Miles Davis recorded modal freedom in two 1959 days
Kind of Blue—Miles Davis sextet with Coltrane, Adderley, Evans, Chambers, Cobb—was taped March 2 and April 22, 1959 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio. Modal sketches replaced bebop chord mazes; Library of Congress and critics call it jazz's pinnacle.
By late 1958 Davis led one of the most admired and profitable hard bop bands in jazz. Paul Chambers had played bass since the group began in 1955, Cannonball Adderley arrived in late 1957, Coltrane rejoined early in 1958, Jimmy Cobb took over the drums that May, and Wynton Kelly replaced Bill Evans at the piano in November. The band worked through standards, blues and bebop tunes by Parker, Monk and Gillespie, improvising over each song's chords, but Davis had come to feel that bebop's ever denser harmony was strangling invention.
His answer was modality: instead of a chord sequence, each player received a set of scales marking out where to roam. Davis had already tried the method on Milestones and Porgy and Bess in 1958, and he told Nat Hentoff that dropping chords opened up space and endless options, calling it a return to melody. According to Evans's liner notes, Davis devised the settings only hours before taping. So What alternates two modes in a sixteen-eight-eight pattern, Freddie Freeloader and All Blues are twelve-bar blues, Blue in Green turns on a ten-bar cycle, and Flamenco Sketches strings together five scales, each held as long as the soloist likes.
The sextet met at Columbia's 30th Street Studio with barely any rehearsal, cutting side one on 2 March 1959 and side two on 22 April, on three-track tape. Despite the legend, the album was not captured in single takes: only Flamenco Sketches yielded a complete first attempt, and that version is not the master. Kelly played on Freddie Freeloader, perhaps to soothe him after Evans was brought back for the date. Irving Townsend produced the sessions, though a 1987 CD wrongly credited Teo Macero, and the Davis estate conceded in 2002 that Evans wrote Blue in Green.
Issued on 17 August 1959, it became, alongside Bitches Brew, Davis's best-selling album, and several of its tunes turned into jazz standards. In 2002 it was among the first fifty recordings chosen for the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry, and the RIAA certified it quintuple platinum in 2019. Rolling Stone placed it 12th among the greatest albums in 2003 and 31st in 2020. Cobb said it must have been made in heaven, and AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it the pinnacle of modal jazz.
Source: Kind of Blue
