Skip to main content

All Blues

By


I'm reminded that today we celebrate the release of Kind of Blue.   Probably more than any other album, this quintessential modern album made jazz cool, and it is played as much today as it was when it first came out in 1959.  You just can't beat the laid back Blues of Miles, Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, along with the amazing rhythm section of Bill Evans, Jimmy Cobb and Paul Chambers.  Ashley Kahn wrote a book a few years back on the making of Kind of Blue.  He also wrote a book on John Coltrane's classic album, A Love Supreme.

Comments

  1. Rick DiguetteAugust 17, 2012 at 2:17 PM

    Great album, but then his entire body of work is incredible. His CDs are never more than a few inches away.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rick DiguetteAugust 17, 2012 at 2:22 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rick DiguetteAugust 17, 2012 at 2:34 PM

    The link below will take you to a nice group of songs that someone has downloaded. Great rendition of Nature Boy from the Blue Moods album.

    http://www.desitara.com/groupvideos/bestmilesdavissongs/random

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. avrdsAugust 17, 2012 at 4:15 PM

      Nice. I have that CD but nice to just have it playing on my computer this a.m.

      Delete
  4. James FergusonAugust 17, 2012 at 3:31 PM

    What gets me is how modern the sound was at that time. Not just Miles, but Mingus, Monk, Rollins, Brubeck and others as well. There are some very good young jazz musicians today, but the late 50s and early 60s represents the high point of jazz in my mind.

    ReplyDelete
  5. avrdsAugust 17, 2012 at 4:18 PM

    For a couple years in the late 60s I volunteered at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Got to meet a lot of the great musicians and just hang out around the backstage. Incredible experience.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

The People Debate the Constitution

By
As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified.  After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution.  Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through.  But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 .  The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others.  Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified.  A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.
166 comments
Read more