‘An artist’s first responsibility is to himself.’1
Miles Davis
For some years now, every new record release by Miles Davis had astonished musicians and fans alike with the freshness of its sound, and by 1958, his music had established itself as, in critic Whitney Balliett’s phrase, the ‘sound of surprise’. And now, at the beginning of 1959, after the brilliant small-group album, Milestones, and the magnificent orchestral album, Porgy and Bess, most people thought that Miles’s music had reached its peak of expression. Early that year, however, he recorded an album that brought to even greater heights the brooding, meditative side of his music that had revealed itself for the first time at Parker’s ‘Now’s the Time’ session in November 1945. This was called Kind of Blue, and it was to be perhaps the most influential single album in jazz history.
Miles Davis thought that his sextet was the finest small group in jazz up to that time, and his aesthetic ideas for the group were clearly formulated, which accounts for the confidence and potency of his current musical vision. He was steadily expanding his knowledge of earlier jazz forms and performances and the interview he did with Nat Hentoff in Jazz Review (December 1958), shows just how perceptive and clearly thought-out were his criticisms of other musicians. He talks lovingly of Billie Holiday, the old blues singer Leadbelly, Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. Hentoff plays him Louis’s ‘Potato Head Blues’, and Miles comments: ‘There’s form there, and you take some of those early forms, play it today, and they’d sound good. I also like all those little stops in his solo. We stop, but we often let the drums lay out altogether. If I had this record, I’d play it.’2 At the same time, Miles was expanding his interests in other areas of music. He told Hentoff: ‘I’ve been listening to Khachaturian carefully for six months now and the thing that intrigues me are all those different scales he uses . . . they’re different from the usual Western scales.’3 By now, too, very few of Miles’s contemporaries held any interest for him. Of the leading pianist, Oscar Peterson, who was popular with musicians as well as with the general public, Miles said: ‘Nearly everything he plays, he plays with the same degree of force. He leaves no holes for the rhythm section.’4 And talking of music in general and his own group in particular, Davis comments:
I usually don’t buy jazz records. They make me tired and depressed. I’ll buy Ahmad Jamal, John Lewis, Sonny Rollins. Coltrane I hear every night . . . He’s been working on those arpeggios and playing chords that lead into chords, playing them fifty different ways and playing them all at once. He’s beginning to leave more space except when he gets nervous . . . I never have anybody write up anything too difficult for us, because the musicians tighten up.5
Ironically, it was becoming more difficult to keep the group together. Bill Evans had left in November 1958, and Red Garland filled in on piano for three months. Coltrane and Adderley were now leading their own groups as well as working with Miles, and so there were three bandleaders in the sextet. The two saxophonists were also thinking of leaving the group, but Miles managed to solve that problem temporarily by asking Harold Lovett to represent Trane and get him a record contract with Atlantic. Miles also asked Jack Whittemore to get bookings for Coltrane’s group whenever the sextet wasn’t playing. Things improved somewhat in February 1959, when pianist Wynton Kelly replaced Garland. Kelly combined the virtues of Red Garland and Bill Evans, and Miles loved his playing, as did both Coltrane and Adderley.
After an incubation period of some ten months, Miles Davis went into the recording studios again on 2 March 1959, but when Wynton Kelly arrived, he was perturbed and mystified to find Bill Evans there. Nothing had been said to Kelly about the occasion, and as he’d only recently joined the sextet, he was still unsure as to whether he was or wasn’t the regular pianist. Jimmy Cobb explained: ‘That’s what Miles used to do sometimes. He used to bring two players down for certain ideas he had . . . He had that thing for the blues and he knew how Wynton played, and he had that thing for the pretty things, and he knew how Bill played . . .’ In fact, on that first day, three pieces were recorded, and although Kelly played on only one of them, he was paid for the whole day’s work. The album was finished on another session that took place in late April, during which two more pieces were recorded.
