Fifty years ago today, Columbia released a jazz album, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, who plays trumpet and composed all of the songs, mostly. The other musicians were Bill Evans on piano, except for one bluesy cut better suited to Miles's regular pianist, Wynton Kelly, John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on saxophones, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums. This disc regularly features on lists of must-haves, jazz essentials, desert island discs, even best albums of all time, without regard to genre. That's because it's really good, and there's lots of reasons why that's true. Fred Kaplan in Slate explains the musical thinking that went into the album (with samples) much better than I can, but the article doesn't mention some background that I
think says a lot about how great recordings -- all recordings -- are
made, and, really, about the nature of effort and greatness in art.
For a more extensive source for the story of the album, I recommend Ashley Kahn's Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. Kahn had unprecedented access to the master tapes and studio notes. He listened to all the studio patter, false starts, and second takes (there was only one complete alternate take). The book helps place the album in the context of Miles's and the other musicians' work before and after the sessions, as well as charting the origins of the modal jazz ideas the songs embody.
Kind of Blue was recorded in two sessions in 1959, a six-hour double session on March 2 for "Freddie Freeloader," "Blue in Green," and "So What," and -- six weeks later, on April 22 -- a three-hour session for "All Blues" and "Flamenco Sketches." Some of the tunes had been worked on during live gigs, but most of it happened right there in the studio, just ideas -- modal sketches -- turned into songs as the clock ran. (Except for Miles, the leader, the musicians earned scale, a little over $20 an hour.)
In between the two sessions, the musicians had other projects. Kelly, Cobb, and Chambers finished Kelly's album and worked with Cannonball on his album; Evans recorded an album with another pianist; Coltrane started a studio project (with Chambers). The sextet played a week at the Apollo, and, a month after the first session, recorded this national TV show for CBS, The Sound of Miles Davis:
What's remarkable is how unremarkable the sessions and even the concepts were then. Davis took his modal ideas from a few sources -- including Bill Evans, who doesn't get the composition credits he likely earned -- which later were seen as a turning point in jazz, but at the time just provided another unexplored avenue for jazz creation. Davis enabled this largly improvisatory work with a six-week window that in fifty years has turned into a sort of granite monument, conceived, planned, and executed by masters to be a timeless classic. Of course they knew they had created something good and even different, but it only seems like an entirely cohesive work from this distance. After that, the sextet broke up, the players moved off into different directions, and there was never even a follow-up. Miles recorded more classics, and this was one of his most fruitful periods, but a specific return to the ideas in Kind of Blue never occurred.
Five songs, nine hours, little preparation, few false starts and almost no do-overs, and six weeks of distance went into the creation of, what, music's Great Pyramids, Taj Majal, Chartres Cathedral? The comparisons are inapt, and a fifty-year celebration seems simultaneously inappropriate and entirely justified.
Bill Evans, who wrote the liner notes (themselves another classic of the form) once said, "We just really went in that day and did our thing." That's how it goes, you show up, you work, and so what? Sometimes you make a thing that means more in fifty years than you ever intended, ever could have intended -- because otherwise who could ever work under the burden?
