Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

Kind of Blue in top 100 and yet  The Sensational Alex Harvey Band  not even in the archives go figure 

Saperlipopette! wrote: Logan wrote: It's a full discography policy issue, but if this site was about great progressive jazz albums of 1959, I think I might go with Ornette Coleman's Shape of Jazz to Come.  Some really great jazz album that year, Colemans SoJtC, Mingus Ah Um, Coltrane's Giant Steps, all of which I much prefer to Kind of Blue.  Then there's Brubeck's Time Out.   Its funny that one of the most legendary albums of 1959 Giant Steps wasn't released until 1960. But of course its still an essential part of the radical change in jazz at the very end of the 1950's. The highly uninfluential, mostly unradical Gong's East by Chico Hamilton Quintet (featuring a young Eric Dolphy at his best) is my personal favorite of that year.  Ah-Um is great, but to my ears Tijuana Moods from 1957 is even more progressive, complex and fun. A real relevation of sorts. Logan wrote:   I love various pre electric Davis albums and like Kind of Blue, but don't "get" the big love it gets.  I'd be happy to see the electric Miles Davis studio albums Get Up With It and Big Fun in the PA top ten. It's never struck me as that progressive a jazz album for its time when compared to others...  Kind of Blue is not sonically radical but its that modal jazz approach that gives it its innovative reputation, isn't it? KOB popularity has obviously nothing to do with any of that, but because its also very pleasant and easy on the ears. I never actually feel like listening to it myself, just respect it as an album that influenced many later masterpieces... and among them many that really do thrill me.

You're right, excellent point, and I should of thought of that (not because I'm an expert in movements or  styles of jazz, hardly, but because I remember reading about that before), and I've read that his earlier aptly named milestone release Milestones (1958) is an earlier seminal modal jazz release than Kind of Blue, but it is more transitional I think (hard bop to modal I guess). There was other stuff earlier that was done in a modal jazz way (before George  Russell, at least based on some minimal research I did),  but yeah, Davis is such a big figure in it, and really pretty much a scene/ movement started with Davis and his collaborators, and Kind of Blue is a seminal release.

Kind of Blue sounds quite conventional by today's standards, as it did set the tone for modal jazz and so much jazz generally down the road.  A radical free-jazz album, seminal for it's style, album such as the Shape of Jazz to Come sonically sounds more progressive in an avant-garde sense, but both that and Kind of Blue were quite avant-garde in the sense of being in the vanguard of jazz movements and styles.

I  prefer later modal jazz albums by Coltrane, Hutcherson, Evans, Davis of course, and Hancock, but Kind of Blue is a really significant release.

I have long had a thing for one particular track in Kind of Blue, Blue in Green.

I don't think I've heard Gong's East (I may have since my brother does a jazz and folk festival so he exposed me to a fair amount of stuff many years ago).  Tijuana Moods is great.




Edited by Logan - April 10 2012 at 15:53

dreadpirateroberts wrote: Blue is Green is pretty wonderful - good old Bill Evans, what a champion

I love it.

Kind of interesting to note the significance to Davis of two white guys from different families (least I haven't thought they were related) named Evans with similar looking given names -- Bill and, with a longer Davis collaboration, Gil Evans.

And if that's not coincidence enough,  there were two different Doctors with the last name Baker in Doctor Who, and to demonstrate even further relevance, the show title sounds kind of like Kind of Blue without the kind of and doctor. {Saper... will know what I mean when I say that the Doctor Who theme sounds great jazzy -- Don Harper}.