In contrast, the opening four bars of ‘All Blues’ (if the rhythm of ‘All Blues’ on your copy is ONE-two three-FOUR-five-six, ONE-two-three-FOUR-five-six then you are listening to what Evans claimed was ‘Flamenco Sketches’) follows exactly the opening of ‘Peace Piece,’ albeit with Evans’ left hand (that plays the lowest notes on the piano) given to bassist Paul Chambers – the tune is in a slow four, counted ONE-two-three-four, ONE-two-three-four. Evans: Mode no. Once again Downbeat awarded five stars, “The New York date is top notch Davis of recent vintage,” noted reviewer Ralph Gleason, “The other horns stand on an equal basis with their leader.”. Those close to him spoke of his ambivalence towards his past achievements, one moment regarding them with pride, the next as a burden. Subsequently, the assault charge was reduced to one third degree assault enabling Davis to have his Cabaret Card back. Looking back at the year 1959 today, it doesn’t just seem like a different world, it seems more like a distant planet in some far-off galaxy. There are two characteristic features that set this style apart. What is interesting is that the piece had a preset chord progression whose duration could be altered by the instrumentalists during their improvisation. It is an effective technique that has the effect of projecting a great solo onto a larger screen. Take a peek inside the latest issue of Songlines magazine. This move towards static harmonies would reach its apotheosis on Kind of Blue, in which pianist Bill Evans played a significant role in midwifeing in the way Gil Evans had done at the Birth of the Cool sessions in 1949 and Joe Zawinul would do on the In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew sessions in 1969. What exactly is modal jazz? It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Listen to it 100 times or so, and you still marvel at its spontaneous inventions; now and then, you'll even hear something new. The names switching theory seems pretty far-fetched. Blue is sharply refracted by the eyes. After the first vinyl pressing, Columbia transposed the song titles on side two, swapping the title ‘Flamenco Sketches’ for ‘All Blues’ and vice versa, ostensibly at Davis’ request to Teo Macero. It was also the year that saw the death of three great singers, coincidentally one each from the worlds of classical music, popular music and jazz – Mario Lanza, Buddy Holly and Billie Holiday – and it saw the release of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder with a Duke Ellington soundtrack, Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphée while Ben Hur swept the Grammy award ceremonies. Kind of Blue was Davis’ musical embodiment of this and, as Lefevre explains, in making it Davis created a landmark album in the process. Wednesday, October 23, 2019 Kind of Blue is frequently cited as the greatest jazz album of all time. In my Musical Quarterly article (link below), I suggest that “Flamenco Sketches” is the correct title for the strumming medium-tempo music on the track that is now known as “All Blues” and that “All Blues” is the correct title for the last, very slow, track on the album. So there must have been high expectations by the time Kind of Blue was released in the UK. 4 – eight bars; Mode no. 4 – eight bars; Mode no. One definition would be a recording that is both of superb quality and of enduring significance. We can still wave in this listening, even playing it by immagination, in a ‘silent way’ How Blue Affects Vision. It is also worth noting that the sound of Kind of Blue was an important influence on record producer Manfred Eicher, helping him shape an aesthetic towards recorded sound that has informed over 1,000 albums on the internationally renowned ECM label. Through his "Kind of Blue" modal jazz was born. “See,” wrote Davis in his autobiography, “If you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time . He played the Blackhawk in San Francisco in June, and Jazz Seville in Los Angeles (where the band was reviewed in the 6 August edition of Downbeat magazine), the Canadian Jazz Festival, The Regal in Chicago and the Lick Festival in France in July. . Indeed, during that time he wrote no new music, tried no new settings and did not experiment further with modes. And just to muddy the waters even further, the first CD release of Kind of Blue in the UK (CD CBS 62066) included the late Benny Green’s liner notes from the first vinyl release of the album in the UK, where he refers to ‘Flamenco Sketches’ as a blues in 6/8 and ‘All Blues’ as a series of scales, even though on the CD, ‘Flamenco Sketches’ is a series of scales and ‘All Blues’ is a blues in 6/8. In the UK edition of the book, the handwritten notes were cut at ‘So What’. It is all the more remarkable, then, that it was made on the cheap – a few thousand dollars contractual advance to Davis, union scale payment to six sidemen – Julian “Cannonball” Adderley on alto saxophone, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Bill Evans or Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums – nine hours studio time, four reels of tape and a piano tuner’s fee. Confused? Davis enters on harmon muted trumpet against a piano and bass accompaniment, and then outlines the order of the five modes used for improvisation, and this order is followed in turn by Coltrane, Adderley, Evans and Davis again, although they are free to play on each mode for as long as they want. Composer and Electronic Music Producer 1 – four bars; Mode no. If the distance from which we stare at Kind of Blue today can be measured in terms of a United Kingdom with no motorways, then the wonder of it all is that the music does not sound as if it has come out of the same time-capsule that contains ‘Tallahassie Lassie’ or ‘Lipstick on Your Collar’; it sounds fresh, newly-minted and contemporary. 4 – eight bars; Mode No. For many, his crowning achievement was the album Kind of Blue, the best selling album in jazz history. What is true is that no one has ever challenged the changes based on a pure music analysis and offered convincing options as those I have suggested.”. 7 spot, they were slim pickings. It is interesting to note that during an 18-month period between May 1959 and November 1960, no less than ten different studio albums and several EPs by Miles Davis were released in the United Kingdom during this period through both Columbia and Prestige. “I think for the dilettante Kind of Blue is a lifestyle recording,” says Bob Belden, composer, saxophonist, pianist and producer of over 200 CD reissues of Miles Davis’ recorded music, and three times Grammy winner for his work on the Columbia/Legacy Miles Davis boxed set series. Your email address will not be published. The Musical Quarterly, founded in 1915 by Oscar Sonneck, has long been cited as the premier scholarly musical journal in the United States. It makes no sense to swap the titles again. This causes the lens to flatten and to push the blue image back. 4 – four bars; Mode no. A [D harmony] You might be forgiven for thinking critics of the time might have suffered from Davis overload during this period, but not a bit of it. Note how, like ‘Milestones’ from 1958, the piece fades; commonplace now but very rare in 1959. . No other recording in jazz has come remotely near acquiring the kind of cachet Kind of Blue has accumulated over the decades. But during the interim he had been unable to work without a Cabaret Card and the Kind of Blue band broke-up. So he could really get a romantic sound out of Miles and Bill Evans and that was partly due to the subdued nature of the music, which partly may have been influenced by the ambient nature of the studio. Add to this The Miles Davis Quintet: The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions box set from the Concord Music Group in 2006, and it seems that Davis still has the power to command our attention in a way no other jazz artist, alive or dead, is able to do today. The following year on the album Milestones, Davis uses modes proper on the title track, which is a 40-bar AABA song form with a different mode for the A and B sections (Dorian and Aeolian respectively). If we go by Evans’ original titles as they appeared on the original vinyl release of Kind of Blue, which Professor Lewis Porter says he believes “were correct” in his book John Coltrane: His Life and Music, then what Evans claimed was ‘Flamenco Sketches’ (identified as ‘All Blues’ on later copies) is a hypnotically swaying minor key twelve bar blues in 6/8, albeit with a simplified first four bars which remain firmly in the tonic key which gives it a “modal” feel.

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