First, let me be a geek for a second. I don’t know if you can tell the difference between this song streamed over You Tube and this song on a high quality digital format. I certainly can. The difference is even more dramatic when you listen to vinyl. That sounds like hipster bullshit, I know, but it is the truth. It’s actual. Anyway, what you hear here is not, in my humble opinion, a complete representation of the beauty of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue.”
Now, “Kind of Blue” has been called the greatest jazz album of all time, and it is certainly one of the most popular. Davis had played in the popular “bop” bands before he struck out on his own. Some have accused him of leaving those bands because he could not play fast enough to keep up. Whether or not that is true, Davis’s departure from that scene did lead him to pioneer a new “cool” sound for jazz.
“Kind of Blue” is in many ways the culmination of that sound. His inspiration was drawn from Ahmad Jamal, who we listened to earlier. Rather than making a lot of takes and splicing the best parts together as a lot of musicians did (and still do), Davis wanted to capture everything in the moment. Each song was rehersed only a few times and then recorded once or twice. Davis compared the process to Japanese caligraphy, where the paper is so thin that the brush can only touch it once.
This immediacy comes through in the recording. It even comes through in this crappy version, but the better the playback the more the vibe gets transmitted. (Analog being best because it is analogous to being in the room.) This vitality may be what I love most about jazz: the idea that anything could happen but that is somehow manages it hang together. It’s a lot like life that way.