Books &Music Entropy | 11 May 2010
Kind of Blue
The Blue Moment
Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music..
The critics and jazz fans alike consider Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue an improvisational tour de force.
Davis cultivated an atmosphere of creative instability by rolling tape on his ensemble’s first takes and refusing to rehearse. They turned out a collection of tunes that changed jazz history with an uncompromising sense of grace and invention.
A brilliant, wide-ranging book on how the seminal album revolutionized music and culture in the twentieth century.
“It is the most singular of sounds, yet among the most ubiquitous. It is the sound of isolation that has sold itself to millions.” Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue is the best-selling piece of music in jazz history and, for many listeners, among the most haunting works of the twentieth century. It is also, notoriously, the only jazz album many people own. Recorded in 1959 (in nine miraculous hours), there has been nothing like it since. Richard Williams’s richly informative history considers the album within its wider cultural context, showing how the record influenced such diverse artists as Steve Reich and the Velvet Underground.
The effortlessly versatile Williams connects these seemingly disparate phenomena with purpose, finesse and journalistic flair making masterly connections to painting, literature, philosophy, and poetry while identifying the qualities that make the album so uniquely appealing and surprisingly universal.
Richard Williams contends that Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue defined a new template for jazz — and all music to come.
Read, Explore & Order . Here
on 11 May 2010 at 7:36 pm 1.Ashwin Panemangalore said …
“Kind of Blue” is considered the best jazz album produced by Miles and is one of the 100 best of all time It is Miles first attempt at modal playing a technique conceived by John Coltrane and later adopted by most others who followed Simply put it means using a combination of scales rather than chord changes Coltrane’s Giant Steps is a popular example
While Davis is given full credit for the album which helped him go up the charts very rapidly only few know that pianist Bill Evans was the co-architect of the date and two of the compositions were entirely his. Evans, an extremely self effacing individual remained in the background despite his contribution to this great album
on 12 May 2010 at 8:18 am 2.Mahendra said …
Hello Ajay,
Thanks for sharing .. year back we had a session at Arvind Kher’s place where few jazz lovers met and had a selected reading from the book along with listening to the album.
It has been long time since we met.
Thanks for sharing all goodies from time to time.
Warm regards,
Mahendra
on 09 Jun 2010 at 8:31 am 3.Max Babi said …
Ajay,
“Kind Of Blue” made history, in the sense it sold maximum number of copies, a phenomenon not many would understand when free copies of music are downloaded in millions every minute.. I have nothing to say about that.
However, your remarks about the phenomenal pianist Bill Evans, perked up my ears. He was indeed one of the constant favorites of the great late Willys Conover, my guru in Jazz, without whose warm voice and encyclopaedic information, all current and incisive, I would have never fallen headlong into Jazz…at a tender age of 10 years, may be less.
Today also, I keep playing Autumn Leaves and Summertime, and Interplay, and many other numbers played by Bill Evans -the great discovery I made yesterday was that my pianist daughter Mimi, barely out of her teens, keeps listening to Bill Evans and could make out, right in the middle of improvisational orgies, that Summertime was being played. This gave my heart wings !
Miles Davis, to my mind remains the greatest innovator, and the greatest musician with weird leadership qualities that saw all major names in 1950s to 1990s, when he passed away. Several path-breaking genres like hard bop, cool, modal, and to some people shockingly jazz-rock in mid ’70s, would not have happened if Miles were not the intrepid leader of the pack.
His album Bitches Brew was also phenomenally successful, and to me it seems, jazz rock was Miles’s answer to jazz funk… the latter slowly turned into more commercial stuff where the likes of Herbie Hancock reigned (one feels Hancock’s creatitivty dwindle and vanish in later years) whilst those who stuck on to jazz rock like the great keyboardist Joe Zawinul, another Miles protege, fared without diluting the jazz quotient. I draw a line there. After 1970s, there was a decline in the electrifyingly jazz content in music, and even rock plummetted too. There ended a phase of creativity, with more fancy packaging taking over for real substance.
We need to discuss this more personally
Regards
Max
on 10 Jun 2010 at 4:20 pm 4.Nimesh Dadia said …
Lao Aju
Incredible photographs of one of the most iconic Jazz Musicians. Like Godard’s A Bout de Souffle was to Cinema, Kind of Blue was to jazz. Errie , improvisational ground breaking yet approachable.
MAX GURUJI,
Thoroughly enjoyed reading your conversational comment. I agree we must meet and talk in person. Or perhaps , We would like to listen to you in person.
Nimesh
on 10 Jun 2010 at 4:22 pm 5.Nimesh Dadia said …
Ashwin,
Thank you for the wonderful insight on to Bill Evans.
Nimesh