MILES DAVISKindofBlue�

THE LASTKING OFAMERICA:HOW MILES DAVIS INVENTED MODERNITY

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By 1959, the year when the album Kind of

Blue was recorded, trumpeter Miles Davis had

become one of the most famous jazz musicians

of his generation (post-World War II), a cele-

brated and singular personality in his culture

and in a profession where unusual and uncon-

ventional sorts were the rule, not the exception.

He stood at a pinnacle, at a moment of mastery

not only of his music but also of his moment.

This was no small achievement as the jazz per-

former is driven equally by talent; insufferable

ego; obsessive, insular training and focus;

blind confidence; self-destructive habits; and

the abject fear of creative failure. Any sus-

tained imbalance of these elements, a precar-

ious alchemy at best, will not produce anything

but an artist who never realized or only dimly

saw his or her gift, the stillborn genius or the

anguished one-work wonder. Davis had his fair

share of all these qualities and attributes, as

uncertainly poised as molecules in a volatile

formula. He played upon his strengths and

weaknesses and bedeviled his audience with

them for adulation as much as those strengths

and weaknesses played upon and bedeviled

him. He was both feared and admired, and ad-

mired for being feared as an imposing, tem-

peramental, seemingly evil-minded artist: Lord

Byron on a bandstand. (Both Davis and Byron

liked boxing and both were cruel to women.)

This was clearly at the time a remarkably new

public persona for a black man to assume but

Davis, undaunted by its daring, wore it with the

panache of swashbuckler.

“I’m a musician, I ain’t no comedian,” he

once growled at nightclub owner Max Gordon,

“I don’t smile, I don’t bow. I turn my back . . .

The white man always wants you to smile, al-

ways wants the black man to bow. I don’t

smile, and I don’t bow. Ok? I’m here to play

music. I’m a musician.”iii These barks of artis-

tic grouchiness, minor enough in most re-

spects, were nearly revolutionary in the 1950s:

first, Davis was insisting that as a black man he

was entitled to be respected on his own terms

for the performance of his craft; second, Davis

was insisting that being a musician, always a

suspect profession in the United States, was

worthy of respect and was quite different from

being an entertainer. (Davis had nothing per-

sonal against entertainers and often went to

see them perform. He just wanted to make it

clear to the public that he was not one of

them.) Davis never thought he was there to en-

tertain his audience in the way a tap dancer, a

magician, or an acrobat might. How Davis’s de-

mand for dignity struck the public beyond the

fact that many people were intrigued or even,

horror of horrors, “entertained” by it is unclear.

Some surely thought he was a snob, others that

he was overly sensitive (a common charge

against a member of a persecuted minority who

gets prickly), and still others probably thought

he was simply engaging in an especially ornery

form of special pleading. It is little wonder that

Davis emerged as a public figure at the same

time as novelist/essayist James Baldwin. De-

spite the considerable differences between the

two men, their upbringing, their temperament,

they served the same needs for both their black

and white publics—pride and racial break-

through for blacks, encounter and racial re-

thinking for whites. (The two men were also

alike in two important respects—they were

small men with artistic bents who were the old-

est sons in their families.) Davis changed his

culture by changing how whites saw black

artists and how whites and blacks understood

jazz. He was not alone in doing this but he was

a major figure in transforming America.

We shall not cease from exploration—T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” i

I’m not thinking about anybody but myself when we

play. I mean, how is my audience gonna move me?

I know that if I don’t move myself, then it’s no good.

—Miles Davis, 1973iiI

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What made Davis extraordinary was that by the

end of the 1950s, he gave every impression to

the public of being a highly exploratory, prob-

ing musician while never seeming at all outside

the mainstream of what jazz was becoming or

had become since World War II. The great

achievement of Kind of Blue was that it was an

experimental record, experimental music, that

never seemed at all experimental. Ironically,

what made the music seem so fresh and ap-

pealing to listeners, even to people who dis-

liked jazz, was that all of it seemed so familiar.

