Kind of Blue, Reloaded

JAZZIZ - Jazz's most revered album turns 50 next year. But is the Miles Davis classic really as significant as we've been led to believe?

On the afternoon of Monday, March 2, 1959, Miles Davis met his working band at Columbia Records' 30th Street Studio in New York City and handed out sheet music. After running down the modal sketches, Davis and the group set about recording three songs, adding two more later, on April 22. The result was Kind of Blue, an album that is now widely considered to be the greatest jazz recording of all time. Rolling Stone magazine ranked it No. 12 on its "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list - right after Elvis' The Sun Sessions and two notches ahead of the Beatles' Abbey Road. Rockers like the Doors' Ray Manzarek have hailed the album as a major influence, and Kind of Blue has sold millions of copies worldwide, making it one of the record industry's best-selling jazz albums.

But is Kind of Blue really as original or as influential as many jazz critics have claimed? Compositions said to have been written solely by Davis for the session actually were adaptations and collaborations. The sonic quality of the album is frustratingly sub-par. And it's even debatable whether Kind of Blue is this sextet's best work.

How then did Kind of Blue rise to become jazz's Mona Lisa - an unassailable icon symbolizing an entire art form? The album's early marketing efforts by Columbia certainly played a pivotal role. So did rock's embrace and the jazz industry's need for an album - any album - to serve as an intellectual jetty against rock's relentless incursions.

How True is Blue?
From the moment Kind of Blue hit stores in August 1959, it was clear this was a different kind of album. Rather than another hard-bop or cool-jazz recording, the album transcended both genres. Each of the five compositions struck a different artistic pose, thanks largely to the use of modal scales, repeated blues riffs and the smoldering intensity of the sextet - Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans (Wynton Kelly plays on one track), Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb.

But Kind of Blue's compositions - long-credited to Davis - aren't quite as original as Bill Evans said in the album's original liner notes or as Davis claimed in his 1989 autobiography. "So What" is easily the album's signature piece, with its daring use of space and the call-and-response interchange between the horns and rhythm section. It's a blues, but with a cosmopolitan feel and an exhilarating strut. According to Ashley Kahn in the book Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, Davis "recalled drawing both melodic inspiration and feeling [for "So What"] from two very specific sources, African folk and American gospel."

Actually, there was a third, unmentioned source: bassist Oscar Pettiford. A close listen reveals Paul Chambers' famous opening bass line to be a virtual lift from Pettiford's intro to his 1955 Bethlehem recording of "Bohemia After Dark." And if you listen carefully to the background horns during pianist Don Abney's solo, you'll hear shades of what Davis was shooting for on "So What."

It's unclear how Pettiford felt about Davis borrowing his "Bohemia" line. But we get a clue on Pettiford's My Little Cello, an LP recorded for Debut in 1960 (released on CD as Montmartre Blues). Included on the album is "Why Not? That's What!" which clearly is Pettiford's musical response. Pettiford says cryptically in the album's liner notes, "The title contains a message for Miles on behalf of Paul Chambers and myself."

Davis frequently "borrowed" from one song to create another. His "Weirdo" (recorded in March 1954) was clearly the basis for his more famous standard "Walkin'," recorded a month later. But on a re-listen to "Weirdo," the figures also sound strangely similar to "Freddie Freeloader," the second track on Kind of Blue.

What's more, "All Blues" was worked over by arranger Gil Evans, according to Davis himself in an interview with writer Ralph Gleason a month before the album's release. And in later years, Bill Evans confessed to writing "Blue in Green" and to sketching the melody and chord changes for the musicians. He also said he played a role in composing "Flamenco Sketches." Jimmy Cobb, the drummer on the session and last surviving member of the sextet, has gone so far as to say that Davis composed all of Kind of Blue in collaboration with pianist Bill Evans.

No one knows why Bill Evans insisted in the LP's liner notes that "Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates." Perhaps that was the Columbia marketing machine at work in 1959. As Kahn says in his book, many of the songs on Kind of Blue were performed by the sextet on gigs before the album was recorded.

So while Kind of Blue's detached mood and plaintive solo lines remain harrowing, the album's compositions were hardly the result of Davis' isolated brainstorms.

Cover story excerpted from the September 2008 issue of JAZZIZ Magazine Log onto www.jazziz.com/promotion for a free sample issue and 2 CDs.

Marc Myers is a New York City jazz writer who blogs daily at
www.jazzwax.com.