NEW YORK, Aug. 28 -- Like a hunky-dory vintage wine -- an
epicurean enrapture near and dear to Miles Davis (1926-1991) -- the music
contained on Kind of Blue reveals added refinement and unexpected pleasures the
older it gets. And yet with each year that Kind of Blue ages, it goes
through a rejuvenation process that is exciting to lay eyes on. The core of
the 1959 record album has never been duplicated. That english hawthorn account, in part, for
its RIAA triple-platinum condition in the U.S. and worldwide recognition as a
timeless masterpiece, #12 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500
Greatest Albums Of All Time."
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Kind of Blue: 50th Anniversary Collector's Edition is an expansive and
lavishly-designed box set. The contents of the box include: deuce CDs
(running clip over two hours); a newly-produced black-and-white documentary
DVD (55 minutes); a full-size 60-page book of critical essays, annotations
and photography; and an envelope chockfull of memorabilia. The box also
includes the 12-inch LP package pressed on 180-gram blue vinyl and an
enormous 22x33 fold-out posting of Miles. The loge will be released on
September 30th by Columbia/Legacy, a division of SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT.
Of special importance to Miles Davis aficionados around the globe is
the DVD, Celebrating a Masterpiece: Kind of Blue. The unexampled DVD incorporates
material from the 2004 mini-documentary, Made In Heaven, including
black-and-white still photography of the recording roger Huntington Sessions and the voices
of Miles (at the roger Huntington Sessions), as easily as excerpts of radio interviews with
the late Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley. There are interviews with
musicians and luminaries including composer/performer David Amram, the late
Ed Bradley, Ron Carter, Jimmy Cobb, Bill Cosby, Herbie Hancock (wHO
demonstrates "So What" at the pianoforte), Eddie Henderson, Shirley Horn, Dave
Liebman, the late Jackie McLean, funk-rocker Me'Shell Ndege'Ocello,
hip-hop's Q-Tip, Carlos Santana, John Scofield, Horace Silver, and many
others.
The DVD also unearths the group's entire 26-minute appearance on
"Robert Herridge Theatre: The Sound of Miles Davis," a CBS television
program recorded in 1959 and circulate in 1960. Another fillip feature is
the gallery of images captured by Columbia staff photographer Don Hunstein,
covering the original recording sessions, as well as a key performance at
New York's Plaza Hotel in September 1958. In junction with the latter,
an unprecedented four-week exhibit of Miles Davis photography will be
mounted at New York's business district Morrison Hotel Gallery in November-December
2008. The exhibit will then travel to other Morrison Hotel locations and
Starwood Hotels in 2009.
At the absolute core of the box set is the original 45-minute album
program, whose five titles -- "So What," "Freddie Freeloader," "Blue in
Green," "All Blues," and "Flamenco Sketches" -- ar indelibly incised in our
contemporary musical DNA, be it wind, rock, third through fifth stream
classical, or beyond. They are familiar sure-enough acquaintances on the LP as it
existed in the marketplace for intimately three decades: the first three
numbers pool occupying side one (which happened to have been cut on the first
day of recording, two three-hour sessions on Monday, March 2, 1959); and
the lowest two numbers on side two (recorded at the final three-hour session
of Wednesday, April 22, 1959).
On CD One of the box set, after the original five tunes are presented,
there is the alternate take of "Flamenco Sketches," the only complete
alternate take from the original recording sessions (a cut first unveiled
on the 5-LP/4-CD box set of 1988, Miles Davis: The Columbia Years
1955-1985, the first Miles Davis box fix ever issued by Columbia).
Following the understudy take, at that place are "studio sequences" (ranging from 11
seconds to nearly deuce minutes) for every one of the five titles, and one
"false begin." As transcribed and fleshed out by Ashley Kahn, these brusk
tracks are eye-opening revelations into the studio human relationship between
Miles, the musicians, Columbia staff producer Irving Townsend, and
recording engineer Fred Plaut, at this still-early stage in Miles' calling
as a leader (though he had been making records since 1945).
The 1959 sessions occupy CD One -- and and so CD Two turns plunk for the
calendar to May 26, 1958. The basketball team completed tracks from that session with
producer Cal Lampley -- "On Green Dolphin Street," "Fran-Dance" (with an
alternate take), "Stella by Starlight," and "Love for Sale" -- are the alone
other studio recordings of the sestet with Adderley, Coltrane, Evans,
Chambers, and Cobb (though unrecorded recordings subsist from the Newport Jazz
Festival in July, and the Plaza in September).
The five 1958 studio tracks, scattered on various LP through the years,
were united in one shoes for the first metre on the double Grammy
Award-winning 6-CD box set issued in 2000, Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The
Complete Columbia Recordings 1955-1961. Now, for the first time, the quintet
1958 studio tracks are rightfully joined -- at last -- with the five
sixer tracks of Kind of Blue. The final data track on CD Two is a mesmeric
17-minute hot concert rendering of "So What" (without Adderley, with Kelly),
recorded in Holland, April 1960.
