1 End of an Era

Since Kind of Blue was not born in a vacuum, we cannot separate it from the time in which it was recorded or the dynamics of the contemporary scene. And since innovation and flux in jazz have always arisen from this community of musical philosophers and explorers, musicians with no direct connection to the album nevertheless influenced its creation—a particularly significant factor because of the album’s place in jazz history. In a sense, we can divide jazz history into two segments: before Kind of Blue and after Kind of Blue. But the particular era in which Kind of Blue was born may be an example par excellence of being in the right place at the right time. This album could not have been produced three or four years earlier or later.

Kind of Blue was created, at least to some extent, because the most important jazzmen in the modern scene desperately wanted to change the way they played their music. This need was not purely musical; it had more than a little to do with the changes then going on in American society, especially concerning the lives of African Americans. And that is how our story begins—with a glance back to the jazz scene and social climate at the end of the 1950s.

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The year in which Kind of Blue was recorded, 1959, can rightfully be considered the final year of the bebop era. Bop continued to be played, of course, as it is to this day. But its status as the cutting edge in jazz came to an end as the decade itself ended. By then there was a restlessness among many of the most-forward-looking jazzmen and a widespread feeling that jazz had to change in order to survive.

The world of jazz during its “golden age”—roughly from the early 1920s to the early 1970s—was somewhat isolated, alienated from American society at large. It had its own values, language, mores, traditions, and politics. It was not a geographical place, although its capital in the 1950s was New York City. It was a world whose entrance was jealously guarded, a world that was certainly not open to all. While all races were admitted to the jazz scene, its primary sensibility was derived from the African American experience, and its provenance can be dated back to its African roots and the subsequent experience of black people in America. It should never be forgotten that the depth and beauty of jazz have arisen from centuries of injustice, brutality, fear, and pain, none of which were passively accepted but were met with African Americans’ resistance, striving, and hope for a more benevolent future.

As preparation for this project, I read a book titled Invisible Republic, written by the famous rock critic Greil Marcus. I read it because, like this book, its core subject is a specific recording, Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Marcus’s contention is that the music of that album evokes a world within a world that is now gone, an “invisible republic” that was once alive in the traditional folk songs of America’s past.

This idea of a separate nation without physical borders that is located both within and outside of America is exactly what the jazz scene once was. It was a unique society that had its origins in the years of slavery, when African Americans—coerced into an alien land—forged their own culture and developed a way of communicating with one another that would not be understood by the white slave masters. White folks took the songs and dances of the slaves to be simply mindless entertainment, not understanding that they were a form of conversation and a means of solidifying community. The words of the songs, the freedom of the dances, even the most subtle gestures, had worlds of meaning beyond the comprehension of the whites. The lyrics of the slave songs and spirituals all had at their core the ecstatic belief in the inevitability of freedom. As in Africa, music was essential to life itself, a key to survival, a way of keeping mind, heart, and community together.

There is another significant aspect of jazz originating in the African American experience. Along with the value placed on community is the value placed on individuality, which in the jazz world is of paramount importance. By “individuality” I do not mean merely the possession of an idiosyncratic style, nor do I mean “individualism,” whose focus on self-aggrandizement and one’s own self-interest is the very antithesis of community. The individuality to which I refer derives from respect for the person and, in jazz, allows each musician to create an entire sound that is unlike anyone else’s. In a society in which black people were routinely stereotyped, being true to oneself had an intrinsic value that ran deep to the bone. Jazzmen have often been characterized as “eccentric” or even “crazy.” But this is simply an expedient way for others to reject their insistence on individuality in a society in which conformity is the desired norm.

Black musicians continued to use a kind of code in their music and in the jazz lifestyle. One fine example is the long list of blues tunes with salacious lyrics that have been cleverly coded—for example, Ma Rainey’s “See See Rider Blues” and Mamie Smith’s “I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None of this Jelly Roll.” Heavily codified references to illegal drugs have been used in jazz and blues virtually since the inception of the music, from Louis Armstrong’s “Muggles” (marijuana) up through Lee Morgan’s “Speedball” (a mixture of cocaine and heroin).

