Kind Of Blue: 50 Years On

"It's so well balanced. There is not an unnecessary note in any of those pieces. And you keep coming back to it. It doesn't wear out its welcome." -- Dan Morgenstern on Kind of Blue

Nearly fifty years from its original release date, Miles Davis' Kind of Blue has been certified triple platinum in sales by the Recording Industry Association of America and continues to sell about 5,000 records a week. Although precise figures have been disputed,Kind of Blue has been cited as Davis's best-selling album, and as the best-selling jazz record of all time. It is also counted by many as the greatest jazz album of all time, ranks at or near the top of many "best album" lists in disparate genres, and is revered by all music lovers (rock, classical, jazz, etc.) as a universal masterpiece. 2009 will be the 50th Anniversary of the seminal recording's original release date, and as such provides a pivotal perspective on the many different directions that modern music, not just the idiom of jazz, has gone in the decades since then.

In this celebration of Kind of Blue, the trajectory of jazz, the legacy and associated lineage of the now legendary players from the original studio recording (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb) and all of the separate musical components, which made Kind of Blue what it is today, are highlighted.

The Bad Plus, arguably one of the biggest breakout stories of jazz in the past decade, will curate the first half of the evening with a deconstruction and reconstruction of some of the Kind of Blue catalogue including "Blue in Green," "All Blues," and "Flamenco Sketches" - in a way that is distinctively their own.

Legendary jazz drummer, Jimmy Cobb (the only surviving member from the original recording), curates the second half of the evening leading an all-star band of members (Wallace Roney - trumpet, Javon Jackson - tenor saxophone, Jesse Davis - alto saxophone, Mulgrew Miller - piano, Buster Williams - bass), who have direct connection to either Cobb or one of the other members of the original recording, through straight ahead interpretations ofKind of Blue pieces like "So What," "Freddie Freeloader," and an assortment of other Davis, Coltrane and Adderly staples.

The document and mark thatKind of Blue has left since its original release in August of 1959 is unmistakable in not only the Jazz vernacular, but in the pantheon of modern music as a collective whole; recognized throughout the world as a benchmark in so many facets of music: composition, performance, and improvisation. As with most historic seminal recordings, the folklore (in the case of Kind of Blue: first take, no rehearsals, no written music, etc), and in some cases the commercial success that surrounds them can somehow overshadow how the actual artistic concepts came to initially materialize on record.

It may come as a surprise to most that Miles Davis was not completely satisfied with the final outcome of the record... in fact he felt that he "missed" the sounds and main concepts he had been trying to combine in his head for some time. Originally Kind of Blue was an extension on Miles' first foray into modal, non-hard bop harmony recording, Milestones, yet it's also well documented that Miles was listening to, and integrating the concepts of quite a bit of Romantic and Impressionist era classical composers like Rachmaninoff and Ravel, during the late 50s.

Perhaps the lesser-known components of the sound he was aiming for at that time are less understood, but listening back to the record one can get a sense that he did not "miss" his original intention by much. In 1958 Miles attended a performance of Ballet Africaine (from Guinea) in New York City. The shifting African meters and accents, combined with the unique finger piano and juxtaposed vocals had quite a lasting impression on him to the extent where he could not avoid the effect it had on his compositional palette at the time. Almost simultaneously, there were sounds and feelings from his youth in Arkansas that were percolating in his musical subconscious that began to emerge. He recalled a memory of walking down a dark Arkansas road with his cousin, hearing gospels from church fading as they were walking away. In an effort to recreate that sound and feeling, Miles toiled at writing a blues that would harness and encapsulate the feeling he held since his youth. The idea of the finger piano and Ballet Africaine had such permanence that it skewed his original intention of the straight Arkansas blues... the resulting hybrid of the two ideas being "All Blues" and "So What." Those two compositional sketches provided the initial creative catapult that lead seven musicians into a converted church studio on 30th street in Manhattan in the Spring of 1959 to record what has become one of the masterpieces of our time.

"I hear it sometimes in some of the movements of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Or when I hear Pablo Casals play unaccompanied cello. I hear that quality. I think it's a universal epitome of sophistication in music development. It's a forum for a great artist to perform at the peak of their development - it's just something that will endure for hundreds of years, maybe a thousand years." -- Elvin Jones

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