Kind of cool

First off, Happy Birthday to Dave Matthews!!  A favourite musician whose music has kept me from going off the deep end. 

Second, I'm still thinking about the cool.  Namely, Miles Davis.  He was too cool for cool.  Born not into a life of hardship, but privilege, his parents sent him to The Juilliard School, only to have him drop out after spending all of his time working out new chords and harmonies in the practice room instead of going to class.  Too hip to even look at the audience, he preferred to play with his back to the crowd and would commonly leave the stage after his solo.  The trumpeter went through the typical drug addiction routine, like many of his contemporaries, but eventually got clean and continued to record. 

There are many theories about why Davis was so iconic.  Why was he cool?  What made his music cool?  What is cool jazz?  Davis entered the New York scene just as bebop was taking off, and he actually shared the stage with bop saxist Charlie "Bird" Parker.  Bebop is, to use Ted Gioia's terms, "hot jazz at its most intense."  Long, winding phrases, unrelenting progressions, florid solo passages, usually all at a very fast clip.  Which makes Davis' transition to cool all the more remarkable.  Here he was on the best bop training ground possible, but instead he turns around, musically, and lays everything so far back that his first record, Birth of the Cool (recorded in 1949 but released later), though a musical masterpiece, was a commercial flop. 

In 1959 Kind of Blue was released.  It features Davis on trumpet, Bill Evans on piano, John Coltrane on tenor sax, Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, rounded out by drummer Jimmy Cobb and bassist Paul Chambers.  In this record Davis placed restrictions on his soloists.  Instead of following the progressions in a conventional way, he had them restrict note choices to within specific modes.  This modal jazz gives an intensely cool sound (intensely cool is a bit of an oxymoron.  Haha!).  The world was changing and audiences were more prepared for this shift in style, Kind of Blue was a success.  Even today, it is cited as one of the most influential jazz records.

I have a special memory of one of the tunes from this album.  While at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp one summer, I remember walking through the woods to get to rehearsal and on more than one occasion hearing a simple, plaintive melody.  Basically made up of two notes.  The tones stuck in my brain, and later I learned that the music I heard in the forest (probably from a jazz group rehearsing nearby) was Freddie Freeloader from the Kind of Blue album.  Go listen.