The opening track, ‘So What’, immediately established the mood and atmosphere of the album Kind of Blue. Bill Evans plays a quiet introduction with impressionist chord voicings, and then a melodic riff is played by the bass, while the rest of the sextet reply to each of his repeated phrases with a mournful two-note riff in three-part harmony. It is yet another variation on the call-and-response technique, with the bass calling (preaching) and the horns and piano saying ‘amen’ (or ‘so what’) to each of his statements. The bass riff and the ‘amens’ of the ensemble go on for sixteen bars, and are then raised a semitone for eight bars before going back to the original tonality for the final eight bars. Thus, in this thirty-two-bar structure, Miles has reduced the harmonic movement to two broad areas; the first sixteen bars are based on the scale of C major but harmonized with the chord of D minor 7th (the Dorian mode); the middle eight is based on the scale of D flat major, but harmonized with the chord of E flat minor (also Dorian); and the final eight goes back to the first tonality. Here, Miles was following up lines of thought first hinted at in the Scaffold film music, and first brought to fruition in his composition ‘Milestones’, also based on just two scales.
Miles Davis’s use of one or two scales or modes, instead of a harmonic structure, as a basis for themes, resulted in what became known as modal jazz, and a whole series of experiences and events had led to this late-1950s phenomenon. Since they met a decade earlier, Miles and George Russell had spent some time together, and Russell’s great theoretical (and profoundly practical) work The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization had, among other things, examined the scales appropriate to certain chords. The translation of chords into scales paved the way for this later modal thinking. Miles had also, with Frances Taylor, seen a performance in New York of the Ballet Africaine from Guinea, which of course featured very rhythmic modal ethnic music. The instruments had included the highly evocative and emotive African thumb piano, which is held in the hand while the several metal rods set in its sound box are flicked with thumb or finger. The dance troupe’s rhythms, modes and the thumb piano had made a powerful impression on Miles. But there were other sources of inspiration nearer home. Working with Gil Evans on Porgy and Bess had also helped to define these modal ideas. Miles said:
When Gil wrote the arrangement of ‘I Loves You, Porgy’, he only wrote a scale for me to play. No chords . . . And in ‘Summertime’, there is a long space where we don’t change the chord at all. It just doesn’t have to be cluttered up . . . All chords, after all, are relative to scales and certain chords make certain scales . . . You go this way, you can go on for ever. You don’t have to worry about [chord] changes and you can do more with the [melodic] line . . . I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variations. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.6
The tensions set up by the theme of ‘So What’ – the unusual role of the bass, the mournful ‘amens’ which are really sardonic ‘so whats’, the decorative function of harmony with its sudden organic use when the theme shifts up a semitone – combine to inspire the soloists. Miles plays two superbly sculpted choruses and is followed by Coltrane. With the latter, Bill Evans’s accompaniment changes from the graceful ebb and flow he used for Miles, to more insistent and ominous chords. With Cannonball there is a more cheerful and relaxed feeling and finally, Evans himself plays a solo with riff backing from the horns that is a subtle variation on the original ‘amen’ response, giving the performance tremendous lift. George Russell has called Miles’s two choruses on ‘So What’ ‘one of the great lyrical solos of the century’, and he later made it the theme for his own Living Time Orchestra’s version of ‘So What’. It has been transcribed and played by many other musicians, and is one of the best-known and -loved improvised solos in jazz.
The second track, ‘Freddie Freeloader’, has Wynton Kelly on piano and is a blues in B flat. Like ‘So What’, it is taken at a medium strolling tempo, and this traditional form, too, Miles has reduced to its starkest, most elemental basis. It is built on the three traditional chords of the blues – the tonic, sub-dominant and dominant – with only one tiny variation when a different harmony is used for the last two bars. This time, a harmonized, two-note ‘amen’ is the main thematic motif, a falling phrase like a gentle sigh, creating an atmosphere of sophisticated melancholia. It is quite remarkable how the blues has been reduced to its simplest form while the feeling which infuses it has become more subtle, more refined, more evocative. Once again, the solo order is brilliantly organized. Wynton Kelly plays first, and suddenly, after the introversion of ‘So What’, and the melancholy theme of this blues, Kelly’s solo sparkles with unrestrained joy. He plays single-note triplets and some block chords which swing mightily, and the muscularity of his phrases, his pulse, his effervescent ideas, throw the whole of the album into relief, enhancing the impact of all the rest of the music. He is followed by Miles, who builds to a magnificent climax in his sixth and final chorus, when he is followed by Coltrane, and then by Adderley, whose irrepressible spirits burst out in fluid, bluesy phrases.
