Today, Columbia staffers around at the time are no longer with us, making the full reason for the song title switch difficult to nail-down. One wonders what is going on when liner notes by an authority such as Bill Evans are doctored in this way. Bob Belden has suggested that the song titles as Evans describes them are rooted in sound musical logic. What is true is that no one has ever challenged the changes based on a pure music analysis and offered convincing options as those I have suggested.
This vamp is used between the first and second choruses of the theme, and between soloists. Davis enters on harmon muted trumpet against a piano and bass accompaniment, and then outlines the order of the five modes used for improvisation, and this order is followed in turn by Coltrane, Adderley, Evans and Davis again, although they are free to play on each mode for as long as they want. Davis : Mode no. Adderley : Mode no. Evans : Mode no. Davis : Mode No. Note that Adderley chooses the greatest variation of mode lengths.
Davis [actually Bill Evans] constructed fragmentary tone-rows which replace harmony in giving the music coherence. These tunes, whatever their correct titles, comprised selections one and two respectively of side two of the vinyl releases. It has been learned by heart by almost every aspiring jazz musician on the planet, it has been set to words by Eddie Jefferson and orchestrated for trumpet section on the George Russell album So What Blue Note from It is an effective technique that has the effect of projecting a great solo onto a larger screen.
What is interesting is that the piece had a preset chord progression whose duration could be altered by the instrumentalists during their improvisation. However, the master machine operating that day was running slightly slower than the industry standard of 15 ips.
Unaware of this, the technicians took the tape from this recorder to mix and master Kind of Blue. For decades, musicians were aware that when playing along with side one of Kind of Blue it was necessary to retune their instruments to a slightly sharper pitch so as to be in tune with the recording.
This anomaly was rectified in with the release of the gold Mastersound reissue of Kind of Blue , using the tape recorded at the correct pitch from the safety machine. The after-the-fact rationalisation of pitch correction has its critics, especially those who grew up with the slightly sharp version of the original vinyl side one.
I think that is important for us to hear. But here the difference is so slight that what it might do, if anything, is slightly broaden the sound and it might be intriguing to hear the true tempo of it, and the true sound of it. Fred Plaut was a highly educated and responsive engineer, trained in classical recording techniques, and that was a big difference.
A difference in the use of space by the engineer, and dynamics and arrangements for the musicians. Pure professional and artistic choices. And the results are born out in the contrasts of recorded styles. Davis grew up in East St. The worst of them occurred in , less than a decade before Miles III was born, and the bitterness and tension lingered on. In the year-old Miles Davis first heard modern jazz — the music that changed his life — when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie played in St.
After sitting in with the band for the two weeks Eckstine was in St. Louis, Davis wanted to go on the road. His family restrained him, but he was able to convince them to send him to New York, ostensibly to study classical music at Juilliard, in September In May , he made his recording debut, backing the blues singer Rubberlegs Williams.
But Parker, whose drug use was already taking on mythic proportions, did not introduce Davis to drugs, as many people once thought. Other musicians had already introduced him to marijuana which he rarely smoked , heroin which he soon became addicted to , and cocaine one of the principal enthusiasms of his later life.
But Davis was too strong-willed to put up with the indignities and uncertainties of drug dependence indefinitely. He kicked heroin in and had reportedly given up both cocaine and alcohol by the mid-Eighties. He made his first recordings as a leader on August 14th, , with Parker — playing tenor saxophone rather than his customary alto — featured as a sideman.
In the trumpeter put together a nine-piece group to play compositions and arrangements with a richer, almost orchestral texture.
The group — which included saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and played two songs arranged by Gil Evans — was mostly white. And though he often spoke out on racial matters with a caustic directness that led some critics to call him arrogant and even a racist in reverse, Davis continued to be colorblind when hiring musicians; several of his post bands were racially mixed as well.
For several years he performed and recorded sporadically while fighting his heroin habit. In , with his drug addiction behind him, Davis made important recordings with Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, and other formidable figures.
In , Davis assembled another definitive band, a quintet featuring a young John Coltrane. At two marathon sessions, the quintet recorded enough material for several outstanding albums on the Prestige label.
Davis rang in his next important musical changes with the help of a mid-Sixties quintet that included Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and bassist Ron Carter. Regular song structures and a regular rhythmic pulse were not abandoned altogether, but they were treated with an impressive plasticity. Davis defined the sound — and sounds — of modern jazz like no other in the way he integrated the electrical instrumentation of genres like rock, funk and soul.
He is one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, in any genre. Davis seemed destined for greatness from the start.
His recording debut could not have been more auspicious. In , having failed to finish his education at the prestigious Julliard School in New York City, he replaced Dizzy Gillespie in a recording session for saxophonist Charlie Parker — the most highly regarded jazz musician of that, if not any other time. He formed a Nonet group of nine musicians with an unusual line-up, including French horn and tuba.
It would be the issuing of the album Birth of the Cool containing recordings dating back to , which brought the music to wider recognition. In those heady years, one style quickly followed another and Davis was at the leading edge of most of them.
This can be heard in the song When Lights Are Low
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