an exposé on a famous (classical) jazz album

Throughout the course of history, most music genres have been seen as more “brash” and/or “overpowering”, not necessarily always allowing people to “think” about what message is being sent by some song(s). Jazz, however, seems to have avoided the “stereotyping” that most other genres have received, due to (generally) not containing many, if any, lyrics, and just letting the music stand on its own. One such album that almost perfectly captures the “thought-provoking”-type sound that most jazz has given us over the years was a 1959 album by trumpeter Miles Davis titled Kind of Blue, which had apparently been in the works for years (behind the scenes) prior to its eventual release to radio stations nationwide. It was recorded with many different contemporary jazz musicians, allowing many different styles to be heard by listeners who perhaps might have been looking for something with some “variety” in some album of that type. Despite its “depression”-type name, the album was almost entirely filled with more “upbeat” instrumental backings, hinting at a relatively easy process for the performers, and an almost “triumphant” lead out of the 1950s, wherein the only major world event was the Korean War, and into the civil rights’ movement of the 1960s, of which Davis would end up being a major proponent, mostly through his music, although also through his activism.

(SIDE NOTE: this happened right before recording started on what would later become Kind of Blue, and sort of “set the tone” for the rest of the civil rights movement, while also simultaneously infuriating the jazz community)

In August 1959, Davis and his world-famous “quintet” (separate from his recording group) were performing for the military inside the Birdland nightclub in midtown Manhattan. As he was leaving the nightclub after the performance, he was reportedly told by a few NYPD officers to “move on” while escorting a blonde woman across the street from the nightclub. After Davis tried to get out of the argument by telling the officer that he was a worker there, the officers chased the woman away from the scene, and arrested Davis for 3^rd-degree assault. As a result of the arrest, Davis was suspended from performances at all N.Y.C. jazz clubs until further notice, and was forced to plea bargain his way out of an N.Y.C. prison to get back to being able to perform in the City once again after those few weeks/months on suspension. Davis soon accused the officers to the Baltimore Afro-American of setting a “double standard”, in so many words, for themselves, and then for everybody else:

“It’s ridiculous to think I grabbed his nightstick. You can’t just take a gun or nightstick away from a policeman. If I had ever taken his nightstick from him, I wouldn’t look like this (points to bandaged forehead).” Davis complained in his autobiography that the aftermath of the arrest and trial/acquittal had “changed my whole life and whole attitude again, made me feel bitter and cynical again when I was starting to feel good about the things that had changed in this country.”, and, for the most part, the African-American and jazz communities agreed that, since the civil rights’ movement was roughly halfway between Rosa Parks’ famous “bus seat refusal” in Montgomery, Alabama, and the desegregation of public schools/Little Rock, Arkansas National Guard intervention/passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they were in need of a more “upbeat” album/set of tunes to get them through ordeal after ordeal they faced back then.

For most musicians/band members recording an album along the lines of Kind of Blue, such would most likely be considered the most upbeat of their solos/albums. For Davis, however, the opposite appeared to be true: his previous solos/albums were more upbeat than Kind of Blue, owing to their styles in and of themselves, according to saxophonist John Coltrane in a 1958 interview during the production process for the album…:

“On returning… I found Miles in the midst of his musical development. There was one time in his past that he devoted to multi-chorded structures. He was interested in chords for their own sake. But, now, it seemed that he was moving in the opposite direction to the use of fewer and fewer chord changes in his songs…”

…and by Davis himself, in a different 1958 interview with Nat Hentoff, then running his own magazine, The Jazz Review:

“When you’re based on chords, you know at the end of 32 bars that they have run out and there’s nothing to do but repeat what you’ve just done – with variations. I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords… There will be fewer chords, but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them. Classical composers – some of them – have been writing this way for years, but jazz musicians seldom have (up until then).”