In his fascinating (and often racially repellent) memoir, Really the Blues, the white New Orleans-style clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow provides an example of a lengthy conversation in “jive” lingo. Although it is blatantly about a drug deal, any police officer overhearing the exchange would have no idea of its meaning; the participants might as well be speaking in Hungarian. Mezzrow also recounts the story of a Louis Armstrong broadcast in which, right in the middle of an interview, Armstrong communicated to Mezzrow a request to have the best marijuana ready for him upon his return to Chicago. To anyone other than those “in the know,” the musician was speaking gibberish. Needless to say, Mezzrow got the message.

Besides being one of the most important of all jazzmen, Lester Young was particularly imaginative in creating his own personal “jive” lingo. For example, “Bing and Bob” meant the police. “I got eyes” meant he wished to do something. “I feel a draft” meant he felt that somebody present was, in his opinion, a racist.

There was constant mutual influence between prevailing social currents and the lives and work of the musicians. Musical style and aesthetics were of necessity interwoven with the social fabric, a reflection of the honored place that music occupied at the heart of the social structure in African societies; thus, as society changed, so did the music. The romantic notions about art that have become accepted in Western society since the last century were alien to African culture.

John Miller Chernoff writes in African Rhythm and African Sensibility:

The fact that most people in Africa do not conceive of music apart from its community setting and cultural context means that the aesthetics of the music, the way it works to establish a framework for communal integrity, offers a superb approach to understanding Africans’ attitudes about what their relationship to each other is and should be. The judgments of competence which people make and the standards of quality of which a musician is aware are elaborations of their own conceptions about the nature of their social life, elaborations which are particularly more evident in musical activity than in many other institutionalized relationships because artistic standards involve explicit judgments on the potential of the communities within which people live.1

The jazz world itself was as self-contained as these African communities, and to an extent, music had the same overriding effect on the lives of those who were part of it. The insularity of this world created a kind of musical “greenhouse effect.” Wherever musicians gathered and played, whether in nightclubs, on touring buses, or in after-hours joints, they nourished the growth of new ideas, challenged one another, or simply talked music.

Because it is chiefly improvisational, jazz has unique problems, as well as assets, that are not characteristic of composed music. There are still classical music snobs who point out that musical techniques that may be viewed as cutting edge in jazz are old hat in classical music. What these criticisms ignore is the profound differences between the two kinds of music. Techniques that are successful in classical music may not work in jazz, and vice versa. So jazzmen cannot simply steal ideas from other forms of music. They must work out their creative problems for themselves within the special boundaries of their music. Their passionate commitment to the progress of this music springs from the belief that jazz serves a higher purpose, that it provides musicians with far more than a career. As Sonny Rollins told me in a letter, “My whole life has been devoted to the achievement of some important breakthroughs, and I would die disappointed if I couldn’t reach them. I want to live up to my promise, not just for me, but for the music.”

It has been said that the jazz combo is a perfect microcosm of American democracy (at least in its ideal form): the individual is as important as the society of which he or she is a part. In jazz the individual solo is essential to the work of the group as a whole. This relationship between part and whole is especially crucial for jazz innovation, which arose out of the progress of both individual musicians and the collectivity of the jazz scene. It was an ongoing process born of the musicians’ deep belief in their music and its possibilities, and a desire born of curiosity about exploring new planes of freedom. Jazzmen realized that outside of a relatively small circle of fellow believers, musicians, writers, and fans, there was little understanding of, interest in, or respect for this art form in America. And few became involved in the music because they thought they could become rich. There were other reasons to persevere; call it faith.

This closed-off community created a rare intimacy among jazzmen, but not every aspect of the scene was positive. To some extent, the heroin epidemic of the 1940s and 1950s was an offshoot of this tightly knit world. According to Sonny Rollins, using drugs was a kind of protest against the whole money system and a way of renouncing American mores. Ironically, however, even dope acted to bring jazzmen closer together in their shared misery. It was just this intimacy in the musical greenhouse of their world that gave them the ability to connect so closely that they could almost read one another’s minds while on the bandstand. The smallest gestures, the subtlest facial expressions, a nod or a glance, had implications lost on most of those in the audience. While playing, jazzmen could hold conversations, admonish one another, or crack jokes, all through their music. Charles Mingus in his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, describes a philosophical conversation he had with Eric Dolphy just before they were due to perform. According to Mingus, they continued the same conversation when they were onstage performing, this time using music instead of words.

