10 So What?

So then, what is it about Kind of Blue that gives it this singular place in jazz history? Of all the thousands of albums, of any genre, why does this one stand out? Why do new generations continue to be drawn to this music, to the extent that forty years after its initial release it remains one of the bestselling of all jazz albums? Why does it still seem so fresh and relevant to our lives? And why does it attract so many lovers? There are lovers of Kind of Blue all over the world. Through the “Miles List” on the World Wide Web, I regularly communicate with fans who live in an extraordinary number of different countries: Italy, France, England, Germany, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, and others too numerous to name. And here, in the United States, there are lovers, too.

Suppose for everyone who loves Kind of Blue there is a different answer to the questions I have posed above? For many musicians the album has been a milestone in their lives. As the superb pianist Larry Willis put it, “It showed me not only what jazz could be but also what art is all about.” This record album has changed lives, and what more can be said about any work of art? Willis is far from the only musician or music lover to feel this way.

Alice Schell, a prizewinning short-story writer who grew up in a small Pennsylvania town and now lives in Philadelphia, offered these comments:

When I was growing up in the 1940s my family did not own a large collection of records. Like most of the other African American families in town, we listened to the radio as our primary source of music; and when we did buy a record, it was sure to be a piece by one of the popular groups like the Ink Spots or the Orioles, or by vocalists like Billy Eckstine and Ella Fitzgerald. Among our favorites were several singers who gradually faded from public prominence: Nellie Lutcher, Savannah Churchill, Hadda Brooks. These were singers of popular music, and I doubt if many readers under the age of sixty ever heard of them. My family’s collection included only a few records by jazz artists in addition to Eckstine and Fitzgerald. We had a few sides of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Illinois Jacquet.

In his CD liner notes for Kind of Blue, Robert Palmer describes the album as “one of those incredibly rare works equally popular among professionals and the public at large…” As the above paragraph suggests, I am a member of that public, a listener—not a musician or music critic. Nor am I knowledgeable enough about jazz even to call myself a true jazz fan; yet I am one of the many lovers of Kind of Blue, which has a special place among the albums I reach for when I want to hear music that touches me in a deep and personal way.

I was introduced to Kind of Blue by the author of this book over thirty years ago. When I think back to my earliest impressions, I realize that this music was not, as it has been for many others, a case of “love at first hearing.” It was beautiful, of course, and I responded immediately to its quiet melancholy, but I did not listen to the record dozens of times a day or exhibit anything remotely like obsession about it. In fact, I had at least one specific dislike: hard as it is for me to believe now, I did not like Miles Davis’s use of the Harmon mute. I thought the sound was thin, whiny, and self-consciously inward.

Over the years I listened to the album, sporadically at first, then more and more often. And I listened more carefully—which is to say, I began to give the music my complete attention. Something changed. Without being fully aware of what was happening, I had been quietly seduced. The third track, “Blue in Green,” was largely responsible for working the spell. Even the sound of the muted trumpet began to pull me into the center of this gorgeous piece. “Blue in Green” is the shortest cut on the album, a mere five minutes and thirty-seven seconds; but like a fine lyric poem, it manages to distill tremendous feeling in that short time. And to my surprise, after many listenings, I no longer find the sound of the Harmon mute thin and whiny. As for my earlier criticism about its sense of “self-conscious inwardness,” I thought to myself: did I ever really feel that way? Now the muted trumpet sounds dreamlike; it has a gossamer quality, like the edge of a memory that refuses to be fully captured. Moreover, the trumpet establishes the mood—what I call a mood of lights and shadows—and is perfectly suited to the understated effect of “Blue in Green.” I love the meshed sound of the piano and bass together, and the almost piercing contrast that comes with Coltrane’s eloquent solo.