The music never put you on the spot as a lis-

tener by revealing your inadequacies to appre-

ciate it. This is usually how many of the most

significant artistic innovations have worked:

the audience is taken somewhere it’s never

been while passing a lot of well-known

signposts. Kind of Blue was experimental in

several ways:

1. The music itself, as nearly every commenta-

tor has pointed out, was built on scales and not

chords, as was traditional for the jazz performer

who needed chords (and fake books) as the

building blocks for solos. But what has been

less noticed is that the intention of moving

away from chords was to free both the soloist

and the music itself from being over-deter-

mined and predictable, to make the music

more spontaneous and instinctive and not a lot

of virtuosic strategizing about running through

a set of chords; in short, to make jazz less bor-

ing as instrumental music. This is exactly what

Ornette Coleman was doing in 1959 with his

album, The Shape of Jazz to Come, and with

his controversial gig at the Five Spot the same

year, albeit with a different theory. The aim was

the same: to free the soloist and the music

from routine and to re-establish the rigors of

creating improvisational composition by re-cre-

ating the conventions of the discipline within

which it was generated. Davis did this in Kind

of Blue without any sense of self-conscious-

ness that what was being done was new or the-

oretical, unlike Coleman, which is one reason

why Davis’s album became so popular and be-

came, not a signifier of the new or the revolu-

tionary, which would have dated it, but rather,

more strikingly, a signifier of the hip and the

cool, which made it timeless.

2. Kind of Blue harkened back to Davis’s Birth

of the Cool sessions of 1949 and 1950 in

being a very self-aware collaboration between

black and white musicians, a stylistic and cul-

tural fusion, in much the way his Columbia

Records orchestral collaborations with arranger

Gil Evans were. Clearly, white pianist Bill Evans

was central to the concept and success of Kind

of Blue, which is why Columbia had him write

the liner notes, although he was upset in later

Having money has helped me once in a while, but

I’m not looking for help. I’m even the one that’s the

helper, helping people by playing my music.

—Miles Davis, 1972ivII

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THE PLAZA, NYC, SEPTEMBER 1958

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years that he did not get as much credit for his

collaboration as he should have, especially

monetary and composer credit. (Composer

theft in jazz was quite commonplace. A musi-

cian had to watch his tunes as much as he did

his money. Did Davis really write “Blue in

Green” or “Flamenco Sketches”? Did Davis re-

ally write “Nardis” or “Milestones”? We will

never really know for sure.) Davis himself over

the years had mixed feelings about his collab-

orations with white musicians. In an interview

with Nat Hentoff published in 1958, he said,

“Boy, I’ve sure learned a lot from Bill Evans.

He plays the piano the way it should be played.

He plays all kinds of scales; can play in 5/4;

and all kinds of fantastic things. There’s such

a difference between him and Red Garland

whom I also like a lot. Red carries the rhythm,

but Bill underplays it, and I like that better.”v

In a 1973 interview, at a time when Davis

spoke more harshly about whites and about

race, he said, “Let them [the critics] say it. I

don’t care what they say. As long as I been

playing they never say I done anything. They

always say that some white guy did it.”vi But

the blending of black and white jazz is key to

the mystique of the album.

3. Kind of Blue would not have been possible

if the LP did not exist. It was jazz conceived

for the record album, not only because of the

playing times of the tunes but also because of

how the album creates an overall mood. Kind

of Blue is not simply a series of tracks as the

standard small group jazz album of the day

was. Kind of Blue was one of the few jazz

records of its time that had a sense of narra-

tive, a cohesive inter-relation between the

tunes. It was a work, not a bunch of disparate

tunes used to pace a small group jazz album:

one fast-tempo piece, one ballad, one blues,

one or two standards, a bop-oriented original.

The sense of the album as an organic whole

added to its appeal.

4. Kind of Blue, its sonic accessibility, its mod-

erate-to-slow tempi, its inspired but tempered

performances, was an album that was tailor-

made for the Columbia House Record Club,

started four years earlier (1955) as a way to

generate a mail order business for LPs. Here

was a jazz album that would appeal to both

Middle America as a kind of hip mood music as

well as to jazz fans and purists as state-of-the-

art, uncompromised jazz: non-commercial jazz

for commercial or aspiring taste. Kind of Blue,

in other words, was one of those records, along

with Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, another Colum-

bia jazz record released in 1959, that made

jazz a middlebrow music, a respectable music

for middle-class, educated people who felt they

had refined taste. This was enormously impor-

tant for Davis both commercially and artisti-

cally for the rest of his career. As jazz ceased

to be dance music, it needed middlebrow sta-

tus in order to survive as art music. Davis was

essential in making this transformation possible.