This intense intimacy also spurred innovation during the “golden era” of jazz. By the end of the 1950s, many jazzmen were beginning to feel that they had reached the limit of improvisation based on the European-derived harmonic system. They were just beginning to look at the music of other cultures, particularly those of Africa and Asia. And they were responding as well to the growing civil rights movement, with its call for “freedom now!”

It is misleading to make too much of a parallel between the changes in society, in particular the lives of African Americans, and the evolution of their music. But it is even more misleading to ignore this connection. For example, the innovations of Louis Armstrong in Chicago during the mid-1920s reflected in many ways the northern exodus of millions of southern black people. The exultant sound of Armstrong’s trumpet represented a new kind of freedom that they sought in the North (however illusory that goal proved to be). Armstrong’s swinging rhythmic attack seemed to offer the joy of freedom itself.

During the Swing Era, a period when Armstrong’s advances were being further expanded by both big bands and certain key players, New York became the center of jazz. Black musicians in the 1930s found themselves becoming somewhat more accepted into the American mainstream. When Benny Goodman fronted a trio, or later a quartet, of racially mixed personnel, it both reflected these changes and helped push them forward. The Swing Era was a period in which jazz (now labeled swing) became massively popular. But many of the most successful bands were white big bands, such as those of Glenn Miller, the Dorsey brothers, and Artie Shaw. This situation did not go unnoticed by a number of black jazz musicians. In a way, the enormous success of swing, and in particular these white bands, was confirmation of the power of black music. Of course, to some black musicians it appeared that this success was more theft than confirmation or acknowledgment, but the reality is somewhat more complicated, for white musicians had been playing jazz since almost the very earliest days of the music.

Nonetheless, by the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was a restlessness in jazz that would begin gradually and grow to enormous proportions by the time it reached its culmination in the 1950s and 1960s. And with black soldiers fighting a war against racism and fascism in Europe, the idea of returning to a home country in which they were themselves oppressed fanned new winds of change.

The revolution of the early boppers was as much social foment as it was musical. This is not to say that the growing jazz revolt came about solely through racial dynamics, especially black hostility toward whites. The idea that bebop was created to discourage whites from playing jazz—a once-popular theory—is belied by the fact that the first bebop group to play on Fifty-second Street, led by Dizzy Gillespie, included a white pianist, George Wallington. And later Dizzy hired the white drummer Stan Levey for his group.

However, the social ramifications of bebop cannot be avoided. For one thing, the boppers wanted to discard the last remnants of minstrelsy and insisted on being taken seriously as artists. Not that Duke Ellington or Lester Young or Roy Eldridge or Billie Holiday was less than a serious artist. But the boppers made a conscious effort to be treated as artists rather than as performers. Dizzy Gillespie might have clowned around onstage, but his jokes had little connection to minstrelsy. It was humor with a bite that often made his audiences uncomfortable. Most of the other boppers, however, purposely avoided any concession to their audience. If people wanted entertainment beyond brilliant and complex music, they were not going to find it in bebop.

According to the jazz composer-theorist George Russell, there was another sociocultural basis for the harmonic complexities of bop: black musicians needed to make clear the fierce intelligence that was necessary to play this music. The greater society thought of jazz as merely an offshoot of the so-called natural sense of rhythm of African Americans and believed that it lacked the sophistication of classical music. But anyone with ears could hear that bop was as challenging to the mind as any art form could be. Again, this is not to say that earlier jazz did not also require a finely tuned musical mind—of course it did: Armstrong, Ellington, Lester Young, and Art Tatum, to name a few, were inarguably musical geniuses. But bop made much more obvious the importance of the intellect in creating this music (although as we shall see, the ability to turn off the mind ultimately became a skill of equal importance).

