When was kind of blue released

Share this page. Tracklistings come from MusicBrainz. You can add or edit information about Kind Of Blue at musicbrainz. Find out more about our use of this data , and also our policy on profanity. Find out more about our use of this data. Consistently rated not just as one of the greatest jazz albums but as one of THE Chris Jones Long held as the jazz album that even non-jazz fans will own, Kind Of Blue not only changed the way people regarded Miles, it changed the very face of music itself.

Share This Article:. Music 12 Nov 21 On this day in U2 kicked off a 6-week run at No. Cormac Neeson - 'Wrong Side of the Town'. The answer came from a friend of his named George Russell who died just last month at the age of A brilliant composer and scholar in his own right, Russell spent the better part of the '50s devising a new theory of jazz improvisation based not on chord changes but on scales or "modes.

A scale consists of the eight notes from one octave to the next. This distinction may seem slight, but its implications were enormous. In a bebop improvisation, the chord changes which occur when, usually, the pianist changes the harmony from one chord to another serve as a compass; they point the direction to the next bar or the next phrase.

Chords follow a particular pattern that's why it's easy to hum along with most blues and ballads ; you know what the next chord will be; you know that the notes you play will consist of the notes that comprise that chord or some variation on them.

Playing blues, you know that the sequence of chord changes will be finished in 12 bars or, if it's a song, 32 bars , and then you'll either end your solo or start the sequence again.

Russell threw the compass out the window. You could play all the notes of a scale, which is to say any and all notes. One night in , Russell sat down with Davis at a piano and laid out his theory's possibilities—how to link chords, scales, and melodies in almost unlimited combinations.

Miles realized this was a way out of bebop's cul-de-sac. In an interview that year with critic Nat Hentoff, Miles explained the new approach. You don't have to worry about changes, and you can do more with time. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you are.

There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them. Davis needed one more thing before he could go this route: a pianist who knew how to accompany without playing chords. This was a radical notion. Laying down the chords—supplying the frontline horn players with the compass that kept their improvisations on the right path—was what modern jazz pianists did.

Russell recommended someone he'd hired for a few of his own sessions, an intense young white man named Bill Evans. Evans was conservatory-trained with a penchant for the French Impressionist composers, like Ravel and Debussy, whose harmonies floated airily above the melody line. No other recording in jazz has come remotely near acquiring the kind of cachet Kind of Blue has accumulated over the decades. Recorded on 2 March and 22 April , it has achieved a feat few recordings have ever managed to do by slipping the context of the time in which it was recorded to become a truly timeless masterpiece.

In October, Harold Macmillan called a general election, defeating Labour in a landslide, and one of his new Cabinet ministers, now long forgotten, was to have a lasting effect on all of us.

Ernest Marples, the new Minister of Transport, launched a nationwide motorway building programme. And it is here the source of its enduring appeal lies. Yet Kind of Blue did not appear out of a vacuum. Miles Davis had been showing interest in modes as a basis for improvisation for several years through his association with George Russell, and an opportunity to harness their potential presented itself during a trip to Paris in December , where he was booked to play the Olympia Theatre, followed by three weeks at the Club St.

Germain with a French group. The following year on the album Milestones , Davis uses modes proper on the title track, which is a bar AABA song form with a different mode for the A and B sections Dorian and Aeolian respectively. In August , Davis collaborated with Gil Evans on Porgy and Bess , which numbers among the great orchestral recordings in jazz and became his best-selling album until , when it was overtaken by Bitches Brew.

This move towards static harmonies would reach its apotheosis on Kind of Blue , in which pianist Bill Evans played a significant role in midwifeing in the way Gil Evans had done at the Birth of the Cool sessions in and Joe Zawinul would do on the In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew sessions in Bill Evans was no stranger to modes.

Today, Columbia staffers around at the time are no longer with us, making the full reason for the song title switch difficult to nail-down. One wonders what is going on when liner notes by an authority such as Bill Evans are doctored in this way. Bob Belden has suggested that the song titles as Evans describes them are rooted in sound musical logic. What is true is that no one has ever challenged the changes based on a pure music analysis and offered convincing options as those I have suggested.

This vamp is used between the first and second choruses of the theme, and between soloists. Davis enters on harmon muted trumpet against a piano and bass accompaniment, and then outlines the order of the five modes used for improvisation, and this order is followed in turn by Coltrane, Adderley, Evans and Davis again, although they are free to play on each mode for as long as they want. Davis : Mode no. Adderley : Mode no.