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NEWPORT, JULY 1958Miles and Guests

What drove Miles Davis? In part, the masculine

sense of competition that always characterized

the life of the working jazz musician who

wanted more than just a gig at the corner bar.

The jazz musician had to have his own voice,

survive jam sessions and cutting contests, tol-

erate long trips on the road and playing in un-

congenial, sub-standard venues, and endure

withering criticism from colleagues and critics

without being fazed by it. In short, a successful

jazz musician with a national reputation had to

be a fairly tough or fairly stoic s.o.b. (More so,

if a woman.) For Davis in 1959, for instance,

was surrounded by more living and working

jazz musicians than any comparable figure is

today, if only because jazz is less listened to

and less performed today and fewer people,

from necessity, practice the craft as once did.

But in the late 1950s, old heads from earlier

eras were still around and still playing well and

working regularly like Harry James and Henry

“Red” Allen. The great Louis Armstrong, the

inventor of modern jazz trumpeting and mod-

ern jazz singing, had released two years earlier

his “Musical Autobiography,” which revealed

that Pops was still the master of the realm and

remained an extraordinarily compelling soloist.

There were Davis’s influences and teachers like

Clark Terry, Roy Eldridge, Ray Nance, and Buck

Clayton, still alive and kicking. There were

Davis’s contemporaries like Dizzy Gillespie,

Chet Baker (the blonde bombshell, the James

Dean of jazz, who could also sing languid bal-

lads), Shorty Rodgers, Maynard Ferguson, the

teenage wonder, Lee Morgan, Booker Little,

Kenny Dorham, Donald Byrd, Freddie Hub-

bard, and the ghost of the recently and tragi-

cally deceased Clifford Brown. By the end of

the 1950s, Davis eclipsed them all, had thor-

oughly stamped the age of post-war jazz, had

made himself a leader in the way the other

great trumpeters, indeed, other jazz musicians

of comparable skill, had not: as a virtuoso who

did not have the skills of the virtuoso but had

the virtuoso’s feelings, sense of flair for the

dramatic, sense of risk and brinksmanship. He

was also, by 1959, the hero and the villain of

his own self-constructed myth: the bad, uncouth

Yeah, you have to come up through those ranks. They can always do that; but you don’t hear anybody

doing that old shit with me. You know, some guys are still playing all that shit we did years ago, things I

did with Bird and stuff; they’re still using those clichés and calling it jazz. Black guys as well as white

guys. I hear it over and over again—shit I’ve even forgotten. —Miles Davis, 1972viiIII

BIRDLAND, NYC, 1959

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black man and the brooding black genius. That

he was able to do this as a black man was a

sign of his will and a sign of the changing

times.

The idea that the 1950s were some tran-

quil time of We Like Ike and the white subur-

ban pastoral, of the nuclear family and

traditional values, is largely a thought cliché. It

was more a time of jittery transition: a bloody

three-year war in Korea that ended in a stale-

mate opened the decade (and lasted nearly as

long as our time in World War II); McCarthyism

cast a long shadow of fear, loathing, and mis-

trust over the land and made “un-American” a

common expression in our language; Atomic

bombs were tested in the desert as nuclear war

seemed imminent; the Russians launched

Sputnik in 1957 and started the space race;

Fidel Castro seized Cuba in 1959 and for the

next several years the United States tried un-

successfully to assassinate him as it fought

communism with a half-crazed foreign policy;

and juvenile delinquency raged across the

nation.

