8 The Sessions

In 1999 someone had the bright idea of producing a concert in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the recording of Kind of Blue. The producer put together a band that included Jimmy Cobb, the only living member of the original Miles Davis sextet; the group used the same instrumentation as that of the original recording, and they played all the tunes from the album. Yet no matter how experienced those musicians were or how well they played, their performance seemed to have little relationship to Kind of Blue. That masterpiece was possible only with the original members of the sextet—playing together as a group—and the music could only have been created at that time, in that particular place. Anything else is a forgery. As we have seen, the roads of the great musicians who recorded Kind of Blue seem to have led them inescapably to a single destination: that CBS recording studio in Manhattan in 1959.

So this is our story so far: the roads traveled by seven post-bop jazzmen intersect when they join Miles Davis’s sextet in 1958. At the time, Miles—who was seeking greater harmonic freedom—latches on to the theory of his old friend George Russell and begins to explore the idea of using modes, or scales, instead of chord progressions. After an initial experiment with modes for the Milestones album, Miles decides to do an entire album on which most of the compositions will be based on various structures founded in modes rather than in Western harmonic theory.

Which leads us to March 2, 1959. This was the first of the two dates on which Kind of Blue was recorded. Miles had worked on the tunes right up until the morning of the session. He had been thinking about this album for a while and had specific goals in mind. One was to steer a new course for jazz, away from Western musical theory; another goal, even more important, was to record an album on which the musicians were forced to play their solos with complete spontaneity.

In his biography of Miles, Bill Cole wrote this about the Kind of Blue sessions: “Much of the playing seemed too cautious due to the fact that only Miles and [Bill] Evans were familiar with the written music.… If the entire group could have shared in the development of these new ideas, they could have gone much further ahead.”1

Of course, that was exactly what Miles very deliberately did not want to do. It is obvious that Cole completely misunderstood the concept behind these sessions. Miles was deliberately attempting to make his group play with a kind of spontaneity that in itself was unprecedented. Musicians have often brought new compositions to a recording studio, but the Kind of Blue sessions went far beyond that. Not only had all the musicians (with the exception of Evans) not seen the tunes in advance, they had never before played music with the very structure of these tunes. Yes, they had played the one modal tune on the Milestones album, but these tunes had different kinds of modal structures that were far more challenging than what they had played on “Miles.”

Miles’s commitment to genuine spontaneity was in itself a key innovation of Kind of Blue. The only session that I can think of in which this type of strategy was used was called Crosscurrents, led by the pianist Lennie Tristano in the late 1940s. On two tunes, he and his musicians played with absolutely no compass, no tune or chord structure, no set tempo. Although it was a fascinating experiment, it was obviously clear that Tristano’s musicians, which included some great ones (the two horns on the session were Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh), were not ready for this kind of all-out freedom, although much later in their careers they eventually were able to play in a “free” context. Nobody attempted to play in a completely “free” context until the early 1960s. At that time, Ornette Coleman, using a “double quartet” (two reedmen, two trumpeters, two bassists, and two drummers) recorded Free Jazz, an entire album that was totally free—no set tunes or fixed tempo or chord structures. It was an audacious musical adventure. While playing with untrammeled freedom is risky, since “anything goes,” the music can be simply pure cacophony. But creating a coherent musical statement in a completely “free” context is an extremely difficult challenge. In the 1960s a whole new generation of jazzmen dealt with the difficulties of truly free jazz, attempting the profound challenge of creating music as free of preset structure as possible while also offering coherence. This music is often just as difficult to listen to as it is to play. When it works, however, it is exhilarating for both musicians and listeners.

The tunes used on Kind of Blue were certainly not as free as that music. While giving the improviser a great deal of freedom, the tunes did have a structure that the soloists had to consider. The musicians could not, for example, play anything that happened to come into their heads. As previously noted, Miles’s goal with his small groups was always to achieve freedom with control. This is how Miles himself put it: “If you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that—but he’s got to think differently in order to do it. He has to use his imagination, be more creative, more innovative; he’s got to take more risks.”2

This is Miles the existentialist speaking—his ultimate goal was to make his musicians realize that they had the freedom to explore new avenues they had never before dared to enter. At the same time, Miles was able to guide their free flights in a direction that gave the album coherence and, especially, that engendered an overall mood.

In his autobiography, Miles says that his aim was not simply to achieve greater freedom but also to play music that was more “African, Eastern, less Western.” Certainly this desire was as much social and political as it was musical. The times they were a-changin’, especially for African Americans, and Miles was acutely aware of this.

But Miles’s idea for the album went beyond the challenge of spontaneity and formal innovations. He had definite ideas about the emotional terrain he wanted to explore. For Miles, Kind of Blue was a memory album. In his autobiography he states that when he conceived the idea for the album, his aim was to try to re-create a memory from his boyhood. It was a memory of when he was visiting relatives in Arkansas. He remembered walking back along a country road from church at night and hearing in the distance ghostly “bad gospels” being sung in some of the black churches they walked past. It was one of those evanescent memories that we all have from childhood, more an unforgettably haunting mood than a specific memory.

