Kind of Blue: Still on the Job at 65
Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue turned sixty-five last month, the same age at which the trumpeter would die thirty-two years after recording the album. The record shows no signs of infirmity. It has no plans to retire, isn’t tempted to ease into the rocking chair heard to sigh and squeak in Davis’s elegiac rendition of “Old Folks” recorded a couple years later in 1961.
The album was released on August 17, 1959. That was ten years after, and ten degrees cooler than the little big band of Miles’ Birth of the Cool. With Kind of Blue the baby had grown up: sleeker, more earnest, now distrustful of irony, and also cagier, suspicious without wanting to show anything that might suggest defensiveness. Its icy hauteur sets the standard for art that draws you in by pretending it doesn’t need anyone or anything but itself.
Kind of Blue sold like cool-cakes. Its popularity has only increased over the years. Often said to be the best-selling jazz record in history, it had attained quadruple platinum status by 2008; by then, some four million copies have been sold in the US. At sixty it has topped five million. In 2019, at the age of sixty, it was certified five times platinum.
The recording took place in 1959 on two days separated by six weeks. First came the double three-hour sessions from 2:00 to 5:00 in the afternoon and 7:00 to 10:00 in the evening on March 2, 1959 in the converted church on 30th Street in Manhattan that was the Columbia studio. Union rate was then pegged at $48.50 per session, and since there were two services Davis’s sidemen were entitled to double scale. Davis argued for a bonus of $100 for the first day’s work for his stalwarts, bassist Paul Chambers and saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley.
As Ashley Kahn noted in his Kind of Blue: the Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (Da Capo, 2000), the initial producer of the session, Irving Townsend (his voice can be heard on the studio sequences included on the fiftieth anniversary re-issue of the album) wrote in an internal Columbia Records memo that Davis would “accept an advance of $10,000 with only a mild oath” after the success of Birth of the Cool and the subsequent Sketches of Spain. Miles had asked for $15,000. It’s hard to know how much Miles made off the record in total, but it’s a lot.
The newcomer on drums, Jimmy Cobb, and the pianists Wynton Kelly and Bill Evans had to make do with their union wages. For the April 22 afternoon session that concluded the recording, Davis’s sidemen got $64.67, since the proceedings went overtime by half-an-hour. Miles got double that. An invoice reprinted in Kahn’s book shows that union rules also dictated that Wynton Kelly got paid the same amount for the April 22 date even though he had only played on the first session back in March. By 1959 Kelly was the Davis group’s official pianist and was surprised on hurrying to the studio by cab for the March date that Miles’ former keyboardist, Bill Evans, was already sitting at the Steinway. Kelly had been brought in for the only “real” blues number on the recording, “Freddie the Freeloader,” which was done in the first session. Kelly doubtless didn’t stick around for the evening, but cashed the checks for his non-work on the April date.
As his later television commercial appearances for mopeds and the like make clear, Davis was a canny money man and promoter of his own image, one he always sailed close to the cool winds of fashion and favor. Another Townsend memo from April of 1960 relates that “Miles Davis is primarily concerned with the amount of jazz now on jukeboxes in many areas of the country while he is not represented.” Columbia promptly turned out promotional 45s with a tune from Davis’s Porgy & Bess paired with one from Kind of Blue on the flip side. Many first heard this music in diners and bars over the jukebox.
The first pressing of Kind of Blue, released into sweltering August, numbered 50,000 with the titles of the B sides, “So What” and “Flamenco Sketches,” mistakenly switched, an error probably due to the fact that Townsend had handed the project off to Teo Macero, who was ultimately credited as producer.
The fiftieth anniversary year brought various commemorations. There was a Kind of Blue tour by the So What Band of Jimmy Cobb, the last surviving member of the sextet that met in the Columbia studio back in 1959.
Much is now made of the spontaneity of the recording, how all was done in the studio without rehearsal or reflection, how the tunes were new to all and that the entire effort is akin, as Bill Evans put it in his liner notes, to the “Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous, [and] must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water pan in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment.” But things were not as spur-of-the-moment as all that. “All Blues” had evolved over a six-month period prior to the recording session for Kind of Blue. Cobb reminded devotees that Miles’s group had played “So What” on gigs before the recording session.
The studio chatter included on the Kind of Blue Legacy Edition is quite illuminating, though its main purpose here seems intended mostly to conjure Miles’s presence by summoning his distinctive gravelly drawl. His voice had been wrecked when he shouted too soon after an operation on his vocal cords, rutted further countless cigarettes. But it was the voice later sold mopeds and managed second-rate dialogue on an episode of the television series, Miami Vice, among other Hollywood forays towards further fame and fortune.
The halting introductions, the searingly efficient swing, the brooding defiance of Kind of Blue, seem so poised that one hardly thinks it the product of real musicians. Its cool seems at times like the proof of the laws of thermodynamics. Even the tumultuous solos of Coltrane and Adderley strike me as otherworldly. To be confronted with the voices of the creators, especially that of Davis, at work is at first shocking. True, his voice had been heard on earlier recordings, as when one of his classic lines, “I’m gonna play it first, and tell you what it is later,” introduces “If I Were a Bell”—the opening track of the 1956 Prestige record Relaxin’. There, the words and the sense of musicians being eavesdropped upon goes along with an unbuttoned feel reflected in the album’s title.