Race relations began to change as both

blacks and liberal whites challenged Jim Crow

segregation and the state-sanctioned political

and economic degradation of blacks. Just five

years before Kind of Blue was recorded, the

United States Supreme Court declared state-

sponsored segregation unconstitutional in

Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. The

Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 made

Martin Luther King, Jr. a household name and

was the beginning of the end of white southern

privilege. The horrific murder of 14-year old

Emmitt Till in 1955 galvanized blacks and

shocked the nation in the way no other racial

lynching had. The southern white reaction to

the integration of Central High School in Little

Rock outraged even Louis Armstrong, not

known for public expressions of militancy or

racial displeasure. Blacks were now actively

and publicly protesting their second-class sta-

tus. But it was also the time of stunning

crossover for blacks as their talents for the first

time were recognized by the guardians of high

culture: poet Gwendolyn Brooks won the

Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for Maud Martha,

novelist Ralph Ellison won the National Book

Award for fiction in 1952 for Invisible Man,

and playwright Lorraine Hansberry won the

Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1959 for A

Raisin in the Sun. In other realms, Dorothy

Dandridge was nominated for an Oscar for

playing the title role in Carmen Jones (1955);

singer Nat “King” Cole had a television show

(briefly); and blacks organized to have the tel-

evised version of the famous radio program

54th PRECINCT, NYC, AUGUST 1959Miles Davis with wife Frances Taylor

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“Amos and Andy” taken off the air. Miles Davis

emerged as a national figure during this time

as something like a militant race man but also

a firm integrationist. And he was never, fortu-

nately, a doctrinaire leftist but he shrewdly cul-

tivated an image of himself as something of an

iconoclast who valued establishment, Playboy

magazine-type ideas of masculine success: a

nice home with modern art and more modern

gadgets; lovely women as trophies; expensive,

well-tailored clothes, and fast, foreign cars.

Davis was always a man who was fascinated by

his own hunger, as he fascinated the public

with how he fed his appetites and rages. He

had no sentiment. He had no nostalgia. Noth-

ing he had done would ever be a reference for

what he would do: that was the definition of

modernity and that was what jazz was sup-

posed to be. Nothing more, nothing less.

Kind of Blue was recorded in two sessions:

March 2 and April 22, 1959. It was released

on August 17. A week later, on August 25,

Davis was beaten and arrested by white New

York City policemen while standing around in

front of the nightclub where he was playing,

enjoying a cigarette between sets, after escort-

ing a white woman from the club to catch a

cab. This made him an instant civil rights hero

and, as much as anything, legitimatized him

with blacks and with the young as something of

a rebel with a cause. That image of himself

may have been tarnished and a bit battered

over the years, but Davis was never to lose it.

GERALD EARLY, June 2008Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at

Washington University in St. Louis. His liner notes have been

nominated twice for Grammy Awards. He is currently the series

editor for Best African American Essays and Best African

American Fiction. Both volumes will debut in the spring of

2009.

i T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays,

1909-1950, p. 145ii Gary Carner (ed.), The Miles Davis Compan-

ion: Four Decades of Commentary, (New York:

Schirmer Books, 1996), p. 153iii Gary Carner (ed.), The Miles Davis Compan-

ion: Four Decades of Commentary, p. 94iv Gary Carner (ed.), The Miles Davis Compan-

ion: Four Decades of Commentary, p. 122v Gary Carner (ed.), The Miles Davis Compan-

ion: Four Decades of Commentary, p. 89vi Gary Carner (ed.), The Miles Davis Compan-

ion: Four Decades of Commentary, p. 155vii Gary Carner (ed.), The Miles Davis Compan-

ion: Four Decades of Commentary, p. 120

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BETWEEN THE TAKES�

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oday at Sony, an official re-

quest to review the reel-to-

reel tapes from the typical,

late ’50s session at 30th

Street Studio—Johnny Mathis

or Doris Day, Duke Ellington

or Miles Davis—brings up boxes upon boxes of

reels. But the Kind of Blue sessions hardly

dented the tape budget. Three reels of Scotch

190, at the time a workhorse product of the

recording industry, hold all that was recorded

at those two historic dates in 1959.

One reel is the assembled master, spliced

together from two master session reels to cre-

ate the original release of Kind of Blue in its fa-

miliar sequence. It is this reel from which

successive editions of the album were created

for almost forty years; despite the estimable

shelf life of the tape brand, it was retired as

splices fell apart and the tape began to deteri-

orate. Then there is a safety master from each

of the sessions. It is on these two reels that one

can hear what is normally dismissed as record-

ing detritus: a few false starts, a number of

take breakdowns, and the studio chatter that

took place when the record button was lit.

It’s not much, but it reveals a lot. Beyond

the mere novelty of hearing Miles Davis’s

hoarse voice, much can be gleaned through fo-

cused listening: the innovative methods used

to create the unusual styles and exceedingly

simple structures on Kind of Blue. The analog

recording process in the heyday of high-fidelity.