I believe that artist and audience are, in a sense, collaborators. We not only receive what the artist has to give, but we also bring our own interior worlds, our feelings and memories, to the experience. For each member of the audience, then, something new is created. This artist-audience relationship accounts for the irreducible subjectivity at the core of anyone’s judgments about art. If I were highly knowledgeable about jazz, I would still describe Coltrane’s solo on “Blue in Green” as a bittersweet piece of music; and there is no objective measure—only arguments (unavoidably subjective even when well buttressed by expertise)—that could make me feel otherwise. “Blue in Green” continues to be my favorite track on Kind of Blue, and I listen to it often enough to drive my neighbors crazy; but I have also come to love the entire album. One day several years ago I was walking in the Old City section of Philadelphia when I saw a small sign that read: “Blue in Green.” I was excited by the obvious reference to Kind of Blue. The sign hung over the doorway of a tiny restaurant where a framed portrait of Miles Davis graced the left-hand wall inside the entrance. The sound system was not blaring Muzak. In this wonderful little eatery there was no “blaring” from the sound system at all, only the exquisite music of Miles Davis. It was not easy to hear the music above the din of conversation in the restaurant, but I recognized that Miles “sound,” however faintly. (I did not know at the time that I had entered the restaurant during a minor lull, a rarity in this popular place, and the lull accounts for my being able to hear anything at all above the conversation.) I ate a stack of delicious pancakes and walked home, where I listened once to Kind of Blue, the whole thing. Then I returned to the third track, as usual, and listened to “Blue in Green” again. And then another two or three or four times. Maybe five. Enough for one day.

These comments come from a lover of Kind of Blue who describes her opinions as “impressionistic” and confesses that she does not consider herself a knowledgeable jazz fan. There are many such “lovers” out there, for some of whom Kind of Blue might conceivably be the only jazz album they own. The following comments, on the other hand, come from a musician—Bill Douglass, a fine Californian bassist who has played and recorded with many jazzmen and women, including Marian McPartland and Art Lange. This is how he feels about the album:

Kind of Blue has had a great influence on me, but it is only at this time in my life that I can articulate what it is. Two aspects stand out. The first is how the rhythm section approached the tunes. The material was so fresh, and the trio really found a new way to support the other soloists that was not the usual way. Certainly I was deeply influenced by that, as I am a bass player.

The second aspect has to do with the overall arc of the recording, the concept that Miles had and that his fellow musicians so wonderfully put forward. Each solo is a perfect example of “telling a story” with music. Sometimes I feel that today’s music lacks that depth of storytelling, the architecture of a great solo. I can return again and again to the recording and hear something new. What a marvel!

I was particularly eager to discuss Kind of Blue with the trumpeter-composer Dave Douglas. Now in his mid-thirties, Douglas is among the most innovative and forward-looking musicians of his generation. While comparing him with Miles Davis places an unreasonable burden around his neck, nevertheless the innovative nature of much of his music places him squarely in the same tradition. I was hoping to learn from him the importance and influence of the album on him and especially on his generation. Our conversation was extensive, and I want to record our dialogue here in order to highlight the complexity of the issues surrounding the album. His comments surprised me with their insight and sense of musical vision. I first asked him how Kind of Blue had affected him:

I think it has affected all of us. In the same way that Miles used to say, “No one plays anything that isn’t influenced by Louis Armstrong.” I think that for people my age, and certainly people younger, Kind of Blue is sort of a touchstone album, whatever we think of it. And it has certainly been listened to many hundreds of times.

Part of what is so fascinating about that record is the different improvising styles of the main soloists. There’s a teacher in Boston named Charlie Banakis who gives as his first lesson to a lot of his students the task of transcribing the three horn solos from “So What.” And something that’s so interesting is how different each of the solos is. I think it is those differences that give a level of balance to the piece. Of course, Bill Evans also is extremely unique. But there’s something there that I think is really important: that sense of balance. I think it adds depth to that particular record. In a way, that kind of depth is what you find in all of Miles’s records and projects over the years, and why people keep coming back to him as one of the great musical minds of the twentieth century. He certainly found his own way to play the music, that was unique, and he wasn’t afraid. In fact, he was encouraging these musical minds in his group to find their own way, which was very different from where Miles was coming from. I think you find that most noticeably in the great 1960s quintet which, in a certain sense, grew out of the Kind of Blue band. I think Tony Williams was very much influenced by what was going on in that earlier group—the way of accompanying and the way of breaking the time up. And that’s a band that grew on the bandstand. I think that the sextet of 1957–58 also grew on the bandstand, but in a very different way.

I asked Douglas if he had a specific interest in George Russell’s theory of modes.

Absolutely! I mean, I think it’s a brilliant way of reinterpreting and studying—examining—music. I actually studied with George Russell. I was in his class for a semester at the New England Conservatory in, I guess, 1982—something like that. But in terms of Kind of Blue and the way modes were used, I wouldn’t attach too much significance. I think one of the things about Kind of Blue that’s so stunning is the equal level of intellectual interest and emotional interest. In other words, these were new ideas that were bandied about at the time, but Miles was able to remove the ideas from intellectual concepts and turn them into something that wasn’t being thought about at all; that was very much instinctual, intuitive, and emotional; that had its own narrative apart from whatever the theoretical ideas were being explored. After all, there had been many other people who previously used modes. I’m sure Gil Evans had a lot to do with what happened in that session. [Douglas was unaware that, according to Teo Macero, Gil Evans was present at the Kind of Blue sessions.]