In addition, Miles had seen a troupe of African dancers not long before the Kind of Blue sessions and was fascinated by the polyrhythms played by the drummers and the spontaneity of the dancers as they moved to those rhythms. He wanted his musicians to play music with the same graceful spontaneity. He also wanted to capture the feeling of the African music itself, its stark harmonic simplicity tied to rhythmic complexity. The sound of the African thumb piano especially moved him.

Miles, then, came into the studio on that day in March 1959 with a well-defined and exceedingly personal sound and mood that he wished to re-create. This was a daunting task, considering the wide latitude he insisted on giving his musicians and that they, of course, had not necessarily had the same experiences that lingered in Miles’s memory. And since they performed these pieces with only minimal preparation, it was very difficult for them to be able to shape their own playing in a way that would summon up the mood and sound Miles had in mind.

It is not surprising that Miles would say years later that Kind of Blue was a failure. He loved the music, but it did not attain the very specific emotional ambience he was trying to evoke, nor did it really reflect the sound of the African music (especially the thumb piano) he had heard at the program of African dance.

The vagaries of jazz improvisation are too complex for anyone to be able to create such a narrow, specific sound or mood. Whatever memories the leader of a jazz group may try to evoke are greatly mitigated by the musical agenda of the musicians in his group. This was especially true of the jazzmen in the Davis sextet. The leader can try to push his musicians in a certain direction, but they can go only so far. A great leader, like Duke Ellington or Charles Mingus or Miles, chooses musicians who they believe will be to some extent sympathetic toward the leader’s own ends. This is one reason that a writer has named jazz “the imperfect art.” If an artist has faith in the power of spontaneity, he cannot also hope for sleekness and perfection.

Whatever happens in the studio is further complicated by the relationships among the musicians, and not just in terms of their music. Just as important are their social relationships. By the time the Kind of Blue sessions took place, these relationships were fairly tangled and, to an extent, tense. Undoubtedly this had a profound effect on everyone and on the music they made.

Tension, even outright anger, can either help or hinder the playing of a jazz group in the studio. The longest-lived of all jazz groups, the Modern Jazz Quartet, had a continual high degree of tension that lasted for most of the group’s history. John Lewis was fascinated with the classical music tradition and often wrote pieces based on fugues or concertos, and at times played with a full orchestra. The vibist, Milt Jackson, simply loved to wail, especially on the blues. Although every member of this group was a master jazzman, I believe that this tension between Jackson and Lewis had a lot to do with their continued success. I have always thought that Jackson played his best with the MJQ, and I also think this tension accounted for his high level of performance.

Another famous example of tension in the recording studio occurred when Bill Evans made his second album—Explorations—with his wonderful trio. He and his bassist, Scott LaFaro, were angry at each other, supposedly because of Evans’s drug addiction and the way it affected the group. Evans thought the session went badly because of the vexed feelings between the two musicians. Upon further listening, though, he was happily surprised. Knowing about this situation, one might think that the music from the session would be tense or even aggressive. Interestingly, just the opposite is true—it is some of the loveliest and most crystalline music Evans ever created.

In the case of Kind of Blue, there were a number of causes for tension. For one thing, at the time of the first session, the group was on the verge of disintegration. Miles was deeply troubled by the prospect of losing both Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane. Adderley had made it clear that he wanted to try achieving success as a leader in his own right, and a few months later he did leave the band. Coltrane was also making noises about leaving the group. Miles was doing everything he could to keep Coltrane from going out on his own. He was a brilliant, almost Machiavellian manipulator, and Coltrane was becoming increasingly frustrated. As I wrote in Ascension, “One night in a rare fit of pique Coltrane said to saxophonist Wayne Shorter, ‘You want the Miles gig? You got it. I’m finished with the Miles gig.’”3 For the usually mild-mannered Coltrane to explode like this is ample evidence of just how much he wanted to lead his own band and of his rising irritation with Miles for making it so difficult for him to leave the sextet. He could not just walk away, because he knew, and Miles undoubtedly never let him forget, how much he had learned from the trumpeter and, of course, all the things Miles had done for him—after all, it was Miles who had made him a major jazz star. On the other hand, Coltrane’s memory of the humiliation he had felt when Miles fired him in 1957 was still fresh in his mind. Yet if Miles had not done so, Coltrane probably would have died from his dual addictions. So the relationship between the two musicians at this point was uncomfortable, to say the least, and complex.

Bill Evans, of course, was officially out of the group at the time of the Kind of Blue sessions. But from Miles’s point of view, Evans had left prematurely. He realized that with Evans the band had a special sound, one quite different from the sound of the group with Evans’s predecessor, Red Garland, or the sound when Evans’s successor, Wynton Kelly, became the pianist. Miles wanted to exploit that sound, and although he had done so to a degree for the “On Green Dolphin Street” session from March of the previous year, he wanted Evans to return because the sound of the group with him was the one Miles wanted to create for the album.

