Perhaps no individual has had a greater impact on popular music than
Miles Davis. Widely considered the most inventive and important figure in the history of jazz, Davis played his trumpet as the finest poet employs the pen, conveying the deepest and most dynamic of emotions through his ingenious sense of melody and craftsmanship. With a professional career lasting nearly fifty years, Miles not only changed the landscape of music and popular culture but continues to impact the core of artistic endeavorment to this day.
Miles Davis is not just the greatest trumpeter of all time…he is innovation itself.
On September 30, 2008, Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings pay tribute to a masterpiece that forever redefined the role of jazz in popular music. KIND OF BLUE: 50th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTOR'S EDITION is the first 12-inch by 12-inch slipcase box set to contain such a magnificent bounty of riches—a rare and lustrous 180-gram blue vinyl LP in its original jacket; two compact discs, each with more than an hour’s worth of music (produced for release by three-time Grammy® Award winner Michael Cuscuna); a newly-produced documentary DVD running nearly one hour; a spectacular full-size 60-page perfect-bound book of critical essays and annotations clocking in at more than 10,000 words, plus discographic data, timeline, and copious photography; and last but not least— memorabilia including six evocative 8x10 photos, an enormous 22x33 poster, a reproduction of a Columbia Records promotional brochure, and more.
At the absolute core of KIND OF BLUE: 50th is the original 45-minute triple platinum-selling album program (released August 1959). The five titles—“So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” “Blue in Green,” “All Blues,” and “Flamenco Sketches”—are indelibly etched in our contemporary musical DNA, be it jazz, rock, third through fifth stream classical, or beyond. The music was completed at Columbia’s old 30th Street Studio in New York City in less than ten hours of actual recording time (in March-April), by one of the most remarkable lineups ever assembled, the “first great quintet” led by Miles Davis on trumpet (1926-1991), including Julian “Cannonball” Adderley (1928-1975, alto saxophone), John Coltrane (1926-1967, tenor saxophone), Bill Evans (1929-1980, piano), Wynton Kelly (1931-1971, piano on “Freddie Freeloader” only), Paul Chambers (1935-1969, bass), and Jimmy Cobb (b. 1929, drums, the only surviving member).
How and why has Kind of Blue held on to its status as an album that crosses genres, speaks to generations, and is one of the first (if not the first) album that any new jazz acolyte purchases? That is a subject which has occupied the greatest journalists and voices in jazz criticism for five decades. The level of scholarly exegesis that has grown up around Miles Davis in general and Kind of Blue in particular is developed even further on KIND OF BLUE: 50th, by writers who have studied their subject for their entire careers. A 4,000-word overview sets the scene, written by five-time ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award winner Francis Davis. The second essay, “The Last King of America: How Miles Davis Invented Modernity,” is a 3,000-word study by Professor Gerald Early of Washington University in St. Louis. The session-by-session transcripts that follow are compiled and expounded upon by Ashley Kahn, author of the definitive book, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece.
A key to the allure of Kind of Blue is provided in the 1959 album liner notes written by Bill Evans; a facsimile of Evans’ original three-page hand-written draft of those notes is part of the box set memorabilia. Evans, a quiet cerebral force in his own right, was a member of Miles’ group (with Coltrane and Adderley) for eight months in 1958. He was asked back into the lineup for the Kind of Blue sessions in early 1959, and his contributions to the end result can never be overstated. Evans’ liner notes discuss the challenge of “group improvisation,” which was the premise that Miles envisioned for Kind of Blue and dozens of his albums that followed.
At the same time, Miles was developing a new, modal approach, a break from the conventions of chordal complexity, “improvising on the sparest and starkest of scales as an alternative to bebop’s dense thickets of chord changes,” as Francis Davis writes. But this was group improv at the highest, most intuitive level of interaction among the musicians, within a framework, a set of structures laid out by Miles only hours before the session, so there could be no “practice.” Indeed, all of the five numbers were “first takes,” and only “Flamenco Sketches” was given an alternate take.
Fortunately, the session tapes preserved various “studio sequences” and one “false start” (ranging from 11 seconds to nearly two minutes) that illuminate the studio relationship between Miles, the musicians, and Columbia staff producer Irving Townsend. Also, for the first time in history, the box set finally couples the five 1959 tracks of Kind of Blue with the five completed tracks by the group in 1958 (produced at 30th Street by Cal Lampley): “On Green Dolphin Street,” “Fran-Dance” (with an alternate take), “Stella by Starlight,” and “Love for Sale.” These are the only other studio recordings in existence by the lineup of Adderley, Coltrane, Evans, Chambers, and Cobb. Added as a bonus is a mesmerizing 17-minute live concert version of “So What” (without Adderley, with Kelly), recorded in Holland, April 1960.
The 1959 sessions, Francis Davis writes, “took place in the nick of time: it’s impossible to imagine Davis, Evans, Coltrane, and Adderley coming together so harmoniously a year or two later, by which point each had become not just leader of his band but practically founder of his own school.”
The final element in this extraordinary box set is the DVD, Celebrating a Masterpiece: Kind of Blue, which incorporates Columbia staff photographer Don Hunstein’s black-and-white still photography of the studio sessions, the voice of Miles at the sessions, and excerpts of radio interviews with Evans and Adderley. There are interviews with David Amram, the late Ed Bradley, Ron Carter, Jimmy Cobb, Bill Cosby, Herbie Hancock (who demonstrates “So What” at the piano), funk-rocker Me’Shell Ndegéocello, hip-hop’s Q-Tip, Carlos Santana, John Scofield, Horace Silver, and many others. The DVD also unearths the group’s entire 26 minute in-session appearance on “Robert Herridge Theatre: The Sound of Miles Davis,” a CBS television program recorded in 1959 and broadcast in 1960.
KIND OF BLUE: 50th commemorates a landmark achievement, not only for jazz but for Miles Davis at a crucial turning point in his career. Its success, especially among middle-class listeners of refined taste, was a pivotal breakthrough for the new jazz as 1960 loomed around the corner. It was, as Early concludes, “enormously important for Davis both commercially and artistically for the rest of his career. As jazz ceased to be dance music, it needed middlebrow status in order to survive as art music. Davis was essential in making this transformation possible.”
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