Kind of Blue

Miles Davis

album cover

All Shades, All Hues

Of life's great paradoxes, there's a special place for the Zen thought that "Less is more." It is a simple enough idea: Load up a novel or a piece of music with too much information, and the effort can wind up overwhelming the essential inspiration. On an intellectual level this principle is easy enough to understand. And yet it's always amazing to encounter art that embodies the less-is-more impulse—the finely filtered piano works of Erik Satie (see p. 675), the strung-out stillness of Chet Baker singing a ballad (see p. 40), the crystalline perfection of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue.

This collection, the most famous jazz album of all time, tells what happens when thoughtful jazz musicians pursue ideas across a profoundly uncluttered canvas. The rhythms are basic swing. The melodies, typified by the ambling ascending-scale motif of "So What," are simple linear exercises. The harmony, though, is downright radical: Where much jazz before it is ruled by fast-moving chordal schemes, the Kind of Blue songs slow things down—they're organized around droning single chords, known as "modes," that can last for a long time. A single shift of the harmony—on "So What," for example, the tonality moves up just a half step—changes the weather, making it feel like galaxies are realigning. The genius of Davis's structures is that immediately after such power surges, the cycle begins again. Each time, the pathways are wiped clean. The soloists—trumpeter Davis, saxophonists Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, and pianists Bill Evans and (on one track) Wynton Kelly—have room to find new ways to explore, aided by the rhythm team of bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb.

Modal music requires an improviser to conceptualize and organize ideas differently. The pianist Bill Evans, whose open-ended chord voicings are key to Kind of Blue, wrote in the liner notes that the musicians arrived at the sessions completely unprepared: They each encountered Davis's music only after they'd entered the studio. To him, this enhanced the session's magic: "Aside from the weighty technical problems of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for empathy from all members to bond for the common result." Unlike many jazz records, Kind of Blue is defined by that sense of common purpose. It's the sound of musicians honoring the simplicity of a setting by listening closely, playing less, and saying more.

Genre: Jazz
Released: 1959, Columbia
Key Tracks: "So What," "Freddie Freeloader," "All Blues"
Catalog Choice: em>In a Silent Way; ESP; Miles Smiles
Next Stop: Herbie Hancock: Maiden Voyage
After That: John Adams: Hoodoo Zephyr
Book Page: 208