As for Evans himself, even briefly performing again with Miles must have been a bewildering situation. Playing with Miles had been a turning point in his life for more than one reason. It had established him as a major jazzman and gave him exposure to both the fans and the critics. But it had also been emotionally eviscerating. For one thing, he had become a drug addict; and playing with Miles had been an enervating musical challenge. Evans had never felt totally comfortable in the group. Miles’s facetious racial jabs were wearying and, to an extent, were probably responsible for Evans’s feeling that he had never really been “one of the guys.” To make matters worse, Miles was disgusted that Evans, who was clean when he first joined the group, now had a bad drug habit. After all, that was exactly the reason he had fired Red Garland.

For Evans, the tension of the session was exacerbated by Miles’s having called on his then-current pianist, Wynton Kelly, to also play on the session. Kelly was even more confused. As Jimmy Cobb remembers it: “When Wynton came to the date, he was puzzled. He said, ‘I thought I was the pianist on this date.’ He was wondering what Bill Evans was doing there. So I told him not to worry, that this may be different from what he was used to, but that Miles did things differently. Miles liked to fuck with musicians’ heads like that, get them worried and nervous. He thought it would make them play better, and I guess he was usually right.” On Kind of Blue Miles’s strategy worked, because “Freddie Freeloader,” the tune that Wynton played on, fit in perfectly with the rest of the album, as if it were all of a piece.

Of course, Miles used the same psychological strategy with the two saxophonists; he used a number of means to make them compete with each other. Probably both musicians were somewhat tired of this kind of manipulation, but for Coltrane it was especially annoying because he had worked with Miles far longer than Cannonball and undoubtedly saw through such maneuvers more than the alto saxophonist.

So the chemistry among the musicians on this particular day was volatile, to say the least. To further complicate things, the seven musicians who play on the album were not the only ones involved with this recording. There was the engineer, of course, and the A&R men, nowadays called producers.

Miles required a very special kind of person to produce his dates. Perhaps most important, he required a producer who knew what not to do. That is, the producer should not tell him what material to use or which musicians. Miles would ignore any such suggestions. A producer had to let Miles create his music in his own way with as little interference as possible. The producer also had to be a musician himself, hopefully someone who was comfortable with Miles’s subtle and constantly progressive musical vision. He also had to be able to have the patience to deal with Miles’s mercurial personality and iron will. Most of all, he had to know how to listen to the music and to truly understand it because Miles had a laser-sharp bullshit detector. Fortunately, the right producer was found in time for the Kind of Blue sessions. His name was Teo Macero.

Teo Macero is an unpretentious, straight-talking and regular kind of guy, never self-consciously hip as one might expect for someone who throughout his life has been dealing with musicians like Miles, Mingus, and Monk. Kind of Blue was the first time that Macero was the producer for an entire Miles session. He was not the only producer, though; the other was Irving Townsend, who along with George Avakian (who had “discovered,” or rather “rediscovered,” Miles at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival) had produced Miles’s Columbia albums up to this point. The relationship between the artist Miles and the producer Teo Macero would last for more than two decades. Macero and Davis are among the most legendary pairings of artist and producer in jazz history. After Kind of Blue the two would go on to record a series of further jazz masterpieces, ranging from Sketches of Spain to In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew.

Unsurprisingly, Miles would often downgrade Macero’s contribution to the success of his albums. (He said to me, “Teo just stands in the booth like a dummy, and I tell him what to do.”) Those who know better understand that Miles’s version is simply not so. Macero had been instrumental to both Miles and a number of other great jazzmen, including Mingus and Monk, in producing superb albums without infringing on their freedom to create and explore.

Undoubtedly Teo’s empathy with these musicians arises from the fact that he himself is both a fine saxophonist and an adventurous and innovative composer. In the fifties he explored modal composition, the combination of symphony and jazz (years before the third-stream movement), atonality, and musical collage. Some of his music is quite daring and at times a bit eccentric—such as his use of two accordions in a series of pieces he recorded in the 1950s. As a saxophonist he combined a beautiful tone, not unlike that of Stan Getz, with a harmonic imagination that is surprisingly advanced. And his own road led as inevitably to Kind of Blue as those of the musicians themselves.

Teo Macero was a year older than Miles, having been born in 1925 in New Jersey. He became aware of music very early on because his father owned a nightclub. He first started playing saxophone in high school and often sat in with jazzmen at his father’s club. Like Miles, Macero attended Juilliard, where he studied both composition and his wind instruments (including both tenor and alto saxophone, clarinet, and flute) as well as keyboards; but unlike the trumpeter, he took his courses seriously and regularly attended classes. But as with Miles, he quickly advanced to the point where he was eager to leave the school prematurely: “I was ready to get out with a bachelor’s degree after two years, but they wouldn’t let me go. So I kept taking courses and wound up taking master’s courses and got my master’s in two years and I said, ‘I can’t stay here for another two years.’”

