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2009 marked the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis's iconic album, Kind of Blue. This is probably the most celebrated and enduringly popular jazz album of all time. Kind of Blue was in many respects revolutionary. It marked a break with the chordal approach to jazz and launched the new modal revolution.
Miles had begun exploring the modal approach on his album, Milestones, but it was with Kind of Blue that it reached its crescendo. It was also revolutionary in that, there was no rehearsal for this recording. Miles brought the musical sketches that everyone was supposed to play to the studio with him - it was the first time the musicians saw the sketches - so he could have a spontaneous feel and texture in the product. "Everything was a first take," Miles would say later in his autobiography and it worked masterfully.
But the real revolution in Miles's approach and in the jazz idiom generally had come circa ten years earlier in Miles's seminal Birth of the Cool recording, which marked Miles's break with the Bebop style of Charlie " Yardbird" Parker and Dizzy "Diz" Gillespie. "Bird" and "Diz" along with Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk were amongst the creators of Bebop, a revolutionary music that was hip and played fast and furious. It was contrapuntal and arduous. But the music did not lend itself easily to the untutored ear. Miles would himself have this to say about Bebop in his autobiography; "The musical sound was not sweet, and it did not have harmonic lines that you could easily hum out on the street with your girlfriend trying to get over with a kiss". In short, it lacked lyricism. And it was lyricism that Miles would re-inject into jazz with Birth of the Cool, in a manner redolent of Duke Ellington and his perennial collaborator Bill Strayhorn-the Quincy Jones of the Swing era.
It is lyricism that imbues and suffuses Kind of Blue with his first great sextet of John Coltrane, tenor saxophone, Julian "Cannonball" Adderly, alto saxophone, Bill Evans, alternating with Wynton Kelly, on piano, Paul Chambers, bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums, and latet with Someday My Prince Will Come, where Miles introduces his second, emblematic group with Herbie Hancock, piano, Wayne...