crucially influential on subsequent generations of innovative musicians all around the world, but many listeners reared on jazz’s well-defined rhythmic and harmonic relationships heard only chaotic polyphony.
‘I play pure emotion,’ he claimed at the time. ‘Musicians should be free to play as they feel it, the way it’s comfortable for them.’
Coleman’s music of this period sounds much more approachable today, to the point where it’s hard to see why it was thought so untoward. Coleman’s revolutionary notion centred on the abandonment of the harmonic structures which had been central to all previous jazz styles in favour of a musical system which he came to call Harmolodics. His approach was predicated on improvisation along melodic rather than chordal lines of development, with the traditional rhythm instruments of bass and drums being called upon to contribute equally with the two horns. A genuinely new sound had arrived in jazz.
Miles Davis
Kind Of Blue
Masterclass in modal improvisation. Whatever that is.
Record label: CBS
Produced: Irving Townsend
Recorded: Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City; March 2 and April 22, 1959
Released: August 17, 1959
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Miles Davis (t); John Coltrane (ts); Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley (as); Bill Evans (p); Wynton Kelly (p); Paul Chambers (b); Jimmy Cobb (d)
Track listing: So What; Freddie Freeloader; Blue In Green; All Blues; Flamenco Sketches
Running time: 45.37
Current CD: Sony 5204085 Dual disc edition adds: DVD documentary
Further listening: Milestones (1958); ’58 Sessions Featuring Stella By Starlight (1958)
Further reading: Miles The Autobiography (Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe, 1989); Miles Davis (Ian Carr, 1999); www.milesdavis.com
Download: iTunes
The band that arrived at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in NYC on March 2, 1959 to record the album that became known as Kind Of Blue were barely a band at all anymore. Coltrane had left Miles in ’57, only to return again following a period with Thelonious Monk, but his confidence and conception had skyrocketed and he was on the verge of leaving again. Cannonball had said he would only stay a year and was ready to go too; Bill Evans had left months before but Davis was so struck by the pianist’s limpid, shifting-sands harmonic style, he devised the album around it and recalled him for the sessions.
Davis had made it clear in a 1958 interview that he was on the verge of a major shift in his musical thinking. ‘The music has gotten thick,’ he said. ‘I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.’ Influenced by composer George Russell’s theory of Lydian tonality, Davis produced simple, slow-moving harmonic frameworks – devised only hours previously – and indicated the scales/modes to be used for improvisation.
The resulting music was a uniquely beautiful triumph of content over form; seeing the sketches for the first time, each player surpassed himself to create line after inspired line of improvised melody. ‘Everything was a first take,’ remembered Miles in his autobiography, ‘which indicates the level everyone was playing on. It was beautiful.’
Immensely popular and influential, Kind Of Blue is a rarity among great works of art; a fashionable masterpiece whose stature is virtually undisputed. Amazingly, Miles claimed to have not quite nailed what he was after, which was the sort of interplay between the dancers, drummers and the finger piano he had witnessed at a performance of the Ballet Africaine. ‘When I tell people that I missed what I was trying to do, getting the exact sound of that African finger piano up in that sound, they look at me like I’m crazy,’ he remembered. ‘I just missed.’ The main players went swiftly on to blaze further trails of their own – artistic (Coltrane, Evans), commercial (Adderley) and both (Davis) – but for many, the essence of what these remarkable jazz musicians had to offer as improvising instrumentalists is to be found on Kind Of Blue.
Charles Mingus
Mingus Ah Um
Brawny, belligerent and beautiful, the jazz composer’s rootsy modern masterpiece.
Record label: CBS
Produced: Teo Macero
Recorded: 30th St Studio, NYC; May 5 and 12, 1959
Released: 1959
Chart peak: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Charles Mingus (b); John Handy (as, clarinet); Booker Irvin (ts); Shafi Hadi (as, ts); Jimmy Knepper (tb); Horace Parlan (p); Dannie Richmond (d); Willie Dennis (t)
Track listing: Better Git It In Your Soul; Goodbye Pork Pie Hat; Boogie Stop Shuffle; Self-Portrait In Three Colors; Open Letter To Duke; Bird Calls; Fables Of Faubus; Pussy Cat Dues; Jelly Roll
Running time: 45:56
Current CD: Sony SNY65512SACD Super Audio CD adds: Pedal Point Blues; GG Train; Girl Of My Dreams
Further listening: Blues And Roots (1959); Black Saint And The Sinner Lady (1963)
Further reading: Mingus: A Critical Biography (Brian Priestley, 1984); Beneath The Underdog (Charles Mingus, 1995) www.mingusmingusmingus.com
Download: iTunes
One of the all time great jazz composers, Mingus quickly found that writing out parts for the players of his Jazz Workshop was not quite achieving the vibrant synthesis of composed and improvised material he was after. He took to directing musicians from the piano, demonstrating the parts, encouraging an adventuresome attitude. One sideman remembered: ‘You had to keep stretching yourself while you were with Mingus. He just wouldn’t let you coast. Even in public he’d yell at you in the middle of a solo to stop playing just licks and get into yourself. He had more confidence in what we were capable of than we had.’
Though by 1959 this titan of jazz creativity was already a colossus of modern bass playing and composition, Mingus always had a respectful ear for the roots of the music. He had grown up with church music – Duke Ellington’s Orchestra was the first secular musical sound he heard – and had cut his teeth with the Dixieland-style bands of Kid Ory and Louis Armstrong. Earlier that year he had already recorded Blues And Roots for Atlantic, a modernist album drenched in raucous Afro-American musical tradition. He was in the same broad bag by May 1959 – when it was time to record what became Ah Um – but this time he had more explicit references in mind. Ah Um, for all its Mingussy flavour (double-time passages, riffs bouncing off one another, ragged ensembles and free-spirited improvised solos) can be seen as a tribute to his ancestors. Sometimes generic (the gospel of the pulse-racing Better Git It In Your Soul, the deep blues of Pussy Cat Dues), there are also character-specific pieces; Goodbye Pork Pie Hat salutes saxophonist Lester Young who had died two months earlier; the dense, multi-tempo Open Letter To Duke is a gorgeous pastiche of his idol Ellington; Bird Calls was the latest of his tributes to Charlie Parker; Jelly Roll is for the great jazz composer of the ’20s, Jelly Roll Morton.
Its head in the present and its heart in the past, there’s a richness of spirit and expressiveness that makes Ah Um one of those