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Wednesday 26 August 2009
May be you haven't heard this before
I will play some tracks that just have not been played in this country before!!!!!!!!!!
Monday 24 August 2009
Sandra Grant
Sandra Grant can be seen on the following:
www.myspace.com/sandragrant
www.sandragrantladysaxophonist.com
email sgrant2000@hotmail.com
www.myspace.com/sandragrant
www.sandragrantladysaxophonist.com
email sgrant2000@hotmail.com
Monday 10 August 2009
ALLEN VACHE
 | Allan Vaché |
 During that same period Allan also performed many professional engagements with such jazz greats as: Bobby Hackett, Wild Bill Davison, Pee Wee Erwin, Gene Krupa, Dick Hyman, Max Kaminsky, Clark Terry, Dick Wellstood, Ed Hubble, Cliff Leeman, Bob Haggart, Jack Lesberg, Lionel Hampton, Bob Wilber and many others. He also made numerous appearances with his brother Warren Vaché, Jr. In 1974-1975 Allan appeared in an on stage band in the Broadway musical "Doctor Jazz" at the Winter Garden theater, starring Bobby Van and Lola Falana for which Luther Henderson and Dick Hyman wrote instrumental arrangements. In late 1975 Allan joined "The Jim Cullum Jazz Band" of San Antonio Texas, formerly "The Happy Jazz Band." With this organization, Allan has appeared numerous times on the Public Radio Series "Riverwalk, Live from the Landing" The band travelled extensively to Europe, Australia and Mexico, as well as making many festival appearances throughout the United States. Allan recorded nine albums and compact discs with this band, including the only jazz CD of the entire score of "Porgy and Bess", released on CBS Masterworks records. Vaché and the band also made many concert appearances of "Porgy and Bess" , many featuring opera great William Warfield as narrator, throughout the Western Hemisphere and including The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and "The Cervantino Arts Festival" in Mexico City, for the U.S. State Department. Allan has appeared in several "World Series of Jazz" concerts in San Antonio. These concerts featured the "Cullum" band alongside such jazz luminaries as Benny Goodman, Pete Fountain, Joe Venuti, Teddy Wilson, Scott Hamilton, Bob Wilber, and many others. Allan appeared with Jim Cullum at Carnegie Hall at the "Tribute to Turk Murphy" concert in January 1987. He has also performed with Culllum on the CBS Morning News, and PBS television show "Austin City Limits." He also performed on NPR’s "A Prairie Home Companion" with Garrison Keillor, and was a regular performer on PRI’s "Riverwalk – Live from the Landing," from 1987-1992. This program aired on over 200 public radio stations in the U.S. and abroad. Many of these shows are still rebroadcast today. In the summer of 1992 Allan left San Antonio to pursue a free lance career. Since that time he has appeared as a solo performer at several jazz festivals and parties around the country and abroad. He has appeared with pop performers Bonnie Rait and Leon Redbone and can be heard on the soundtrack of the 1998 film “The Newton Boys”. In 1993 he moved to Orlando, Florida to perform at various Orlando attractions including Walt Disney World and Church Street Station. Vache has numerous recordings to his credit, several under his own name, for various labels. These include Audiophile, Jazzology, Arbors, and Nagel-Heyer, of Hamburg, Germany. Vache has presently recorded twelve CDs for this label, six of these as the leader. His latest CD “Ballads, Burners & Blues”, released in March of 2004 for the Arbors label, includes his wife, Vanessa Vache’, on clarinet, as a special guest. In March 2006 he recorded a tribute to Benny Goodman for Arbors entitled “With Benny in Mind” to be released early in 2007. Having toured in Germany, Austria, England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Poland and Switzerland, Allan continues to work as a freelance artist in the Orlando area as well as appearing at many concerts and festivals in the U.S. and around the world. | |
CHRISTINE JENSEN
| CHRISINE JENSEN | |
 | |
 |
BIO
Born in Sechelt, British Columbia, Jensen spent her formative years in Nanaimo, gaining a firm footing in the jazz and classical tradition. Her mother, an accomplished pianist and music teacher, had her taking piano lessons starting at age seven. Subsequently, Jensen picked up the alto saxophone in order to participate in the city's award winning school music program. Her teachers, as well as her mother's record collection turned her in the direction of jazz, garnering her accolades for her saxophone playing at a national level. Jensen's works have been transported all over the world, in part due to her sister, jazz trumpeter Ingrid Jensen. Her composition skills gained attention when Ingrid's debut jazz album Vernal Fields went on to win the 1996 Juno Award. This album contained three of her compositions, including the title track. She has had her big band works played and recorded by the Frankfurt Radio Big Band, The Banff Jazz Orchestra, The McGill Jazz Orchestra, as well as numerous University bands throughout North America. A Shorter Distance has given Jensen the chance to arrange her music for quintet, sextet, and