Author reveals reality of mythical jazz session

KIND OF BLUE – THE MAKING OF THE MILES DAVIS MASTERPIECE by Ashley Kahn, Da Capo Press, New York, 2000, 222 pages, $23.

On two days in early 1959, seven musicians gathered at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, a converted church in downtown Manhattan. The lineup – trumpeter-leader Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley on alto and John Coltrane on tenor, pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, drummer Jimmy Cobb, bassist Paul Chambers – was stellar. The five tunes to be recorded – mere sketches of melody and scales – were simple, spare and all tinged with melancholy. The atmosphere was relaxed but professional. Just another day at the office.

The result was ”Kind of Blue.” Hailed in Downbeat magazine at the time of its release that summer as a ”remarkable album of extreme beauty and sensitivity,” the reputation of ”Blue” has grown to legend in the 41 years since. It represents like no other jazz record, and like few records in any genre, the perfect marriage of brilliant conception and exquisite execution.

To musicians, it is the bible, in the truest sense of providing both inspiration and a glimpse of unattainable perfection. To the novice listener, it is the essential jazz recording. To the avid jazz fan, it likely was the first scratchy LP to be replaced when compact discs came out, elevating the scratchy LP to the status of cherished relic. It is on every credible end-of-millennium Top 10 list. It is the ultimate desert-island record. It still sells, after more than four decades, an astonishing 5,000 copies per week.

And, like all good legends, it has become wrapped in a good deal of myth. Well-meaning myth, principally to the effect that ”Kind of Blue” was a spontaneous one-take wonder, a miraculous lightning bolt of creativity. The truth, as thoroughly and well told in Ashley Kahn’s new book, ”Kind of Blue – The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece,” is more compelling: ”Kind of Blue” is the result of years of searching, refining and just plain hard work by Davis and his colleagues. Reading Kahn’s book will heighten one’s appreciation of the recording in the same way that understanding the personal and physical challenges Michelangelo overcame makes the Sistine Chapel that much more beautiful.

Kahn provides ample background and biography to provide that understanding, going back 10 years before the sessions, when Davis was a newcomer to the 52nd Street bebop scene – popular, busy and increasingly dissatisfied with his playing and with trying to copy the high-flying style Bird and Dizzy already had perfected. When that dissatisfaction and fashionably hip heroin addiction had his career on the brink of destruction in the mid-’50s, Davis exiled himself to Detroit, quit cold turkey and began to forge the intimate, plaintive sound that became his trademark.

Davis returned to New York and built the first of his great bands – Chambers on bass, Red Garland on piano, Philly Joe Jones on drums and a young, inexperienced and terribly insecure, overly serious but promising kid named Coltrane on tenor. Davis had his first introduction to Julian Adderley, a cannonball-shaped, constantly joking

Tampa schoolteacher who wailed a funky, gospelish alto during summer vacations. And he met, and occasionally gigged with, a white guy named Bill Evans, a classically trained pianist who could play like mad and who had some very unusual ideas about music theory.

After a few extraordinary years as the undisputed best jazz group in the world, the breakup was sudden – drug addiction and unreliability cost Davis his musically flawless pianist and the drummer with whom he’d developed uncanny telepathy. On the positive side, Coltrane had overcome his problems with alcohol and drugs, he’d developed a deep spirituality and his playing was incredible. Adderley was less and less hooked on that regular teacher’s paycheck. Kelly was one of the best rhythm-section pianists around, Cobb was working out just fine and the theory Evans had been talking about was starting to make sense.

The theory was nothing new. It was, in fact, ancient – the modes of classical Greece, of the Middle East and Africa, of the early church. It was not about the rapidly changing chords of be-bop and Tin Pan Alley, or of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms for that matter, but of scales. Long scales held out for dozens of measures at a time, combined with rhythm to make melody, which, after all, is what music was all about in the first place. If be-bop was like racing down a twisty mountain road in a sports car, the modal style was, in the hands of truly inventive players, like swooping in a jet through a cloudless sky.

That’s what got these seven musicians to the former Greek-Orthodox church on East 30th the afternoon of March 2, 1959, the date of the first session. Kahn sets up the story well, but the heart of the book is his description of what the Columbia tape machines captured that day and on April 22 – the false starts, the between-takes conversations, the adjustments, the final takes followed by the comments of awed engineers and musicians almost embarrassed by the perfection they knew they had produced. The brief introduction by Jimmy Cobb, the sole surviving member of the group, offers a touchingly humble first-person glimpse.

Kahn offers lots of interesting tidbits, too. What gave the recording a rich, warm resonance engineers still marvel at today. Why the first side of your old LP sounds different from the corresponding tunes on the CD. What Dave Brubeck, another Columbia artist, did to the studio piano to give it a distinctive sound in the upper register. How five unnamed sketches based upon music theory from antiquity came to have names such as So What, Freddie Freeloader, Blue in Green, All Blues and Flamenco Sketches.

Mostly, though, Kahn’s book is a thoughtful exploration of the creative process, a respectful tribute to the pursuit of perfection and an affectionate companion to a remarkable recording that happened when it all came together.