But it’s a greatly flawed record on many levels, which I think is very interesting. There are mistakes, and I think it has a quality of being thrown together, which of course is not at all the case. I think of Miles as a great composer of groups. And his contribution was to put together a situation that created great music. I think that the making of Kind of Blue was a very haphazard, thrown-together thing and that Miles came into the studio without a whole lot of stuff, other than the idea that “We’re gonna go in and do this with these people, and create the music in this way.” So I think you have to give a lot of credit to that—to his mastery of “the moment,” rather than some enormous rehearsal time and previsionary work.

Perhaps that’s a level where the record is a very great influence on the music that has come after. I know that even though Kind of Blue has an incredibly haphazard feel, maybe that’s why we want to listen to it thousands of times, over and over. To get to that depth, you hear something different each time, and you really read into each player because they’re caught like deer in the headlights in that session. I know that as a producer of records myself, that has encouraged me to think about the way I lead recording dates.

While we may have brazenly come up with new compositional ideas that work, there is still the moment when it comes down to rolling the tape; there has to be that spark and flame that gets everyone up to that next level of interaction and creation. And so, almost every record I’ve ever made, I’ve done in two days. By doing it this way, I think you create that feeling and that excitement. And that comes one hundred percent from the philosophy of the way Kind of Blue was made. Kind of Blue also benefited from the photograph on the cover of the album, and the time it came out, and where everyone was in their careers—where Miles was in his career. In purely musical terms, everything was in the air at that time. There were a lot of other records that you could point to, within that same time span, that had the same musical significance and impact. However, so many different elements came together for Kind of Blue that it has become this iconic cultural artifact.

I asked Douglas about Miles’s remark concerning a jazzman in a musical situation in which he must play above his head rather than lean on clichés and easy licks.

I think that is true, and I also think that Miles did that with himself as well—he did things that a lot of people are afraid to do. One of my favorite records is that of Art Blakey with the Jazz Messengers and Thelonius Monk. With Bill Hartman and Johnny Griffin there is that same element, as if they had just barely got through some of those takes. Yet it’s the most exciting jazz from that period, and I think it has some of the same element of mystery, which is why you can listen to it over and over again—to figure out how they did that and why. Maybe there is not even an intellectual reason why, and that is what mystery is.

I think you had to play differently in order to play with Monk. Miles really, more than a lot of people, blazed a trail for the way he wanted to play that was very specific. After a certain period you never heard him play as a sideman, or at jam sessions or anything like that. He only played in his own group. He mastered framing—at framing what he could do. I think there is a parallel in the making of Kind of Blue to a record like In a Silent Way. I get a little upset when people say that Kind of Blue was a fluke, that it was just a lucky coincidence. Taking records like In a Silent Way, I think there was very much the same process. Miles came in with a few ideas and created this whole album of music with one outlook, with one clear vision of what it was supposed to be. What he had to play on was very refined, and it forced everyone else to think that way.

I asked Douglas about the different perspectives that Miles and Coltrane had about recording. When playing live, Coltrane seemed to be committed to pure spontaneity, but while leading his own recording dates, he did just the opposite. Coltrane would do take after take, trying to attain something as close to perfection as possible. Miles, of course, tried as much as possible to make records with the same spontaneity as a live performance. Douglas replied:

I think Coltrane was a very different musician from Miles. Coltrane was obsessed with the instrumental, with the expression of what he had to say, and perhaps a lot of those takes he would throw out because they didn’t sound spontaneous. Maybe he got to the technical level he wanted, but he felt as if the feeling of spontaneity was gone. He became a master of re-creating that feeling. I think that’s what is interesting about all those outtakes of Giant Steps in the Atlantic boxed set, The Heavyweight Champion. On a surface level, on a peripheral level, all of those solos sound fine. But when you put them up against the one that Coltrane decided to release, they don’t have that feeling that he just pulled it out of thin air. Clearly he did not, but he wanted to create that illusion.