The camaraderie and comedy shared by an all-

star cast of improvisers. The cool confidence

of a star bandleader.

To Miles and his men in 1959, Kind of

Blue was another day at work. The closest we

may come to witnessing such a melodic, mas-

terpiece of a workday follows.T

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FREDDIE FREELOADER –studio sequence 1

Irving Townsend: The machine’s on . . .

Miles Davis: Him, me, him, you . . .

IT: Here we go: CO 62290, no title, Take 1 . . .

Unidentified: . . . B-flat on the end?

MD: Hey Wynton, after Cannonball, you play

again and then we’ll come in and end it.

“Freddie Freeloader,” Take 1—Davis whistles

after the eighth bar, cutting off the take.

MD: It was too fast.

IT: Miles, where you going to work now?

MD: Right here.

IT: OK, ’cause if you move back we don’t get

you. You were right when you played before . . .

MD: When I play I’m going to raise my horn a

little bit. Can I move this down a little bit?

(moves microphone)

Cannonball Adderley: The union’s gonna bust

you.

IT: It’s against policy to move a microphone . . .

(laughs)

Fred Plaut: Just remain . . . (Townsend releases

the talk-back button, cutting off the engineer’s

German-accented remark)

IT: Here we go. Ready? Number 2 . . .

Between production budgets, the studio clock,

technical snafus, and other unforeseen pres-

sures, recording sessions can be intense

enough to bring even the most laid-back band-

leader to a boil. Miles Davis’s short-fuse repu-

tation was well established by 1959, yet from

the outset of the first of two sessions that

yielded Kind of Blue, all seems easy-going and

. . . fun. Out of the public eye and in his

circle—among familiar sidemen and studio

staff—Davis was in his element. He and the

producer Irving Townsend share a laugh when

he moves a microphone, both Adderley and

Townsend pointing out that maneuvering

equipment in Columbia’s studio was exclu-

sively a union responsibility.

Davis’s dialogue also revealed a flexibility

in restructuring music in the moment. As the

tape started rolling, Davis was caught instruct-

ing Wynton Kelly to return for one chorus after

Cannonball Adderley’s statement on “Freddie

Freeloader,” which effectively creates an en-

ergy-shifting buffer between the cycle of solos

and the closing theme of the tune.

In choosing to first record “Freddie Free-

loader” that afternoon (it would become the

second track on Kind of Blue) Davis even

seems mindful of his sidemen. It would be the

sole album track featuring Wynton Kelly, who

was then holding the piano chair in Davis’s

group vacated the previous November by Bill

Evans.

Kelly had been informed of the recording

session, but not that his predecessor was play-

ing on most of the tracks. “Wynton used to

come to the gigs from Brooklyn by cab because

he couldn’t stand the subway,” Jimmy Cobb re-

members. “So he saw Bill sitting at the piano

and was flabbergasted! He said, ‘Damn, I

rushed all the way over here and someone else

is sitting at the piano!’ I said, ‘Hold it before

you go off, you’re on the date too.’”

Whether to minimize Kelly’s time at the

session, reassure him of his continuing posi-

tion at Davis’s side, or both, Davis helped mat-

ters by calling on Kelly first. When the clock is

ticking, a smart bandleader knows the value of

avoiding drama—or of fueling it, as Davis was

also wont to do.

FREDDIE FREELOADER – false startTake 3 of “Freddie Freeloader” makes it

through the familiar theme (loosely based on

the melody of “Soft Winds”) and makes it into

FIRST SESSION—MARCH 2, 1959—2:30 PM

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Wynton Kelly’s solo. Before the second chorus

of the piano ends, Miles whistles off the take.

MD: Hey look Wynton, don’t play no chord

going into the A-flat . . .

Three points of interest here: first, even after

the third take of “Freddie,” Miles is still tin-

kering, making small structural changes after

calling off the performance with a whistle

rather than a shout (made necessary by the

permanent damage he caused his vocal chords

in 1955 after getting into a shouting match

with a club manager).

Second, despite Davis’s general compul-

sion to simplify harmonic rigidity using a modal

approach on most of Kind of Blue, he was still

a stickler for structural precision—willing to

call off a take as Kelly misses an unusual, but

significant structural twist during his solo.

