"When you compose music, you discover a side of yourself you never knew existed." - Bill Evans

For a lot of people out there, whether they are Jazz musicians, composers, or enthusiasts – the album ‘Kind of Blue’, by Miles Davis – is a definitive milestone. It is so, both in the larger sense of jazz music itself – and for a lot of musicians I know, including myself - a source of clarity, pleasure and overwhelming knowledge. For many, the music of the album has become synonymous with what the sound of Jazz is in itself.

The album was recorded in 1959 and was essentially a revolution. The breakthrough came in the form of a reply to the current trend of Jazz music existing at the time. The latter, called hard-bop/bop, was characterized by fast tempos and a Lot of chord changes – think very busy fingers and very busy improvisation. (Believe me, it’s a great genre of music and it forms a major chunk of what I do with Drift. But man, it’s hard – and I don’t even really solo.)

Kind of blue, one the other hand, was categorized as Modal jazz. It made immense room for improvisation by removing excessive chord changes and breaking them down to a simple few – opening the sound up and simplifying the process immensely. The first track on the record stuck to only two chords. D and E^b.

(This doesn’t change the fact, for people like me, that a lot of space can be a puzzling thing.)

Kind of Blue was my first jazz album and was presented to me somewhere around my first year of college. The vibe - and it was all about the vibe - and the sound of the album was something I had been searching for, for a long time but had no idea where to find. The brief flirtations that the mainstream media brought of jazz, were mostly in the form of background scores in movies. And in cartoons – like Tom and Jerry.

The opening track, called ‘So What’, starts with bass and piano playing a unison intro followed by the melody on bass.  It is hard to find some one who has not heard this track yet or will not recognize this theme (Second only to Take Five – Dave Brubeck).  The melody is followed by the crash of a cymbal and the bass breaking into what I know recognize, is a pulse from a rhythm section, so steady, I could only hope to imitate it.

Looking back at it, that track and that bassist (Paul Chambers) made me want to pick up the bass and really just learn how to Do That. I needed to be able to Do That. It didn’t matter where I’d find a double bass and it didn’t matter how I’d find a band. 

Needless to say, it’s been a few years since then: basses and bands have come and gone; but with every jazz musician I work with, every record that I listen to and every track that I play on my instrument – the hidden complexity behind doing that becomes more amplified and much more apparent.

 I still haven’t figured it out and the songs on the album sound different to me every month – if not every week. And that collective ‘feel’, isn’t just about thinking bass, it’s thinking rhythm section and feeling a whole band – a bunch of people all playing the same game and thinking the same thing.

Thinking together with an intense awareness of yourself and everybody else. If that isn’t zen-like, I don’t know what is.

I am no where near mastering the art. Maybe my friends are, though. Sometimes, when I play with Drift, on a really good night, during a really good track I’ll feel a sense of quiet and calm while playing – maybe that’s what it is. The drummer from my other band, called the Variety Hour, once said he almost had something like an out of body experience while playing with us at a gig – and it let him listen to our sound ‘together’, as opposed to just as a bassist, pianist and drummer. He changed the way he played after that. I’m due for one of those any time now : ) .

Anyway. Kind of blue is a never-ever compendium of knowledge for jazz musicians – teaching everything from melodic improvisation to just plain and solid control. The entire album was recorded in one go – in an overnight recording session in New York; where no one aside from Miles Davis (trumpet) and Bill Evans (pn.) had ever seen the music before. There was nothing like it before it came about – and these guys went ahead and played it like it had been stylistically present for years.

 It’s definitely something to appreciate – personally speaking, I have to run over charts more than twenty or thirty times (more), before I can get something steady cracking.

 The album has a whole bunch of great tracks on it. Tracks like: Blue and Green/Freddie Freeloader etc.

 Go Listen!