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How Miles Davis's Kind of Blue shaped 50 years of music

How Miles Davis's Kind of Blue shaped 50 years of music

Since Columbia/Sony reissued its 50th anniversary box set of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue a year prematurely in 2008, it feels as if we've already been celebrating this transformational moment in the evolution of 20th-century music for a long time.

However, Kind of Blue was first released in August 1959 – so for those keen on sticking to precise dates, its official anniversary has arrived. Another good reason to celebrate is this month's publication of The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the remaking of modern music – Guardian journalist Richard Williams's illuminating personal essay looking at the record's impact on jazz, pop and contemporary-classical music.

I didn't hear Kind of Blue for another six years after its original release, but when I did it was obvious that this was a jazz record different from anything I'd heard before, including the wayward leanings of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. A significant indicator was that it appealed to people who weren't even jazz fans. When Kind of Blue was playing, those who expected heart-on-sleeve vocals, sumptuously swelling strings and roaring operatic arias tended to ask with genuine fascination, "What's that?". As he did throughout his career, Davis seized your attention with barely a gesture, and certainly nothing as dictatorial and defining as a word.

As is now part of jazz folklore, the New York sessions that produced this remarkable album were completed in a handful of takes over just a few hours, with a minimum of compositional materials. Davis, guided by faith in the powers of his band, knew he was on to something revolutionary, and the outcome has supported that conviction ever since.

It's no longer necessary to remind music lovers that Kind of Blue is essential listening, and that everybody who wants to make sense of the music of our time ought to have at least some idea of what's good about it. But Richard Williams's book, Kind of Blue, in the spirit of the original record, suggests connections – to Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, John Cale, the Velvet Underground, James Brown, Sly Stone, Soft Machine, Brian Eno, Manfred Eicher and the ECM Records label, Moby and more – that readers can assimilate and then make their own associations. Williams quotes Eno as wanting to make music more "like environment" than "like stories", and suggests that late 20th-century and early 21st-century listeners find Kind of Blue a crucial inspiration. This is because it encourages an active and participatory experience, inviting the listener to find fresh patterns from music with a more suggestive empty space.

All that might not necessarily be obvious from the clip above, a 1959 account of Kind of Blue's So What, with Davis, John Coltrane and a Gil Evans-led band. They play it faster than on the album, and maybe with less mystery, but in the pared-down arrangements and solo there is a sense of infinity and endless possibility, of a loose-strung story that is going to forever change the way we listen to music.

original text found on www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog

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If anyone roams across Sydney as much as I do, then one would inevitably find oneself raising that hand, getting into that taxi and dreading that meter going up and up while he takes you to your destination.

But like many others, I've found that some of the best conversations I've ever had were with cabbies.

The last one I met was a Polish engineer who proceeded to explain to me how to pave the outside of my house from scratch, because the "professionals" don't know how to do it properly. He was unimpressed and blatantly questioned why I was studying law while stating that "engineers are respected a lot more in Europe than in the West". Honestly, he seemed far more educated than me.

Before him there was another driver who engaged me in a stimulating conversation about Indian poetry and literature. With another, I had an argument about raising children in different cultures.

The reason for this is one that we've heard almost too often - qualified immigrants come to Australia, their expertise is refused recognition, and they get stuck driving people around the city when their true skills obviously lie elsewhere.

We can't help these guys get a job. But next time you sit in a cab, don't be afraid to have a chat. You never know who you might be talking to.  

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This entire fiasco is an incredible over reaction. Australia is an easy target. Why? because we are honest, transperant and we talk about our failings. Is there aggression and iolence in Australia? Sure, like any country. But we face it head on and we work to eliminate it. What about the stories of the 100’s of thousands of Indian workers who are treated as slaves in the middle east and nobody says anything? What about the fact that India still has entrenched pedophilia in terms of child brides? What about the crushing poverty embraced by more than 60% of the Indian people while this nation runs around building nuclear warheads? A storm in a teacup, an over reaction, and a diversion from some the really bad issues facing India. What is really happening here is that students are being unnecessarily frightened. meaning they will miss out on what could be the opportunity of their lifetime. - Daryl
 
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