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How Miles Davis changed the landscape of music with ‘Kind of Blue’
“Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.” – Miles Davis
With five songs unfurling over the course of a fluid and vitalised 45 minutes, Miles Davis and his all-star band helped to bring jazz full circle and changed the landscape of music once more. It is said that the entirety of popular music is the child of jazz, but by the time of the approaching dawn of the sixties, the golden age of the genre itself was slowly being subsumed by the reckless offspring of rock ‘n’ roll that it had borne itself several decades earlier. However, in the summer of ’59, with Kind of Blue, Miles Davis would once more assert its dominance and reinvent the musical wheel, with an explosion of sound that still resonates in the ripples of influence today.
Being a pioneer was simply in Miles Davis’ nature, “I have to change, it’s like a curse,” he once declared. And this was a mantra ratified by his frequent drumming collaborator, the legendary Billy Cobham, who said that “everything was experimentation. There was not one moment that whatever was put on a piece of paper would not be changed.” This endless innovation and drive to the future is mirrored in what David Bowie said when he philosophically declared: “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it.” On Kind of Blue, it served Davis so well that many describe it as the greatest jazz album of all time.
However, excellence, and even innovation for that matter, does not always equal influence or the sort of art that could be dubbed ‘defining’, so what is it about Kind of Blue that has established its legacy as a seismic moment in music? In his early years, Davis was a propagator of what was known as bebop jazz, which is, in layman’s terms, the sort of scatty complex style of the genre with constant chord changes. However, Davis soon became disillusioned with this method of playing, and his inherent need to change things up found its muse in the modal exploring work of pianist George Russell.
Although when we witness a musical maestro behind their chosen instrument it might seem like constant improvisation as though they can just think up a sound and play it on a whim, the roadmap of chords makes it a lot more structured than that. Music might seem like poetry, but it also has a mechanical form. However, with modal jazz, the ordinary structure of things is turned on its head.
As Miles Davis put it in his autobiography: “The challenge here, when you work in the modal way, is to see how inventive you can become melodically. It’s not like when you base stuff on chords, and you know at the end of thirty-two bars that the chords have run out and there’s nothing to do but repeat what you’ve done with the variations.”
Away from the nitty-gritty of the musicology behind modality, what it creates from a listener’s point of view is floating sonic structures that explore feeling more so than sound. The driving force of the piano means that all of the instruments in the ensemble have equal billing allowing for a greater exploration of a theme than traditional soloing.
As Nick Cave told The Quietus about the modal sound: “I love all of those live albums around Get Up With It but I think it’s On The Corner is one that I really like. It really stands out because the band use solos in the same way as a lot of that jazz stuff… with egalitarianism between the instruments that creates this incredibly unique wall of sound that I just love so much.
“It doesn’t draw you in to any particular instrument like most music does; and I really enjoy listening to music in that way. And the playing on it is amazing. On The Corner… I remember first hearing it and it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe 15-years-ago and it had that [starts stamping on floor and clapping hands to rhythm] handclap rhythm to it and I remember being as completely knocked out by it as I was when I heard John Lee Hooker for the first time.”
On Kind of Blue, this new style was laid out for the first time as a sort of rudimentary off-road map for the future of jazz and every other genre that would disregard song structure and turn more towards this wall of sound approach. The sound of the record is effortless, which is remarkable considering it was pure alchemy at the time, and this would prove influential beyond measure not just in its reinvention of the rules, but the fact that Davis dabbled in the future so freely and disavowed any naysaying from the purists in an emotional maelstrom that was all his own. In short, it was musically as Promethean as splitting the atom and, in spirit, it was pure punk before there was a word for it.
Jimmy Cobb, Drummer on Miles Davis’s ‘Kind of Blue,’ Dies at 91
The last surviving member of that landmark album’s sextet, he was a master of understatement, propelling his bandmates with a quiet persistence.
Jimmy Cobb performing with the Miles Davis Quintet in 1960. His instructions from the boss? “Just make it sound like it’s floating.”Credit...Popperfoto, via Getty Images
Jimmy Cobb, a jazz drummer whose propulsive ride cymbal imbued countless classic recordings with a quiet intensity, including Miles Davis’s epochal album “Kind of Blue,” died on Sunday in Harlem. He was 91.
The cause was lung cancer, according to his daughter Serena Cobb. As the only surviving member of the “Kind of Blue” sextet, Mr. Cobb had long been hailed as the last apostle of a defining moment in American music.
His great talent was his ability to play understatedly, almost casually, without letting the beat or the momentum sag. He rarely took a solo.
“I was just trying to get it done,” he said in a 2010 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, adding, “You have to be at the right place at the right time with the right stuff, and then you got a chance.”
On spirited performances led by the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, whispery jazz standards sung by Sarah Vaughan, dreamier late-career collaborations with the pianist Geri Allen, and thousands of albums and gigs in between, Mr. Cobb goaded his bandmates by holding steady. In his hands, persistence didn’t mean insisting, and an even keel never felt like a bore.