But such is the perfect hipness of Kind of Blue that Miles’ voice here has a completely different effect, not least because we are so used to hearing the succession of tunes as on the original album without the “non-musical” presence of the performers reinserted. This humanizing of the sacred text seems an act of uncool iconclasm.
Still, there are interesting things to be heard in these odd inclusions. Over the years, the twelve-bar blues, “Freddie the Freeloader” is the track that I’ve listened to ten times for ever one of “So What.” That ratio in the blues favor increases for the other tunes. In “Studio Sequence 1” of the Legacy Edition, Townsend introduces the take as “no title.” The name would be added afterwards in honor of the Miles groupie Freddie Tolbert—a bartender and street character who moved from Philadelphia to New York to be able to hear all the trumpeter’s performances. Miles played it first and told himself what it was later.
Before the band starts in on the tune, a voice asks about whether “to play a B-flat on the end.” This must be Wynton Kelly inquiring of the bandleader what to do with the final chord of the form, since this blues doesn’t return to its home key as expected for the final two bars. Miles cancels the second and longest false start also heard on the Legacy Edition because Kelly adds more than Miles wants rather than keeping to the obsession with less that pervades Kind of Blue, the effusions of Coltrane and Adderley notwithstanding.
The last chord sidesteps the home key of B-flat and holds out a tone lower before finally being pulled up to its proper harmony when the twelve bar cycles starts anew. With this single, minimal touch, Davis (if it was indeed his idea) embodies the essence of his cool through harmonic means: not only can he lag behind the beat with graceful reluctance, but he can also hold the posture of resistance and disdain across larger expanses of elapsing time. Those final two measures of apparent disinterest seem to stretch to an eternity before these blues slide up grudgingly to their proper position. Miles gives Kelly the honor and duty of the first improvisation, and his opening solo does more than simply its duty, snapping things back to attention.
Just before starting the tune, Davis has an idea: “Say Wynton, after Cannonball, you play again and then we’ll come in and end it.” In the final take, Kelly does solo once more after all the horns have had their say, but instead of his characteristic right-hand curlicues, he supplies only glassy chords allowing Paul Chambers’ bass to stride into the foreground: here the harmonic and, indeed rhythmic, foundation for the preceding eight minutes of the track emerge in all its easy grandeur. An unmatched improviser of jaunty lines, Kelly also ranks among the greatest blues ensemble players, and it seems to have been his intuition to lay back for these final choruses. Chambers was also a great soloist, but he keeps to the business of walking his bass line. Kelly plays just as Davis had directed him, but perhaps not as Davis had expected. Kelly loved most to accompany—to comp—and here near the close of “Freddie the Freeloader” grants himself the full pleasure. With the ornament stripped away, as if to allow us poised contemplation of the flowing source from which the horn and piano improvisations draw their power.
Davis’s hiring of Kelly for this blues instead of Evans was a brilliant decision. But equally as vital was the way Davis used both his pianists.
The sparse horn chords that constitute the “tune” of “Freddie the Freeloader” allow, indeed demand, jaunty intervening commentary, and Kelly’s pianistic optimism brightens the somber mood: he is the light in the shade. Given the chic that glints in the shadows of this music, it is hard to believe it was recorded in the middle of the afternoon—proof that the studio and church keep to their own hours.
Davis also gives Kelly the first solo as if to acknowledge that his warmth is crucial to the maintenance of the Davis cool. With an apparent nonchalance that belies the emphatic nature of the gesture, Davis then begins his subsequent solo by taking two quarter notes from Kelly’s last chorus in what amounts to a casual but unmistakable reassertion of his authority.
Another small but striking difference heard on this the first false start is that the blues is introduced by an upbeat comment from Jimmy Cobb’s snare drum that anticipates the rest of the band—both the pulsing progress of the other members of the rhythm section and the ritual solemnity of the horns. Had this version found its way onto the record instead of the synchronized beginning of the canonic take, there would have been a tiny, but telling, chink in the hermetic hipness that insulates “Freddie” from the outside world.
Miles calls off the first take for being too fast. Then Townsend cautions the trumpeter to stay close to the microphone. Davis asks if he can move it. Townsend replies that “It’s against policy to move a microphone”—apparently a joke about the regulations governing a union facility. The quip attains retrospective resonance given the earnings disparity between Miles and his sidemen.
After two more miscues, the fourth take rolls into jazz history without edit: it is the only complete one of this tune on the session. Kelly could now go home, and the other pianist, Bill Evans, could get to work.
In light of how much money the record made, the shabby payout for the sidemen is very uncool, but especially so in the case of Evans, whose harmonic and aesthetic senses were so crucial to the album’s sound—a broader impact than Kelly’s shaping of “Freddie.” All the compositions are credited to Davis: the trumpeter was never shy or in the least apologetic about appropriating the work of others. How much Evans’s invention of the ostinato for “Flamenco Sketches”—the final track on the album is worth is hard to say. The tentative musings of Evans and Chambers that serpentine across the arid landscapes of “So What” are priceless, yet worth millions.
I will admit that I’ve never found Evans’s Iberian Zen ruminations as appealing as Kelly’s bluesy swing. Evans’s thing was never my kind of blue, but his unmistakable sound colors the album as a whole and makes the disparity between the earnings of Davis and Evans far bigger even than the numbers of zeroes suggests. The blues have their price. The ghost in Evans’s melancholy chords will always haunt Davis’s masterpiece, which, even at 65, has no intention of signing up for Medicare.
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