septet formations. Adding the texture of guitar opened up a whole new spectrum of sound to explore, as it created a rich palette when combined with the piano. She was also able to further the development of the three-horn sound which she has spent a decade working on with her counterparts, Ingrid on trumpet and Joel Miller on tenor saxophone. The presence of Jon Wikan on drums gave her the "New York drive" that she was exploring over the last few years, as she has spent considerable amounts of time studying and sessioning her music there. Jensen has received numerous awards from both the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec. This has led her to have the opportunity to study with composers and saxophone teachers Jim McNeely, Dick Oatts, Kenny Werner, and Steve Wilson. Currently she resides in Paris as the recipient of the Québec Studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts untill January 2003. She is also a member of the BMI Composer's Workshop in New York, where she is able to study and have her large ensemble works played under the direction of Mr. McNeely. | |||
I |
Friday 7 August 2009
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Sep 24, 02:24 PM
Miles Davis - Kind of Blue 50th Anniversary Collectors Edition
Like a fine vintage wine - an epicurean delight near and dear to Miles Davis (1926-1991) - the music contained in Kind of Blue (recorded and released on Columbia in 1959) reveals added nuance and unexpected pleasures the older it gets. And yet with each year that Kind of Blue ages, it goes through a rejuvenation process that is exciting to behold. At the same time, the album inspires renewed levels of scholarship into the context of its creation, seeking to solve the mystery of its allure after five decades.
All the elements of the classic album's terroir - the earthy chemistry of Miles the creator and his "first great quintet": Julian ‘Cannonball' Adderley (1928-1975, alto saxophone), John Coltrane (1926-1967, tenor saxophone), Bill Evans (1929-1980, piano) or Wynton Kelly (1931-1971, piano), Paul Chambers (1935-1969, bass), and Jimmy Cobb (b. 1929, drums, the only surviving member), brought together at Columbia's old 30th Street Studio for less than ten hours of actual recording time - resulted in a work of deceptively stunning simplicity. Tens of thousands of jazz albums, and - three? four? - generations of jazz players later, the essence of Kind of Blue has never been duplicated. That may account, in part, for its RIAA triple-platinum status in the U.S. and worldwide recognition as a timeless masterpiece, #12 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time.KIND OF BLUE: 50th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTOR'S EDITION is an expansive and lavishly-designed, super-deluxe 12-inch slipcase box set. It gathers the entire panoramic sweep of the album's history - past, present and future - onto two CDs (running time over two hours); a newly-produced black-and-white documentary DVD (55 minutes); a full-size (12x12) 60-page perfect-bound book of critical essays, annotations, discographic data, timeline, and copious photography; and an envelope chockful of memorabilia; all accompanied - for the first time in the history of Legacy Recordings - by the original 12-inch LP package pressed on 180-gram blue vinyl. Together with an enormous 22x33 fold-out poster of Miles, the box set will be available at all retail outlets starting September 30th through Columbia/Legacy, a division of SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. Of special importance to Miles Davis aficionados around the globe is the DVD produced by Nell Mulderry: Celebrating A Masterpiece: Kind Of Blue. The new DVD incorporates material from the 2004 mini-documentary, Made In Heaven, including black-and-white still photography of the recording sessions and the voices of Miles (at the sessions), as well as excerpts of radio interviews with the late Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley. There are interviews with musicians and luminaries including composer/performer David Amram, the late Ed Bradley, Ron Carter, Jimmy Cobb, Bill Cosby, Herbie Hancock (who demonstrates "So What" at the piano), Eddie Henderson, Shirley Horn, Dave Liebman, the late Jackie McLean, funk-rocker Me'Shell Ndege'Ocello, hip-hop's Q-Tip, Carlos Santana, John Scofield, Horace Silver, and many others. The DVD also unearths the group's entire 26 minute in-session appearance on "Robert Herridge Theatre: The Sound of Miles Davis," a CBS television program recorded in 1959 and broadcast in 1960. Another bonus feature is the gallery of images captured by Columbia staff photographer Don Hunstein, covering the original recording sessions, as well as a key performance at New York's Plaza Hotel in September 1958. (Hunstein is prominently represented in the 50-plus images in the KIND OF BLUE: 50th book.) In conjunction with the latter, an unprecedented four-week exhibit of Miles Davis photography will be mounted at New York's downtown Morrison Hotel Gallery in November-December 2008 (also featuring live music); the exhibit will then travel to other Morrison Hotel locations and