Kind of Blue
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the first recording session for Kind of Blue, the Miles Davis album.
The lauds and honours for the album are well known. It has been placed in the US National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress. It is the best selling jazz album, and Miles Davis album, of all time and continues to sell 5,000 copies every week.
It is also considered by many to be the best and most influential jazz album, assembling some of the greatest musicians of the era at the height of their careers. The album features John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley on alto saxophone, Paul Chambers on bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano, and Miles Davis on trumpet.
NPR has an excellent podcast devoted to the recording of Kind of Blue and on Jazz Note SDP Ken Blanchard has a couple of posts looking at Kind of Blue, and the two pianists (Evans and Kelly) who feature on the album.
Bill Evans, who had been a part of the Davis sextet and was replaced by Wynton Kelly, features on every track except ‘Freddie Freeloader’ and has been given credit for co-writing ‘Blue in Green’ and ‘Flamenco Sketches’. In his autobiography, Davis wrote: “I… planned that album around the piano playing of Bill Evans.” Evans also wrote the liner notes that go some way to explaining the improvisational nature of the recordings:
This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflections, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician.
Group improvisation is a further challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording.
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Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a “take.”