I remember driving home from high school one day, listening to the jazz station on the radio, when a track came on that sounded different from anything I had ever heard, much different from the big band jazz I had been playing since junior high, and a stark contrast to the immaculate yet blusey Oscar Peterson recordings my teacher had suggested I get. I was new to listening to jazz, and while I didn’t know Kelly from Marsalis I somehow knew that what was coming out of my car speakers was something very special, there was something important about it, and I needed to hear the whole thing, so as I pulled into my parent’s driveway I sat in my car, turned the engine off and kept listening. The track was “All Blues” and that was the first time I had heard Kind Of Blue.
Two decades later, I like many others am still captivated by this recording. Granted, many of us have taken the album for granted as we have played and over played “So What” and “Freddie Freeloader” and “All Blues” and made our students listen to the record, but when we were asked recently to perform all the tracks from Kind Of Blue at the Pasadena Jazz Institute, I sat down and listened to the record all the way through, something I hadn’t done for years. It transported me back to high school, when I so desperately wanted to understand how those guys could make those sounds on their instruments and sound so cool, in contrast to our frenetic blues scale playing that we did in jazz band over C Jam Blues. Even now I still am amazed at how patient and spacious all of the songs are, like those guys were aware of every sound and every instance between the sound. It’s a beautiful and serious record, and listening to it now with the understanding I’ve gained from my pursuit of becoming a better musician has only confirmed and increased that sentiment.
Playing that music that night at PJI was suprisingly emotional and anything but cliché or campy. To the contrary, it felt like the music itself had its own energy that we could channel into our playing, seeming as if there was power in those melodies. Perhaps it’s a little over the top to call it the sacred music of jazz, but is there anything else that even comes close? We learn these tunes very early on in our development, so how can they not touch a nerve that strikes at the foundation of our first experiences with jazz? In this music there seems to be something approaching ritual, part of the rites of passage as a developing jazz musician the purport of which transforms it so it no longer becomes just another set of tunes.
Sometime after listening to “All Blues” for the first time in my car, we formed a student combo at my high school and performed during a big band concert, and the tune we played was none other than “All Blues”. I had no idea what I was doing, I tried to copy those Bill Evans voicings as best I could (most of it was on the white keys so it didn’t sound too bad), but do remember thinking how cool this tune was and how awesome it was that we could actually play it.
I felt the exact same way as we played Kind Of Blue at the Pasadena Jazz Institute back in February.
Well, this year is the 50th anniversary of Kind Of Blue, and trumpeter Josh Welchez has taken the initiative to put together a group to celebrate this historic landmark. Over the next month, we’ll be doing a number of shows that feature the music from Kind Of Blue as well as some of the early Birth Of The Cool recordings. Josh has worked very hard at transcribing and arranging those tunes, and anyone who is a fan of Miles Davis is encouraged to make it out to see one or more of these shows.
The dates and locales are as follows (click on links for more info):
Saturday 5/16 (THIS SATURDAY!!!) - Spazio (Sherman Oaks) 9-midnight
Tuesday 5/26 - Cafe 322 (Sierra Madre) 9-midnight
Wednesday 6/3 - Sangria (Hermosa Beach) 6:30-9:30pm
Even if you can’t make it out to the shows, I encourage you to listen to Kind Of Blue all the way through at some point this month. You won’t be disappointed…