The best-selling orchestral music album of all time is Miles Davis ‘ 1959 song Kind of Blue. Because the music-buying public is naturally suspicious of jazz, Kind of Blue is the kind of jazz that ca n’t tolerate jazz fans. When he convened a six-piece for two meetings at Columbia Records ‘ 30th Street Studio in March and April 1959, Davis did not intend this to happen. Music was then still young enough to pursue Ezra Pound’s 1934 tips,” Make it new,” but also old enough to possess the method and self-consciousness to do it.
James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue is a careful consideration of the movie’s causes and effects. There are not enough textbooks about music, America’s art form. There ought to be more books like 3 Shades of Blue, which skilfully combines artistic history with musings on cultural background, cleverly interwoven biographies, and a hefty jump of music idea.
Kaplan’s three colors, Davis, Coltrane, and Evans, are accompanied by a third, the shadow of Charlie Parker, the Banquo of the show who laid out the rhythmic supper of Bebop in the 1940s and died of drug and alcohol abuse in 1955. Parker was primarily taught the traditional methods of wood shedding and blocking. But was Coltrane, who spent decades playing rhythm and blues. The Coltrane of the 1960s transformed the split-tone howling of bar-walking 1940s honkers like Illinois Jacquet into proof of religious sincerity in what was both a talent or a sleight of hand. But Davis and Evans went to college, and it shows.
Ellington had drawn on Ravel and Debussy. Parker, Kaplan writes, “adored Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy, and reformers quite as Bartók, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Schoenberg”. Aged 18, Davis moved to New York City to get nearer to Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and study Western art music at Juilliard. When Gillespie tired of Parker’s medicine- addled “minstrelsy” on the show, Parker brought in Davis. This shocked people, Davis included. Gillespie was quick and powerful. Davis took the Parker idiom so seriously that he wrote” Donna Lee,” which is typically referred to as Parker’s quintessence, but Davis ‘ natural register was lower and more lyrical. Parker’s impulse was right. He had seen” a stone in the rough” in 1955 when Davis may have done the same.
The white Canadian arranger Gil Evans ( no relation to Bill ) developed a similar two-track development as a working jazz student and a working jazz musician. By 1948, Davis was part of a group that met at Evans’s room house on West 55th Street. The other Evans team included the tenor saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, the pianist John Lewis ( who had observed the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1952 ), and George Russell, the mixed- race composer and “brilliant musical theorist” who, Kaplan writes, was “destined to transform jazz, yet fated to be all but unknown”, at least to the public. Russell composed with little chording. Instead of the singer tracking the song changes, which had become boring and electrical in Bebop, he assigned a method, a series of notes. In 1947, Dizzy Gillespie recorded Russell’s” Cubana Be/Cubana Bop”. In 1950, Artie Shaw recorded his” Similau”. However, Davis ‘ music only became fully aware of the full implications of the modal revolution after almost ten years.
Mulligan and Lewis were the two musicians who produced a nine-piece in 1949 that featured Gil Evans and Davis, and the majority of the compositions were influenced by Gil Evans and George Russell‘s style. A kind of chamber Bebop, the sessions were issued in 1957 as The Birth of the Cool. In the same year, Davis, having shed a four- year heroin addiction, found a way out of the frantic Bebop chording and worked his way into the West Coast” cool” scene. After that, he returned to the bluesy fundamentals of Hard Bop with Walkin‘.
Sound- wise, Walkin’ , set the spacious, swinging template for Kind of Blue. On the Milestones album, Bill Evans pushes Davis further toward the open feel of modal improvisation when he joined Davis ‘ quintet on piano in 1958. No one realized what was about to happen when Davis ‘ group met at 30th Street Studio on March 2, 1959, for a project Columbia Records labeled Project B 43097, just as none of the Casablanca creators did not realize they were creating a masterpiece.
A few prompts and some modal-friendly variations on the blues had been created by Davis and Bill Evans. In the studio, Davis ordered the sound baffles to be taken away, so that the group could see each other and their playing would “bleed” into each other’s microphones. They caught lightning in a bottle. The album’s opener, the two- chord modal vamp” So What”, is the first complete take. The second track,” Freddie Freeloader”, a reharmonized blues with the deep swinger Wynton Kelly on piano, is also the first complete take. The third track, the mood piece” Blue in Green”, was an Evans melody, written to Davis’s simple prompt,” the symbols for G- minor and A- augmented”. Davis, as the conceptualist and the boss, pinched the copyright.
The band returned on April 22, 1959, and recorded the album’s other two tracks. ” Flamenco Sketches” is what it sounds like. It avoids parody by underplaying the Spanish feel on the album’s only track that required a second full take. Again, Bill Evans inspired it: Before the first session, Davis went to Evans’s apartment and heard him play a tune called” Peace Piece”, a” serene and pensive ramble over the haunting two- chord vamp” that begins Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Leonard Bernstein’s tune” Some Other Time”, from the musical On the Town.
