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    The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece
    The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece
    The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece
    Ebook292 pages5 hours

    The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece

    By Eric Nisenson

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    About this ebook

    From the moment it was recorded more than 40 years ago, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue was hailed as a jazz classic. To this day it remains the bestselling jazz album of all time, embraced by fans of all musical genres. The album represented a true watershed moment in jazz history, and helped to usher in the first great jazz revolution since bebop.

    The Making of Kind of Blue is an exhaustively researched examination of how this masterpiece was born. Recorded with pianist Bill Evans, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, composer/theorist George Russell and Miles himself, the album represented a fortuitous conflation of some of the real giants of the jazz world, at a time when they were at the top of their musical game. The end result was a recording that would forever change the face of American music.

    Through extensive interviews and access to rare recordings Nisenson pieced together the whole story of this miraculous session, laying bare the genius of Miles Davis, other musicians, and the heart of jazz itself.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 10, 2013
    ISBN9781466852259
    The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece
    Author

    Eric Nisenson

    Eric Nisenson is the author of Round About Midnight: Portrait of Miles Davis, Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest, Blue: The Murder of Jazz, and Open Sky, a biography of Sonny Rollins. He lives in Massachusetts.

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    • 5/5
      A well written background narrative of the group of musicians who created the landmark Miles Davis album "Kind of Blue." The author having know Miles personally, gives the reader a well balanced history that includes jazz history, personal accounts, cultural influences and a well crafted guide to enjoying the recording. Whether you've heard "Kind of Blue" many times or not at all this book is an excellent travel guide to the album and the people who created it. I found the author's writing style to be equally clear, deeply informative and richly entertaining. The individual chapters on Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans give the music a rich foundation of influences that add a great deal of depth to the listening of each track. Highly recommend this read for anyone looking to get behind the musical influences and personalities that created one of the greatest jazz albums of all time.
    • 5/5
      I 've always loved "Kind of Blue", but my appreciation of the album, the artists involved, and Jazz in general, has grown exponentially since reading this book. As a bonus, Nisenson clearly explains George Russell's "Concept" (the framework Miles Davis and co. used for recording the album).

    Book preview

    The Making of Kind of Blue - Eric Nisenson

    1 End of an Era

    Since Kind of Blue was not born in a vacuum, we cannot separate it from the time in which it was recorded or the dynamics of the contemporary scene. And since innovation and flux in jazz have always arisen from this community of musical philosophers and explorers, musicians with no direct connection to the album nevertheless influenced its creation—a particularly significant factor because of the album’s place in jazz history. In a sense, we can divide jazz history into two segments: before Kind of Blue and after Kind of Blue. But the particular era in which Kind of Blue was born may be an example par excellence of being in the right place at the right time. This album could not have been produced three or four years earlier or later.

    Kind of Blue was created, at least to some extent, because the most important jazzmen in the modern scene desperately wanted to change the way they played their music. This need was not purely musical; it had more than a little to do with the changes then going on in American society, especially concerning the lives of African Americans. And that is how our story begins—with a glance back to the jazz scene and social climate at the end of the 1950s.

    *   *   *

    The year in which Kind of Blue was recorded, 1959, can rightfully be considered the final year of the bebop era. Bop continued to be played, of course, as it is to this day. But its status as the cutting edge in jazz came to an end as the decade itself ended. By then there was a restlessness among many of the most-forward-looking jazzmen and a widespread feeling that jazz had to change in order to survive.

    The world of jazz during its golden age—roughly from the early 1920s to the early 1970s—was somewhat isolated, alienated from American society at large. It had its own values, language, mores, traditions, and politics. It was not a geographical place, although its capital in the 1950s was New York City. It was a world whose entrance was jealously guarded, a world that was certainly not open to all. While all races were admitted to the jazz scene, its primary sensibility was derived from the African American experience, and its provenance can be dated back to its African roots and the subsequent experience of black people in America. It should never be forgotten that the depth and beauty of jazz have arisen from centuries of injustice, brutality, fear, and pain, none of which were passively accepted but were met with African Americans’ resistance, striving, and hope for a more benevolent future.

    As preparation for this project, I read a book titled Invisible Republic, written by the famous rock critic Greil Marcus. I read it because, like this book, its core subject is a specific recording, Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Marcus’s contention is that the music of that album evokes a world within a world that is now gone, an invisible republic that was once alive in the traditional folk songs of America’s past.