I also think that Coltrane’s interaction with composition was very different from Miles’s. Maybe we are getting at something about Kind of Blue here. Miles was interested in achieving, especially in “All Blues,” the African thumb piano feel. So his idea or vision about what the music should be interacts with Coltrane’s interest in having a virtuosic solo that sounds spontaneous. And then there was Cannonball, a good-natured, brilliant kind of ebullient soloist. Those are the interactions that were going on, the vibes, the atmosphere. Coltrane was thinking more in the way that an American Indian musician would think, where the whole thing is gonna ride on elaborating on the theme in improvisation.

Now that we have all these wonderful boxed sets available, with alternate takes, you listen to Miles’s quintet from the 1960s, with some of the outtakes from that, and you see that they don’t achieve the atmosphere at all. There were tunes that they rehearsed that were never released because that vibe wasn’t there on a piece like “I Have a Dream,” the Herbie Hancock piece; there was one other outtake on there. To be able to listen to this was really a revelation. It wasn’t about the idea that “Okay, we’ll get some tunes that are fodder for improvising and just do our thing.” The idea was more like this: “Okay, this tune isn’t gonna work for us because we’re not able to find our spirit with this bit of material.” So maybe that applies to Kind of Blue in the sense that Miles happened on these ideas that, with just a very few notes, created the atmosphere that permitted everyone to do their thing.

I told Douglas about my image of this album being recorded late at night—an image that doubtless comes from the dark strain of feeling that runs throughout Kind of Blue. I told Douglas how surprised I was to learn from Jimmy Cobb that it was recorded in the afternoon. I just could not conceive of it—in the afternoon! Douglas responded:

When the musicians came in, they were ready to do it. I think, as a jazz musician, that an improvising musician who is in the studio a lot … has seen moments when the magic just happens, and moments when the band will be knocking itself over the head trying to find the magic, and not finding it. But there is a big difference for musicians between making a record and playing live. When you record, you’re creating an artifact that will live in someone’s home, an object which represents the music and should not necessarily reflect a live performance. It’s an object in a sleeve. I think that various musicians have a different awareness of that. I think Miles was one of the most brilliant in understanding the format of the LP, and how to make something that people could bring home and understand.… Other artists don’t think that way.

Of course, there were those who really resisted Kind of Blue, including one of Miles’s biographers. As we have seen, Bill Cole in his book Miles Davis expresses little regard for the music. He states that “although Kind of Blue was a commercial success and helped liberate music by less structured forms, it [nevertheless] lacked any emotional drive; [the pieces] just floated along like banners in a ticker-tape parade. Much of the playing seemed too cautious.… [T]he music was sluggish and low in its energy output. Here Miles was breaking out of old territory but being careful on the new ground.”1

I have always been puzzled by Cole’s remarks and would like to suggest a couple of comparisons: Is Indian music “lacking in emotional drive” because it is fundamentally meditative? Is a quiet hymn “low in energy output” because it is not foot-stomping gospel? As for Cole’s comment about the music’s “sluggishness,” one person’s “sluggish energy” is another’s transcendent beauty. In his disparaging comments I suspect that Cole is referring to the fact that none of the tunes are played at a fast tempo, as if that were the only way of playing with high energy and intense emotional drive. I believe that, to an extent, this kind of thinking arises from the idea that jazz should be “masculine” in some stereotypical way—fast, rough, and bullying. Music that is sensitive and lyrical is, well … sort of effeminate. This weird kind of sexism in jazz has been prevalent for a long time. I hope we have advanced enough as a society to see now that such attitudes are not only limiting but ridiculous.

Cole also seems not to understand Miles’s most important goal for the Kind of Blue album: to attempt to record jazz with as much spontaneity as possible. Miles once said that the day they release jazz albums with all the mistakes that are inevitable in improvisation, then they will finally produce authentic jazz records. Further, Cole makes it quite evident that, at least for him, the importance of Bill Evans on these sessions somehow made the music unauthentic, overly “European.” Throughout his career Miles got whacked from both sides of racism: by those who attacked him for being antiwhite and by those who thought he hired too many white jazzmen. (Don’t forget that his first band, the Birth of the Cool nonet, was virtually all-white and that later on during his so-called electric period he frequently used young white musicians.) Miles must have thought that these warring prejudices would, in the end, cancel each other out. Unfortunately, they never did, and he continued to be criticized from both sides.

