A TRACK-BY-TRACK GUIDE TO MILES DAVIS’S KIND OF BLUE, THE GREATEST JAZZ ALBUM EVER:
The critical reaction was sometimes baffled by the absence of easily graspable melodies, but it was mostly awe-struck. Benny Green wrote on the album’s liner that “Davis is the most delicately poised musician ever to use the jazz frame…classic severity is the hallmark of Miles’s painful sensitivity, as he devotes his attention to each single note.” Later it floated free from the jazz world to become, as Richard Cooke described it in the Penguin Guide to Jazz, “the hippest easy-listening album of them all”. Not everyone was ecstatic. Some missed the absence of jazz’s wonted driving energy, and Philip Larkin couldn’t stand the “passionless creep” of Miles Davis’s muted trumpet.
As with many classic albums, there was something miraculous about the birth of Kind of Blue. All the stars had to be aligned, and that wasn’t easy in such a volatile art as jazz, where everything depends on the musical chemistry between naturally headstrong individuals.
Well worth a read, but there’s a jarring “layers and layers of fact checkers and editors” moment in this London Telegraph article for even the most cursory of Miles Davis fans. It’s a sort of photographic Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect moment; as author Ivan Hewett notes, “Crucial to the album’s soft-edged, blurry sound was Bill Evans, also no stranger to heroin and booze.” So much so that Evans died in 1980 at age 51 of a “peptic ulcer, cirrhosis, bronchial pneumonia, and untreated hepatitis,” according to Wikipedia.
But the photo above that text is captioned, “Miles Davis (R) and saxophone player Bill Evans (L) performing on stage in Paris, 1982.” There was a second Bill Evans, born in 1958, who played and recorded frequently with Miles in the 1980s. But that’s not him in the photo, which based on Miles’ hairstyle and wrap-around sunglasses, is from the early 1970s. It’s Dave Liebman, who played sax with Miles in 1973.
Related: From me in 2019: The 60th Anniversary of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis’ Masterpiece.