Starwood Hotels in 2009.Celebrating A Masterpiece: Kind Of Blue was directed by Chris Lenz, known for his work on the bonus DVD of interviews and performances that accompanied the 2003 Legacy Edition of Jeff Buckley Live At Sin-É. The new DVD was executive produced by Adam Block, co-produced by Ashley Kahn, and written by Michael Cuscuna.At the absolute core of KIND OF BLUE: 50th is the original 45-minute album program, whose five titles - "So What," "Freddie Freeloader," "Blue in Green," "All Blues," and "Flamenco Sketches" - are indelibly etched in our contemporary musical DNA, be it jazz, rock, third through fifth stream classical, or beyond. They are familiar old acquaintances on the LP as it existed in the marketplace for nearly three decades: the first three numbers occupying side one (which happened to have been cut on the first day of recording, two three-hour sessions on Monday, March 2, 1959); and the last two numbers on side two (recorded at the final three-hour session of Wednesday, April 22, 1959).On KIND OF BLUE: 50th's CD One, after the original five tunes are presented, there is the alternate take of "Flamenco Sketches," the only complete alternate take from the original recording sessions (a track first unveiled on the 5-LP/4-CD box set of 1988, Miles Davis: The Columbia Years 1955-1985, the first Miles Davis box set ever issued by Columbia). Following the alternate take, there are "studio sequences" (ranging from 11 seconds to nearly two minutes) for every one of the five titles, and one "false start". As transcribed and fleshed out by Ashley Kahn, these short tracks are eye-opening revelations into the studio relationship between Miles, the musicians, Columbia staff producer Irving Townsend, and recording engineer Fred Plaut, at this still-early stage in Miles' career as a leader (though he had been making records since 1945).The 1959 sessions occupy CD One - and then CD Two turns back the calendar to May 26, 1958. The five completed tracks from that session with producer Cal Lampley - "On Green Dolphin Street," "Fran-Dance" (with an alternate take), "Stella by Starlight," and "Love for Sale" - are the only other studio recordings of the sextet with Adderley, Coltrane, Evans, Chambers, and Cobb (though live recordings exist from the Newport Jazz Festival in July, and the Plaza in September). The five 1958 studio tracks, scattered on various LP through the years, were united in one place for the first time on the double Grammy Award-winning 6-CD box set issued in 2000, Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955-1961. Now, for the first time, the five 1958 studio tracks are rightfully coupled - at last - with the five sextet tracks of Kind of Blue. The final track on CD Two is a mesmerizing 17-minute live concert version of "So What" (without Adderley, with Kelly), recorded in Holland, April 1960.In late 1958, after some eight months, Bill Evans left the lineup and was replaced by Wynton Kelly. As Miles began to formulate his next studio recording, Evans was invited back for the sessions and became an integral spark on the album's conept. Cobb bears witness to the fact that "the concept behind Kind of Blue grew out of the way the two (Miles and Evans) played together," as Francis Davis writes. "Evans and Davis were certainly on the same wavelength, and the pianist certainly contributes more than a sideman's share of Kind of Blue's air of pensive melancholy. In addition to which, his eloquent liner notes - titled ‘Improvisation in Jazz' - cued listeners to hear the album as the very essence of jazz, an unmediated exercise in spontaneity."The session-by-session transcripts compiled and expounded by Ashley Kahn are an indication of the quantum advance in scholarly exegesis that has grown up around Miles Davis in general and Kind of Blue in particular. This intellectual pursuit is given full exposure in the course of the box set's 60-page book. Kahn's 3,000-word section, entitled "Between The Takes," reflects the full scope of research that went into his book Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Master¬piece (DaCapo Press, 2000; updated edition, Perseus, 2007, foreword by Jimmy Cobb).Kahn's section is preceded by two major in-depth studies from writers who have also studied their subject for their entire careers. The book's opening essay is a 4,000-word overview written by Francis Davis, contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, jazz columnist for The Village Voice, and winner of five ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for Excellence in Music Journalism. In addition to writing many books (among them The History of the Blues, Hyperion, 1995; and Jazz and Its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader, Perseus, 2004), he has also written liner notes for over 60 jazz and pop albums, including titles by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans."The two recording sessions for Kind of Blue," Francis Davis writes, "took place in the nick of time: it's impossible to imagine Davis, Evans, Coltrane, and Adderley coming together so harmoniously a year or two later, by which point each had become not just leader of