Davis created “Freddie” as a 24-bar blues—

rather than the standard 12-bar form—and he

wanted that form followed.

And third, as a bandleader, Davis gave

minimum instruction. “He never told anyone

what to play but would say, ‘Man, you don’t

need to do that,’” Adderley recalled in a 1972

radio interview. “Miles really told everybody

what not to do. I heard him and dug it.”

FREDDIE FREELOADER –studio sequence 2

IT: Here we go. This is Insert 1, Take 1

Sound of finger-snapping

muffled voice: . . . last 4 bars?

MD: No. Wait a minute . . . it’s the last 12 bars.

Chambers solos for one chorus, and the horns

join in for the closing theme.

MD: All right?

IT: Yeah.

MD: Let’s hear a little bit of it.

IT: Right.

Yes, in the studio or on the stage, Davis fol-

lowed a “first idea, best idea” philosophy. He

once famously admonished George Coleman,

one of a string of renowned saxophone players,

when he heard him practicing in his hotel

room; the bandleader wanted him to save his

freshest ideas for that night’s gig. Of more than

30 albums in the Davis discography, Kind of

Blue is one of the strongest examples of that

aesthetic.

Yet, that Davis felt the need to rerecord

the closing theme of “Freddie” with the intent

of later splicing it onto the end of the first com-

plete take (hence Townsend dubbed it an “In-

sert”) shows Davis also felt a priority in the

final product. He was never the purist—neither

in jazz styles nor record making. Tape splicing

created almost all of the tracks on Miles

Ahead, his first collaboration with Gil Evans,

in 1957. Echo made his lonely trumpet sound

all the lonelier on Kind of Blue (an echo cham-

ber had been built into the basement at 30th

Street Studio). Synthesizers and MIDI technol-

ogy helped Davis update the sound of fusion

thirty years later. If it created a better record-

ing, he was all for it.

This is the first time the only Insert take

for “Freddie Freeloader” has been available.

SO WHAT – studio sequence 1The door to the control room closes and foot-

steps approach the talkback microphone.

IT: Here we go.

MD: Wait a minute.

IT: CO 62291, number 2, Take 1.

MD: Wait one minute

Cannonball Adderley: One short second . . .

PC: Gimme a D, Bill.

Bill Evans plays a note on the piano to help

Paul Chambers tune his bass, which he

checks, playing with the bow.

IT: Number 2, Take 1.

Chambers plays the opening sequence to the

“So What” prelude and Evans answers with a

series of haunting chords. A voice calls off the

take in the studio.

IT: Start again please.

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With deliberate focus and at an even more lan-

guid tempo than the released take, Evans and

Chambers played the “So What” prelude. The

bassist ended the section with a long, low note

that edged toward distortion (begging the ques-

tion why Townsend did not halt the take at this

point). Chambers played the familiar “So

What” theme, Evans added punctuation, and

as they completed the first chorus the rustle of

paper is heard.

IT: Hold it . . . sorry . . . listen, we gotta watch

it because if there’s noise all the way through

this. This is so quiet to begin with, that every

click sounds . . .

MD: (unintelligible, to a sideman)

Unidentified: All right . . .

IT: Watch the snare too—we’re picking up

some of the vibrations on it.

MD: Well that goes with it.

IT: What?

MD: All that goes with it.

IT: All right (chuckles)—not all the other noises

though . . . Take 2.

By 1959, the relationship between producer

and artist was rapidly moving away from the

former in total charge, determining all (song

selection, final takes) to a more equal-minded

approach. Instructions were no longer simply

barked from control room to studio. Producers

were becoming careful to make decisions

jointly and to speak more as a partner over the

talkback.

That Davis answers Townsend’s chiding

about studio noise certainly stems from a need

to respond with wit or feigned challenge. But

what a perfect and revealing reply: One need

only think of Davis’s embracing of electronics

in the ’60s, and rhythmic layering in the ’70s,

to know Davis was not one to pass up the

chance to exploit an unexpected sound or mu-

sical flavor.

SO WHAT – studio sequence 2The final take of “So What” ends somewhat

jaggedly; a gentle fade out was eventually used

on the album.