Like Miles, he spent much of his time on Fifty-second Street, which was where he met one of his most important colleagues, Charles Mingus: “I used to play with his band and we would play at the [Cafe] Bohemia with other musicians, like Monk [whom he would later produce for Columbia]. It was a very nice association.” Surprisingly, Macero had no problem dealing with the intermittently explosive and volatile Mingus: “We got along fine, just fine. He never gave me a problem. We did lots of shows together, lots of records, too.”

The music that Macero recorded with Mingus as well as on his own is very advanced, and some of it highly experimental. Although at the time there was a bevy of musicians who were as influenced by Lester Young as Macero was, Teo’s harmonic conception is far more sophisticated than their’s.

In 1954 Macero got a Guggenheim grant, which helped open up new avenues for him:

I took the money and just started giving grants all around New York, and one day one of the producers from CBS attended one of the concerts. At the end of the concert he said, “Would you like a job with Columbia?” So I asked him how much it paid. He said it was ninety bucks a week. I was only making $2,500 a year teaching blind students and mentally retarded kids. The only extra money I got was from working in the recording lab at Juilliard and the shows I did with Mingus. So I took the job.

Macero’s first job at Columbia was to score some sides for Johnny Mathis. He did four sides, the composer-arranger Bob Prince did four sides, and Gil Evans did four sides—three years before recording his first monumental orchestral collaboration with Miles Davis, Miles Ahead.

Macero was given the opportunity to write some fairly adventurous music for Columbia, but eventually he spent most of his time producing. Although it was regular work, he found that trying to do creative and innovative projects was a continual war with the top brass:

It was such a struggle! I mean, those guys didn’t give a quarter! And I used to lick my wounds, because there were so many goddamned guys in the Columbia A&R department and they were all opinionated—they wanted this, they wanted that. So I would say, “For chrisssakes. Just leave me alone!” I just wanted to have them leave me and the artists alone so we could make some records.

Teo first met Miles in the early fifties at Birdland. But they did not work together until a few years later:

In 1956 I did a thing with Leonard Bernstein called “This Is Jazz.” And I wrote some of the examples that they used. I wrote an introduction for “Just You.” Miles played the tune—it was the quintet with Coltrane and Red Garland. After that, I did some editing for the Porgy and Bess album. I put it all together—Gil didn’t give a shit whether the splices worked or not. The tempos kept changing. I said, “Gil, listen to it. The tempos are changing.” So he told me I could do whatever I wanted with the tapes.

Teo had also been involved in the first recording session of the sextet with Bill Evans, in which the group played four tunes, including “On Green Dolphin Street.” But the Kind of Blue sessions would be the first time that he experienced the highs and lows of working with Miles. As Macero recalls:

It was a long time ago, but as I remember it, we made that record at the CBS studio on Thirtieth Street. It had to be there because that is where everything was being recorded at that time. It was just a great studio. It was a great big place, and none of the musicians had to wear earphones like today. I boxed everyone in so that there would be a physical closeness among the musicians, not like today when the musicians are spread all over the place. I used to spend most of my time outside the booth ’cause I could hear what the hell was going on. I didn’t have to sit in the control booth and say, “Take one, take two.” A lot of things that happened with a jazz group happened outside the control booth when the microphones were turned off. I used to stand right next to Miles with a pair of earphones on. I had to make sure that he played into the right goddamned microphone.

Even back when he first started to produce Miles, Macero had a special understanding of the trumpeter’s motives for his musical direction:

I think Miles was genuinely uncomfortable with chord changes by that point, and he would cut out the changes when somebody brought him a tune. And he felt very comfortable doing that. Not that I could blame him, because it gave you a chance to expand your ideas. But I did not discuss this at any length at the sessions. Miles was not very talkative in the studio. Neither was Coltrane. We would just be there to listen, to see what was going on and put it down. Every once in a while, at the end of a take, [Miles] would motion me to come out and sit with him. And I’d go out and sit in the hall with him for ten or fifteen minutes and he would not say one word! Then he would turn to me and say, “Hey, motherfucker, you didn’t like that, did you?” And I would say, “No, I didn’t. It was a piece of crap.” So he’d jump up and we’d do another take, and I’d go, “That’s it! Good night, everybody.” I did that more than once. A lot of times Miles would call me about ideas he had for an album, like those he had for Kind of Blue. I’d get a call from him in the middle of the night, two or three in the morning. And he would play something on trumpet or piano over the phone and then he would want a critique. So I used to lie there and listen. I helped steer him toward a lot of the musical directions that he went after.

