Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (1959)

This Musical Life: Essential Albums, Part 2 of 5

Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959)

Jazz as a genre was given to me by my father, who sat me down in 1992 with Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959) and made sure I listened with headphones, undistracted. It had a huge impact on my ability to truly listen to music. I was twenty-one and visiting my German father in France (I didn’t grow up with my father, and this was the first time we’d ever met face to face, so this was a monumentally important trip). At the time, I was a well-versed young woman musically due to my mother’s influences, but I hadn’t yet started to pick out specific lines, instruments, harmonies, or performers in a song. Before jazz, before learning to really listen, I just heard a song as one monolithic experience. After jazz, specifically Kind of Blue, I heard standouts everywhere in a piece of music.

For instance, I was immediately taken with the first notes of the standout song, “So What.” The first slow notes pouring in from Miles’s trumpet, Wynton Kelly’s piano, and the saxes. I heard the sound in the pauses, the silence. I felt drawn into a story through the instrumentation instead of lyrics, which were so important in the folk-rock of my ‘70s childhood.

And then, after the swinging “Freddie Freeloader” and mournful “Blue in Green,” came Side B and perhaps my favorite track on the album: “All Blues.” Here was John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley dueting on the sax, Bill Evans tinkling the ivories, and Miles’s genius blowing, all at their very smoothest. Evans’s cool piano carries the throughline, Paul Chambers on double bass holds the pocket. And not forget the stylin’ drumming by Jimmy Cobb providing a swank backdrop for the whole gang to stay connected to something while they improv during the entire one-take recording.

Back to my father, Uwe. He sat me down with a glass of red wine in front of a blazing fireplace on a rainy April night in the south of France. He put a pair of humongous, old-fashioned headphones on my head and an original vinyl of Kind of Blue on the record player. My father said, “Listen. Don’t do anything else. Just sit there. Listen.” And so I did.

I can still feel the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. For me, that moment truly was the birth of cool.