ve listened to that album so many times that for the past couple of years, I haven’t hardly listened to anything else.”.