his band but practically founder of his own school."The second essay, "The Last King Of America: How Miles Davis Invented Modernity," is a 3,000-word study by Professor Gerald Early of Washington University in St. Louis. Early, who has served as consultant on numerous Ken Burns documentary projects (Baseball, Jazz, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, The War), is a widely published author who has written about subjects diverse as Negro baseball, Motown, Sammy Davis Jr., Muhammad Ali - and Miles Davis. Early was the editor of Miles Davis and American Culture (2001), a compendium of essays."Kind of Blue would not have been possible if the LP did not exist," Early says. "It was jazz conceived for the record album, not only because of the playing times of the tunes but also because of how the album creates an overall mood. Kind of Blue is not simply a series of tracks as the standard small group jazz album of the day was. Kind of Blue was one of the few jazz records of its time that had a sense of narrative, a cohesive inter-relation between the tunes. It was a work, not a bunch of disparate tunes used to pace a small group jazz album: one fast-tempo piece, one ballad, one blues, one or two standards, a bop-oriented original. The sense of the album as an organic whole added to its appeal."Even so, the Kind of Blue LP was possessed by another kind of voodoo for decades. Musicians who tried to "play along" with the first three tracks (side one) were perplexed because the music always sounded slightly sharper than pitch. In 1995, the problem was traced back to the old Columbia 30th Street Studio, and a 3-track tape machine that was running slightly slow during the March recording sessions. As a result, after the mastering process, those first three tunes always sounded sharp. In 1995, this pitch problem was finally corrected. At the same time, it was decided to remix the original 3-track tapes on a Presto all-tube recorder, similar to the one used in 1959. The mixes were brought back to "real life." The rich, full instrumental sound was restored, rendering every previous configuration obsolete.Listening to KIND OF BLUE: 50th today, the ground rules come quickly: This was an exercise in solo and group improvisation, a break from the conventions of chordal complexity, "improvising on the sparest and starkest of scales as an alternative to bebop's dense thickets of chord changes," as Francis Davis writes. It was a "return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation," as Miles told The Jazz Review the year before. The works were composed (as it were) just hours before the sessions, so there could be no rehearsals as such. Once the group got past the "studio sequences" described earlier, the results were all first takes; only "Flamenco Sketches" was given an alternate take. Moreover, as Davis and Early and many other writers and musicians have openly discussed - and Miles would frequently accede - the five works all had their roots in other sources. Kind of Blue was the first Miles Davis album comprised entirely of songs credited to his name, even though at least two of its themes were provided by Evans: "Flamenco Sketches" (whose piano intro derived from Evans' "Peace Piece," itself based on Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time" from On The Town); and "Blue in Green," which (writes Davis) "sprang verbatim from [Evans'] introduction to ‘Alone Together' on an earlier recording of that standard by Chet Baker." This may have been business-as-usual in the jazz scene, but the financial impact of Miles not crediting anyone else certainly hastened the departure of Evans from the group.For a more voluminous study of this crucial period in jazz history, and the intersection of two of its prime movers - the ultimate destination is the aforementioned 6-CD box set, Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955-1961. Several of the elements of KIND OF BLUE: 50th saw first light on that box set eight years ago, including a broader six-year version of the timeline chronology prepared by Bob Belden and Ken Vail. Both old and new box sets reprise the LP liner notes written by Bill Evans, titled "Improvisation In Jazz" - but the new box set adds a facsimile of Evans' original three-page hand-written draft. It is part of a sheaf of memorabilia in the new box set that includes a reproduction of a "Miles Davis & Group" Columbia Records promotional brochure, and six 8x10 photographs.How and why has Kind of Blue held on to its status as an album that crosses genres, speaks to generations, and is one of the first (if not the first) album that any new jazz acolyte purchases? It "was one of those records," Early concludes, "along with Dave Brubeck's Time Out, another Columbia jazz record released in 1959, that made jazz a middlebrow music, a respectable music for middle-class, educated people who felt they had refined taste. This was enormously important for Davis both commercially and artistically for the rest of his career. As jazz ceased to be dance music, it needed middlebrow status in order to survive as art music. Davis was essential in making this transformation possible."
