Few jazz albums are easier to listen to than Kind of Blue, which isn’t to suggest it’s easy listening, though I think for many it does function as unchallenged aural wallpaper. If there’s a unifying idea to what makes music last and spread, it’s melody. That’s what makes The Beatles as popular as they are more than anything. Not ideas, not depth—hummability.
We can think about a witty, incisive song like “They Can’t Take that Away from Me” by George and Ira Gershwin, and for all of the value packed in those lyrics, they’re not what’s going through your head as you vocalize the song in the shower. You can’t hum Charlie Parker’s “Ko-Ko,” but good luck getting the melody to “So What” from Kind of Blue out of your head.
This is wordless jazz, but highly melodic jazz has these kind of built-in, ghost words. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald realized as much and gave those ghost words discernible shapes via scatting. The instrumentalists on Kind of Blue perform a variation on the idea, save the “voice” is Bill Evans’ piano or Cannonball Adderley’s horn.
Coltrane could do melody, but Kind of Blue has always felt to me like he had been asked to be a sixth man coming off the bench, rather than a starter and potential MVP candidate. I heard the album early in my own initial foray into jazz as a teenager. I don’t think there’s anyone who comes to Kind of Blue after years of listening to jazz. It will be among the first 10 albums you hear, and, more often than not, the first one you seek out unless you’re a listener on a mission.
That can be problematic. I feel like I need to preface the next remark by saying try to stay calm, but here we go: Kind of Blue isn’t close to the best music Miles Davis ever made. Nor is it the best music from this period. Milestones from the previous year, waxed by the first great quintet with the addition of Adderley to the mix, also explored modes, but with greater derring-do.
Kind of Blue tries to please, and when we try to please, we often try to placate. Milestones, on the other hand, answers first to its own aims and standards, and stands up just as the much to repeat listen as the more famous record that followed. Then there are the sessions at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago from December 1965 with Davis’ second great quintet, and the Cellar Door material from Washington, D.C. in 1970.