    This idea of a separate nation without physical borders that is located both within and outside of America is exactly what the jazz scene once was. It was a unique society that had its origins in the years of slavery, when African Americans—coerced into an alien land—forged their own culture and developed a way of communicating with one another that would not be understood by the white slave masters. White folks took the songs and dances of the slaves to be simply mindless entertainment, not understanding that they were a form of conversation and a means of solidifying community. The words of the songs, the freedom of the dances, even the most subtle gestures, had worlds of meaning beyond the comprehension of the whites. The lyrics of the slave songs and spirituals all had at their core the ecstatic belief in the inevitability of freedom. As in Africa, music was essential to life itself, a key to survival, a way of keeping mind, heart, and community together.

    There is another significant aspect of jazz originating in the African American experience. Along with the value placed on community is the value placed on individuality, which in the jazz world is of paramount importance. By individuality I do not mean merely the possession of an idiosyncratic style, nor do I mean individualism, whose focus on self-aggrandizement and one’s own self-interest is the very antithesis of community. The individuality to which I refer derives from respect for the person and, in jazz, allows each musician to create an entire sound that is unlike anyone else’s. In a society in which black people were routinely stereotyped, being true to oneself had an intrinsic value that ran deep to the bone. Jazzmen have often been characterized as eccentric or even crazy. But this is simply an expedient way for others to reject their insistence on individuality in a society in which conformity is the desired norm.

    Black musicians continued to use a kind of code in their music and in the jazz lifestyle. One fine example is the long list of blues tunes with salacious lyrics that have been cleverly coded—for example, Ma Rainey’s See See Rider Blues and Mamie Smith’s I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None of this Jelly Roll. Heavily codified references to illegal drugs have been used in jazz and blues virtually since the inception of the music, from Louis Armstrong’s Muggles (marijuana) up through Lee Morgan’s Speedball (a mixture of cocaine and heroin).

    In his fascinating (and often racially repellent) memoir, Really the Blues, the white New Orleans-style clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow provides an example of a lengthy conversation in jive lingo. Although it is blatantly about a drug deal, any police officer overhearing the exchange would have no idea of its meaning; the participants might as well be speaking in Hungarian. Mezzrow also recounts the story of a Louis Armstrong broadcast in which, right in the middle of an interview, Armstrong communicated to Mezzrow a request to have the best marijuana ready for him upon his return to Chicago. To anyone other than those in the know, the musician was speaking gibberish. Needless to say, Mezzrow got the message.

    Besides being one of the most important of all jazzmen, Lester Young was particularly imaginative in creating his own personal jive lingo. For example, Bing and Bob meant the police. I got eyes meant he wished to do something. I feel a draft meant he felt that somebody present was, in his opinion, a racist.

    There was constant mutual influence between prevailing social currents and the lives and work of the musicians. Musical style and aesthetics were of necessity interwoven with the social fabric, a reflection of the honored place that music occupied at the heart of the social structure in African societies; thus, as society changed, so did the music. The romantic notions about art that have become accepted in Western society since the last century were alien to African culture.

    John Miller Chernoff writes in African Rhythm and African Sensibility:

    The fact that most people in Africa do not conceive of music apart from its community setting and cultural context means that the aesthetics of the music, the way it works to establish a framework for communal integrity, offers a superb approach to understanding Africans’ attitudes about what their relationship to each other is and should be. The judgments of competence which people make and the standards of quality of which a musician is aware are elaborations of their own conceptions about the nature of their social life, elaborations which are particularly more evident in musical activity than in many other institutionalized relationships because artistic standards involve explicit judgments on the potential of the communities within which people live.¹

    The jazz world itself was as self-contained as these African communities, and to an extent, music had the same overriding effect on the lives of those who were part of it. The insularity of this world created a kind of musical greenhouse effect. Wherever musicians gathered and played, whether in nightclubs, on touring buses, or in after-hours joints, they nourished the growth of new ideas, challenged one another, or simply talked music.

    Because it is chiefly improvisational, jazz has unique problems, as well as assets, that are not characteristic of composed music. There are still classical music snobs who point out that musical techniques that may be viewed as cutting edge in jazz are old hat in classical music. What these criticisms ignore is the profound differences between the two kinds of music. Techniques that are successful in classical music may not work in jazz, and vice versa. So jazzmen cannot simply steal ideas from other forms of music. They must work out their creative problems for themselves within the special boundaries of their music. Their passionate commitment to the progress of this music springs from the belief that jazz serves a higher purpose, that it provides musicians with far more than a career. As Sonny Rollins told me in a letter, "My whole life has been devoted to the achievement of some important breakthroughs, and I would die disappointed if I couldn’t reach them. I want to live up to my promise, not just for me, but for the

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