Bop had been born in the mid-1940s after years of development by young, forward-looking jazzmen. During its embryonic years (from approximately 1939 to 1944) musicians would experiment at after-hours joints in Harlem such as Minton’s or Monroe’s. Included among the chief “Young Lions” of this era were trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, alto saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, and guitarist Charlie Christian (although Christian died in 1942 at the age of twenty-five). At these after-hours clubs the nascent boppers would challenge musicians who dared to sit in with them by playing at very fast tempos and, especially, using tunes with complex chord structures such as “How High the Moon” (once declared the “anthem of bebop”). Harmonic complexity became a hallmark of modern jazz. A musician’s ability to run the harmonic gauntlet and still make a coherent musical statement was the great challenge of bop.

The use of harmonic structure had special, extramusical significance in jazz: it was the aspect of the music that was most deeply rooted in Europe. Jazz is usually considered a fusion of African and European musical sensibilities. The rhythms and, to an extent, melodies of jazz can be traced to Africa. But the use of chords comes out of the European harmonic system. And jazzmen were very aware of this—a crucial fact to remember when considering the making of Kind of Blue.

With this in mind, it is useful to compare the attitude of the original boppers toward European classical music and that of the later generation of jazzmen. Dizzy Gillespie once said that when the boppers listened to the great European repertoire, it was like “going to church.” I find this a revealing phrase. The religious analogy implies that the great composers of classical music were patriarchal gods and that the best that jazz musicians could do was act as members of the congregation or obedient children.

In other words, they were expected to embrace the commonly held belief that classical music is the pinnacle of musical achievement for humankind and that the ultimate goal of a musician is to reach for that seemingly unobtainable level of artistry. The accomplishments of Western civilization have too often been used as a weapon against other cultures. The obvious cultural bias may rarely be stated aloud, but we know that in our society the general attitude throughout our educational system—at least until relatively recently—is that we have geniuses such as Shakespeare, Keats, Bach, Mozart, and da Vinci, to name a few. What could any society produce that would come even close to the artistic works of those towering geniuses? The beboppers assumed this cultural bias to be the gospel truth. They simply wanted to be in the same pantheon, albeit on a lower tier.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, this attitude began to change. Jazz musicians started to look for inspiration beyond Europe and went back to their non-Western roots. (This movement was also, to some degree, a continuing reaction by mainly East Coast African American jazzmen to the cool-jazz movement.) Many began to question whether European tradition was the only yardstick they had with which to measure their own music. In 1960 Miles recorded Sketches of Spain with an orchestra that included several classical players. According to Miles, many of them clearly thought of themselves as superior to Miles himself and the other jazzmen. But Miles bluntly told them that he could do everything they could and that they could not do something he could—which was to improvise, at least to improvise at any significant length. Many jazzmen began to wonder whether trying to achieve the harmonic complexity of classical music was a desired goal after all, especially for a music such as theirs, based primarily on improvisation.

These were the early years of the Black Power movement in which African Americans, no longer kowtowing to the standards of white people, asserted their belief in their own culture. This steadfast commitment reflects one of the distinguishing characteristics that separated Malcolm X philosophically from Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm had no faith in Western culture and believed that African Americans should distance themselves as far away from it as they could; King continued to hope for solutions within the Euro-American system. Once again, this parallel with the growing movement in jazz away from European harmonic complexity is far more than coincidence. It is evidence of a major shift in the attitudes of masses of American blacks. As usual, jazzmen were far ahead of the curve; but they were not ready to dispense completely with European harmony. One musician, John Coltrane, took it to its maximum complexity before turning his back on it and choosing another route altogether. Kind of Blue was the deciding factor in his turnabout.

There were those who felt that the harmonic and rhythmic sophistication of bop ruined jazz as “people’s music,” and they resisted the ride. Many of the jazz listeners as well as the artists themselves claimed that the new jazz divested the music of its charm. And, in fact, jazz did lose a portion of its popular audience with the inception of bop. It was no longer music to dance to, although early on many tried. The boppers often played dances in the 1940s, and there were those who attempted to create ballet using the new music. But eventually modern jazz became primarily a small-club phenomenon, where audiences listened intently to this subtle and complex music. Dancers had to look elsewhere for suitable music, eventually finding it in rhythm and blues and in rock.

