Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’ and the shades of JazzFull Album: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB669XXjnUg

I started playing the piano when I was 24 years old driven by the idea to improvise and play jazz, listening to music almost 24 hours a day spanning from Charles Mingus to Duke Ellington, from Charlie Parker to Keith Jarrett and Thelonious Monk, I soon realised that the role of the pianist, in all combos, is subordinated to the overall musical sound of the band.

The album which best revealed to me the essence of jazz for is collective improvisation and sounds is Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’ (1959), where the piano not only plays the role of accompanist and soloist but adds color to the overall soundscape of the instant group compositional work.

Miles Davis, whose career spanned for more than 40 years embracing and often anticipating, different styles within the jazz language, used to carefully choose his pianist in relation to the project he was working on. He had sitting-in pianists like, Red Garland and Wynton Kelly on his bebop and hard-bop period, Bill Evans who recorded with Miles ‘Kind of Blue’ the manifesto of modal jazz, young Herbie Hancock on the fabulous post-bop ‘Four and More’ album recorded live at Philharmonic Hall in New York on February 12th 1964 as well as Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett using electric piano who worked with him to realise ‘Bitches Brew’, an album recorded in April 1970 which would have became soon a starting point for all the Electric jazz Fusion to come.

Before ‘Kind of Blue’ the role of the piano especially as a harmonic/percussive instrument emerged in jazz in the early and mid-1940 where saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpet player ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie were re-inventing jazz language in a style called ‘Bebop’. The bebop rhythmic session, composed by piano, double bass and drums, was mainly used to rhythmically outline intricate harmonic structure and chromatic melodies often at a fast tempo, backing up soloist during improvised solos as well as create syncopated dialogue between piano and drums with the bass keeping the harmony structure over a steady crochet pulse. ‘Bebop’ as concept was to take a standard blues or ballad and to improvise a whole new melody built on its chord changes nothing more.

In this period Miles, at first, joined Charlie Parker replacing Gillespie, then started to create his own bands, along-side fabulous soloists like saxophonists John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley and pianist Red Garland, focusing more on the melodic exposition of the theme, its interpretation, the ‘swing feel’, the pauses and the overall sound of the group rather than the empty virtuosism. Examples of this are contained in the 4 albums recorded in 2 sessions within 1956, ‘Steamin’, ‘Workin’, ‘Cookin’ and ‘Relaxin with Miles Davis Quintet’. Miles was approaching the jazz standard repertoire in a more singable way compared to Parker and the bebop scene, an approach that would have allowed the rhythm session to interact more with the soloist. In these sessions pianist Red Garland provides syncopated rhythm support backing the soloists, harmonic support using rootless voicing as well as using poignant melodic swing lines and ‘block chords’, a four part harmonised melody in ‘locked-up hand’, for his solos.

In 1957 two years before ‘Kind of Blue’ session, Miles joined composer Gil Evans in an orchestral project called ‘Miles Ahead’, a ten piece’ suite album released the same year by Columbia records. Davis first met Gil Evans on his basement apartment that had become, at that time, a meeting place for musicians looking to develop new musical styles outside of the dominant bebop style of the day.

Composer Gunther Schuller described this movement as ‘Third Stream’ using the term also to describe a musical genre which is a synthesis of classical music and jazz improvisation. This can also be seen as a curiosity that Miles had towards the Western classical music as well as the newer theories of the time, especially to George Russell’ ‘Lydian Chromatic Concept for tonal organization’ a theory based not on chord changes but on scales or modes.

After his first experiment with ‘Milestone’ (1958), with Red Garland on piano, Davis called up in August 17th 1959 a session to record ‘Kind of Blue’ to imprint on record what from now on would been have called modal jazz. For that session Miles called on piano Bill Evans, a Russell’s acolyte, who with his debut album “New Jazz Conception”(1956) demonstrated not only to have a great swing and knowledge of bebop language but also an impressive melodic use of ‘block chords’ and modes.

