A story about Miles Davis and the nature of true genius

http://www.elezea.com/2012/05/true-genius/

by pascal07 • 14 years ago

116 46 14 years ago

m0skit0• 14 years ago

Nice article, but you failed to focus one of the real co-authors of Kind of Blue: Bill Evans. There would be no "Kind of Blue" or Miles Davis without Bill Evans. You can even say "Kind of Blue" is a Evans' LP by how much his influence on composition and arrangement is strong, how his "impressionist" way of playing is permeating everything... One of most underrated musicians ever.

microtonal2• 14 years ago

For correctness: I think you mean 'Gil Evans'?

michael_dorfman2• 14 years ago

No; Bill Evans and Gil Evans are two different people (and both collaborated with Miles.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Evans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Evans

demet8• 14 years ago

Bill Evans played with Miles Davis for no more than a total of 8 months. Miles Davis was a genius before he met Bill Evans. Bill Evans was a good piano player who complemented Miles's playing style @ the time. Without Miles Davis there's no Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers, etc.

stephencanon2• 14 years ago

All of the players you mention would be remembered as greats with or without Miles Davis. Their playing might have been different, but Miles wouldn't have been Miles without them, either.

Calling Bill Evans a "good piano player" is like calling Feynman a "good physicist".

bitops3• 14 years ago

IMO its not Miles Davis that deserves all that credit but Duke Ellington.

davidthewatson• 14 years ago

Well-stated retrospective that gets at a common point between great art and great design.

Charles Mingus said, "Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."

I only wish that kind of sentiment drove more modern design work, or music for that matter. I guess the fact that it's so exceedingly difficult to do explains why we only see it once in a decade in a given domain. Still, I find striving for what Mingus describes, and what Davis achieved, a worthwhile goal.

bhousel4• 14 years ago

First.. I'm a huge fan of this stuff, and Kind of Blue is one of my favorite records.

That said, I think that the author is making a mistake by taking Stephen Thomas Erlewine's review too seriously. When you read things like "an album that towers above its peers, a record generally considered as the definitive jazz album, a universally acknowledged standard of excellence..." take it for what it is -- fawning praise written 50 years later by a fanboy.

Read a bit further... "this music never flaunts its genius," a line that stuck with the blogger. In fact, anybody who knows a bit about Miles Davis is probably laughing now about how backwards this is. Miles was Mr. Flaunty Genius.

"Kind of Blue is more than easy listening. It's the pinnacle of modal jazz"... I think at this point, modal jazz was just getting started, not reaching it's pinnacle.

"...this is an exceptional band... one of the greatest in history, playing at the peak of its power. "... Um, no! None of these musicians were at the peak of their power at all. They all went on to do more.

Unfortunately now the blogger is trapped in this line of thinking, and he writes... "I think what draws me to this album is the enormous restraint that each of these brilliant musicians show... They were all extraordinary musicians at the top of their games, and yet they came together and produced a piece of work that doesn’t feel strained or over the top. There is a sense of comfort – of rightness – to every note on the album."... In fact, there are other critics that have said that Cannonball Adderley was really a wrong choice for Kind of Blue - his playing stands out as being too bluesy and he didn't really "get" the modal jazz like the other musicians.

Anyway, I guess my point is to be wary of empty praise. The author was clearly moved by the music, and the Erlewine review reinforced those feelings, but he is missing out on a lot of interesting lines of criticism that might bring him new insights. Jazz, like other abstract arts, is especially interesting because of how malleable it can be, with each listener bringing their own perspectives and opinions into how they perceive the work. The best ones (and Kind of Blue is among them) will grab your attention, play off your memories and emotions, and inspire you.

sk5t• 14 years ago

I couldn't agree more... a lot of the appeal of Kind of Blue isn't its musicians' virtuosity, but rather that the pieces are very well-executed, accessible and interesting to both casual listeners and "serious" jazz fans, and the recording is now very, very familiar.

noname1234• 14 years ago

Can you explain how improvisation is different in modal jazz vs. improvisation over chord changes?

