Why is kind of blue so important

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. A difference in the use of space by the engineer, and dynamics and arrangements for the musicians.

Pure professional and artistic choices. And the results are born out in the contrasts of recorded styles. With Milestones they were recording the hardest of hard bop. Harold Chapman was a commercial engineer who specialised in vocals. So he could really get a romantic sound out of Miles and Bill Evans and that was partly due to the subdued nature of the music, which partly may have been influenced by the ambient nature of the studio.

Conjecture, I admit, but based on experience in a recording environment. It is also worth noting that the sound of Kind of Blue was an important influence on record producer Manfred Eicher, helping him shape an aesthetic towards recorded sound that has informed over 1, albums on the internationally renowned ECM label.

It is interesting to note that during an month period between May and November , no less than ten different studio albums and several EPs by Miles Davis were released in the United Kingdom during this period through both Columbia and Prestige. You might be forgiven for thinking critics of the time might have suffered from Davis overload during this period, but not a bit of it. So there must have been high expectations by the time Kind of Blue was released in the UK.

Indeed, some British fans had probably already read American reviews of the album in Downbeat which had appeared in the 1 October edition. It is one of the best jazz discs I have heard so far this year. For that matter it is one of the best jazz discs of any year.

This disc is also a pointer to the way that jazz can-and-will-develop. Yet for Davis, having completed what today is probably considered one of the greatest jazz albums of all time on 22 April, it was business as usual. On 29 April he closed at Birdland after playing a week with his sextet alongside the Gil Evans Orchestra before heading for Chicago where he closed at the Sutherland Lounge on 18 May. Music scholar Samuel Barrett argues, however, that this narrative oversimplifies both the way Kind of Blue was composed and performed, and its true cultural impact.

Modal jazz emphasized melodies created through scales, just as the blues had always done, albeit with a more limited set of tools—typically the pentatonic scale. Many of the scales Davis chooses, despite being more abstract in their total conception, still employ many of the flatted thirds and sevenths characteristic of the blues. Barrett argues that Davis thus authoritatively married the blues to the freer forms of the musical avant garde in a manner reflecting the integrationist spirit of the racial politics of the era.

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