Any study of the late Swing Era makes it clear that the bebop movement was inevitable. Musicians ranging from Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw to Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Don Byas, and Art Tatum were pushing the harmonic or rhythmic envelope and were already pointing the way toward the modern jazz era. Jazz was simply growing up and moving in new directions.

With the advent of bebop, small groups came to dominate the jazz scene. There were still big bands, and for that matter there were big bands that played modern jazz. For the most part, though, modern jazz was small group jazz. Most often a performance of modern jazz consisted of a statement of theme followed by a series of solos. Sometimes even the melody itself was dropped, and the musicians simply improvised on the chord changes.

There were exceptions to this routine, however. John Lewis, the musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, for example, developed complex arrangements that proved small groups could do more than simply play a series of solos. And composers-arrangers such as Charles Mingus and George Russell worked to put jazz improvisation in a more formal context, giving their performances direction and coherence. On the other hand, Sonny Rollins developed an improvisational style in which solos were not just a series of melodic ideas but rather possessed form and overriding logic. Instead of playing on the chord changes only and discarding melody when he started to improvise, many of his solos used the melody itself as a way of imposing form.

After the initial bop revolution, modern jazz went through two important permutations in the 1950s. The first was the cool, or West Coast, jazz movement. This lyrical, languid, pastel jazz is bop without the heat. It is associated mainly with white jazz musicians, though the most important influences were Miles Davis, Lester Young, and in his less incendiary solos, Charlie Parker himself in the work he did with strings.

One reason cool jazz is associated with white jazzmen is that the music often seems as much influenced by European classical music as by the jazz tradition. To many people it was jazz in which the African American elements had been bleached away, although there were a number of black musicians who played in West Coast groups, such as Sonny Clark or Chico Hamilton. Actually, Hamilton’s popular group was the apotheosis of the movement. His group included a classically trained cellist and often performed suites and complex arrangements that at times gives off the musty odor of the conservatory.

Cool jazz is associated with white jazzmen for yet another reason. As anyone who has read my earlier books knows, I have little use for the revisionist segregation of jazz history, but there is no doubt that much cool jazz lacks the harsher truths heard in bebop. It is jazz minus the tortured history one can hear in even the most joyous playing of the great black jazzmen, as well as in the music of white jazzmen who empathized with that sensibility.

A particularly key influence in the advent of cool jazz was a nonet that Miles Davis led in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The collection of this group’s recordings would be titled Birth of the Cool, and from then on Miles would routinely be identified as a cool jazzman no matter how far he advanced from the style of those earlier recordings. Even when he was playing the often cacophonous music of his fusion groups in the 1970s, he was still dubbed a cool jazzman. For that matter, Kind of Blue has occasionally been called a great cool-jazz album. To a degree this is understandable since the album has a surface serenity not unlike that of much cool jazz. But beneath that surface are deeper and darker emotions; these complex layers of feeling and thought give Kind of Blue its continual fascination and help explain why it remains so powerful, even after multiple listenings.

In the 1950s there was a movement on the East Coast that in some ways was a reaction to the cool-jazz movement. Dubbed hard bop, it is far more bluesy and strong-edged than West Coast jazz. It is inevitably portrayed as an attempt to bring jazz back to its African American roots, which is true to an extent (although in a mirror reversal of West Coast jazz, there were a number of important white players of hard bop). Out of hard bop developed a subgenre usually called soul jazz. This is music even more centered in the blues than most hard bop, and it became very popular. Usually featuring an organist who had been influenced by Jimmy Smith’s funky style, the tunes generally have titles referring to down-home black life, such as “Back to the Chicken Shack” or “Members Don’t Get Weary.” But this music soon became mired in clichés, and the plethora of soul jazz albums, with few exceptions, became unrecognizable from one another. Ironically, there are also those who classify Kind of Blue as one of the ultimate products of the hard-bop movement—a view that is merely a knee-jerk reflex among commentators who need to pigeonhole. The truth is that Kind of Blue is beyond easy categories.