*   *   *

Trying to analyze the significance of any work of art as multi-layered as Kind of Blue reminds me of the old fable about the four blind men and the elephant. As each of them touches a different part of the animal, they come to different conclusions about the elephant’s appearance; yet all are wrong. Nonetheless, there is in us an irresistible urge to search for reasons that this album speaks to so many of us, and on such a profound level. The following summary, with several additional references, is an attempt to pull together the salient features of the album itself, i.e., the music, as well as the characteristics of the musicians and their contributions to Kind of Blue.

There are two primary aspects of this piece of music that have made it unique, and at first glance these two characteristics seem to have little connection to each other. The first is formal and is related to Miles Davis’s use of modal structures in place of the usual harmonic progressions, and his use of this innovative context as an attempt to attain spontaneity among his musicians. We have seen how important a step this was for the evolution of jazz and in the way it reflects what was taking place in American society at the time.

One can point to a handful of records that are turning points in jazz history, and for the most part they also reflect the continuing struggle among African Americans to establish themselves as genuinely free citizens of their country. The few seminal records that come readily to mind are Louis Armstrong’s first Hot Five recordings; the earliest sessions of Count Basie with Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker’s earliest work such as “Shaw ’Nuff”; Miles’s Birth of the Cool nonet sides, and Ornette Coleman’s first album, Something Else! Without question Kind of Blue deserves to be on this list.

It is important to remember that Miles Davis was not the first jazz musician to use modes or even to create an entire album using modes. George Russell should be given credit for having done that; he first used modes in his 1947 collaboration with Dizzy Gillespie, “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop,” and then used modes in the tunes he wrote for his 1956 masterpiece, The Jazz Workshop. Other musicians, such as Mingus and Teo Macero, had experimented with similar forms. The difference lay in the manner in which Miles used modes. Rather than writing complex scores based on modes, as these other musicians had done, Miles put together very simple structures with the idea of giving his musicians the widest possible harmonic latitude so they could play with unhampered melodicism and at an unprecedented level of spontaneity. For Miles, modes were the door to freedom, a breaking away from the most important European element in jazz—its harmonic architecture—and a movement in the direction of African and Eastern folk music.

Another reason Miles wanted to experiment with modes was that they would offer a challenge for his musicians to create music that was really “in the moment” without leaning on the usual procedures and hackneyed phrases and licks. Miles’s purpose was to make their reach exceed their grasp or, as Miles put it, to “play above what they know.” Thus, as far as its formal implications are concerned, the Kind of Blue sessions were a kind of experiment in freedom and spontaneity that provided one of the most important opening volleys of the free-jazz revolution of the 1960s. The fact that Miles was probably the leading modern jazzman of his time gave this album a certain cachet as well as special significance; it became a manifesto about the future of jazz improvisation and composition.

So, is it simply a coincidence that an album with such historical significance in the evolution of jazz also happens to be among the most beautiful and profoundly moving pieces of music—in any genre—in this past century and probably for centuries to come; and that it has won adherents not only among musicians but also among the general public? I do not think coincidence explains these factors. I believe the album’s beauty, and especially its emotional power, is related directly to its formal innovations; moreover, I think these qualities are inseparable.

There are additional formal aspects of Kind of Blue that make it distinctive. For one thing, it reveals and benefits from the influence of Duke Ellington, who more than any other musician except Gil Evans (with whom Miles collaborated on orchestral works as well as some of the later music of his “electric period”) was central to Miles’s development as a musician. Miles once said that every year musicians should get down on one knee to honor Duke Ellington. Many of the “hip” cognoscenti wondered why he was so worshipful of a musician associated with the Swing Era—a musician against whom, presumably, the modernists had rebelled. But no artist was ever more continually progressive than Duke Ellington, although he moved forward in a musical world of his own creation. The best of the boppers and post-boppers had a deep and abiding appreciation of Ellington’s genius.

Miles once told me that, for him, the biggest challenge for a jazzman was establishing a sound that is uniquely his (or hers). “Ideas are a dime a dozen; I can just look at a picture on the wall and come up with all kinds of ideas. But finding a sound is hard.” Kind of Blue, indeed, creates a sound, a very specific sound. This is why Miles was so disappointed when first Bill Evans left the band, and then Cannonball Adderley. He knew he could easily hire another pianist or alto saxophonist, but no matter how good they might be as musicians, the band could never have the same sound. Other eminent jazz leaders sought that same elusive quality called “sound.”