I understand that instead of targeting the tones found in chord progressions, Miles Davis etc. focused on playing the tones in D Dorian mode for "So What?" which has notes that could be actually dissonant to whatever chord-tones/walking bass being played. But how does one actually construct a modal solo and does one not think about at all the chord-progression being played at all or is chord consonance still very important?

davydka• 14 years ago

Chord consonance is still important in modal jazz. For the most part, the players have more freedom to stretch out on longer harmonic movement, rather than hopping around quickly like in bebop. If you look closely at transcriptions of the solos in kind of blue, some of the players do hint at chord progressions towards the beginning, middle, and end of their solos, which might be the dissonance you mentioned. At least, this is what I remember from back in music school. :)

zedshaw• 14 years ago

Well, three things about modern Jazz to understand:

1. Dissonance isn't bad or good, it's just more or less tension. 2. You can alter chords with substitutions, effectively creating a "chord abstraction theory". 3. If you can get abstract about chords, and that lets you play similar chords where other chords are, then you can do the same thing with scales.

They then just play fewer chords. If you only have 3, or even 1 chord, then you can simply stay in one key and solo all day long. You can then go outside the key to add tension with dissonant notes by picking a new "abstraction".

This reduction in the number of chords in the song then lets you play with abstractions on the chords being used. You can start doing substitutions with chords that are similar to give the song a feeling of progression where there really is none.

If I remember correctly, Freddie Hubbard's "Mr. Clean" is just a F-7 chord for the whole song, but check out what they do with it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5CNYsmAJwI

BTW, I hate that song.

bhousel4• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if you are a musician or not, but for now just accept that, to a musician, each mode has it's own "feel". If you are playing in D Dorian, it "feels" different than C Ionian or G Mixolydian, even those these all involve the same primary notes.

Chord consonance in a modal solo is far less important than in blues or bop, but for sure there is a structure to whatever song you're playing (i.e. rules) and you need to know those rules in order to sound capable.

The old rules of bop and blues said that you need to hit specific notes at the right times to sound good. There were right and wrong notes. The newer rules that Miles introduced with Footprints (1958) and continuing with Kind of Blue (1959) freed him and his musicians to explore a lot more and "play around" in certain modes. (I say "play" in the sense of what a child might do, not "play" in the sense of "playing" an instrument). In a modal solo, the aim is to create a melody, not demonstrate capability by hitting the "right" notes as fast as possible. In bop, playing the 9th or 11th of a chord would sound weird, whereas in modal jazz you can linger over those notes and it could sound really nice.

initself• 14 years ago

I really dislike your point of view.

  - Kind of Blue *is* a definitive jazz album.

  - Miles was *not* flaunting during that particular time period of writing and 
  recording.  He changed his mode of expression and self numerous times throughout 
  his life.

  - The musicians *were* at their peak *while they were together for this 
  recording*.

  - Cannonball Adderley's playing is often times the best of the bunch.

I don't think you can have "empty praise" when you are expressing your subjective opinion about music and you like something.

jmmcd• 14 years ago

The application of these artistic principles to startups is such a stretch. If it was just about coding, fine: restraint is good, technical ability is good, cooperation is good. But why should a startup be worried about whether it's flaunting its genius?

_urga2• 14 years ago

Tone is everything. People pick up when you have their interests at heart.

rglover• 14 years ago

I think it comes down to a matter of taste. Having the ability to restrain one's ego is the mark of a true professional. If you're good, you don't have to flaunt it, your work just speaks for itself. For startups, this doesn't mean you can't promote or sell your product as you see fit, but you shouldn't run around saying "what we've come up with is the most brilliant thing in the world." A lot of people do this and it's quite the detractor. Again, though, this is a taste thing and not a universal preference.

mark_integerdsv• 14 years ago

I'm feeling a little cranky over this... possible viral from the upvomgin biopic starring Don Cheadle?

(Hopefully this will be the Oscar that Cheadle has already earned in my opinion...)

chernevik2• 14 years ago

IANA Musician but rumor has it that Davis wasn't a great technical trumpet player, that he lacked the speed and range of others. The essence of his genius was in his understanding of the music and his ability to examine and re-arrange its principles.