Recording with Miles was always easy. You might think it would be difficult, but it wasn’t. I remember with Sketches of Spain he didn’t show up for six of the sessions because he was ill, but when he came, it was a breeze. We just went straight through it! He was always prepared. He knew what he wanted to do and how to do it. I was there just to help him in any way I could. And there was such camaraderie among the players. When Miles was there, you had to play what was right! They would play a tune for the first time, and I would say, “Let’s make it!” That was my favorite expression—“Let’s make it!” Of course, back then Miles’s music was a little simpler than it eventually became (during his electric phase). I do remember that Gil Evans was at the Kind of Blue sessions. And as I recall, that introduction for “So What” was his idea—he and Miles were very tight musical partners at that time. Miles would listen to Gil. But when other musicians came to him, guys in the band, he wouldn’t pay any attention to them.

Macero was usually the sole editor of Miles’s albums, because the trumpeter himself had little interest in that aspect of recording:

He never came to the editing room after the recording was over. Maybe four or five times, tops, in all those years. I would just put it together and send it up to him; if he liked it, fine. If he didn’t like it, I’d tell him I would do it again. But I never really did it again. Every time I sent it back to him, he would say, “Yeah, I liked it.” So he was just being ornery, as usual. Miles wanted to put all kinds of shit on record. I would say to him, “Look, this has gotta go. I mean, Jesus Christ, you wanna sell Miles Davis, or you wanna sell some saxophone player or guitarist? Your first obligation is to you. You want to put in thirty choruses of the sax player—hey, be my guest! But it ain’t gonna be shit. People are going to say, “Where’s Miles?” He even wanted to put some curse words on a record. I told him to go to hell! I think he was just trying to be hip.

Despite all his hassles with Miles, he looks back on those riotous days with great affection:

It was fun. I’d go up to his house and we’d sit or whatever, and I used to go up there quite a bit and try to get him to do things and work on another project, and yeah, it was always fun. Miles had a mind of his own, and he didn’t give a shit who we were. I once brought the head of the Columbia A&R Department. So we hung out in that little backyard of his, and finally I asked, “Where is Miles?” And I was told he had left half an hour before we had arrived. He knew I was bringing this guy up, and we had some money for him! He was doing it just to be ornery. But I would just laugh at the guy. One time he even bit my earlobe. He said, “It’s such a nice white ear.” He was playful. But he was very serious when it came to music.

Miles had been carefully thinking and strategizing the Kind of Blue sessions months before they actually took place. Bill Evans said that a couple of months before the sessions, Miles showed him some chords and asked him to try to do something with them. Evans took those chords and wrote “Blue in Green.” Miles would later claim coauthorship of the tune, but Evans was always outspoken about the fact that he had been the actual composer of the lovely piece. This was an old trick of Miles’s. I once asked him who wrote the tunes “Four” and “Tune Up.” He replied, “Eddie Vinson.” So I asked him why, then, the tunes listed Miles as sole composer. “Because I wrote them,” he replied.

“But you just told me that Eddie Vinson wrote them.”

“What difference does it make?” he asked with mock exasperation. I am certain that the authorship of such popular blowing vehicles meant something to Vinson.

Miles had sketched out all the other tunes for Kind of Blue within hours of the sessions. These were the fruits of his long months of thought about the goals he wished to achieve. All the pieces of Kind of Blue were finally together on Thirtieth Street in Manhattan: all seven musicians, the producer, and in his role as unofficial adviser, Gil Evans. Ever since I heard this album, I was certain that it must have been recorded late at night—how else could these musicians evoke such a mood unless the hour was late? So I was surprised, and slightly disappointed, when Jimmy Cobb told me that it had been recorded in the afternoon. On the other hand, it gave me a better appreciation of Miles’s ability to create and sustain a mood.

Like many who love jazz, I have often fantasized about going back in time and being a fly on the wall during legendary recording sessions. Needless to say, the Kind of Blue sessions are at the top of my imaginary list—obviously pure fantasy.

Well, not altogether. We can hear at least the first session thanks to some audio documents that have turned up. So now we can close our eyes and dream that we are patiently waiting at the Thirtieth Street studio for the musicians to appear. Once they have arrived, all the musicians except Bill Evans gather around the piano as Miles shows them the music he has written out for the first tune, “Freddie Freeloader.” This is the only tune on which Wynton Kelly is going to play, so Miles chooses to record it first so Kelly can leave after it is done. I don’t think Miles did this just to be courteous to Kelly; as we have seen, Kelly was confused and more than a little upset that Evans was going to play on the rest of the album. The expedient thing to do would be to record “Freeloader” immediately so Miles would not have to deal with Kelly’s consternation any further.

Most of the conversation during a Davis recording session was between the producer in the booth and Miles. In the case of Kind of Blue there were two producers: Teo Macero and Irving Townsend. Macero’s role, however, was clearly that of an apprentice and observer. After all, working with Miles Davis required a special kind of know-how and an understanding of the man himself.

Once the musicians have worked out the general guidelines of the performance and briefly practiced playing the tunes, Miles is ready to record; then once the engineers signal their readiness, Townsend cues the band: “Take one, CO620290, no title.” The “no title” designation was not unusual for Miles, who frequently did not assign titles to his tunes until they were needed for the album jacket.