By way of analogy, go back once again to Duke Ellington. No jazz musician ever had the genius for tonal coloration that characterizes Ellington’s work. Duke brought musicians into his band not necessarily because they were the strongest players around, but rather for their having a tonal color that, alongside the other musicians, achieved the sound the Duke was looking for. There is a cliché about Ellington that he played his band just as a great instrumentalist plays his instrument. The cliché, in this case, is founded in truth. Ellington wrote his pieces specifically for the musicians in his band at that time. He did not write a “Concerto for Trumpet”; instead, he wrote “Concerto for Cootie,” since the piece was written specifically for Cootie Williams. Another trumpetman playing the piece might play it brilliantly, but it would never be exactly what Duke had had in mind. Duke thought the same way about the ensemble—which is why he had to keep the band playing constantly, even late in his career when he probably no longer needed the money. He could not relinquish his chosen instrument, even if life was at that point nothing but an endless series of one-nighters.

This awareness of the texture of sound in his bands was part of Miles’s musical world, going back even to the first group he led, the Birth of the Cool nonet; but in no other small group recording was Miles’s awareness of tonal possibilities of the small group more obvious than on Kind of Blue. Replacing, say, Cannonball or Coltrane with different saxophonists would not have achieved the sound that Miles was trying to evoke, that sound of the dark, haunted roads of Arkansas with those “bad gospels” sung in the distance. It is clear that one reason he brought Wynton Kelly in for “Freddie Freeloader” is that this one tune needed a rougher and funkier texture than the others on the album, those played by Bill Evans.

In addition to wanting to blend the sounds and tonal colors of the musicians in the sextet, Miles also had a clear idea of the emotional texture he wanted his players to evoke. As different as the emotional texture is between, say, the playing of Coltrane and Evans, it took the genius of Miles Davis to perceive that in the right context they beautifully complemented each other. They created a whole truth greater than the sum of its parts, and did so with unforgettable eloquence. Even those people who question, “Where’s the melody?” while listening to jazz improvisation “get” Kind of Blue; they “get” the feel of the music.

It is wondrous, at least to me, how jazzmen can dredge up not just musical inspiration but also the deepest of their emotions in such an impersonal surrounding as a recording studio. It is a process that must expose their inner selves, leaving them unusually vulnerable. Most of us do not have to face our deepest fears, desires, intense joy, or despair on a routine basis. We go through our days with a well-modulated personality that we present to the outer world; we are generally too busy to be overly introspective. In addition, looking inside oneself can also be cause for anxiety or pain, and most of us try to avoid these emotions—a case of letting sleeping dogs lie, I suppose. For the jazzman, on the other hand, his job is to create music out of the emotions he feels at the moment he is actually playing, however painful those emotions might be; there are no sleeping dogs.

Bill Evans once described what he called a “switch” that he could turn on whenever he had to sit down at the piano and improvise. As I said earlier, sometimes listening to Evans’s playing (and that of most other jazzmen, for that matter), I am astounded by the naked emotion that is so clearly present in the music. Of course, every art form requires the artist to deal with the emotions engendered by his work; but in jazz the emotion is often far more raw than that of other kinds of art. Since jazz is created in the moment, there is no easy way to refine the emotion. The line between the emotion and the ensuing music is immediate and direct. In many ways this notion of creating “in the moment” is the opposite of Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings … [taking] its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” By virtue of his reliance on spontaneity, the improvising jazzman cannot make music by “recollecting emotion in tranquillity”; there is only the raw emotion he brings to the moment of creation.

Ultimately; turning that level of emotion off and on, using the “switch” Bill Evans described, must take its toll on the musicians. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that jazzmen become involved with drugs or alcohol. How else does one cope with the kind of emotional roller coaster demanded by playing this music? I do not mean to provide a cop-out for the self-indulgence of some jazzmen, but I think it is clear that the creation of jazz requires a daunting ability to live a “quick change” existence.

The free-jazz movement of the 1960s was particularly notable for the rawness of the emotions it evoked, in both the musicians and the audience. At times it seemed as if it were not so much a form of music as an expression of rage or pure ecstasy. However, it would be a mistake to say that playing “free” always led in a direct line to music of greater emotional intensity. As noted, the first free-jazz recording was one led by Lennie Tristano in the late 1940s. Yet the music on that date was at least as frostily cool as the rest of Tristano’s music. (I do not mean to disparage Tristano, whose music I love.)