It's worth considering in the discussion of the value of 'rock star' programmers.

byproxy• 14 years ago

His sense of melody, arc, and color were second to none. I don't think he was totally without chops, though. He was playing faster and more agressive with his hard-bop crew.

chernevik2• 14 years ago

Right, didn't mean to say that he was, just that the knowledgable could name technically better players who weren't anything like as important.

tjr• 14 years ago

He was something of a groundbreaking musician, establishing new concepts and then moving on to yet more new things, while others picked up his ideas and ran with them. His "Birth of the Cool" music, for example, really wasn't very popular at the time he did it. As I recall, the recordings weren't even released until years later, because it just wasn't expected to be well-received. In retrospect, it was great music, and helped set the stage for a whole sub-genre of jazz.

He was also adept at discovering / identifying great up-and-coming musicians and associating himself with them, to the benefit of both parties.

sebphfx2• 14 years ago

as the great Tony Williams

gtani• 14 years ago

Depends, he had classical chops and attended Juilliard briefly (in those days it was uptown by Columbia) and could produce beautiful tone in all registers, but critics have commented that he couldn't produce the dazzling topspeed runs that Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker or Coltrane had, nor did he want to duplicate what anybody else had done.

_urga2• 14 years ago

Miles Davis knew when to keep silent. He played the notes and the space between them.

sebphfx2• 14 years ago

and he was the happiest when he found the "sweet spot" on stage.

vijayr• 14 years ago

This. Bruce Lee said the same, about his movements

scutfarkas• 14 years ago

How do you know somebody owns a 180g vinyl copy of "Kind of Blue"?

Don't worry - they'll tell you.

planetguy• 14 years ago

Wow, people sure do fall over themselves to declare people "geniuses" nowadays.

alexyoung• 14 years ago

That's genius.

bitops3• 14 years ago

That may be true, but Davis really was a genius.

parenthesis• 14 years ago

For me, the real genius of Miles Davis was in his role as band leader, in particular in choosing his bands. A large number of great jazz musicians from successive generations (1950s to 1980s) played in his bands early in their careers. He was a jazz professor with them his grad students.

daeken• 14 years ago

Unrelated but awesome anecdote about Miles Davis: After Sketches of Spain (his most impressive album IMO) was released, there was a huge debate about whether it was 'jazz' or not. When asked about it, he responded "it's music, and I like it." Perfect response.

surement2• 14 years ago

Equivalently, it's difficult to say whether Anthony Braxton's or John Zorn's music is jazz, even though they use improvisation, and are referred to as jazz musicians.

jules• 14 years ago

Can somebody help me to appreciate the genius of jazz music? When I listen to Kind of Blue it does sound nice, but I am not deeply moved by it or able to appreciate its genius, like I can with some classical music. I have the same question for people knowledgeable about poetry and abstract art (and some non-abstract art).

bitops3• 14 years ago

Go out to somewhere urban late at night and find a spot where you can watch people and cars go by. It should be late, maybe an hour before most places close. Then listen to Kind of Blue. If it doesn't move you, it could just be you that you're not a jazz fan.

Or try listening to "A Love Supreme" early in the morning before you leave the house. This time of year is a perfect time for it.

Or if it's raining, put on "Blue in Green" from Kind of Blue.

bhousel4• 14 years ago

Here's a thought. Do you know your Meyers-Briggs type? It sounds like you might be more of a "thinker" than a "feeler".

If you're more of a "thinker", start at the beginning, learning about the roots of blues and ragtime, what life was like in New Orleans in 1900.. Then work your way forward, learning about how jazz evolved into more modern forms. It's a really fascinating story.

You could check out the Ken Burns documentary. I also really recommend this "coffee table" book, which really covers everything (in case you don't want to watch 20 hours of documentary about something you don't really care much about): http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-John-Fordham/dp/0751300500/ref=sr...

This approach will work for art, literature.. really anything..

A story about Miles Davis and the nature of true genius

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