Miles Davis: All Blues

The jazz group Mostly Other People Do The Killing is recording Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and The Jazz Times asked: “What’s Your Take?”

My take? Why bother? If you want to hear Kind of Blue, there’s plenty of ways to hear Miles Davis and his group do it.

I don’t get the point of cover bands or tributes. They’re music’s version of decaffeinated coffee or non-alcoholic beer. The real thing is better and has the intended impact.

Good for MOPDK if they want to play Kind of Blue, and good for the group for bringing attention to the album. But why settle for a copy when you can get the original?

Said Quincy Jones, according to Ashley Kahn’s book on the album, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece: “I play Kind of Blue every day—it’s my orange juice. It still sounds like it was made yesterday.”

You think Jones wants some artificial orange drink instead? Kind of Blue is 55 years old. If Quincy Jones hears the copy rather than Miles, he’ll be likely to spit out whatever he’s drinking as if it was 55 years old.

It may be that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And that the album is meant as tribute. But if they copy it note for absolute note, timed to the tenth of a second, it’s no more jazz than Kenny G. Doesn’t that miss the point of the music?

I’m not sure how Miles would feel about it, whether he’d be flattered or slighted.

My guess? He’d turn his back on it.

That’s good enough for me.

The link above is to All Blues, song one on side two of the album. From allmusic.com: “‘All Blues’ was a live staple throughout much of Davis’ career, and it’s easy to see why – the tune is built upon the melodic brilliance of Davis’ trumpet, which even Coltrane fails to upstage during his solo. ‘All Blues’ is also a testament to Jimmy Cobb’s light, fluid drumming, a rather unsung hero of the Kind of Blue sessions, but a most vital member of the group.”

Miles Davis: All Blues

Miles Davis' 1986 album Tutu

Remembering trumpeter Miles Davis on the day of his death from pneumonia 20 years ago.

Davis was as full of contradictions as he was musical ideas: personally churlish, he was supportive and encouraging of the apprentices in his band; disdainful of critics, he was pained by their criticisms; reared on bebop, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His album, Kind of Blue, was saluted on its 50th anniversary by Congress by a 409-0 vote; we’re guessing there weren’t 409 members who were familiar with it.

The next time you need to be reminded that people are complicated, remember Miles. When he turned his back on audiences, we can only assume he meant it.

Trumpeter heir Wynton Marsalis told The Independent in 2003 Davis was “a genius who decided to go into rock, and was on the bandstand looking like, basically, a buffoon.” Davis had been dead 12 years, but his reaction probably wouldn’t have been any different than it was 17 years previously, according to the Telegraph, when Marsalis climbed on the stage as Davis performed at the Vancouver Jazz Festival: “That motherf—-r’s not sharing the stage with me.”

 “There was a classic competition between an older man and a younger man who is more idealistic. By that stage he’d given up jazz and was playing pop and rock, trying to stay pertinent,” Marsalis told the Telegraph’s Peter Culshaw. “He had released a large portion of his integrity. He knew it. We both knew it.”

We’ll see if Marsalis feels any differently a quarter-century hence when he’s 65.

We know this: asking where Miles Davis’ place is in jazz is a little like asking where Ty Cobb, the baseball player Davis’ personality most closely resembles, ranks in the Hall of Fame. It’s not if he’s in the first class, but whether he’s at the head of it.

Because there aren’t many jazz musicians whose death will evoke an editorial reaction from The New York Times as Davis’ did.

From the Times, three days after Davis’ death: “Unless someone soon emerges from nowhere, the trumpeter Miles Davis will be remembered as the most influential jazz artist of the second half of the 20th century. Mr. Davis remained iconoclastic through four decades as instrumentalist, composer and band leader. He felt compelled to change (a “curse,” he called it) and when he did, the whole of jazz often changed with him . . . Miles Davis is dead at 65. One of his albums was called “Miles Ahead.” And he was: an American original, as cool as they come.”

Davis was 65 when he died.

The link below is to Davis’ composition All Blues from the 1959 release Kind of Blue; it’s a live 1964 version with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams (there is, unfortunately, a slight skip or two).

Sources: telegraph.co.uk, independent.co.uk, wikipedia.org

Bill Evans: Waltz for Debby

Bill Evans' 1975 double album Peace Piece and Other Pieces; 2 sides a re-release of 1958's Everybody Digs Bill Evans and 2 previously unreleased sides

Remembering pianist Bill Evans on the day after his death in 1980.

Although much is made of Evans’ relationship with and impact on Miles Davis, and vice versa, they made only two studio albums  together — 1958 Miles and Kind of Blue.  Which is a bit like saying Harper Lee only wrote To Kill A Mockingbird. If you read, you’ve  probably read it. And if you listen to jazz, or music at all, you’ve probably listened to and/or own a copy of  Kind of Blue.

The irony is that Bill Evans — not to be confused with composer/arranger Gil Evans, who also influenced Davis — had already left Davis’ group before Kind of Blue was recorded. But according to Ashley Kahn’s jazztimes.com article on their relationship (link below), Davis made a special request of Evans. Thus the 1959 album that featured Davis and John Coltrane had Evans on piano (and Paul Chambers on bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums and ”Cannonball” Adderley on alto sax). “I planned that album around the piano playing of Bill Evans,” Davis said in 1989, according to Kahn’s piece.

(According to npr.org, Davis said to Evans, “See what you can do with this;” the result was Evans’ solos on Blue in Green.)

On Rolling Stone’s 2003 list of 500 greatest albums, Kind of Blue was rated 12th; the only surprise is it didn’t rank higher. Said pianist Chick Correa, from Kahn’s book Kind of Blue: The Making of a Miles Davis Masterpiece: “It’s one thing to just play a tune, or play a program of music, but it’s another thing to practically create a new language of music, which is what Kind of Blue did.”

Evans and Davis each pursued careers as band leaders; their music diverged. “The further he got from the Miles experience in point of time, the less aggressive his playing became,” said producer Orrin Keepnews, in Conrad Silvert’s liner notes to the album Spring Leaves.

Evans died, after years of drug abuse and hepatitis, at just 51 years old. A friend called it, in Peter Pettinger’s book: Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings, “the longest suicide in history.”

A link to Kahn’s fascinating account of race and the Evans-Davis relationship below, and to a live version of Evans’ Waltz for Debby. 

Bill Evans and Miles Davis

sources: wikipedia.org, bittersuiteband.com, jazztimes.com