The free-jazz movement came about at the same time as (and, in some observers’ minds, because of) the explosion of the civil rights and Black Power movements and the heated emotions that it evoked among African Americans. Many black people were discovering the depth of their rage; and music—both jazz and the black popular music of the time—reflected those feelings and, in some sense, even exacerbated them, just as it had throughout African American history.

This explosive music does not mean that all jazz musicians had thoughts of injustice when they played; but it is true that there was a general feeling of self-liberation, a feeling of not holding back, a feeling that, in Jesse Jackson’s famous phrase, “I am somebody!” The bebop revolutionaries had gone a long way in creating a wider spectrum of emotional intensity, which is not to say that the emotional tone of Louis Armstrong or Lester Young was bland. It is just that earlier musicians were more disposed to choose which emotions they wished to express. Later many musicians believed in jazz as a means of self-expression rather than as musical entertainment.

Ornette Coleman’s revolutionary ideas are based on the need to connect directly with one’s emotions without having to filter them through a preestablished structure. There was no intermediary. Coltrane, and those who imitated him in the 1960s, was accused of taking Coleman’s raw emotionality too far. To some extent both musicians had made themselves vulnerable to the charge of being self-indulgent. But as pointed out, Coltrane’s improvising was, in his own phrase, “cleaning the mirror,” looking into his soul to discover ultimate truths. While recording Kind of Blue, he found the route that allowed him to journey even deeper inside, letting him come even closer to the final emotional and spiritual truth he sought.

It is instructive to remember Coltrane’s participation in one track of George Russell’s New York, New York album. According to Russell, after he gave the score for the tune on which Coltrane was to play, Richard Rodgers’s “Manhattan,” the tenorman studied it in order to work out new progressions in addition to the altered progressions that Russell had already written. Coltrane had become so committed to harmonic complexity that he could no longer simply put the tenor sax in his mouth and play. He had become harmonically ingenious and very much advanced, but this very precocity made for certain difficulties when he needed to play music directly from his heart and soul. After all, since his spiritual awakening in 1957, being able to get closer to God had become the great passion of his life. Coltrane’s earlier music had always been passionate, but for Kind of Blue he seemed to be shedding his restraint and reaching higher than ever. His solo on “All Blues” is surely the most passionate of all his work of the 1950s, including his own Giant Steps album. That intensity would grow progressively stronger after he went out on his own in 1960, and as with Kind of Blue, most of his work during that decade would be either modal or blues.

Coltrane was not alone. I think the playing of the others for Kind of Blue has an emotional immediacy unheard in their previous work. In particular, the way Miles came across to the public was based very much on the persona he had deliberately chosen. Consistent with this persona, the words generally used to describe his music are introspective, blue, stark, lonely, even haunted. I think these words also describe Bill Evans and, in quite a different way, Cannonball Adderley. He comes across as the joker in the deck, without whom it would be incomplete. All of them were defined by their Kind of Blue personas.

When we think of the meaning of words such as introspective, blue, stark, lonely, haunted, we might be more surprised than ever that this album has persisted in its popularity for so long. After all, this is not happy, “good times” music, and it is not the kind of music one would expect to have much appeal beyond the core jazz audience. The fact that it is dark, brooding, dense, and introspective makes one wonder about our own lives and our society during the past century. Still, there is an edge of suppressed joy in this music that reveals the other side of the coin of despair; the music is ultimately triumphant. Kind of Blue embraces both sides simultaneously.

I think Miles wanted to confront his listeners with the same kind of choices he gave his musicians. He wanted us to go beyond what we knew, to expand and realize our own freedom. These goals possess a quality of enigma; therefore, the emotional currents heard on the album are mercurial. This moodshifting means, in part, that one can listen to the album over and over, yet it never loosens its grip.

We have explored the ways in which the emotional power of Kind of Blue accounts for its unusual popularity over time. For the musicians, however, the chief benefit derived from the use of modes, which freed the jazzmen to create melody without having to fit it into a tight harmonic architecture. It may seem obvious that music in which melody is emphasized would be immediately appealing to a wider audience, until one reflects that Ornette Coleman’s music, though it was almost purely melodic, lost many jazz fans who had difficulty with his free jazz. But Ornette’s music, as well as the “new thing” players who followed him, sounds atonal—whether or not it really is. But all the improvisation on Kind of Blue sounds tonal to the ear. And that, I think, has made a major difference (as well as the post-Coleman players’ use of a range of extramusical effects, such as multiphonics, screams, and wails). As it had been with music of the European classical tradition, atonal music (or even polytonal music) had a difficult time finding a large audience. For some musicians, including Miles, going this route meant that jazz would lose its folk roots as “people’s music” and would become music for a select minority. The “new thing” players, and those who followed them, saw the matter differently; they were unwilling to pander to the lowest common denominator for which so much of our culture seems intended. The so-called avant-garde jazz still retains that “sound of surprise,” which has made so many of us love this music.