Bill Evans, who wrote the original sleeve note for Kind of Blue, commented: ‘Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording date, and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore you will hear something close to spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces before the recordings.’7 Also, according to Evans, each piece was done in just one take. But one piece on the album was definitely worked on consciously, over a period of six months. This was ‘All Blues’, which opened side two. Miles worked at it on his piano at home, and took his ideas round to Gil Evans for his opinions and suggestions, but even then the piece found its ultimate form only in the studio on the actual day of the recording. Miles told Ralph Gleason: ‘I wrote it in 4/4, but when we got to the studio, it hit me that it should be in 3/4. I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but it was exactly right.’8
The striking feature of ‘All Blues’ is a plaintive, repeated three-note riff played in harmony by the two saxophones throughout the beginning and ending of the piece, and intermittently by the piano during the solos. This riff is yet another variation on the three-note theme of ‘Milestones’, and there is something of the same way in which the tension ebbs and flows according to whether the notes are played short or long. Miles knew exactly what he was doing here, and said of this riff: ‘You can get a lot of tension by repetition . . . I didn’t write anything for me to play; I just play what I feel like at the time.’9 Over this hypnotic riff, Miles plays a series of haunting calls using his Harmon mute. The unhurried nature of the piece gives him time to remove his mute (while the saxes are playing the riff) and play the first solo. His use of the open trumpet sound here gives an added textural richness. Indeed, the whole piece is remarkable for the original and subtle way Davis creates the textures he wants. ‘All Blues’ is built up of layers of sound: the drums play straight, unobtrusive 3/4; the bass states the pulse by repeating a two-bar slow, lilting boogie-woogie figure reminiscent of Jimmy Yancey; over this Bill Evans plays a long, sustained trill in the middle register of the piano; to this is added the hypnotic saxophone riff. Over this rich texture, Miles calls with the astringent sound of the Harmon mute. Just as he plays his solo with open trumpet, so the other textures change and loosen up as the musicians start reacting to the soloists. As is usual with Miles, the formal elements of ‘All Blues’ are deceptively simple, and the whole is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.
There are no fast pieces on Kind of Blue: ‘So What’, ‘Freddie Freeloader’ and ‘All Blues’ are medium-tempo performances, and ‘Blue in Green’ and ‘Flamenco Sketches’ are skeletal ballads. Miles Davis’s titles are usually just methods of identifying particular pieces; they are rarely descriptive of the music. Often, he names compositions after things, people or phrases from his everyday environment. ‘So What’ is one of the expressions he has used a great deal, particularly to people who come up and tell him how much they like his music. And ‘Freddie Freeloader’ was the nickname of an ex-bartender in Philadelphia, a hipster who just hung around the jazz spots and ran errands for musicians.
The homogeneity of mood on Kind of Blue, and the superlative response of the musicians to the contexts Miles devised, combined to make this one of the seminal albums, and one of the most enduring classics, of jazz. It has been bought, loved and learned by non-musicians as well as by musicians, and it has influenced world-famous musicians as well as obscure performers. The more it is listened to, the more it reveals new delights and fresh depths. Typically, at the time, the musicians in the studio didn’t realize that they had just made a historic recording. Jimmy Cobb recalled the playback in the studio:
After it was over and we heard it, we went through the things . . . and it sounded so nice in the studio . . . and it came out so good on the record . . . I said ‘Damn! – it sounded good!’ But since then it got to be something special in the music . . . a lot of people started listening to the music with that record, and a lot of guys started to play jazz from behind that record . . . and I had a few people tell me that they had worn out three to four copies of that record.