Davis’ comments signaled that he would continue the style started only about a year earlier, in one of his 1958 singles, “Milestones”, which had more of a “modal” style, instead of the more upbeat tone of “bebop”/”hard bop” of his previous singles/albums, prior to 1958: not quite as “mellow” as “cool jazz”, yet definitely more designed for “outings”, with its overall faster pace than “modal” jazz. “Bebop”, in its time, was routinely described as such things as “memorable”/”planned”/”short” (Michael Cuscuna, jazz producer), and also as an “anagram of blues and gospel” and “vigorously creative” (David H. Rosenthal, in his jazz “exposé”, Hard Bop). On the other hand, Dirk Sutro, in Jazz for Dummies (another installment of the “intro series” to (insert topic here) that has become popular with people learning about topics), described “modal” jazz as (more qualitative traits 1^st, then more quantitative traits):

-       typically CDEFGAB, with “C” starting everything off

-       B♭ appearing less often than those notes

-       C “Ionian” being the dominant note above all others

-       C/F/G/A/D/E all being present on the “pentatonic scale”

-       Slow-moving, yet not quite as slow as “cool jazz”

-       More “harmonic” than any other jazz styles

-       More “melody” than “progression”/”transition”

-       More use of bass pedals, multiple keys being played at once (“polytonality”), and “droning” sounds, where the same note gets extended longer than usual

To that end, the album’s 1^st track, “So What”, started off with every “D” note (known as “Dorian mode”), transitioning to E♭ “Dorian”, and then back to “D” “Dorian” – overall, in the same structure used mostly in rock music, but also, perhaps most famously, in a certain tune from the Wizard of Oz “soundtrack”. Continuing on, “Freddie Freeloader”, featuring the fast-paced piano work of Wynton Kelly, was mostly B♭, and progressed into A♭7 near its end, instead of the more typical B♭7. “All Blues”, the 4^th track, owing to its name, was played in 6/4 time, exclusively featuring 7^th chords, and an E♭7 in a “G” key, with a “vamp” noise reverberating from the bass throughout the tune. Last but not least, “Flamenco Sketches” technically has no melody, yet pianist Bill Evans is usually credited with giving the tune its 4-bar Cmajor7/G9suspended4 form, with “C”, “A♭”, “B♭”, and “G” notes being played throughout the tune. Overall, the album almost perfectly encapsulated what Davis and the rest of his “crew” wanted from the album: a slower pace than any of the performers’ previous works, particularly any of Davis’ works, since he was the almost undisputed leader of the recording group, despite not having his quintet to support him at too many points in the recording process.

            Davis himself noted the significance of Kind of Blue in a 1986 interview with jazz pianist-turned-NPR host Ben Sidran, on his show, “Sidran on Record”:

"’So What" or Kind of Blue, they were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It's over [...]. What I used to play with Bill Evans, all those different modes, and substitute chords, we had the energy then and we liked it. But I have no feel for it anymore—it's more like warmed-over turkey.”

Davis might have dismissed his own work, but others certainly didn’t, as evidenced by the rankings for the album over the years:

-       1977: Billboard Jazz #37

-       1987: Billboard Top Jazz #10

-       1994: Colin Larkin, author of Top 1000 Jazz Albums: #1

-       2001: Billboard Top Internet #14

-       2002: Library of Congress – 1 of 50 “culturally significant” recordings selected for historical preservation that year

-       2003: Rolling Stone “500 Greatest Albums” list - #12

-       12/16/09: U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously (409-0) to “affirm” the album as a “cultural national treasure”

-       gold in Belgium

-       platinum in Australia/Italy/the U.K.

-       quadruple platinum over here in the U.S.

…why not let an 8/1/01 article from NPR’s “Jazz Profiles” finish this?

“Musicians from all genres perform, record and study the album's songs, and the influence of the songs on culture beyond music continues to grow. Drummer (Jimmy) Cobb says it all comes down to simplicity — the reason Kind of Blue has remained so successful for so long, and because of its inherent balance, historian Dan Morgenstern adds, the album never wears out its welcome.”