KIND OF BLUE. MILES DAVIS

KIND OF BLUE is the culmination, as an artist, of Miles Davis. It is an album that rises above its peers. It is the best jazz album ever. And not only because it is the album of jazz in its pure state, without remixes or modern filigree, but also because it is the best-selling album in history.

Why does Kind of Blue possess such a mystique? From the beginning, with that bass line at once elegant and seductive, the music envelops us in a perfect atmosphere, vital, round, where all the themes fit together without distortion, as if they had not been created as individual pieces but as a whole work.

Here converge the genius of Miles Davis, the intelligence of the compositions that Miles entrusted to his musicians as a father gives advice to his trusted children and the elegance of Bill Evans…

Kind of blue is at the highest peak of jazz. In the main themes of this album we find all the jazz styles invented to date.

The group is completed by: Bill Evans, on piano (replaced by his friend Wynton Kelly in Freddy Freeloader); Paul Chamber, on bass; Jimmy Cobb, on drums; John Coltrane, on tenor saxophone and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, on alto saxophone.

It was released in the summer of 1959 and was the climax of Modal Jazz. Before the appearance of Modal Jazz, jazz soloists’ improvisations were based on the specific key of the theme, that is, on a tonal center. The starting point to which his melodies and chord progressions had to return to produce a sense of resolution or of having completed something.

But Miles, he turned all this around. According to legend, Davis arrived at the studio with some sheet music he had written during the night and handed it out to the musicians.

There were five original compositions, five brief sketches of melodies on which the musicians had to apply the rules of modal improvisation and their own genius.

There was only a short rehearsal. When the final was recorded, a sublime result was obtained.

And all this created in two sessions. In total, nine hours of recording resulted in a masterpiece.