Tampa Calling

I thought I had reached the point of no return with Kind of Blue. Having listened to the classic 1959 Miles Davis album so many times, having owned it in so many of its reissued iterations, I suspected, feared even, that I might never desire to hear it again.

What was once my go-to platter for midnight mood music had slipped considerably down the list — and for no other reason than burnout. I hardly thought that yet another reissue of Kind of Blue — this time a deluxe 50th Anniversary Edition — would rekindle my passion for it. But somehow it did.

And I didn’t even get the full deluxe box, which includes, staggeringly, the original album on CD along with several studio segments, breakdowns and false starts; a second CD that compiles recordings by the Kind of Blue ensemble from 1958, and a 17-minute, previously unreleased concert version of the lead track “So What,” recorded in 1960 (and played at a faster tempo, but not as fast as Miles would play it further on in the ’60s).

The new set also includes a riveting 55-five minute documentary DVD on the making and impact of Kind of Blue.

These three elements were what the kind folks at Sony Legacy sent me in the mail. I did not receive the 12×12-inch full color, 60-page book or the LP on 180-gram blue vinyl. I just couldn’t bring myself to plunk down the $109 retail to own the extras. (But I’m hoping that the LP comes to market in a stand-alone format at some point.)

So some of you might be wondering: What’s the big deal about Kind of Blue? Most anyone with any awareness about music has at least heard of it. Probably more non-jazz fans own it than any other jazz album. Sony touts it as the best-selling jazz album of all time, having moved more than 3-million units. Rolling Stone put it No. 12 on its rock-intensive list of the 500 Greatest Albums of all Time.

Reams of scholarly words have been spilled about the importance and appeal of Kind of Blue, and I won’t try to recap them here. Let me try to explain it through personal experience.

In the late 1970s, not long out of college, as a new resident of St. Petersburg with a lot of spare time on my hands and a lousy job, I was in the process of becoming a jazz fan. I had evolved from Spyro Gyra to Weather Report and Pat Metheny when I met a woman who was moving out of town and asked me to take temporary custody of her jazz collection that included maybe a hundred titles (but not, incidentally, Kind of Blue).

My younger brother Kurt and I, sharing a room in our parent’s house, ravaged the stack. When the woman came by some years later to reclaim her LPs, I’m sure she was disappointed that the grooves had been worn to the nub. Our favorite title was a dog-eared copy of John Coltrane’s Trane Tracks.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, Coltrane was a key member of Miles Davis’ band in the late 1950s, and played tenor saxophone on Kind of Blue — along with alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, pianist Bill Evans (or Wynton Kelly), drummer Jimmy Cobb and bassist Paul Chambers. As a pure convergence of talent, this lineup stands up to any in jazz annals.

I took a job at a small, local music magazine, and continued my budding jazz fandom, aided by the promo copies of LPs sent to me by record labels (including some by Miles Davis). One day in the very early 1980s, I was chatting about jazz with my co-worker, and he asked if I’d heard Kind of Blue. I said I hadn’t, to which he responded with something like, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

By that night, I had procured a copy, and it was love at first listen. The music was slower and more sensual than the bebop and post-bop I had been consuming. Kind of Blue evoked a late-night back alley — but in a decent neighborhood.

I could visualize the hipster cats in the late ’50s and early ’60s sitting around the bachelor pad with their narrow ties unfastened, drinking highballs, smoking cigs and grooving to Kind of Blue.

Soaking up Kind of Blue made me an immediately cooler customer; it relaxed me, while it forced me to keenly home in on the music.

The tunes were built around spare scales rather than cascades of chords, which gave the music a simplicity and accessibility that has been a big factor in it standing the test of time. You don’t have to make your bones with Kind of Blue — like you have to work to get Ornette Coleman music or a lot of Coltrane’s stuff. Kind of Blue just washes over you, seduces you. Moody, dark, melancholy but somehow reassuring.

Kind of Blue has a consistency of feel — there are no burners on the record — that’s another one of its strong points, but within that consistency is a wide emotional range. Most of this comes from the character of the soloists.

The tunes essentially start with short, riffy (and catchy) melodies and then give way to a round of extended solos by Miles, Cannonball, Trane and Evans (or Kelly); the band restates the theme and the song ends. That’s pretty much a pro forma jazz approach. Each of those soloists, though, makes a profound impression in each and every song.

Francis Davis, one of annotators on the new box, makes an intriguing point that I had never considered. Because improvising over scales, or modes, was effectively new to these players, and because they entered the studio without any preparation, some of their playing sounds tentative.

That doesn’t, on its face, sound like a good thing, but Davis writes, “Coltrane benefited from a little slowing down at this point in his career, just as Adderely needed a safeguard against glibness. In fact, a good deal of tentativeness on the part of everyone but Davis and Evans is one of Kind of Blue’s most beguiling aspects.”

The new approach essentially forced the saxophonists to discard instincts toward self-indulgence or showboating, and as a result, each note sounds nigh perfect, and various phrases stand out amid the solos as viable and memorable melodies in and of themselves.

Despite some agreeable caution, the basic character of each soloist emerges, and gives the record more emotional heft. Miles: unhurried and introspective, each phrase sublimely crafted for maximum impact with the fewest notes; Evans: self-effacing and spare; Coltrane: still restless and searching through his tentativeness; Adderley: sweet-sounding, bluesy, the happiest sounding of the lot.

Kind of Blue became the mother lode. I would subsequently bring other landmark albums into my orbit: Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth, Sonny Rollins’ Freedom Suite, Bill Evans Live at the Village Vanguard and scores of others. But Kind of Blue remained the one.

Until the last two or three years, when I thought I’d heard enough of it — too much of it — for the music to have anything more to offer me.

I’m glad I was wrong.

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