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Sep 24, 02:24 PM
Miles Davis - Kind of Blue 50th Anniversary Collectors Edition
Like a fine vintage wine - an epicurean delight near and dear to Miles Davis (1926-1991) - the music contained in Kind of Blue (recorded and released on Columbia in 1959) reveals added nuance and unexpected pleasures the older it gets. And yet with each year that Kind of Blue ages, it goes through a rejuvenation process that is exciting to behold. At the same time, the album inspires renewed levels of scholarship into the context of its creation, seeking to solve the mystery of its allure after five decades.
All the elements of the classic album's terroir - the earthy chemistry of Miles the creator and his "first great quintet": Julian ‘Cannonball' Adderley (1928-1975, alto saxophone), John Coltrane (1926-1967, tenor saxophone), Bill Evans (1929-1980, piano) or Wynton Kelly (1931-1971, piano), Paul Chambers (1935-1969, bass), and Jimmy Cobb (b. 1929, drums, the only surviving member), brought together at Columbia's old 30th Street Studio for less than ten hours of actual recording time - resulted in a work of deceptively stunning simplicity. Tens of thousands of jazz albums, and - three? four? - generations of jazz players later, the essence of Kind of Blue has never been duplicated. That may account, in part, for its RIAA triple-platinum status in the U.S. and worldwide recognition as a timeless masterpiece, #12 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time.KIND OF BLUE: 50th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTOR'S EDITION is an expansive and lavishly-designed, super-deluxe 12-inch slipcase box set. It gathers the entire panoramic sweep of the album's history - past, present and future - onto two CDs (running time over two hours); a newly-produced black-and-white documentary DVD (55 minutes); a full-size (12x12) 60-page perfect-bound book of critical essays, annotations, discographic data, timeline, and copious photography; and an envelope chockful of memorabilia; all accompanied - for the first time in the history of Legacy Recordings - by the original 12-inch LP package pressed on 180-gram blue vinyl. Together with an enormous 22x33 fold-out poster of Miles, the box set will be available at all retail outlets starting September 30th through Columbia/Legacy, a division of SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. Of special importance to Miles Davis aficionados around the globe is the DVD produced by Nell Mulderry: Celebrating A Masterpiece: Kind Of Blue. The new DVD incorporates material from the 2004 mini-documentary, Made In Heaven, including black-and-white still photography of the recording sessions and the voices of Miles (at the sessions), as well as excerpts of radio interviews with the late Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley. There are interviews with musicians and luminaries including composer/performer David Amram, the late Ed Bradley, Ron Carter, Jimmy Cobb, Bill Cosby, Herbie Hancock (who demonstrates "So What" at the piano), Eddie Henderson, Shirley Horn, Dave Liebman, the late Jackie McLean, funk-rocker Me'Shell Ndege'Ocello, hip-hop's Q-Tip, Carlos Santana, John Scofield, Horace Silver, and many others. The DVD also unearths the group's entire 26 minute in-session appearance on "Robert Herridge Theatre: The Sound of Miles Davis," a CBS television program recorded in 1959 and broadcast in 1960. Another bonus feature is the gallery of images captured by Columbia staff photographer Don Hunstein, covering the original recording sessions, as well as a key performance at New York's Plaza Hotel in September 1958. (Hunstein is prominently represented in the 50-plus images in the KIND OF BLUE: 50th book.) In conjunction with the latter, an unprecedented four-week exhibit of Miles Davis photography will be mounted at New York's downtown Morrison Hotel Gallery in November-December 2008 (also featuring live music); the exhibit will then travel to other Morrison Hotel locations and Starwood Hotels in 2009.Celebrating A Masterpiece: Kind Of Blue was directed by Chris Lenz, known for his work on the bonus DVD of interviews and performances that accompanied the 2003 Legacy Edition of Jeff Buckley Live At Sin-É. The new DVD was executive produced by Adam Block, co-produced by Ashley Kahn, and written by Michael Cuscuna.At the absolute core of KIND OF BLUE: 50th is the original 45-minute album program, whose five titles - "So What," "Freddie Freeloader," "Blue in Green," "All Blues," and "Flamenco Sketches" - are indelibly etched in our contemporary musical DNA, be it jazz, rock, third through fifth stream classical, or beyond. They are familiar old acquaintances on the LP as it existed in the marketplace for nearly three decades: the first three numbers