A moment before the band begins to play, Miles says to Wynton Kelly, “Hey, Wyn, I want you to play after Cannon, and then we [the ensemble] come in.” A short while later Miles says, “Hey, Wyn, I want you to play again after Cannon, okay?” One would have thought that it was a bit late for Miles to be giving further instructions, but this is an indication of how loose he wanted these sessions.

After the first few notes of “Freddie Freeloader,” Miles signals to stop. “Too fast.”

“Hey, Miles,” asks Townsend, “where are you going to work? Where are you going to work?”

Miles replies, “Right here.”

“Okay, but when you move back, we don’t get you.”

“I wasn’t playing with my horn into the mike before.” He changes the position of the mike so that he can play straight into it.

“We’re not allowed to change the mikes around here. Against regulations,” jokes Townsend.

On the second take, Miles stops again after the theme is played and tells Kelly, “You don’t play no chord going into A flat.”

The third attempt at “Freddie Freeloader” is a complete take. But Miles is dissatisfied with the final improvised section in which there is a kind of duet between Kelly and Chambers. They attempt that section a few more times before Miles decides that he is dissatisfied with the ending. He listens a couple of more times and eventually concedes that the end of the complete take is best.

“Freddie Freeloader” has never received the same kind of popular and critical fascination as the other pieces on Kind of Blue. I imagine this may be because of the more conventional form of the tune. It is a basic twelve-bar blues, but a blues that Miles has stripped to its essence, providing as much freedom for an experienced jazzman as he does for the other pieces on the album. Most good jazzmen can play the blues virtually in their sleep (and I have witnessed jazzmen who actually did that, or at least came close to it). The challenge for great players is coming up with a fresh approach to this bedrock form. Within the hushed, ghostly atmosphere that Miles created for this session, it was as much of a challenge to the musicians as any of the other pieces; blues clichés and old funk licks were out of place, perhaps even gauche.

From the beginning of the piece, Wynton Kelly’s rambunctious accompaniment creates a mood that is clearly different—at least to an extent—from the other tunes on Kind of Blue. He seems to prance on the keys, even as the ensemble plays the simple blues line. Miles takes the first solo, and it is a masterpiece: for me, one of the greatest blues solos in all of jazz history. It is, I believe, a solo that had been a kind of “work in progress” for a number of years. It can be traced back to such early 1950s performances as “Blue Haze” and its sequel, “Green Haze.” (It is interesting to note that even back then Miles was playing with the concept of blue and blue-green, and shades of blue.) One can hear elements of this tune on Miles’s solo “Bags Groove,” which he recorded in 1954 with the Modern Jazz Giants, among whom were Milt Jackson and Thelonious Monk. And there were performances of similar medium-slow blues-oriented pieces that project the same mood we hear on the sound track that Miles had recorded in France for the film Elevator to the Gallows. There is also his solo on “Sid’s Ahead” on the sextet’s first album, Milestones, when both Philly Joe Jones and Red Garland were still in the band. In these solos, too, the music is a starkly played slow blues line in which Miles seems to be summing up everything he knows about the blues. Someone once compared Miles’s sound to that of a little boy trapped in a closet, desperate to get out. We hear that deep wellspring of primal feeling in all of Miles’s blues pieces, nowhere more so than in “Freddie Freeloader.”

The first soloist after Miles is Coltrane, who plays with the typically fiery sense of purpose that has always characterized his blues style. His blues playing here reminds me of seeing him perform at a small out-of-the-way club like the Half Note in lower Manhattan. In late sets he would simply blow the blues for chorus after chorus, never seeming to repeat a single idea. On “Freddie Freeloader” his solo seems so overheated with ideas that at times he cannot get them out of his horn before another comes tumultuously on its heels. It is essential Coltrane.

Cannonball follows Coltrane, and for him this kind of bluesy piece is his bread and butter. It would also seem to be a trap for Cannonball to simply throw one well-worn funky lick after another, and he does do this to a degree. But I do not know how anyone could not love this solo; it is almost as if Adderley is telling the other players to get down to the nitty-gritty. Adderley’s solo is followed by a section that is fundamentally a Chambers-Kelly duet. Even at this early date, the musical empathy between the two jazzmen borders on the paranormal.

Incidentally, the tune was named for a well-known hanger-on of the jazz scene back then, not the famous Red Skelton character. Many years after the album was released, I heard an interview with the actual Freddie Freeloader. He said he appreciated Miles’s using his name for the piece but told Miles that he would have preferred it if “So What” had been named after him. Obviously, Freddie had justly earned his nickname.

With “Freddie Freeloader” now out of the way, Kelly leaves, and Bill Evans takes over the piano chair for “So What.” Anyone who knew Miles was aware that this was one of his favorite expressions, a way of dismissing the grandiose, perhaps; Miles had a genius for seeing through pretension and hyperbole. The piece begins with a duet between Evans and Chambers that Gil Evans had apparently brought to the session. It is the single most difficult aspect of “So What.”