Released in 1959, “Kind of Blue” — with Mr. Davis’s trumpet backed by Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane on saxophone, Paul Chambers on bass, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano, and Mr. Cobb on drums — received warm reviews, but its immortality accrued only over time. Through changes in fashion and dips in jazz’s popularity, its brooding, translucent aura has never gone out of style. It is widely known as the best-selling album in jazz history, and last year the Recording Industry Association of America announced that it had surpassed five million copies sold worldwide.
“Kind of Blue,” released in 1959, has grown in importance over time.Credit...Columbia Records
For most of its tunes, Mr. Davis brought in only rough sketches of melody; all but one of its five tracks were recorded in single takes. Mr. Davis’s advice for his drummer at those sessions was simple. “He said, ‘Jimmy, you know what to do. Just make it sound like it’s floating,’” Mr. Cobb recalled.
He remained in Mr. Davis’s band for over four years and contributed to other landmark recordings: “Porgy and Bess,” “Sketches of Spain,” “Someday My Prince Will Come” and more.
In 2003, listening to a set of live recordings from 1961, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times celebrated Mr. Davis’s rhythm section — Mr. Kelly, Mr. Chambers and Mr. Cobb — as “the gold standard for straight-ahead, postwar jazz rhythm.”
Even after they had all left Mr. Davis’s band, that core trio continued playing together until Mr. Chambers’s death in 1969.
Mr. Cobb knew what moved him, and what didn’t. When jazz turned toward the avant-garde in the 1960s, he stayed on course, relying on his regal status to find work with giants of the hard-bop era, often in Europe and Japan, after the clubs scene in New York had dried up.
Though he never hungered for the spotlight, Mr. Cobb did embrace a leadership role in his last decades, often fronting bands under the name Cobb’s Mob. In a Times review of Mr. Cobb’s 2014 album, “The Original Mob,” Nate Chinen took note of the “indefinable but unmistakable pull in the ride cymbal beat of the jazz drummer Jimmy Cobb, who’s now 85 and sounds not unlike he did at 30.”
Mr. Cobb in 2019. Though he never hungered for the spotlight, he did embrace a leadership role in his last decades, often fronting bands under the name Cobb’s Mob.Credit...via Smoke Sessions Records/Associated Press
The national endowment named Mr. Cobb a Jazz Master in 2009, the year he turned 80.
In addition to his daughter Serena, Mr. Cobb is survived by his wife, Eleana Tee Cobb, and another daughter, Jaime Cobb.
James Wilbur Cobb was born on Jan. 20, 1929, at his home in Washington. His parents, Wilbur and Katherine (Bivens) Cobb, lived just blocks from U Street, which had recently become the center of the country’s most robust urban black middle class, as well as one of its greatest music scenes. His mother was a domestic worker, his father a security guard and taxi driver.
The couple separated when their children were young, and to help support his mother, Jimmy worked from an early age: shining shoes, delivering newspapers, toting heavy bags of ice for $5 a day. He spent summers working on his grandfather’s tobacco farm in Maryland.
He fell in love with the drums as a teenager, listening to modern-jazz records with a friend and using his knuckles to hammer out rhythms. Before his 20th birthday, he was working at clubs on U Street, sometimes accompanying stars who passed through town, like Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker.
Mr. Cobb first went on the road with the saxophonist Earl Bostic, then joined the vocalist Dinah Washington’s band, which was as loaded with talented young instrumentalists as Mr. Bostic’s had been. Ms. Washington and Mr. Cobb began a romantic relationship and lived together for a time.
Soon after they split up, he began to fill in here and there for Mr. Davis’s first-call drummer, Philly Joe Jones. Then one day in 1958, Mr. Davis called Mr. Cobb at his home in Queens about 6 p.m. and asked him if he could make a gig that night.
“I say, ‘Yeah, where?’” Mr. Cobb recalled. “He say, ‘Boston.’”
Mr. Cobb packed his drums and hustled to La Guardia Airport. He caught a plane and arrived at the club just as the band was starting to play “’Round Midnight.”
Mr. Davis’s classic arrangement of that tune has a sequence of rhythmic hits in the middle, pinching the tension before things open up into steady swing. With the band making its way through the first half of the piece, Mr. Cobb set up his drums just in time to nail those hits.
“When they got to this certain part,” he recalled, “I played this little break with them, and I was in the band. No rehearsal, no nothing.”
INTERVIEW: Bill Evans on Miles Davis and Kind of Blue
Allan Chase writes, “I’ve been looking forward to sharing this informative interview with Bill Evans for a long time. It seems to me that it contains some valuable and possibly unique insights and details about the compositions and recording of Kind of Blue and Evans’s views on and relationship with Miles Davis.”
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Why Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” Is So Beloved
A music scholar suggests that Miles Davis combined the blues with the musical avant garde in a manner reflecting the integrationist spirit of the era.
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Kind of Blue: The jazz album by Miles Davis that transformed music...60 years later.
To mark its 60th anniversary, Martin Chilton tells the story of how the trumpeter created a multimillion-selling masterpiece that still ranks as one of the greatest albums of all time.
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