Miles’s idea, was to apply Russell’s modal theory in a spontaneous session, providing music never rehearsed before to musicians with a sense strong of the melody drawing together a smoky evocation ambience in an elegant and laid back sonic space.

In an interview in 1959 with critic Nat Hentoff, Miles explained the new approach. "When you go this way," he said, "you can go on forever. You don't have to worry about changes, and you can do more with time. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you are. … 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."

In the liner notes Bill Evans writes about spontaneity: “There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. “

Davis was ‘painting’ jazz in what I would like to call an ‘impressionistic way’, based on the subjective reactions of each musician, presenting a non-systematical framework in a given tempo.

On this note Bill Evans also add: “Miles conceived these settings (structures) 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 pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a "take."

Miles conceived the band also balancing the musician’s expertise joining together the black blues tradition with Coltrane and Adderley, the ’smoky’ drums of Jimmy Cobb and the classic western ‘white’ pianism of Bill Evans. Davis finally found in Bill that elegance and the perfect marriage between blues/bebop tradition and western classical culture. Classically trained Evans was a penchant for the French Impressionist composers, like Ravel and Debussy, whose harmonies floated airily above the melody line. Bill’s ‘open handed voicing’ built in 4th, his chord fragments and his unconventional melodic lines gave to this session the sound Miles was looking for, using the piano to add colors, floating with the ensemble not just providing rhythmic and harmonic support but adding counterpointed lines to each soloist.

Even though I am a jazz pianist the first thing that shocked me when I first listened to ‘Kind of Blue’ was Jimmy Cobb crash cymbal at 1.32 on the first track ‘So What’.I vividly remember that moment, I was in bed at night with my headphone on and after a tenebrous intro, setting the scene and the exposition of the head of ‘So What’, Jimmy Cobb’s crash was an explosion of colors that catapulted me into a ‘smoky’ jazz club on the 52 nd street in New York. The music was able to throw me into the picture, painted by masters, I felt I was in the coolest place on earth.

In the general atmospheric soundscape created by the band an example where the piano is used as color accompanying the band without the use of the chords is in the intro of ‘All Blues’ where Evans plays a minor second interval to create tension under the theme a 6/8 jazz waltz.

Yet the superb use of the sharp11 over a major chord on ‘Blue and Green’ a beautiful ballad seem to be the color needed to paint the melancholic atmosphere in a structure that doesn’t resolve. Bill demonstrated a vast knowledge in harmony also using chord shapes never used before in jazz.

In ‘Flamenco Sketches’ the overall sound seems to change to in a more Spanish tinge. The modes used are Lydian, dominant Sus 4, Aeolian and the last chord of the sequence where Miles seem to pay homage to Picasso adding a dominant chord with the 9 and 6 using a Phrygian mode typical of the Spanish folk music.

All this musical variety, moods and effects are included in in ‘Kind of Blue’ a Miles Davis album that has been considered by writers and music critics as the greatest jazz album of all time.

Rolling Stone magazine stated: "This painterly masterpiece is one of the most important, influential and popular albums in jazz". (December 16th, 2009). It is included in the book ‘1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die’, described by reviewer Seth Jacobson as "a genre-defining moment in twentieth-century music, period."

This album for me is the perfect example of what I define as Jazz, a multicultural language able to blend black and white culture, exactly like the ebony and ivory on the piano, with the ability to paint shades of colors on an open canvas thanks to the collective improvisation. That’s why I started playing Jazz. That’s why I am still playing the piano.

Bibliography:

NAT HENTOFF ‘An Afternoon with Miles Davis’ The Jazz Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (December 1958)

BILL EVANS ‘ Kind of Blue’ linear notes: http://www.billevanswebpages.com/kindblue.html

GEORGE RUSSELL ‘Lydian Chromatic Concept for tonal organization’ – www.georgerussell.com

Rolling Stones Magazine ‘Kind of Blue’ (December 16th, 2009)

LUCA CERCHIARI ‘Il Jazz’ Bompiani (1997)

R. DIMERY ‘1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die’ (2005)