occupying side one (which happened to have been cut on the first day of recording, two three-hour sessions on Monday, March 2, 1959); and the last two numbers on side two (recorded at the final three-hour session of Wednesday, April 22, 1959).On KIND OF BLUE: 50th's CD One, after the original five tunes are presented, there is the alternate take of "Flamenco Sketches," the only complete alternate take from the original recording sessions (a track first unveiled on the 5-LP/4-CD box set of 1988, Miles Davis: The Columbia Years 1955-1985, the first Miles Davis box set ever issued by Columbia). Following the alternate take, there are "studio sequences" (ranging from 11 seconds to nearly two minutes) for every one of the five titles, and one "false start". As transcribed and fleshed out by Ashley Kahn, these short tracks are eye-opening revelations into the studio relationship between Miles, the musicians, Columbia staff producer Irving Townsend, and recording engineer Fred Plaut, at this still-early stage in Miles' career as a leader (though he had been making records since 1945).The 1959 sessions occupy CD One - and then CD Two turns back the calendar to May 26, 1958. The five completed tracks from that session with producer Cal Lampley - "On Green Dolphin Street," "Fran-Dance" (with an alternate take), "Stella by Starlight," and "Love for Sale" - are the only other studio recordings of the sextet with Adderley, Coltrane, Evans, Chambers, and Cobb (though live recordings exist from the Newport Jazz Festival in July, and the Plaza in September). The five 1958 studio tracks, scattered on various LP through the years, were united in one place for the first time on the double Grammy Award-winning 6-CD box set issued in 2000, Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955-1961. Now, for the first time, the five 1958 studio tracks are rightfully coupled - at last - with the five sextet tracks of Kind of Blue. The final track on CD Two is a mesmerizing 17-minute live concert version of "So What" (without Adderley, with Kelly), recorded in Holland, April 1960.In late 1958, after some eight months, Bill Evans left the lineup and was replaced by Wynton Kelly. As Miles began to formulate his next studio recording, Evans was invited back for the sessions and became an integral spark on the album's conept. Cobb bears witness to the fact that "the concept behind Kind of Blue grew out of the way the two (Miles and Evans) played together," as Francis Davis writes. "Evans and Davis were certainly on the same wavelength, and the pianist certainly contributes more than a sideman's share of Kind of Blue's air of pensive melancholy. In addition to which, his eloquent liner notes - titled ‘Improvisation in Jazz' - cued listeners to hear the album as the very essence of jazz, an unmediated exercise in spontaneity."The session-by-session transcripts compiled and expounded by Ashley Kahn are an indication of the quantum advance in scholarly exegesis that has grown up around Miles Davis in general and Kind of Blue in particular. This intellectual pursuit is given full exposure in the course of the box set's 60-page book. Kahn's 3,000-word section, entitled "Between The Takes," reflects the full scope of research that went into his book Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Master¬piece (DaCapo Press, 2000; updated edition, Perseus, 2007, foreword by Jimmy Cobb).Kahn's section is preceded by two major in-depth studies from writers who have also studied their subject for their entire careers. The book's opening essay is a 4,000-word overview written by Francis Davis, contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, jazz columnist for The Village Voice, and winner of five ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for Excellence in Music Journalism. In addition to writing many books (among them The History of the Blues, Hyperion, 1995; and Jazz and Its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader, Perseus, 2004), he has also written liner notes for over 60 jazz and pop albums, including titles by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans."The two recording sessions for Kind of Blue," Francis Davis writes, "took place in the nick of time: it's impossible to imagine Davis, Evans, Coltrane, and Adderley coming together so harmoniously a year or two later, by which point each had become not just leader of his band but practically founder of his own school."The second essay, "The Last King Of America: How Miles Davis Invented Modernity," is a 3,000-word study by Professor Gerald Early of Washington University in St. Louis. Early, who has served as consultant on numerous Ken Burns documentary projects (Baseball, Jazz, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, The War), is a widely published author who