That album opened up the rock market for Miles and his mates, resulting in sell-out tours of the USA, Europe and Japan. Many of those who played with the master in those days went on to set up their own key fusion units, the afore-mentioned McLaughlin forming the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Zawinul and Shorter linking up for Weather Report, and sidemen like Airto Moreira, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock and Billy Cobham cropping up on an endless series of stunning albums recorded under a variety of names, but all bearing the unmistakeable influence of Miles Davis.
Miles Davis possibly enjoyed more musical peaks that any other musician in history. Please contact us. Join Our Newsletter. More Stories. They were portrayed negatively. Performing Arts. In , the parade replaced live animals with helium balloons designed by puppeteer Tony Sarg.
In the year of Dostoevsky's bicentennial, a revisiting of familial relationships in one of his most popular works. Ever since the medium was invented, people have used photography to document loss. This distinction may seem slight, but its implications were enormous. In a bebop improvisation, the chord changes which occur when, usually, the pianist changes the harmony from one chord to another serve as a compass; they point the direction to the next bar or the next phrase.
Chords follow a particular pattern that's why it's easy to hum along with most blues and ballads ; you know what the next chord will be; you know that the notes you play will consist of the notes that comprise that chord or some variation on them. Playing blues, you know that the sequence of chord changes will be finished in 12 bars or, if it's a song, 32 bars , and then you'll either end your solo or start the sequence again.
Russell threw the compass out the window. You could play all the notes of a scale, which is to say any and all notes. One night in , Russell sat down with Davis at a piano and laid out his theory's possibilities—how to link chords, scales, and melodies in almost unlimited combinations. Miles realized this was a way out of bebop's cul-de-sac. In an interview that year with critic Nat Hentoff, Miles explained the new approach.
You don't have to worry about changes, and you can do more with time. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you are. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them. Davis needed one more thing before he could go this route: a pianist who knew how to accompany without playing chords.
This was a radical notion. Laying down the chords—supplying the frontline horn players with the compass that kept their improvisations on the right path—was what modern jazz pianists did. Russell recommended someone he'd hired for a few of his own sessions, an intense young white man named Bill Evans. Evans was conservatory-trained with a penchant for the French Impressionist composers, like Ravel and Debussy, whose harmonies floated airily above the melody line.
When Evans started playing jazz, he tended not to play the root of a chord; for instance, when playing a C chord, he'd avoid playing a C note. Instead, he'd play some other note in, or hovering around, the chord, suggesting the chord without locking himself into its restraints. Davis hired Evans for his next recording date, the session that became Kind of Blue , which would be the perfect expression of this new approach to playing.
This vamp is used between the first and second choruses of the theme, and between soloists. Davis enters on harmon muted trumpet against a piano and bass accompaniment, and then outlines the order of the five modes used for improvisation, and this order is followed in turn by Coltrane, Adderley, Evans and Davis again, although they are free to play on each mode for as long as they want.
Davis : Mode no. Adderley : Mode no. Evans : Mode no. Davis : Mode No. Note that Adderley chooses the greatest variation of mode lengths. Davis [actually Bill Evans] constructed fragmentary tone-rows which replace harmony in giving the music coherence. These tunes, whatever their correct titles, comprised selections one and two respectively of side two of the vinyl releases.
It has been learned by heart by almost every aspiring jazz musician on the planet, it has been set to words by Eddie Jefferson and orchestrated for trumpet section on the George Russell album So What Blue Note from It is an effective technique that has the effect of projecting a great solo onto a larger screen.
What is interesting is that the piece had a preset chord progression whose duration could be altered by the instrumentalists during their improvisation. However, the master machine operating that day was running slightly slower than the industry standard of 15 ips. Unaware of this, the technicians took the tape from this recorder to mix and master Kind of Blue.
For decades, musicians were aware that when playing along with side one of Kind of Blue it was necessary to retune their instruments to a slightly sharper pitch so as to be in tune with the recording. This anomaly was rectified in with the release of the gold Mastersound reissue of Kind of Blue , using the tape recorded at the correct pitch from the safety machine. The after-the-fact rationalisation of pitch correction has its critics, especially those who grew up with the slightly sharp version of the original vinyl side one.
I think that is important for us to hear. But here the difference is so slight that what it might do, if anything, is slightly broaden the sound and it might be intriguing to hear the true tempo of it, and the true sound of it.
Fred Plaut was a highly educated and responsive engineer, trained in classical recording techniques, and that was a big difference.
0コメント