The restrained elegance of Kind of Blue, however, could be achieved only in the cloister-like atmosphere of the recording studio, working with unfamiliar material. In live performances, Miles’s groups were too irrepressibly dynamic to function in so restrained a way. With this album, Miles had taken the Western aspects of his music to their limits. ‘Blue in Green’, for example, takes civilized melancholia, and the introverted, self-regarding sensibilities which are European in origin, about as far as they will go without turning into mawkishness. The piece is so sad and nostalgic that it is almost painful. The qualities of Bill Evans are of crucial importance to the music of Kind of Blue, and it is significant that on this piece Evans claimed his contribution was more organic than on the other pieces. All the compositions on the album were attributed to Miles Davis, but some years later, Bill Evans said:
Actually it’s my tune, even though Miles is credited as co-writer for reasons only he understands. One day at Miles’s apartment, he wrote on some manuscript paper the symbols for G minor and A augmented, and he said, ‘What would you do with that?’ I didn’t really know, but I went home and wrote ‘Blue in Green’.10
This begs the question of in what, precisely, the act of jazz composition consists. The cause of Evans’s writing ‘Blue in Green’ (if indeed he did), as he points out, was Miles Davis’s defining the area of interest: the relationship of two particular chords. In a Zen pupil-and-master sense, by pointing Evans in a particular direction, Miles was certainly ‘composing’ himself. Miles himself has stated that he composed everything on the album and that Evans was given the same sketches in the studio as everyone else.
This vexed problem of composition, by composing improvisers and improvising composers, had begun with the early confusion about the composer of ‘Donna Lee’ (it was attributed to Bird, but had been written by Miles), and would continue to be a recurrent theme throughout the rest of Miles’s career. There is, of course, money in composing: composers gets a royalty every time their music is played, and if it is recorded, they can expect a steady income so long as the records either sell or get played in public on radio or television. Because of the financial advantages, some bandleaders throughout the history of jazz have exercised what might be called a sort of droit du seigneur so far as their sidemen’s compositions were concerned, either taking over the rights completely or at least sharing them. In some cases, the problem was far simpler and less abstract than the question of the authorship of ‘Blue in Green’. For example, two of Miles’s most famous tunes of the early 1950s, ‘Four’ and ‘Tune Up’, have been claimed by the saxophonist and blues singer, Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, who said:
He [Miles] was in Kansas City and he needed some tunes. He said, ‘Well, man, can I take these?’ I said, ‘Yeah, just put my name on it.’ I hadn’t bothered to copyright it at the time . . . I’ve seen him since, we’re still friends! Oh, he’s tried to pay me, but I just enjoy his playing anyway.11
There is an authentic note in this claim, because of the lack of rancour. Miles himself has made the following remarks about the relationship of improvising and composing: ‘Do I like composing better than playing? I can’t answer that. There’s a certain feeling you get from playing that you can’t get from composing. And when you play, it’s like a composition anyway. You make the outline.’12 The irony and the difficulty lie in the fact that themes and structures are accepted as compositions and can be registered as such, but the improvisations on them, often where the most potent music is created, cannot usually be registered as compositions.
In 1959 Miles Davis’s reputation was blossoming and the scope of his activities widening. Although the specialist magazines still wrote about all aspects of his music, he was featuring more often in the non-specialist, national press. By now his fans were often people who were not jazz enthusiasts, but Miles Davis fans. In March, a long feature written by Nat Hentoff was published in the sophisticated, up-market magazine Esquire. In April, between the two recording sessions which produced Kind of Blue, Miles was recorded and filmed for a major TV programme, a thirty-minute show in a prestige series produced for CBS by a Welshman called Robert Herridge. The show was called ‘The Sound of Miles Davis’, and it immediately broke all the rules. Cannonball Adderley was ill and couldn’t make the programme, so the first item was a nine-minute quintet version of ‘So What’, which took the show right up to the middle commercial – the show was sponsored, though CBS didn’t network it. Miles’s solo on ‘So What’ rivalled his original masterpiece recorded the previous month, but was very different from it. The second half featured Miles with Gil Evans and the orchestra (which had already played some riffs behind the solos on ‘So What’) playing three pieces from Miles Ahead: ‘The Duke’, ‘Blues for Pablo’, and ‘New Rhumba’. The programme was not shown until July 1960, when it caused quite a stir because of its uncompromising emphasis on the music, and the casual, relaxed appearance of the musicians. Instead of the usual formal black suits, for example, Miles wore a tweed jacket and a sports shirt with a silk, Ascot-knotted kerchief, and Gil Evans wore a ‘sloppy’ sweater, though one reviewer hastened to mention that ‘the effect wasn’t pretentiously messy, beatnik-slobbism; only comfortable’.13 Between the recording and the transmission, Davis watched the film at least five times.