has written about subjects diverse as Negro baseball, Motown, Sammy Davis Jr., Muhammad Ali - and Miles Davis. Early was the editor of Miles Davis and American Culture (2001), a compendium of essays."Kind of Blue would not have been possible if the LP did not exist," Early says. "It was jazz conceived for the record album, not only because of the playing times of the tunes but also because of how the album creates an overall mood. Kind of Blue is not simply a series of tracks as the standard small group jazz album of the day was. Kind of Blue was one of the few jazz records of its time that had a sense of narrative, a cohesive inter-relation between the tunes. It was a work, not a bunch of disparate tunes used to pace a small group jazz album: one fast-tempo piece, one ballad, one blues, one or two standards, a bop-oriented original. The sense of the album as an organic whole added to its appeal."Even so, the Kind of Blue LP was possessed by another kind of voodoo for decades. Musicians who tried to "play along" with the first three tracks (side one) were perplexed because the music always sounded slightly sharper than pitch. In 1995, the problem was traced back to the old Columbia 30th Street Studio, and a 3-track tape machine that was running slightly slow during the March recording sessions. As a result, after the mastering process, those first three tunes always sounded sharp. In 1995, this pitch problem was finally corrected. At the same time, it was decided to remix the original 3-track tapes on a Presto all-tube recorder, similar to the one used in 1959. The mixes were brought back to "real life." The rich, full instrumental sound was restored, rendering every previous configuration obsolete.Listening to KIND OF BLUE: 50th today, the ground rules come quickly: This was an exercise in solo and group improvisation, a break from the conventions of chordal complexity, "improvising on the sparest and starkest of scales as an alternative to bebop's dense thickets of chord changes," as Francis Davis writes. It was a "return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation," as Miles told The Jazz Review the year before. The works were composed (as it were) just hours before the sessions, so there could be no rehearsals as such. Once the group got past the "studio sequences" described earlier, the results were all first takes; only "Flamenco Sketches" was given an alternate take. Moreover, as Davis and Early and many other writers and musicians have openly discussed - and Miles would frequently accede - the five works all had their roots in other sources. Kind of Blue was the first Miles Davis album comprised entirely of songs credited to his name, even though at least two of its themes were provided by Evans: "Flamenco Sketches" (whose piano intro derived from Evans' "Peace Piece," itself based on Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time" from On The Town); and "Blue in Green," which (writes Davis) "sprang verbatim from [Evans'] introduction to ‘Alone Together' on an earlier recording of that standard by Chet Baker." This may have been business-as-usual in the jazz scene, but the financial impact of Miles not crediting anyone else certainly hastened the departure of Evans from the group.For a more voluminous study of this crucial period in jazz history, and the intersection of two of its prime movers - the ultimate destination is the aforementioned 6-CD box set, Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955-1961. Several of the elements of KIND OF BLUE: 50th saw first light on that box set eight years ago, including a broader six-year version of the timeline chronology prepared by Bob Belden and Ken Vail. Both old and new box sets reprise the LP liner notes written by Bill Evans, titled "Improvisation In Jazz" - but the new box set adds a facsimile of Evans' original three-page hand-written draft. It is part of a sheaf of memorabilia in the new box set that includes a reproduction of a "Miles Davis & Group" Columbia Records promotional brochure, and six 8x10 photographs.How and why has Kind of Blue held on to its status as an album that crosses genres, speaks to generations, and is one of the first (if not the first) album that any new jazz acolyte purchases? It "was one of those records," Early concludes, "along with Dave Brubeck's Time Out, another Columbia jazz record released in 1959, that made jazz a middlebrow music, a respectable music for middle-class, educated people who felt they had refined taste. This was enormously important for Davis both commercially and artistically for the rest of his career. As jazz ceased to be dance music, it needed middlebrow status in order to survive as art music. Davis was essential in making this transformation possible."
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