Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 26

Record label: CBS

Produced: Irving Townsend

Recorded: Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City; March 2 and April 22, 1959

Released: August 17, 1959

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Miles Davis (t); John Coltrane (ts); Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley (as); Bill Evans (p); Wynton Kelly (p); Paul Chambers (b); Jimmy Cobb (d)

Track listing: So What; Freddie Freeloader; Blue In Green; All Blues; Flamenco Sketches

Running time: 45.37

Current CD: Sony 5204085 Dual disc edition adds: DVD documentary

Further listening: Milestones (1958); ’58 Sessions Featuring Stella By Starlight (1958)

Further reading: Miles The Autobiography (Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe, 1989); Miles Davis (Ian Carr, 1999); www.milesdavis.com

Download: iTunes

The band that arrived at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in NYC on March 2, 1959 to record the album that became known as Kind Of Blue were barely a band at all anymore. Coltrane had left Miles in ’57, only to return again following a period with Thelonious Monk, but his confidence and conception had skyrocketed and he was on the verge of leaving again. Cannonball had said he would only stay a year and was ready to go too; Bill Evans had left months before but Davis was so struck by the pianist’s limpid, shifting-sands harmonic style, he devised the album around it and recalled him for the sessions.

Davis had made it clear in a 1958 interview that he was on the verge of a major shift in his musical thinking. ‘The music has gotten thick,’ he said. ‘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 variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.’ Influenced by composer George Russell’s theory of Lydian tonality, Davis produced simple, slow-moving harmonic frameworks – devised only hours previously – and indicated the scales/modes to be used for improvisation.

The resulting music was a uniquely beautiful triumph of content over form; seeing the sketches for the first time, each player surpassed himself to create line after inspired line of improvised melody. ‘Everything was a first take,’ remembered Miles in his autobiography, ‘which indicates the level everyone was playing on. It was beautiful.’

Immensely popular and influential, Kind Of Blue is a rarity among great works of art; a fashionable masterpiece whose stature is virtually undisputed. Amazingly, Miles claimed to have not quite nailed what he was after, which was the sort of interplay between the dancers, drummers and the finger piano he had witnessed at a performance of the Ballet Africaine. ‘When I tell people that I missed what I was trying to do, getting the exact sound of that African finger piano up in that sound, they look at me like I’m crazy,’ he remembered. ‘I just missed.’ The main players went swiftly on to blaze further trails of their own – artistic (Coltrane, Evans), commercial (Adderley) and both (Davis) – but for many, the essence of what these remarkable jazz musicians had to offer as improvising instrumentalists is to be found on Kind Of Blue.