Kind of Blue: The Making of a Jazz Masterpiece

Cover of Kind of Blue (Columbia CS 8163). Photo credit: Jay Maisel. Image source: HMV.com

The Miles Davis sextet's Kind of Blue regularly tops listener's and critic's polls of the greatest jazz albums of all time. It was certainly an ear-opening experience for me. It became a gateway to further exploration of jazz, especially from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s. The players on the album were a remarkable and never-to-be-repeated group. Each was a bandleader in his own right: apart from Davis himself on trumpet, they included John Coltrane on tenor sax, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley on alto sax, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums. [1]

Ashley Kahn's Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (second edition with a new afterword by the author, Da Capo, 2007; originally published in 2000) is a deep dive into the recording sessions, held on March 2 and April 22, 1959. The book is essentially 200 pages of detailed liner notes; if you love this album it's a fascinating read, even if Kahn occasionally lapses into empty critics' shorthand (calling Kind of Blue "the height of hip" (p. 16) in his introduction, for example).

Cover of Ashley Kahn's Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (Da Capo, 2007). Cover photo: Chuck Stewart. Image source: Bookshop.org

The year 1959 was a remarkable moment in the evolution of jazz. Among the albums released that year were the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out, Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come, João Gilberto's Chega de Saudade, Abbey Lincoln's Abbey Is Blue, Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, Thelonious Monk's 5 by Monk by 5, Oliver Nelson's debut Meet Oliver Nelson, and Nina Simone's debut Little Girl Blue. It was also the year John Coltrane recorded Giant Steps, which was released in early 1960; six of its seven tracks were recorded on May 4 & 5, 1959, just two weeks after the second and final Kind of Blue session.

Kind of Blue crystallizes both the artistic ferment of the era and the mastery of the players in the Davis sextet. Its special atmosphere is apparent from the first moments of the opening track, "So What":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylXk1LBvIqU

Bill Evans played piano on "So What," "Blue in Green," "All Blues," and "Flamenco Sketches." Wynton Kelly replaced Evans on piano for the second track on Side 1, "Freddie Freeloader." The track titles were all added by Davis after the sessions; when they were recorded they were simply assigned project and song numbers by the engineers.

Kind of Blue achieved greatness despite a host of errors, small and large, that marred the original issue of the album. Most consequentially, the first side was mastered at the wrong speed, and so the music sounded a little faster than it was played in the studio and about a quarter-step sharp (something a generation of musicians discovered when they tried to play along). My partner noticed this immediately when I put on the 1997 CD reissue—amazingly, the first issue of this album on which the playback speed was corrected. "It's slower than on the album," she said, perceptively. The running time of the corrected version of "So What" is 9:22, versus the original album's 8:57. [2]

There's also the moment in "Freddie Freeloader" (the second track on Side 1, but the first song to be recorded), where, on Coltrane's emphatic entrance for his solo, you can hear engineer Fred Plaut frantically turning down the volume level on his mic. As Kahn writes, "As precise a balance as Plaut may have achieved by arranging the band in the studio, he was unprepared for the startling power of Coltrane's tenor" (p. 106).

From left: John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, and Bill Evans during the Kind of Blue recording sessions. Photo credit: Don Hunstein. Image source: Simon Schreyer

In some versions of the album, the order of the tracks on Side 2 was switched on the back cover, with "Flamenco Sketches" erroneously listed as coming first (in some pressings this is true of the listing on the Side 2 record label as well). Additionally, Adderley's name was misspelled on the cover (the second "e" was dropped); the drummer, who was known professionally as Jimmy Cobb, was credited as James Cobb; Wynton Kelly, who went by his full name professionally, was listed as Wyn Kelly; and the producer Irving Townsend was uncredited. As with the mastering speed of Side 1, the crediting errors were corrected for the first time on the 1997 CD reissue, 38 years after the album was first released.

Back cover of a 1959 issue of Kind of Blue, with the reversed Side 2 track listing and misspelled/misnamed credits. Image source: Discogs.com [3]

There are three key legends about Kind of Blue that, although false, continue to cling to it. The truth about how the album was created is miraculous enough to need no embellishment. It has been claimed that the music on Kind of Blue is:

• Unrehearsed: Bill Evans' original liner notes say that "Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates," and the implication is that none of the musicians had seen any of the music before. However, Kahn reports that drummer Jimmy Cobb remembers of "So What" that "we had played it once or twice on gigs" before the recording sessions, and Miles stated in an interview at the time with jazz critic Ralph Gleason that "All Blues," the opening track on Side 2, had been played live and developed over several months (p. 96). Evans had left the band in November 1958 and had only rejoined them for the recording sessions several months later; he may not have known about music the band had been playing since his departure.
  