Shortly after the TV recording, Coltrane also fell ill, and although Miles had signed a contract to play a Milwaukee night club, he cancelled the booking, thus risking legal proceedings and a fine. This gives some indication of how highly he rated his two saxophonists; if either of them had been fit, he would certainly have fulfilled his part of the contract and played at the club. But there were already signs that Adderley and Coltrane might not stay with the sextet much longer. Miles’s growing fame was reflecting on all his musicians, and Adderley with his direct, blues-based style, and Coltrane with his passionate innovations, were both building up a substantial following. Cannonball was already getting inquiries from club owners about when he would start his own band, because they noticed the tremendous audience response when Cannonball’s name was announced. But for the moment, there were strong inducements to stay with Miles. Adderley stated clearly why he wanted to stay:
Jazz has no place for stagnation. I know one thing for sure. You can’t repeat yourself night after night when you’re working with Miles Davis. Miles and Coltrane are creating all the time and the challenge is tremendous . . . Miles’s group is as it should be. It’s a laboratory. New and exciting music is played each night. I learn so much being around him.14
But despite all the critical acclaim, the recognition, the prestige both in the USA and abroad, Miles Davis was still experiencing racial discrimination. In the early summer of 1959, for example, he drove to Chicago for an engagement, and rolled his imported Ferrari (a sure badge of money and status) into a motel on the shores of Lake Michigan, only to be told that there had been a mix-up with the reservations. But back in New York in August, Miles was to suffer an indignity so gross that it made the Chicago incident seem negligible.
One hot night, when the Davis sextet was working at Birdland on Broadway, Miles escorted a girl out of the club and hailed a cab for her. Afterwards, he speculated that it may have been this which sparked off the whole incident, because the girl was white. After her cab drove off, Miles took a breather on the pavement outside the club. As he stood there, a police patrolman came up and told him to move along. Miles replied, ‘I work here’, and added that he just wanted a breath of fresh air and would soon be returning to the club. The patrolman asked Miles if he was a ‘wise guy’, and said: ‘If you don’t move, I’ll have to lock you up.’ Miles replied, ‘Go ahead, lock me up.’
As Miles’s attention was fixed on the first patrolman, a second one came up behind him and beat him savagely on the head with a blackjack. Covered in blood from his head wounds, Miles was taken to gaol and his temporary cabaret card confiscated. Musicians could not work in New York without such a card. During the fracas, an angry crowd of onlookers jammed the sidewalks, blocking the traffic, and later a crowd gathered outside the 54th Precinct where Miles was being held. He was kept in gaol overnight and released on $1,000 bail the following day. He needed five stitches in his scalp, and said later, ‘They beat me on the head like a tom-tom.’ One eye-witness commented: ‘It was the most horrible, brutal thing I’d ever seen. People were crying out to the man not to kill Miles.’15
The incident was given a great deal of publicity in the New York press, with indignant headlines everywhere and strong sympathy for Miles. The black paper, Amsterdam News, gave Miles’s story prominence, and said that he had suffered from a ‘Georgia head-whipping’. And press around the world covered the story, the London Melody Maker, for example, printing a photograph of the blood-spattered Miles standing with Frances in the police precinct. Ironically, it was Miles Davis who was charged with disorderly conduct and assault. The two policemen claimed that Miles had made the first violent move: ‘Davis grabbed the stick and was going to hit the officer,’ claimed the second patrolman, ‘so I hit him with a billy on the head.’ Miles’s contention was that he was trying to protect his mouth from being battered, or his lip damaged, which is why he may have seemed to be trying to ‘grab the stick’. The day after the affair, the Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians sent the Police Commissioner a telegram requesting a complete investigation because of the conflicting accounts, and a few days later, the police said Miles could have his cabaret card back any time he wanted to collect it.
