506 - Miles Davis' Kind of Blue

Miles Davis' Kind of Blue
By Jon Michael Spencer

When I listen to the cool jazz cuts on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, he album produced during what the sextet leader called his most "fertile creative period" (1954 to 1960),¹ I sense that the music has something to-do with -the spiritual-realm. That is, the composi­tions on Kind of Blue are neither of a tempest tempo nor eerily intense like the bebop Davis was moving away from after a stint with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie "Bird" Parker. Rather, the compositions are orga­nized around simple melodies constructed by the melodists and improvising soloists selecting from the sparse number of notes in the particular modal scale or scales of a piece. The rhythm of the album's music, carried and conveyed by the drums and the bass, is equally easeful and supple, forming a cushion on which the select notes of the melodies find space to rest and resonate. Thus, the rhythmic feel of the music comes not through truculent sounds pulsating against the listening flesh but seemingly from within the body whence it extends outward in the form of tapping the foot and nodding the head and exuding spirituality.

Cultural critic Pearl Cleage similarly describes Kind of Blue as re­strained but hip, passionate but Cool.² Cleage goes on to say of Davis and his music:

He became a permanent part of the seduction ritual. Chill the wine. Light the candles. Put on a little early Miles: Give the gentleman caller an immediate understanding of what kind of woman he was dealing with.... This was the woman I was learning to be, and I will confess that I spent many memorable

Jon Michael Spencer is the Tyler and Alice Haynes Professor of American Studies and Professor of Music at the University of Richmond. Among his numerous books are Black Hymnody (1992), Blues and Evil (1993), and The Rhythms of Black Folk (1995).
¹Miles Davis (with Quincy Troupe), Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), pp. 235, 410.
²Pearl Cleage, Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot (New York: Ballantine, 1994), p. 40.

507 - Miles Davis' Kind of Blue

evenings sending messages of great personal passion through the intricate improvisations of Kind of Blue.³

Miles Davis himself considered jazz to be spiritual, and not alone the

jazz on John Coltrane's A Love Supreme or Duke Ellington's Concert Of

Sacred Music.⁴ Davis also considered his own music to be "spiritual" and

"about the spirit," characteristics that neither he nor Coltrane and

Ellington believed were derived from or dependent on the Judeo-

Christian tradition. "I personally don't like a lot of things that are

"He believed that performance made music an entity, and, in that regard, he preferred the live performance over that of the studio set."

happening in organized religion," Davis declared. "It don't seem too spiritual to me, but more about money and power, and I can't go for that." Davis continued, "I do believe in being spiritual and do believe in spirits. I always have. I believe my mother and father come to visit me. I believe all the musicians that I have known who are now dead do, too.... It's ... spiritual... and part of what I am today is them.... Music is about the spirit and the spiritual.”⁵

If we look at Davis' views from the perspective of the philosophy of music, we can tease out some of the spiritual possibilities of jazz by asking the "what is" question of philosophy: What is (jazz) music? That is, where does the existence of jazz commence-prior to composition (musical discoverism), at the point of compositional documentation (musical formalism), or at the point of performance? Davis certainly contested the Western concept of music as being first and foremost that which is notated.⁶ Rather, he believed that performance made music an entity, and, in that regard, he preferred the live performance over that of the studio set .⁷

There is an extreme form of musical formalism called "musical Platonism," which holds that music is an ideal, ontological entity that transcends physical reality and is only imperfectly embodied in the material world via performance. Davis hinted that he might be a musical Platonist when he commented that he never liked liner notes on his albums because he felt that no one could adequately capture in words what he was "trying" to say in music, that the music had to speak for itself.⁸ But the music was also "trying" to find its ideal expression. For

³Ibid., pp. 40-41.
⁴Davis, Miles, p. 286.
⁵Ibid., p. 411.
⁶Ibid., p. 89.
⁷Ibid., p. 265.
⁸Ibid., p. 252.

508 - Miles Davis' Kind of Blue

Davis remarked that he spent his whole career questing for the musical experience he had when he first heard Dizzy and Bird perform together in Billy Eckstine's band at the Riviera Club in St. Louis.⁹ "I've come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I've never quite got there," Davis stated. "I've gotten close, but not all the way there. I'm always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day."¹⁰ Not only did Davis imply that the "feeling" of Dizzy and Bird's music was somewhere in the air waiting to be recaptured or discovered, but that the music itself was somewhere out there. "I believe their music is still around somewhere," Davis said with regard to his earlier performances with Dizzy and Bird in New York City. "The shit we played together has to be somewhere around in the air because we blew it there and that shit was magical, was spiritual."¹¹

Seemingly it was also as a musical Platonist that Miles Davis valued spontaneity over polish and precision in his musical performances. He believed in the potential of his musicians and himself to discover in­stances of genius that lay in wait for especially talented musicians. He said he learned this from Bird during his stint with Bird's band in New York City: "He was real spontaneous, went on his instinct. He didn't conform to Western ways of musical group interplay by organizing everything. Bird was a great improviser and that's where he thought great music came from and what great musicians were about." This concept, Davis contin­ued, later helped him with his own music.¹² This is why the album Kind of Blue was intentionally recorded from first takes of unrehearsed musical sketches that Davis brought to the recording studio on the two recording dates in March and April of 1959.¹³ Davis said of his sextet that recorded the album:

I wanted them to go beyond themselves. See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that-but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He has to use his imagination, be more creative, more innovative; he's got to take more risks. He's got to play above what he knows-far above it-and what that might lead to might take him above the place where he's been playing all along, to the new place where he finds himself right now-and to the next place he's going and even above that! ... Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.¹⁴

So, the sound Davis wanted could not be prearranged but had to "come out of a process," a process that Davis said is rooted in improvisation and makes jazz so fabulous.¹⁵

Here is the window, opened via the philosophy of music, through which

⁹VW., pp. 7-8.
¹⁰Ibid., p. 10.
¹¹Ibid., p. 411.
¹²Ibid, p. 89.
¹³Ibid., pp. 233-234.
¹⁴Ibid., p. 220.
¹⁵Ibid., p. 300.

509 - Miles Davis' Kind of Blue

we can partly see Davis' understanding of the spirituality of jazz. Having the freedom necessary to explore musical space seemed to Davis to be the prerequisite to music's being able to exude spirituality. This very idea is implied by social ethicist Peter Paris in his book The Spirituality of African Peoples. Paris identifies improvisation not merely as a possible key to a black aesthetic but as an African American moral virtue that derives from African cultures, a moral virtue with obvious spiritual qualities. He writes:

Improvisation comprises unpredictable variations on a theme. It brings novelty to bear on the familiar, not for the sake of destroying the latter, but for the purpose of heightening the individuality and uniqueness of the agent and his or her creative ability. Improvisation expresses not only the agent's creativity and spontaneity but also his or her spirit of perceptive wholeness. By keeping the old and new close at hand, the virtue of improvisation embraces and enhances the whole and thus serves to promote and preserve the goal of community.¹⁶

Paris concludes that, "The converse of the virtue of improvisation is rigidity, fixity, legalism, dogmatism, all of which connote an incapacity for creativity and an insensitivity to the psychic needs of oppressed peoples."¹⁷

"Davis acknowledged both sacred and secular influences that merged in his music, a synthesis that is the very basis of the spirituality of African peoples and characteristic of their religions. "

Thus, the "spirit of perceptive wholeness" and, therefore, the spiritual component of music cannot be captured in notation-which is rigid, legalistic, dogmatic. Rather, it must be stumbled upon through improvisa­tory musical probing.

There is another way by which we might understand the jazz on Davis' Kind of Blue to be spiritual: if we would simply understand that jazz had its beginnings among people who gave it recognizable religious and spiritual elements of their African-rooted cultural traditions. For in­stance, Davis acknowledged both sacred and secular influences that merged in his music, a synthesis that is the very basis of the spirituality of African peoples and characteristic of their religions. The secular influ­ences began when, as a youth of seven or eight years old, he used to listen to a radio show called "Harlem Rhythms," which featured the jazz and blues performances of Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, and many others. The sacred influences in Davis' music also began during those early years when Davis (with his two siblings) visited

¹⁶Peter J. Paris, The Spirituality of African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral Discourse (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), p. 147.
¹⁷Ibid., p. 148.

510 - Miles Davis' Kind of Blue

his paternal grandfather in rural Arkansas and heard the sounds of Saturday night church services. Davis recalled:

We'd be walking on these dark country roads at night and all of a sudden this music would seem to come out of nowhere, out of them spooky-looking trees that everybody said ghosts lived in. Anyway.... I remember somebody would be playing a guitar the way B. B. King plays. And I remember a man and a woman singing and talking about getting down! ... But I think that kind of stuff stayed with me.... That kind of sound in music, that blues, church, back-road funk kind of thing, that southern, midwestern, rural sound and rhythm. I think it started getting into my blood on them spook-filled Arkansas back-roads after dark.¹⁸

This combination of sacred and secular influences comprised the essen­tial feeling of Davis' music, which Davis said he became especially conscious of when he recorded Kind of Blue in 1959. He said of the album,

This time I added some other kind of sound I remembered from being back in Arkansas, when we were walking home from church and they were playing these bad gospels. So that kind of feeling came back to me and I started remembering what that music sounded like and felt like. That feeling is what I was trying to get close to. That feeling had got in my creative blood, my imagination, and I had forgotten it was there.¹⁹

That "feeling" was one of both the spiritual and the sensual-inseparable. In this regard, Peter Paris writes that the spirituality common to African peoples of the continent and the diaspora derives from the unification and interdependence of three forms of life-nature, history, and spirit. He says this worldview is deeply rooted in the African mythologies that form the bedrock of African culture, including the theology and ethics of African peoples.²⁰

The mix of the sacred and the secular in Davis' music was an aesthetic that, in my estimation, extended outward from the music to reinforce in the performers and listeners a core African American credo: There is no boundary between the alleged opposites of our world-the flesh versus the spirit and so forth. It is a core precept because, as Peter Paris says, this worldview has been with us all along. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue demon­strates this exceptionally well.

¹⁸Davis, Miles, pp. 28-29.
¹⁹Ibid., p. 234.
²⁰Paris, The Spirituality of African Peoples, p. 22.