Kind of Blue 50th Anniversary
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis' timeless record, Kind of Blue.
On its release in 1959, the album--which also features a young John Coltrane on sax--was a completely new direction for bebop and jazz in general. Miles was mainly concerned with new sounds and the introduction of space into his improvisations. From his autobiography:
"Kind of Blue also came out of the modal thing I started on Milestones. This time I added some other kind of sound I remembered from being back in Arkansas, when we were walking home from church and they were playing these bad gospels. So that kind of feeling came back to me and I started remembering what that music sounded like and felt like. That feeling is what I was trying to get close to. That feeling had got in my creative blood, my imagination, and I had forgotten it was there. I wrote this blues that tried to get back to that feeling I had when I was six years old, walking with my cousin along that dark Arkansas road."
This is the kind of album that expands with every listen (I believe a "grower" is the technical term).
Read/Listen to an NPR article on the album and its reissue this year.
and check out my favorite song from the record:
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2 comments:
This album was definitely key in defining his sound. What gets me most is the way he phrases his lines, and even single notes. He pays much more attention to how the length, accentuation, or bend of a single note can change the feel of what he is trying to express. In contrast, listen to Birth of the Cool and notice how UNoriginal it is. Though Kind of Blue may not be his most diverse album, it was (arguably) his best.
yeah everything up till '59 was an imitation of dizzy gillespie, which isn't a bad thing of course, but post moving into the 60's davis was his own man.
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