Repercussions from the affair rumbled on for months, finally stopping in the spring of 1960. In October, Miles was cleared of the charges of disorderly conduct, which still left the simple assault charge. His manager, Harold Lovett, threatened to file a million-dollar damage suit against the City of New York. But after Miles was also cleared of the other charge (the judge commented: ‘It would be a travesty of justice to adjudge the victim of an illegal arrest guilty of the crime of assaulting the one who made the arrest’)16 he was not anxious for Lovett to proceed with the filing of his suit for false arrest, assault and battery, and malicious prosecution. Jack Whittemore, his booking agent, explained:
Miles feels that if he pushes the City too far, even though he might win his damage suit, he would then be the target for the police, who would be looking to nail him on any little charge they could think of. He feels he has proved his point if he is found innocent on all charges.17
As the decade drew to an end, there was a feeling of change in the air. At the end of September, Cannonball Adderley finally left the sextet, even though Miles offered to guarantee him an annual salary of $20,000. Also, the new technique of stereo recording had just been introduced, and Porgy and Bess had been Miles’s first album in stereo. When Gil Evans was editing and mixing the tapes for that LP, he was assisted by a Columbia employee called Teo Macero who, in 1959, was officially made the CBS A&R (artist and repertoire) man for Miles Davis. He became the key man in Miles Davis’s recording career and retained that role until 1975. This was a significant change for Miles because, from the late 1950s onwards, actual recording techniques were to play an increasing role in music generally, and in Miles’s music in particular. His orchestral albums, especially, needed great technical expertise for their realization, because the ensemble led by Gil Evans was not self-balancing like a symphony orchestra.
Teo Macero was a master craftsman of recording techniques, and one of the pioneers of stereo recording, but he was also much more than this. He had a Master’s degree from Juilliard, and had also played tenor saxophone with Charles Mingus’s Composers’ Workshop. Between 1953 and 1955, Macero had played on several of Mingus’s albums, and had also appeared in 1956 at the Newport Festival with him. It was Teo Macero who produced Mingus’s album Mingus Ah Um, which had such a seminal influence on jazz (and rock) thinking in the 1960s. His experiences with Mingus must have stood Teo Macero in good stead when he began working with Miles. His expertise was not only technical and electronic; he also knew the problems of playing an instrument, and was still composing music himself – something he continued to do all the years he was with Columbia. In the middle 1950s he’d had a Guggenheim award to write a composition. Columbia, in their laudable efforts to promote understanding of jazz, assigned Macero to work with Leonard Bernstein on an album called What is Jazz? Teo recalls:
I wrote a lot of the little examples for that album. Then I wrote an arrangement of ‘Sweet Sue’ which never came out. According to Lenny, it was too lugubrious . . . Lenny said he wanted something to swing, and I said, ‘Then don’t ask me, get somebody like Miles.’ He said, ‘That’s a good idea,’ so we got Miles . . . Miles wrote the chords himself.
The Miles Davis Quintet version of ‘Sweet Sue’ on What is Jazz? is still a most lugubrious rendering of a normally bright tune. But that marked the first time that Macero and Miles worked together in the studio. After assisting Gil Evans with Porgy, Teo was the producer, the man in the studio control booth, for Kind of Blue (where he had little to do) and for all subsequent albums, except for a brief period in the early 1960s when he and Miles fell out and were not on speaking terms. George Avakian, the man who had signed Miles for Columbia, and who had produced the first orchestral album, Miles Ahead, had left CBS, and it was his role in the company that Teo Macero was assuming. So far as Miles Davis was concerned, Teo was going to expand this role: he was not there merely to help the artist realize his music and record it, but also to become an intermediary between Miles and the CBS bosses. This became clear on the very first major project he did with Miles and Gil Evans: the recording of Sketches of Spain, the album with which Davis closed the old decade and opened up the new one.