After a few attempts at the opening section, Townsend complains that there is too much extraneous noise. He says, “This [section] is so quiet, and I can hear noises all the way through. I can even hear the snare drum.”

Miles replies, “But that’s part of it. All of that is part of it.” To Miles, mistakes and even extraneous noises are part of a genuine jazz performance. Townsend concedes the point but adds that not all such noise should be allowed. After a few more attempts at the opening section, the band plays “So What” all the way through. Once again, the first complete take is the master take, without inserts.

“So What” is probably the single most famous piece on Kind of Blue (although in recent years “All Blues” has become almost as widely played). The composition is so simple that even a nonmusician can suss out the degree of freedom offered to the improvising jazzmen. Interestingly, the tune is constructed as an elemental call-and-response, a musical form that can be traced to early European liturgical music. And certainly call-and-response has a special place in African American music, being used for centuries in gospels and spirituals. (One wonders whether Miles was deliberately using this form to bring to life memories of the “bad gospels” he used to hear on those Arkansas roads.)

After the eerie opening passage, superbly played by Evans and Chambers, the theme comes in with Paul Chambers playing a figure that is responded to first by Bill Evans and then by the entire ensemble.

Miles takes the first solo, and it is at least as brilliantly constructed as “Freddie Freeloader.” It is unlike anything else Miles had previously played. With a strict economy of notes, not one of which is superfluous, without ever resorting to double time or arpeggios, this is certainly not a bebop solo, nor is it reminiscent of jazz solos of a previous era. It is, in its own way, a new kind of jazz, with a lyricism that had only been hinted at by Miles and other jazzmen (most particularly Lester Young and those who were influenced by him). In it is the jazz equivalent of the impressionism of Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin—the kind of lyrical impressionism usually associated with some European folk music. However, its emotional nuances are certainly those of Miles alone; it is not blues but a different “kind of blue,” a violet perhaps. It is a kind of melancholy that does not rule out hope or transcendence.

Coltrane’s solo follows Miles, and it is obvious that Trane has been picking up on the direction Miles had been taking, and is adapting it to his own style. Hearing this solo is particularly fascinating because Coltrane is, on his own stylistic terms, almost as economical as Miles. But unlike Miles, Coltrane has not yet learned how to make a totally coherent improvisation based on a modal tune. Although he is far more relaxed and less hesitant than he was on his first modal performance, “Milestones,” he is still feeling his way. Of course, eventually he would become inarguably the greatest of all jazz modal improvisers.

As with “Milestones,” Cannonball seems more comfortable with modes than Coltrane does. His solo is fine enough, though at times overly florid.

For Evans’s solo, the piece turns again to call-and-response. The ensemble plays the two-note “So What” phrase, to which Evans responds. What is remarkable here is Evans’s ability to create a solo statement despite this kind of tricky arrangement. Both Miles’s simple arrangement here and Evans’s improvisations are highlights of the piece, continuing the impressionistic flavor that Miles had brought to the tune.

Townsend asks, “This is just for you four guys on this next one, right?”

Miles replies, “Five. Adderley lays out on this piece.”

The next piece recorded at this session is the ballad “Blue in Green.” It is such a subtle, delicately constructed and lyrical piece of music that it presents its own kind of problem: the only analogous form that I can think of is a Zen koan—within the few simple lines of a koan, a Zen master can offer the transcendence of nirvana. Undoubtedly, this is why Miles said that Cannonball should lay out on “Blue in Green.” Adderley’s bold funk simply did not fit the mood of this piece. Although its construction is at least as simple as the other pieces on Kind of Blue, its melody is so fragile that the challenge of playing it can rightfully be compared to walking on eggshells.

Bill Evans—who was the true composer of the piece—plays the melody with the rich voicings that were such a key aspect of his work. On this piece alone, we have ample evidence of the truth of Miles’s assertion that Evans did not simply play notes, he played a sound. After a few attempts, the band takes the tune all the way through Coltrane’s solo. Something goes wrong, and Townsend says to the band, “That was our fault this time.”

Miles disagrees. “I don’t believe that.” Anyone who thinks that Miles was the ultimate temperamental artist should listen to how he behaves on this session; he is patient, polite, and respectful to the producer and the engineer. Teo Macero has himself made clear that Miles was rarely difficult; one had only to understand him and to be knowledgeable about the way he worked.

On the fourth take, the jazzmen play through the complete piece, and that is the master. Evans’s playing throughout the piece is simply gorgeous. Miles solos with his Harmon mute, of which he was the ultimate master. His poignant use of the mute is itself a sound as personal to Miles’s soul as his own voice. Coltrane plays a brief solo that, once and for all, proves he did not have to lean on playing a cascade of notes. His solo is so simple, so emotionally direct and lyrically stunning that one is transfixed by its beauty. For a moment, we catch a glimpse of nirvana.