In late 1958, after some eight months, Bill Evans left the lineup and
was replaced by Wynton Kelly. As Miles began to devise his next studio
recording, Evans was invited back up for the sessions and became an integral
spark on the album's construct. Cobb bears witness to the fact that "the
concept behindhand Kind of Blue grew out of the way the iI (Miles and Evans)
played together," as Francis Davis writes. "Evans and Davis were certainly
on the same wavelength, and the piano player certainly contributes more than a
sideman's share of Kind of Blue's air of reflective melancholy. In addition to
which, his eloquent lining notes -- titled 'Improvisation in Jazz' -- cued
listeners to hear the album as the very essence of jazz, an unmediated
example in spontaneity."
The session-by-session transcripts compiled and expounded by Ashley
Kahn are an indication of the quantum advance in scholarly exegesis that
has grown up around Miles Davis in general and Kind of Blue in particular.
This intellectual pursuit is given full exposure in the course of the box
set's 60-page book. Kahn's 3,000-word subdivision, titled "Between The Takes,"
reflects the full scope of research that went into his book Kind of Blue:
The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (DaCapo Press, 2000; updated
edition, Perseus, 2007, foreword by Jimmy Cobb).
Kahn's section is preceded by two major in-depth studies from writers
wHO have also studied their subject for their entire careers. The book's
hatchway essay is a 4,000-word overview written by Francis Davis,
contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, jazz columnist for The Village
Voice, and victor of basketball team ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for Excellence in Music
Journalism. In addition to writing many books (among them The History of
the Blues, Hyperion, 1995; and Jazz and Its Discontents: A Francis Davis
Reader, Perseus, 2004), he has also written liner notes for all over 60 jazz
and bug out albums, including titles by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill
Evans.
"The deuce recording roger Sessions for Kind f Blue," Francis Davis writes,
"took place in the nick of meter: it's unimaginable to reckon Davis, Evans,
Coltrane, and Adderley coming together so harmoniously a year or two later,
by which point each had become not just leader of his band only practically
founder of his own school."
The second essay, "The Last King Of America: How Miles Davis Invented
Modernity," is a 3,000-word study by Professor Gerald Early of Washington
University in St. Louis. Early, wHO has served as adviser on numerous
Ken Burns objective projects (Baseball, Jazz, Unforgivable Blackness: The
Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, The War), is a widely published source who
has written about subjects diverse as Negro baseball, Motown, Sammy Davis
Jr., Muhammad Ali -- and Miles Davis. Early was the editor in chief of Miles Davis
and American Culture (2001), a compendium of essays.
"Kind of Blue would not have been possible if the LP did not exist,"
Early says. "It was jazz conceived for the record album, non only because
of the playing times of the tunes simply also because of how the record album creates
an overall humour. Kind of Blue is not only a series of tracks as the
standard small group nothingness album of the clarence Shepard Day Jr. was. Kind of Blue was one of the
few jazz records of its time that had a sense of narration, a cohesive
inter-relation betwixt the tunes. It was a work on, not a bunch of disparate
tunes used to pace a small group jazz album: one fast-tempo piece, one
ballad, one blues, one or two standards, a bop-oriented original. The sense
of the album as an organic whole added to its appeal."
Even so, the Kind of Blue LP was demoniac by some other kind of voodoo
for decades. Musicians who tested to "play along" with the first three
tracks (side unitary) were perplexed because the music always sounded slimly
sharper than pitch. In 1995, the problem was traced back up to the old
Columbia 30th Street Studio, and a 3-track tape machine that was working
slightly dull during the March recording sessions. As a result, after the
mastering process, those number 1 three tunes always sounded sharp. In 1995,
this pitch problem was in the end corrected. At the same time, it was decided
to remix the original 3-track tapes on a Presto all-tube recorder, similar
to the one put-upon in 1959. The mixes were brought back to "real life." The
rich, full instrumental sound was restored, rendering every previous
configuration obsolete.
Listening to Kind of Blue today, the ground rules come promptly: This
was an exercise in solo and group improvisation, a break from the
conventions of chordal complexity, "improvising on the sparest and starkest
of scales as an alternative to bebop's dull thickets of chord changes," as
Francis Davis writes. It was a "return to emphasis on melodic kind of than
harmonic variation," as Miles told The Jazz Review the year before. The
works were composed (as it were) just hours before the sessions, so there
could be no rehearsals as such. Once the radical got past times the "studio
sequences" described earlier, the results were all first takes; only
"Flamenco Sketches" was given an alternate lease.
Moreover, as Davis and Early and many other writers and musicians have
openly discussed -- and Miles would frequently defer -- the five kit and boodle all
had their roots in other sources. Kind of Blue was the first Miles Davis
album comprised entirely of songs credited to his name, even though at
least deuce of its themes were provided by Evans: "Flamenco Sketches" (whose
piano intro derived from Evans' "Peace Piece," itself based on Leonard
Bernstein's "Some Other Time" from On The Town); and "Blue in Green," which
(writes Davis) "sprang verbatim from [Evans'] introduction to 'Alone
Together' on an earlier transcription of that standard by Chet Baker." This may
have been business-as-usual in the jazz scene, simply the financial impact of
Miles not crediting anyone else certainly hastened the going of Evans
from the group.
How and why has Kind of Blue held on to its status as an album that
crosses genres, speaks to generations, and is one of the first (if not the
first) album that whatsoever new