It was while he was on the West Coast with his sextet early in 1959, that a friend played Miles a recording of ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ for guitar and orchestra by the contemporary Spanish composer, Joaquín Rodrigo. ‘After listening to it for a couple of weeks,’ Miles said later, ‘I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Then when Gil and I decided to do this album, I played him the record and he liked it. As we usually do, we planned the programme first by ourselves for about two months.’18 For the album, Evans rewrote and extended the middle section of the Concierto, which takes up most of side one, and for the rest of the music he went to the library and did some detailed research into Spanish music, flamenco, and the life of the Spanish gypsy. The other piece on side one is a version of an excerpt from Manuel de Falla’s 1915 ballet, El Amor Brujo, and the second side of the album has three compositions (‘The Pan Piper’, ‘Saeta’, ‘Solea’) which are credited to Gil Evans himself.
More time was spent on recording and editing Sketches of Spain than was spent on any of the other orchestral albums, and it was Teo Macero’s proselytizing on behalf of Miles and Gil which won the extra time. It was unheard of then to do ten or fifteen sessions in the studio with a big orchestra for one album, particularly with a jazz artist, but the first four studio sessions for Sketches were completely unproductive because Miles had flu. The president of CBS, Goddard Lieberson, expressed some concern to Macero, who said: ‘Miles is sick . . . We’ve had four sessions where we’ve received absolutely nothing from him – they were like giant rehearsals, and we were over time with the sessions too. It doesn’t look like we’ll finish it in five or six sessions.’ Lieberson said, ‘Well, do you think it will be worth it?’ Macero replied, ‘Absolutely. When we’re finished we’re going to have something of gigantic proportions!’ Lieberson said simply, ‘Stay there until you finish it.’
It took fifteen three-hour sessions with the orchestra to record the album. But Macero’s enthusiasm and Columbia’s faith and daring were fully justified and amply repaid. The finished results were ultimately hailed as a masterpiece, and the album has sold steadily over the years since it was first released. In 1976, for example, sixteen years after its release, it sold 463 copies in Great Britain, and three years later, in Germany, 4,000 were sold. By 1980 it had ‘gone gold’.
Apart from the forty-five hours of recording, just to get the basic tracks on tape, Teo Macero also spent about six months editing the tapes and putting the album together. Here, for the first time, stereo recording techniques were fully exploited. Teo says:
There were a lot of new tricks which we tried at the time. We had the bands going off the side and one band going in the middle and then coming back and splitting it and going to the sides again. Then the whole band going out – there’s a little march [on ‘Saeta’] . . . if you listen carefully, you’ll hear all these things – movement . . .
Sketches of Spain reveals a further step away from the Western concept of orchestral function, which insists that the ensemble has to play together with machine-like precision, and that individual musicians should merge anonymously into the ensemble, which exists to express the will of a composer. Sketches moves even further away from this idea than Porgy had done, inclining more towards the non-Western idea that the individuality of the musicians should be a clearly evident part of the whole, and that the music’s power is heightened by a slight raggedness. What had been perhaps a deeply subconscious idea on the two previous orchestral albums now became formulated as a conscious thought. Miles said: ‘It was hard to get the musicians to realize that they didn’t have to play perfect [my italics]. It was the feeling that counted.’19 He was referring specifically to ‘Saeta’, but the remark stands in its general application to his whole approach. The great gap between the two musical cultures was becoming more and more apparent. The composer, Bill Russo, once said: ‘The melodic curve, the organic structure, and the continuity of a Miles Davis solo . . . cannot be perceived very easily by a classically trained musician.’20 And at this stage of his career, Miles Davis seemed to be turning his back on much of the Western musical tradition, and concentrating more on ethnic elements. With Sketches of Spain, he knew exactly what he was doing, and stated at a press conference in 1960: ‘Flamenco is the Spanish counterpart of our blues.’21 When asked what he and Gil Evans were going to do next, he replied: ‘Gil and I are interested in doing an African ballet album. I think that will be the next direction.’22 But something he put into words in 1964 clarifies his thinking on this whole matter of the two cultural standpoints:
As for Gunther Schuller, I can see why [Leonard] Bernstein would get along with him. It’s like the difference between talking to a Spanish nobleman and talking to a gypsy. Bernstein can talk to Schuller, who’s a classical musician and doesn’t really play jazz; but he can’t talk to Tony Williams, my drummer – they’d have nothing in common.23
Miles Davis is plumping for the values of the gypsy.