As soon as it is finished, Townsend says, “Beautiful, beautiful!” What other words could he have used? “Blue in Green” is, quite simply, beautiful.

With the three tunes in the can, the session comes to an end. A little over a month later, on April 9, the group reconvenes to complete the album’s final two cuts. Miles is again in high, confident spirits; he is obviously pleased with the results of the first session. However, the two tunes planned for this session are “All Blues” and “Flamenco Sketches.”

Surprisingly, Miles begins with the ballad, “Sketches.” This is similar in delicacy to “Blue in Green,” although it has a “Spanish tinge” (to use the phrase of Jelly Roll Morton) that makes it unique and more than a bit tricky. And in contrast to “Blue in Green,” this piece does include Cannonball Adderley. I personally believe that using Cannonball on this tune was a mistake, perhaps the only truly egregious one that Miles made on the entire album.

Bill Evans opens the piece with an introduction that seems derived from some of his recent work as a leader: his version of Leonard Bernstein’s “Some Other Time” and Evans’s own famous “Peace Piece.” Like “Blue in Green,” the tempo is extremely slow; perhaps no tempo, except for the exceedingly fast, is such a challenge for an improviser to make a coherent musical statement.

After the first attempt at playing “Sketches,” Miles tells Adderley that his horn squeaks. One has to wonder whether Miles is really trying to make Cannonball more conscious of what is coming out of his horn. They play several incomplete takes and one complete take, but Miles is not happy with the results. Finally, they do another complete take, and it is obviously a success. After the second complete take, Miles says to Townsend, “That was terrible, Irving.”

“Don’t worry about it,” replies Townsend, laughing.

Perhaps the main problem with “Flamenco Sketches” is that the listener automatically compares this piece with “Blue in Green.” The difference, of course, is the Spanish flavor of “Sketches.” For Miles, this tune was undoubtedly a preview of his next major project, the magnificent Sketches of Spain. It was actually the second attempt by Miles at playing a piece influenced by flamenco. “Blues for Pablo” was part of Miles’s first orchestral collaboration with Gil Evans, Miles Ahead. (Incidentally, two years later Coltrane would record his own modal/flamenco piece, “Ole.”)

The solos by Miles, Evans, and Coltrane are all quite beautiful, if not as stunning as those on “Blue in Green.” But Cannonball’s brassy, rather tasteless solo almost completely dispels the darkly introspective mood so carefully built up by the other players. Nevertheless, if “Flamenco Sketches” were on any other album, it would be considered a masterpiece.

The next and final tune, “All Blues,” is probably the trickiest one heard on Kind of Blue, which is probably why Miles chose to record it last. As it turns out, however, the band has little trouble with it, and their first attempt at playing the tune all the way through is the only take they need.

“All Blues” is an exceptionally stirring and emotionally compelling piece. It also has a special significance, since it is played in 6/8 time (although Miles originally conceived it as a straight-ahead 4/4 blues). It begins with the rhythm section setting up the mood and rhythmic direction, which gains greater focus when the two horns play an effective vamp. Miles enters with the lovely melody.

Miles is the first soloist, and he discards his mute, making a particularly dramatic entrance. Once again, he uses an economy of notes, saying exactly what he has to say without a single superfluous idea or note. This is the only piece on the album in which Cannonball Adderley is the second soloist, and he is in quite cogent form here. However, almost every other musical statement is virtually wiped out by Coltrane. His own entrance is at least as dramatic as that of Miles; Jimmy Cobb brings him in by playing a drum roll, making it clear that something momentous is about to happen, and indeed it does. Coltrane’s solo here is the first time on record that the John Coltrane of the 1960s can be heard: here is the apocalyptic visionary whose scorching intensity so illuminated, and was illuminated by, the cultural climate of the sixties. (It is important to note that many of Coltrane’s key performances of the 1960s were in waltz time, including his single most famous work, his raga-influenced version of “My Favorite Things.”)

Bill Evans follows with a short, typically impressionistic solo, and it is probably the only way that any solo could be effective following Coltrane’s.

The group ends the piece by repeating the theme heard at its beginning. When the recording is over, Miles jokes around by acting as if he were gasping for breath. But that is how Miles tended to behave when he was deeply moved. No doubt he was so proud of what the group had accomplished that joking was the only way he could respond. In two days in 1959 he and his musicians had created an indelible musical masterpiece. And I think Miles knew it.

*   *   *

Now the album would be readied for the public—the record jacket with its brooding photograph of Miles on the front cover, and on the back, another photo of him seated deep in thought, his trumpet held loosely between his fingers; also on the back is “Improvisation in Jazz,” the famous liner notes by Bill Evans, and, of course, a listing of the personnel. Kind of Blue is complete. Is there anything else to say about it? Does the story of a great work of art end with its creation? What of its effect on the future, its effect not only on the art form itself but also on the careers of the artist or artists involved? In a word, what is its legacy?