Introduction

In 1959 Miles Davis recorded his sixth album for Columbia Records, a small group session that would eventually be titled Kind of Blue. More than forty years after its release, it is still one of the most-sought-after recordings in the country; in fact, as late as 1998 it was the best-selling jazz album of the year. In both Rolling Stone and Amazon.com end-of-the-century polls, it was voted one of the ten best albums of all time—in any genre—and it is the only jazz album ever to reach double-platinum status. Yet its popularity is not the only extraordinary thing about Kind of Blue. In addition to being an incontestable masterpiece, it is also a watershed in the history of jazz, a signpost pointing to the tumultuous changes that would dominate this music and society itself in the decade ahead.

Beyond its historical significance, this album is for many listeners the record that lit their passion for jazz. I was one of them. Kind of Blue is the album that made me fall in love with jazz when I was about fifteen years old. It was not the first jazz album I had ever heard. It was not even the first Miles Davis album I had ever heard; that was ’Round About Midnight, which I greatly enjoyed. But my reaction to Kind of Blue was of an entirely different order. I was immediately fascinated, even obsessed with it. The music stayed with me and seemed to follow me wherever I went, singing to me in the far reaches of my mind. As I sat in my math class, the memory of Miles’s incomparable solo on “Freddie Freeloader” kept me from being bored to tears. John Coltrane’s solo on “Blue in Green” would haunt me while I was strolling down the hall to biology class or while walking my dog. I could not get the music out of my mind. And after a lifetime of listening to jazz, I find that this fascination still lingers. Very few experiences remain so vividly with us from the time we are kids to the later years of our lives. But my love for Kind of Blue has remained a constant in my life—as it has, apparently, for many others.

It was not simply the beauty of the music that moved me; I was engulfed by the dark, melancholy mood of the album, a mood leavened by a kind of cool joy or sad irony that seemed to be an illustration of the old blues line “laughing to keep from crying.” Although I have listened to Kind of Blue countless times over the years—so much so that I know every note by heart—when I play it now, I still have the same visceral response that I had as a boy.

Even the album’s liner notes fired my imagination. Bill Evans’s perceptive comments, in which he compares the spontaneity of jazz improvisation to a type of Zen painting, intrigued me and gave me the first clues to the mysterious process by which a jazz piece comes into being. Creating music spontaneously, right now, here in the moment, seemed a thoroughly magical idea, expressing an act as profound as the Zen Buddhism that I had become increasingly interested in at that time. (I would sit in study hall and, instead of doing my homework, attempt to meditate and reach satori, floating in my mind far away from the gray halls of my high school. Unfortunately, I never reached satori.)

Like Zen, the music of Kind of Blue seemed both simple and profound. For me as a young person, it was like a gateway to the world of adult emotions—not just any adult emotions but those that speak to the ambiguities and tragedies of life. Kind of Blue reflected not only hard-lived experience but also the discipline of contemplation. This was, I thought, music created by people who knew the meaning of pain, hunger, fear, great sadness, and irrepressible joy. Moreover, it was music that seemed to express an awareness of death. I cannot point to anything specific to support this last observation. But throughout the album, I heard—and still hear—an awareness of mortality and a deep knowledge of the exigencies of living. Yet despite the undercurrent of melancholy in the music, I also felt an affirmation of life in the face of death; and these are emotions that were foreign to me as a boy. Through repeated listenings to the album, I began to glimpse something of the complexity of these emotions. Thus, for me, Kind of Blue was one of the stepping-stones toward emotional maturity as well as simply another beautiful piece of music.

Sadly, describing something as beautiful no longer carries any special weight. The overuse of words such as beautiful, profound, or awesome has impoverished our language. Commercials routinely invite us to buy products that are “beautiful”: products as disparate as margarine, eyeglass frames, SUVs, instant coffee. But the unmistakable beauty of Kind of Blue rests on two qualities of great depth: the splendor of its sound and the starkness of its hard-won truths. Kind of Blue is further proof of Keats’s statement that beauty and truth are inseparable.

Jazz has been called “the imperfect art,” and there is much validity in that description. After all, any art form that is largely created spontaneously, in the moment, might have a number of fine qualities, but perfection is usually not one of them. And so it is with Kind of Blue—a flawed masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless. Miles once complained that record companies should release jazz albums with all the mistakes included instead of editing them out. With Kind of Blue he realized his wish; the album was released, imperfections and all, without a single edit.

The diversity of musical sensibilities of the jazzmen who play on Kind of Blue is impressive: Miles Davis’s terse lyricism, John Coltrane’s intense spirals of sound, Bill Evans’s introspective romanticism, and Cannonball Adderley’s ebullient funk. I used to think that Adderley was the most noticeable flaw in this album, but I have completely changed my mind. The album would have been far less compelling without Cannonball’s bluesy joie de vivre; the listener can almost hear him saying to the others, “Hey, lighten up, you guys!” The older I get, the more I understand that this sensibility is at least as profound as the darker moods expressed by the other musicians (though Wynton Kelly, who spells Evans on the blues “Freddie Freeloader,” had a style close to Adderley’s spirit).