CA: (singing) With a sooong in my heart . . .

Probably PC: (singing the “So What” theme)

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Dik-dik-du-gong . . . dit-dit . . .

Why Adderley chose a Rodgers and Hart com-

position with which to express himself, and

dispel the sobriety of “So What,” who knows?

Perhaps a certain melodic or harmonic similar-

ity between the two triggered the choice. Per-

haps it was simply Adderley’s sense of humor:

juxtaposing the old and the new—a slightly

mushy lyric (With a song in my heart/I behold

your adorable face/Just a song at the start/But

it soon is a hymn to your grace) with the hip,

bittersweet elegance of “So What.”

Speaking of hip: how finger-snappingly

effective is the primary theme to “So What”? It

is certainly the most instantly recognized

melody on Kind of Blue—and arguably one of

the most easily recalled in modern jazz. It’s

easy-going yet strong enough to leave its im-

print no matter the fidelity: a high quality stu-

dio recording, a whistle heard from a passing

stranger.

The voice singing the theme probably

belongs to Chambers, who, after playing it for

the first time, apparently could not get it out of

his head—the magical, melodic quality every

songwriter strives to create.

BLUE IN GREEN – studio sequence

IT: Just you four guys on this, right Miles?

MD: Five . . . No, you play.

Faintly perceptible in the background is

Evans’s voice, directing the structure of the

tune.

IT: CO 62292—Number 3, Take 1

The take ends almost immediately. Evans ab-

breviates the introduction, leading to a brief

confirmation of the form.

Bill Evans: We better do that again . . .

PC: Can we start on the last four bars?

BE: That’s what I thought . . .

MD: Last four bars, but then you repeat it.

BE: Oh, do it twice.

MD: So it’s eight.

BE: All right . . .

Finger snaps

IT: Take 2

Evans plays the introduction, and Miles’s

muted trumpet is heard as Cobb starts playing

the snare, using only one brush to achieve a

lighter feel than normal. Chambers hits a

wrong note and the take breaks down.

Unintelligible studio chatter

MD: Use both hands, Jimmy.

Jimmy Cobb: Huh?

MD: Just use both hands and play it the best

way you can. You know, it’ll be all right.

There’s a wealth of details evident in the

dialogue preceding the last tune that day:

• As Townsend’s question seems to suggest,

“Blue in Green” may have been originally in-

tended as a quartet performance—a more con-

tained meeting of Davis and Evans, the two ar-

chitects behind Kind of Blue. At the last

minute, the bandleader informs John

Coltrane—whose talent at imbuing a down-

tempo ballad with heart-breaking delicacy was

then gaining renown—that he should play as

well. Note Davis’s standard protocol: he

informs the producer first, then asks, or rather

tells Coltrane to play on the tune.

• In 1986, keyboardist and journalist Ben

Sidran asked Davis about Kind of Blue: “Does

the success of that record surprise you, Miles?

It seems to have been such a simple record in

a lot of ways.” “Not back then,” Davis replied.

“Because Bill Evans, his approach to the piano

brought that . . . out. He used to bring me

pieces by Ravel . . . and Bill used to tell me

about different modes, which I already knew.”

It seemed to require effort at times, but Davis

never denied Evans’s contribution to, or the

collaborative heart of Kind of Blue. Nowhere is

their teamwork more evident than in the ramp-

up to the final take of “Blue in Green.” Evans

took an active role for the first time during the

session as the two speak and work out the

structure of the tune.

• Jimmy Cobb remembers when recording

“Blue in Green” Davis’s instruction was

simple. “I want a floating sound.” Uhhh, OK.

Cobb’s response was to try a one-handed ap-

proach to the brushes. After hearing the result,

Davis urged him to play the brushes normally.

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FLAMENCO SKETCHES –studio sequence 1

CA: Damn thing, right?

MD: Hey Cannon . . .

Studio chatter and bass playing is heard.

IT: Take 2.

MD: Wait a minute Irving . . . wait.

IT: OK.

MD: (to CA) Hey when you raise up off the stool

man you get . . . oh yeah! (laughter)

MD: (to IT) You know your floor squeaks, you

know. You know what I mean? Can you hear

me?

IT: Yeah!

Unidentified: unintelligible

General laughter.

MD: Let’s go!