By 1959 bop—in one form or another—had been dominating the jazz scene for almost fifteen years. But there was a new kind of restlessness, a feeling of anticipation that yet another fresh wave of change was about to engulf jazz. The prophets of this change were musicians such as Rollins, Mingus, Jimmy Giuffre, and George Russell. By this time cracks were becoming obvious in the bop aesthetic. When improvisational geniuses like Parker, Gillespie, or pianist Bud Powell had performed, bop seemed limitless. But by the end of the 1950s, many less-than-stellar musicians had mastered the rhythmic and harmonic disciplines of bop and were playing solos that just “ran the changes”—playing through the harmonic structures without creating coherent musical statements.

By the late 1950s a number of important musicians were becoming dissatisfied with the status quo and were actively seeking ways of giving jazz renewed life. One of the most important of these musicians is the bassist-composer Charles Mingus, who in the notes for his wonderful 1959 album, Mingus Dynasty, wrote about Ornette Coleman, even though at the time he had not actually heard Coleman play. Mingus had, however, already heard about Coleman’s innovations. Coleman, in order to play with a new melodic freedom, was playing music that mostly discarded conventional harmonic structure. He had previously recorded two albums in Los Angeles before coming to the East Coast, but they were largely overlooked at the time. Mingus knew that Coleman, or somebody like Coleman, was inevitable. Mingus was well aware that he and many other musicians who were not satisfied with conventional harmony were looking for a way to expand their ability to create melody unhampered by the prison of chord changes. Mingus himself had already explored atonality and other harmonic forms in his search for new areas of freedom.

Mingus was not the only musician looking beyond the frontiers of bop. Sonny Rollins had practiced with Coleman while on his first trip to Los Angeles in 1957. Rollins was not shaken by Coleman’s direction, because he himself had been thinking along similar lines. In some ways Rollins’s famous “Blue Seven,” recorded in 1956, is an indication of the shift in Sonny’s direction. After he left Max Roach’s group in 1957, he usually performed with only bass and drums in order to provide himself with the greatest possible melodic freedom. A new revolution was on its way, and the best musicians in jazz knew it.

At the same time, African Americans in general were becoming increasingly impatient, confronting head-on the racism and segregation that, despite the gains following World War II, still held them in place as second-class citizens, in both the South and the North. Again, it is certainly not a coincidence that the idea of freedom, especially for African Americans, was itself in the wind, especially in the late 1950s.

It is ironic that the 1950s in general were a period that has often been described as tepid, bland, and conformist; nothing could be further from the reality of that decade’s tumult and hard-won achievements in the African American experience. During that “tepid” decade, among other groundbreaking events, Rosa Parks made her courageous stand, and following it the amazing (and successful) grassroots bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, took place. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the end of school segregation, with fierce opposition in many states, and federal troops had to be sent in to Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure the safety of black children as they entered the desegregated high school. To America’s crushing shame, the crime of lynching was still a menace, the most widely publicized case being that of Emmett Till in 1955. Under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement picked up momentum; eventually, especially for the people on the front lines, that movement—“the Movement”—would become a juggernaut, a relentless force.

These parallels between the lives of African Americans battling for their freedom as citizens and that of jazz musicians for their freedom from European harmony are too close to be mere happenstance. The disenchantment of black Americans with the status quo following World War II was mirrored in the gathering anger that revealed itself in the changes in jazz. Kind of Blue is a product of this striving for both social and musical freedom—which is one reason this album is so deeply textured.

Miles Davis clearly had his finger in the wind by the late 1950s. At the time, Miles had become one of the most influential of all jazzmen, and his home had become a favorite gathering place for musicians. It was often the center of lively discussions about any number of subjects, but the usual focus was on expanding the vocabulary of jazz and dealing with innovation and change. Many musicians looked to Miles almost as if he were a prophet, which in some ways he was. He was always on the crest of the latest wave of change, although very often, as we shall see, his actions were in reaction to innovation rather than in accordance with it. Miles always had his own agenda, like the greatest musicians, and was constantly on the lookout for ideas and jazzmen who could help him achieve his goals.

It is worth noting that Miles had been a forward-looking musician even as a teenager in East St. Louis. He had also been acutely sensitive to the frustration and untenable situation of black people in America. Miles’s intuition about the course of jazz evolution and its connection to the changes in American society were among the reasons Kind of Blue had so much impact on the jazz scene and the future of what Duke Ellington called “the great American music.”