That the sessions were something of an experiment only adds to the mystery of the album’s brilliance. None of the players saw the pieces Miles planned to use until the actual sessions—with the exception of Bill Evans, who composed at least one of the tunes and probably collaborated with Miles on one or more of the others. And the tunes themselves were experimental. Instead of being based on chords, modes were used for their tonal organization. This was not the first time modes had been used in jazz or even the first time this particular band had played a modal tune. On Milestones, the small group session that preceded Kind of Blue, the title track was modal (the front line of that band was the same, but the drummer was Philly Joe Jones and Red Garland was the pianist, at least for part of the session). But that single tune was hardly preparation for the experimental pieces that Miles and Evans brought to the Kind of Blue sessions. This album would prove that jazz could find a tonal path apart from the European harmonic system that had been such a constant throughout music history, and it would give improvisers a new and unprecedented melodic freedom.

These matters of form are interesting, especially to musicians, and provide an additional explanation for the long history of attraction to this album. Formal elements aside, Kind of Blue gets under the listener’s skin. Every one of the soloists creates the illusion that he is speaking to each of us as an individual, and to us only, thereby developing an extraordinary level of intimacy. Most of the solos are so eloquent that it is almost as if, on some other level—perhaps on the level of dreams—the musicians are speaking words directly into the listener’s ears.

And what are they saying? That, too, is like a dream: in some sense we know exactly what they are “saying,” but—by its very nature—music transcends language. Our understanding is intuitive; there is no need for a translation. This kind of immediate communication characterizes all good music, of course. But in Kind of Blue the phenomenon is especially vivid.

I have wanted to write extensively about Kind of Blue for a long time, but only when I began to research the subject and talk to the participants did I discover that the story behind the creation of the album is itself a fascinating one, and a long one. Its roots go back to the mid-forties, and it embraces the entire history of modern jazz. It is a story that offers a number of revelations about how innovation happens in jazz, about how musicians worked together during the “golden age” of jazz to keep the music fresh and to build upon and extend its great tradition. It is an error to think that the steady flow of innovation means somehow that the tradition is unimportant or that jazzmen are ignorant of its existence. One of the dominant aspects of the true jazz tradition is the desire of the musicians (though not necessarily the critics or fans) to find ways to expand the perimeters of jazz expression. And the story of Kind of Blue gives further credence to the importance of this desire.

In order to understand how an album like Kind of Blue (or any other jazz album, for that matter) was created, we must approach it from several angles: the period and overall milieu in which it was recorded, the events and musical ideas that led up to this period, the musicians who played on the dates and their individual histories and contributions to the album, and in particular the musical history and characteristics of its leader—in this case, Miles Davis.

The Kind of Blue story describes the roads traveled by some great jazzmen—roads that were not laid out in straight lines. For each musician there were innumerable detours, backtracking, unexpected loops and circles. And given the tight, insular world of jazz, their separate paths inevitably crossed and intertwined with one another long before the historic sessions for Columbia Records. There were disparate points for these journeys: St. Louis, Missouri; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Plainfield, New Jersey; Tampa, Florida; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C.; Cincinnati, Ohio; Brooklyn, New York. From such varied beginnings each jazzman followed his own path, leading ineluctably to the shining moment when they came together in 1959 for the creation of Kind of Blue.

The story reminds me in a way of the great Japanese film Rashomon, in which four individuals, having witnessed or participated in the same event, reveal their differing visions of the truth concerning what happened. In the case of Kind of Blue, the “differing visions” appear not after the fact, as in the film, but come as individual contributions to the same event. The musicians on Kind of Blue arrived in 1959 with their own personal visions and were affected by the success of the album in different ways for years afterward. The story of Kind of Blue is one of ideas and dreams, of sociocultural and political change and musical evolution; it is the story of towering geniuses who for a brief moment collaborated to produce an imperishable work of art and then went their separate ways.

Not long after making this album, three of the dominant players in the band—Evans, Coltrane, and Adderley—became leaders of their own very successful groups. But each of their bands were so different that it seems nothing short of miraculous not only that they had played in the same group together but that they had been parts of the magnificent whole that was this Miles Davis sextet and, in particular, the group that created Kind of Blue.

Some readers may fear that telling this story with so much background detail will spoil the magic of the album. There is no way any writer or critic could do that. No matter how much we explore and attempt to understand the creative process or the actual details involved in the making of Kind of Blue, its beauty and truth can never be tarnished. If listening to it literally hundreds of times does not diminish its power, which has been my own experience, nothing can. I have no doubt that five hundred years from now Kind of Blue will speak as eloquently to those who hear it as, say, the loveliest of Mozart’s string quartets speak to us today. I find this idea reassuring—that there are works of art that, even in this age of transience and packaged feeling, will last as long as life itself.