Sunday 8/18/24
Something a bit different before I get back to it.
A couple pieces by me--a feature and op-ed--on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue came out this weekend. For the op-ed, I wrote the headline. I always write a title or a headline or both, if the venue uses both a title and headline (a subtitle, in effect); normally, the venue supplies their own. In one of these two recent cases, I wrote the title you see. That was for the op-ed on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue that ran in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The piece is a touch shorter than what I turned in because it has to fit a certain way on the page. Very rarely am I asked to do any edits, which is itself rare. The prose is the prose. I don't need to go into that, because anyone who has read any the prose knows the deal with its quality.
I was doing some work tonight, when I looked at my phone, and saw some things posted about me--but really not about me--on Threads. Ignorant things that say so much about the people doing the posting, and, more than that, about how our world is right now. All of remarks pertained to that second piece, this feature on Kind of Blue the feature in full from The Daily Beast. The link will take you to said feature in full, but I'll paste in an excerpt here:
Davis was always a melodist, the same as a Paul McCartney or a Franz Schubert. He fashioned tunes that then rooted themselves in a listener’s brain, never to go anywhere. The music of Miles Davis—until his fusion period—is ideal for whistling, the music of John Coltrane much less so. Coltrane’s music chopped you up into little squares and reassembled you with a brand new prevailing geometry. His style of intense imbrication and scalar cubism was coming to the fore around this time. Something was going to have to give, but first there would be Kind of Blue and Davis’s directive of modes.
Fewer jazz albums are easier to listen to than Kind of Blue, which isn’t to suggest it’s easy listening, though I think for many it does function as unchallenged aural wallpaper. If there’s a unifying idea to what makes music last and spread, it’s melody. That’s what makes the Beatles as popular as they are more than anything. Not ideas, not depth—hummability.
We can think about a witty, incisive song like “They Can’t Take that Away from Me” by George and Ira Gershwin, and for all of the value packed in those lyrics, they’re not what’s going through your head as you vocalize the song in the shower. You can’t hum Charlie Parker’s “Ko-Ko,” but good luck getting the melody to “So What” from Kind of Blue out of your head.
This is wordless jazz, but highly melodic jazz has these built-in, ghost words as I think of them. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald realized as much and gave those ghost words discernible shapes via scatting. The instrumentalists on Kind of Blue perform a variation on the idea, save the “voice” is Bill Evans’ piano or Cannonball Adderley’s horn.
Coltrane could do melody, but Kind of Blue has always felt to me like he had been asked to be a sixth man coming off the bench, rather than a starter and potential MVP candidate. I heard the album early in my own initial foray into jazz as a teenager. I don’t think there’s anyone who comes to Kind of Blue after years of listening to jazz. It will be among the first ten albums you hear, and, more often than not, the first one you seek out unless you’re a listener on a mission.
That can be problematic. I feel like I need to preface the next remark by saying try to stay calm, but Kind of Blue isn’t close to the best music Miles Davis ever made. Nor is it the best music from this period. Milestones from the previous year, waxed by the first great quintet with the addition of Adderley to the mix, also explored modes, but with greater derring-do.
Kind of Blue tries to please, and when we try to please, we often try to placate; whereas, Milestones answers first to its own aims and standards, and it’s every bit as revistable as the much more famous record that followed. Then there are the sessions at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago from December 1965 with Davis’s second great quintet, and the Cellar Door material from Washington, D.C. in 1970.
The truth is, you can learn and experience most of what there is to learn and experience about Miles Davis minus Kind of Blue, which sounds like the ultimate heresy. That isn’t to knock the album. I’d not care to guess how many times I’ve heard it, to say nothing of the many additional times I plan to. But we can’t let Kind of Blue stop us cold, because of all that we might miss out on.
You’ve maybe heard from someone who cares about you that you were spending too much time with a given friend or significant other, and that wasn’t so hot for your well-being. Don’t lose your identity.
Part of our identity, as people who partake of music, is going out and finding something else. In film, Citizen Kane was branded as the best ever movie for an age. In rock, it used to be Sgt. Pepper. These were givens. We watch many movies, though, and rock is always around. Titles are challenged. Kings and queens are dislodged.
Jazz has a different problem, in that the people who listen to jazz are typically other musicians, the highly educated—in the went-to-school-for-a-long-time sense—the intellectual, the wannabe intellectual. So when we land on that jazz album—like Kind of Blue—we pat ourselves on the back, because most people do not. We are very smart, eclectic. We’ve done a form of cultural extra credit.
A listener gets wrapped up in those melodies of Kind of Blue and it becomes a bit like staying in bed—it’s just so damn comfy there. But I’m telling you, if you haven’t heard Davis’s E.S.P. (1965) or Agharta (1975), I want to do a wellness check by speeding over to your home with the music in hand so we can have a listening session.
Bill Evans was himself a master melodist and Davis absorbed all of his lessons, just as Coltrane would later absorb those of Eric Dolphy, who I’d put forward as the most influential jazz artist of the era. “Blue in Green” is such a Davis work, but it’s also such an Evans work, and this is one of those partnerships I was talking about, though it goes overlooked, despite that relationship being the main reason that Kind of Blue is Kind of Blue. The two found harmony, and Kind of Blue is itself as harmonious a jazz album as there is.
The Kind of Blue band was not built to last. Having achieved what he had achieved, Davis was ready to move on, as always. His time with Evans was at an end, and the partnership with Coltrane would soon flame out in volcanic fashion in the spring of 1960 across various bandstands in Europe upon which Coltrane would unleash his extended solos of tessellated fire, as Davis watched and listened, letting his brother in innovation have his head, but knowing that this would be it for the two of them.
Have you ever seen any writing like that?
Ever seen any "music criticism" like that?
Any writing on jazz?
We all know the answers to these questions. Do you know how many times I've written on Miles Davis? Been interviewed on the radio--NPR and what have you--about Miles Davis? Written in this journal about Miles Davis?
It's a lot of times probably, right?
Same as with everything.
Now what I'm going to do is post in screenshots of what I saw tonight. I want you to note the judgments that are passed, the lies, essentially, that almost all of these people tell, the overwhelming ignorance, and the posturing by these people as not only people in the know, but people who know vastly more about any of this than I do, and, further, who digitally cosplay as fair people, crusaders, upholders of equity, justice, decency, intellectual honesty.
Which is pretty rich, considering the hypocrisy. Among other issues.
What you'll see at the end is a two-part response from me, which I never do. I don't look at these kind of things--for I have so much to tend to and it is to those more important things in the war I'm in, and in my quest, to which my energy goes--but I did see this, so I figured I'd try a little experiment and say something.
When people like this find out what I do, the level at which I do it, how much of it I've done, the range of all that I do, do you know what ends up happening?
The hate is kicked up many more levels.
Lastly: I invite you to look up these people. If you are on Threads, click on their profiles. Have a big old gander. You could go point by point through all of this and take it apart, but to mention one item: Casually calling Kind of Blue bebop is...something.
But it's all something, isn't it? And what that is ain't good. This is the world now. This is what one has to overcome to get anywhere, if one is not like this--which is also to say, nothing good, no one with a clue, no one of substance or seriousness.
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