CA: That’s surface noise you know.

PC wipes bass.

BE: . . . surf-ass noise.

JC: It’s all part of the tune, man.

CA: (laughs) Surf-ASS noise!

IT: Here we go. Take 2 . . .

The members of the Miles Davis group arrived

in jolly spirits for the second session that

produced music for Kind of Blue. The feeling

must have been infectious. In reference to

Davis insisting on keeping the rattle from the

open snare on “So What” at the last session,

Townsend announced (or “slated” as its known

in studio parlance) the first take of the after-

noon as “Surface Noise.”

The good humor persisted: Davis pointed

out to Adderley that his chair would make a

noise if he stood up during the take, to which

the alto saxophonist responded with a zinger

that made Davis chuckle, who then baited

Townsend by complaining about the studio

floor squeaking. The producer acknowledged

the ribbing, as Adderley dismissed the con-

cern, calling it “surface noise.” Unable to re-

sist a quick pun, Evans chimes in with his own

zinger and Coltrane mimics Davis’s contention

that any studio noise is part of the perform-

ance. Adderley—catching Evans’s pun a beat

later—laughs and repeats his line. Not a high

point of improvised comedy, but an amusing

snapshot of the bonhomie often in play at

Davis’s sessions back then.

FLAMENCO SKETCHES –studio sequence 2Miles cuts off Take 4 with a long trill.

MD: Let’s try it again Irving.

IT: Ready . . . Take 5, Miles.

At the first modal transition, Evans comes in

early.

MD: You’re not watching, Bill.

BE: I know. I’m sorry.

MD: Try it again Irving.

IT: Right, 6!

SECOND SESSION—APRIL 22, 1959—2:30 PM

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“Flamenco Sketches” was one of two highly

unusual musical structures on Kind of Blue

(the other being the 10-bar circular form of

“Blue in Green”). Amazingly, the sextet pro-

duces a relatively smooth, complete take on

the first try. Convinced they can do better,

Davis directed the group through a few more

attempts before nailing the final master with

Take 6.

Essentially a series of five harmonies—

with no opening or closing theme—“Sketches”

relied heavily on the roles of the pianist and

bassist to define structure and guide solos. Ap-

parently, this was accomplished visually as well

as musically, the soloists signaling as they

switched from one mode to another. At one

point before Take 3, Chambers commented “I

forgot—I thought I could close my eyes . . .”

and Take 5 ended as Evans anticipated Davis’s

first transition early while not looking at the

trumpeter. Davis chided Evans, who apologized,

and the next take proved to be the master.

ALL BLUES – studio sequence

Unidentified: Ssshhhhooooooo!

Probably PC: (panting) Damn that’s a hard

mother!

BE: Boy, if I didn’t have coffee . . .

IT: What?

At 11:36, “All Blues” was the longest perform-

ance on Kind of Blue. After struggling a bit

with “Flamenco Sketches” at the start of the

session, recording two nine-and-a-half minute

takes of the tune, and then “All Blues”? If the

session had not been over, it would have been

time for a serious break.

As easy-rolling as “All Blues” may sound,

the discomfort of repeatedly playing the same

musical phrase—even for veteran musicians—

became apparent as the tune ends. Fingers

and lips finally relaxed. One musician breathed

an exaggerated sigh of relief, Chambers panted

like a dog and used one of Davis’s favorite

terms to describe the tune. Evans noted the

performance-enhancing effect of caffeine.

One other indicator of the unusual length

of the tune is discernible in the liquid rasp of

Davis’s trumpet. It had been awhile since he

had the opportunity to clear the instrument’s

spit-valve. Even that—as the maestro would

say—goes with it.

ASHLEY KAHN, JUNE 2008

Ashley Kahn is a music journalist and author of Kind of Blue:

The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, and other books

on jazz. His voice is often heard on NPR’s Morning Edition.

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PHOTOGRAPHY: cover, pages 6, 11: © Chuck Stewart; pages 5, 12-13, 15: Don Hunstein/Sony

Archives; page 7: Vernon Smith; page 9: Beuford Smith/Cesaire; page 10: Vincent Lopez, New

York Journal – American Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of

Texas; pages 14, 16, 18-19: Teo Macero Collection: Music Division, The New York Public

Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

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