The Blue and the Great

Critics have never stopped writing about "Kind of Blue," and Ashley Kahn's absorbing 2000 book, "Kind of Blue," is devoted exclusively to the making of this classic album and its lasting influence. Columbia (now Sony) has kept the album in print since it first appeared. In the past year it has released two different commemorative editions that include not only the original album but also false starts, studio chatter, the one alternate take of "Flamenco Sketches" and a previously unreleased live version of "So What." There are also excellent critical essays and a DVD that contains a gushing documentary on the album and a terrific tape of a 1959 television show on which Davis played "So What" with his combo and three big-band numbers arranged and conducted by Gil Evans. The more deluxe of these sets even includes a blue vinyl copy of the record. It is a testament to the original album's undiminished potency that none of this feels like overkill.

"Kind of Blue" has little historical import beyond its musical influence, but it makes a terrific cultural milestone against which we can measure a half century of change. Certainly the album made Davis a star—yes, in 1959 jazz musicians could still be pop stars—and in doing that it put before the public a black man unafraid to speak his mind and unwilling to compromise his art to please or appease anyone. In the materials accompanying the anniversary editions of the album, there is a picture of Davis draping his arms over pianist Bill Evans while demonstrating something on the keyboard. Today the picture seems innocuous, but in 1959 it could have caused a riot in certain parts of this country: a black man almost hugging a white man, a black man instructing a white man, a black man who was the white man's boss. It is a measure of just how polarizing a figure Davis was that he took criticism from both the white and the black communities. While Evans was a member of the band, Davis got an earful from black people who thought he should hire only African-Americans. In his public pronouncements, Davis could be intemperate, petulant and contrarian, but when it came to his music, he was always clearheaded and colorblind.

In 1959, jazz was more broadly popular than it is today—jazz was on the jukebox in '59—but it was still fighting for its place in the American cultural pantheon. It would be decades before anyone began calling it America's classical music (in 1965, when the music jury for the Pulitzer Prize voted to give the award to Duke Ellington, the Pulitzer board vetoed the decision). The battle is over now. Public schools teach jazz appreciation. Every major musical conservatory has a jazz department. Lincoln Center devotes two concert halls and a nightclub to jazz. Some of the excitement and sense of discovery that characterized the music at midcentury has leaked away in subsequent decades, but jazz still attracts new players, composers and audiences, and its influence is everywhere. Even the president of the United States boasts of having Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis on his iPod.

It would be foolish to credit "Kind of Blue" as the single tipping point in the debate, but considering its enormous popularity, it would be equally silly to ignore its influence. Millions of fans first encountered not just Miles Davis but jazz itself on this album, and it continues to define the form for new generations (almost half its sales have come in the past two decades). At a time when what is popular and what is good seem ever more divergent, "Kind of Blue" sounds better all the time.

© 2009