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Despite all of this analysis, I find it hard to put my finger on exactly why we find Kind of Blue so compelling. Words are imprecise. The music is somehow ineffable; it has a quality that I can only call spiritual. In an article for Theology Today, John Michael Spencer argues that the spirituality of Kind of Blue is derived from both the music itself and the musical philosophy that Miles perfected for this album. Spencer tortuously attempts to find some grounds to explain the deep spirituality in this music. For example, he states that the improvisation that dominates the album “reinforced an African credo: There is no boundary between the alleged opposites of our world—the flesh versus the spirit and so forth.” This may be true, but it is an idea that could apply equally to all of the best jazz. Spencer is basically correct, though, in finding an undeniable spiritual essence in this album, and thus we find yet another reason that the music seems so ageless.

It might seem difficult to label “spiritual” a record led by Miles Davis. Miles had a disdain for religion, at least on the surface. As we have previously noted, he stopped believing when he was a boy after observing that all the churches were racially segregated. He also saw organized religion as an institution focused on money and power. Miles understood spirituality to mean something very different from religion, and it is spirituality that claimed his belief. He said that he believed his deceased mother and father had come to visit him. He also said that he was visited by “all the musicians I have known who are dead, too, and part of what I am today is them.… Music is about the spirit and the spiritual.”

That statement tells us better than any I have read why Kind of Blue is such profoundly spiritual music and why it is so haunting. Along with the “bad gospels” Miles heard on that Arkansas road, I believe that when he created Kind of Blue, he was also in touch with the specters of all the musicians who had preceded him and the players in his own group; they are the ghostly voices heard in the dark—not just Duke Ellington, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker but also Buddy Bolden blowing the first jazz trumpet in New Orleans, the ragtime pianists, the work songs, the deep “bad gospels” and the spirituals, and the drums and folk music of Africa.

The making of Kind of Blue had many heroes: George Russell, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and all the rest of the brilliant musicians who were involved. Jazz is a communal art form, and any given jazz work has to be viewed from this perspective. Given the collaborative nature of jazz, it is invalid to see its history as a succession of great men. (I deliberately do not say “and women” because, in truth, they have been largely, and regrettably, ignored.) Charlie Parker did not single-handedly “invent” bebop, just as Miles never “invented” cool jazz, modal jazz, or fusion. All of the advances and greatest creations in jazz have been the accomplishments of many different musicians. This is true for the other great twentieth-century art forms, such as movies. But like film, there is a first among equals, and in film it is the director.

Kind of Blue was a triumph specifically for Miles Davis. He is the rightful auteur of the album, which is a reflection of him in so many ways: his sensibility, his musical persona, his philosophy of improvisational music. I realize that many people think of Miles as a kind of ultimate “Mr. Cool,” a jaded and cynical man with little emotion invested in life. That was the (apparently convincing) front he put up in order to protect himself from those who did not understand the complex life he lived. He believed so passionately in life that he continued to put beauty into this world almost to his dying breath. He once said to me, “If you don’t have anything to put into the world, you ought to get out of it.”

There have been others who referred to Miles as “the Prince of Darkness.” In reality, he was our angel of light. He illuminated our lives with his beautiful music in the second half of the dark and bloody twentieth century and gave many of us that rare commodity: hope.

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Some years ago I was walking with Miles on the Upper West Side. Miles needed a taxi to take him to his apartment, and a taxi was a hard thing to get—especially in that area of Manhattan. Suddenly Miles turned to me and asked, “What do you want from me, Eric? What do you want me to do for you?”

I was so surprised by the question that, unfortunately, I blathered something about an old friend who wanted to interview him for the (now defunct) SoHo News.

“No” was Miles’s quick reply.

It was one of those moments for which I wish I could enter a time machine and go back to that instant and say the thing I felt in my heart. What I wish I had said was, “Miles, you have done more for me than virtually anybody else. And you did it long before we met. You saved my life—how much more could I ask of you?”

I think Miles would have understood.