  And in 1991 Miles said of "All Blues" that "it's just 'Milestones' in 3/4" (p. 143); it's a similar chord progression, although the chords in "Milestones" are played staccato, at twice the speed, and with a different time signature (4/4). The title track of Davis' 1958 album Milestones was his first modal composition, a way of basing chord changes on specific scales, or modes, rather than melodies; it's a framework that structures all the tracks on Kind of Blue. Bassist Paul Chambers and saxophonists Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane had played on Milestones.
  
  And finally, motifs on two of the tracks seem similar to music that Evans had recorded several months earlier, in one case with Chambers (see below). So both the general musical approach and perhaps elements of specific pieces were familiar to at least some of the musicians when they walked into the studio.
• First takes: A statement frequently made about the album is that it consists entirely of first takes. However, this isn't quite true even if the statement is modified as "first complete takes": the version of the closing track "Flamenco Sketches" that was selected for the album is the second complete take, and the sixth take overall. (The first take was issued for the first time as a bonus track on the 1997 CD reissue.) "So What" had multiple false starts before the first complete run-through on the fourth take; "Freddie Freeloader"'s first complete take was also Take Four; "Blue in Green"'s first complete take was Take Five; and "All Blues" is the second take after a false start. It's still remarkable that the five tracks on the album were selected from only six complete takes, but it was also how Davis often preferred to record. Keyboardist Herbie Hancock, who was in his band from 1963 to 1968 and continued to record with him for several years afterward, said "Everything was a first take unless we screwed up the melody, so what you hear on the record is the first full take. The five-and-a-half years I was with him that's the way Miles worked" (p. 105).
• Solely composed by Davis: The album cover states "All compositions by Miles Davis." However, Evans later said that he wrote the opening chords of "Blue in Green" (the closing track of Side 1) in late 1958 based on a suggestion from Davis.
  
  
  
  
  https://youtu.be/TLDflhhdPCg
  
  And indeed the chords can be heard in modified form in Evans' accompaniment to Chet Baker's instrumental version of "Alone Together" (Dietz/Schwartz), recorded in December 1958 and released on the album Chet in early 1959. [4]
  
  An even closer match with an Evans composition, to my ears, are the opening chords for "Flamenco Sketches," which sound very much as though they are derived from Evans' "Peace Piece" from the album Everybody Digs Bill Evans, also recorded in December 1958. Although Kahn reports that Evans expressed some bitterness about the lack of composing co-credit, he never challenged Davis's copyright to "Blue in Green" or "Flamenco Sketches." Davis repeatedly credited Evans for his contributions to the sound of the album, and in 1986 said in an interview with his biographer Quincy Troupe, "'Blue in Green'—we wrote that together" (quoted in Kahn, p. 98). Nonetheless, the composing credits remain Davis's alone.

Of course, jazz is by its very nature improvisational and collaborative, and Kind of Blue is the sum of all of the contributions of the brilliant musicians who played on it. This is not to take anything from Davis' role as leader: he assembled the band, chose the numbers, sketched the chord progressions, and gave each musician instructions about how and when they should play. But within his conception he left them free to choose what they played; Kahn reports Cannonball Adderley as saying "He never told anyone what to play but would say 'Man, you don't need to do that.' Miles really told everyone what NOT to do" (p. 106). The album these men produced together remains one of the greatest achievements in jazz.

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1. Kelly, Chambers and Cobb would continue to play live and in the studio as a part of Davis's group until 1963. Coltrane would leave in early 1960 after the release of Giant Steps, and Adderley departed in the fall of 1959 to form his own quintet. The group as it appears on Kind of Blue never recorded together again.
2. You can hear the difference by listening to the original album version of "So What" and comparing it to the version above.
3. The variant versions of the early pressings and their matrix numbers are listed on Discogs.com.
4. Apart from Evans and Baker, the musicians on "Alone Together" are Herbie Mann (alto flute), Pepper Adams (baritone saxophone), Paul Chambers (bass), and Connie Kay (drums).