Although the three great orchestral albums are always discussed as if they are virtually the same sort of thing, each one has a distinct and separate identity. Sketches in particular differs strongly from the first two in several important ways. Here, for the first time, there is an extensive use of percussion (tambourines, maracas, castanets etc.) for colour and texture as well as for rhythmic purposes. Throughout the album there are frequent long periods based on a single scale where the interest is textural and spatial rather than harmonic, and where Miles solos over this mobile (but harmonically static) backcloth. There is also frequent use of ostinati – repeated rhythmic figures – several of which often go on simultaneously and are sustained for long periods, thus creating a hypnotic, ‘possessed’ effect. There are passages where Miles solos – ‘calls’ – out-of-time against a rich tapestry of sounds.
The trumpeter’s inward-looking self is exquisitely expressed on the ‘Concierto’, but a wilder, more primeval meditation is given voice on ‘Saeta’ and ‘Solea’. Here his vocalized tone is developed and expressed to its fullest extent. On ‘Saeta’, which occupies the same sort of role on Sketches as ‘Prayer’ did on Porgy, the passionate muezzin calls which Miles utters over a droning tremolo again make the neckhair bristle. ‘Solea’ is a tour de force. It is a long piece presenting a continuous dialogue between Miles and the ensemble that lasts for ten minutes, and yet the interest, the movement, the efficacy of Miles’s phrases – often very ‘Eastern’ in their intervals – are all sustained throughout.
All the conceptual implications of Sketches of Spain were not to be more fully explored until Miles recorded Bitches Brew in 1969. Meanwhile, when Sketches was released in 1960, it was so different that many critics simply didn’t know what to make of it. At the same 1960 press conference, Miles was asked: ‘Mr Davis, do you feel this new work of yours is jazz?’ Miles replied: ‘It’s music, and I like it. I’ll play anything I take a fancy to, if I feel it’s possible for me to do it.’24 Asked the same question in Great Britain, Miles replied: ‘I think so . . . what do you think?25 John S. Wilson, the New York Times reviewer, failed to see anything of merit in the album at all, and wrote:
This is the third album that Mr Evans has written and conducted for and with Mr Davis, and one is struck by the continued exploitation of a similarity of sound on all three as Mr Evans creates a rich, exotic, hanging background through which emerges the languid, pained sound that Mr Davis squeezes from his trumpet . . . For the listener in search of jazz, there is mighty little of that commodity evident in any of these selections except for a portion of the ‘Concierto’.26
Sketches of Spain brought to a fitting climax the period of intense creativity that had begun in 1954. These six productive years seem to divide naturally into two parts: the classic small-group recordings of 1954–6 plus the Scaffold film music and the orchestral album, Miles Ahead, of 1957, are all like preparations for the tremendous achievements in the years 1958–60: Milestones, Porgy and Bess, Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain. And there is an almost uncanny parallel with Miles Davis’s second great creative period, 1964–7, when he is once more producing conceptually fresh small-group music that is a preparation for the huge achievements of the years 1968–70: Miles in the Sky, Filles de Kilimanjaro, In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Live-Evil, Jack Johnson.
By the beginning of the 1960s, Miles had won both the Down Beat international critics’ poll and the readers’ poll. As a kind of bonus, the Down Beat readers also voted him jazz personality of 1959. As one club owner remarked: ‘The trouble with you is that everybody likes you, you little son of a bitch!’27 With his popularity and prestige at their highest points, and with controversy about his work raging more violently than ever, Miles Davis was about to start a period of intense travel abroad, where interest in his music and his mystique had mushroomed from Europe to Japan.