The transition from the show tune to the modal moodiness demonstrates how distantly connected its characters are. The same goes for the final track,” All Blues”, another single take. It’s a blues, but it’s a modal blues. Jimmy Heath, the saxophonist who replaced Coltrane in Davis’s group in 1959, observed that where a normal blues in G would go to C at the fifth measure,” All Blues” uses” a G minor sound” that’s” a little dissonant, and a little more sophisticated”. As Kaplan says,” Less chordal, more modal. Kind of blue”.
Kind of Blue is high- concept, mass- market modal modernism, decades after the principles of modernism had been established in print and on the canvas. Davis, who was invariably high as a kite, highly conceptual, and highly aware of the market, applied the European conservatory to the American nightclub. A groundbreaking, theory-driven reinterpretation of jazz harmony removed the chordal clutter, focusing on the popular fundamentals of the genre: swing feel and blues phrasing.
Kind of Blue is swinging but spacious, lyrical but understated, intellectual in an unforced way, and emotionally candid. The group strikes a perfect balance. Jimmy Cobb’s drums and Paul Chambers’s bass move on padded slippers, the Platonic ideal of swing. Although Bill Evans ‘ piano occasionally uses gently percussive pushes and the smeary chromaticism that Wagner had domesticated nearly a century earlier, it generally sticks to the smeary chromaticism that Wagner had domesticated almost a century earlier. The three horns ( Davis on trumpet, John Coltrane on tenor, Julian” Cannonball” Adderley on alto ) steer the rhythm section’s gentle vehicle in contrasting directions, letting even neophyte listeners in on the game of improvisation. Davis underplays it, pounding it like a boxer to find the rhythm and feel the modes. Coltrane runs forward, racing up and down the modal scale with abandon. Adderley ventures back into the future, bringing the ghost of Charlie Parker and the deteriorating chordal structure.
” We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex”, Hugh Hefner wrote in Playboy‘s inaugural editorial in 1953. Hef appears to be waiting for Kind of Blue while lounging in his short polyester dressing gown as he first becomes the first man in history to mix an alcoholic beverage with one hand while the other thumbs one of Walter Kaufmann’s new, America-friendly translations of Nietzsche ( which are to Euro Nietzsche as Abstract Expressionism, another success of European modernism in America’s mid-century market, is to the Surrealism of the 1920s and 1930s ).
In 1962, an interview with Miles Davis became Playboy‘s first long- form article. The fate worse than being deaf was that Kind of Blue never deserved to become sophisticated background music. And it was not made to be a shagger’s soundtrack. Kind of Blue is a standout exhibit if it is required to demonstrate that jazz is a form of art and that it can be produced under financial pressure. Its blues are n’t so much tragic as melancholic, the emotional heat is recollected as a rueful warmth. The players control the impulse to comedy, showboating, and ornament, hence the” cool” feel. Its five tracks have a similar feel to Victorian program music in terms of mood and sequencing. There is no equivalent to Charlie Parker’s early performances in Macbeth or the Porter’s scene from Macbeth.
The six musicians who made Kind of Blue never collaborated again. Despite a heroin problem that at one point caused nerve damage to his right arm, Bill Evans eventually learned to play piano trios with one hand. After Schoenberg, Coltrane hit the logical brick wall that the European avant-garde had hit:” a lot of noise,” as his collaborators Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner said as they left his group, with Giant Steps in 1960, and then cycled back into modal exploration, notably with My Favorite Things ( 1961 ). None of Coltrane’s incoherent later music has the impact of” Alabama”, a modal blues from 1963 that is a harsh, political echo of Kind of Blue‘s soft, vague privacy.
Cannonball Adderley remained in the blues. Hearing Adderley’s quintet playing with an electric keyboard, and realizing that he was losing sales to white rockers, Miles Davis went electric in the mid- 1960s, assembling the modal jams of Bitches Brew ( 1969 ) and In a Silent Way ( 1970 ) from tape loops. He then went silent in the mid- 1970s while he concentrated on hard drugs, wife- beating, and his fantasy life as a pimp. He returned in red leather trousers in the 1980s, feebly parping out Cyndi Lauper’s” Time After Time”.
Bitches Brew, like the Birth of the Cool sessions, fixed a sound as an artifact of its time. Kind of Blue is the ideal form of jazz and a sonic artifact for all time. It is not a concept album, but a conceptualist one. Davis was in at the time of his death, whereas he was present at the Cool’s birth. Did he play a role in the murder of it, James Kaplan inquires, and what kind of magical encounters produced the Kind of Blue kind of the moment when the death was predicted and the die cast?
” Jazz died in 1959″, the trumpeter Nicholas Payton wrote in the 2011 polemic” On Why Jazz Is n’t Cool Anymore”. Jazz, Payton argues,” separated itself from American popular music” and “never recovered”. The year of Kind of Blue, 1959, was” the coolest year”, leaving jazz forever “haunted by its own hungry ghosts”. James Kaplan’s later chapters are an obituary, ending with Miles Davis’s zombie last years. It had to happen, sooner or later, as it happens with all art forms. Miles Davis, however, did more than anyone else to make the death happen by contaminating America’s native art form with the conceptual toxins that had made European art music unlistenable. Each man murders the object he desires.
3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool
by James Kaplan
Penguin Press, 496 pp.,$ 35
Dominic Green is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal.
