Shortly after writing my introductory piece a few weeks ago, I came to realize the degree to which jazz is itself a highly referential form of music. So much so that some (and by some I am referencing Geoff Dyer, whose unique work, But Beautiful is well worth your time) have said it is almost pointless to try and write worthwhile criticism on jazz, the music is its own critical essay. What I mean is that many classic jazz pieces and great musicians were often loading their music with a sort of performative commentary on earlier work and artists they admired. So, in turn, the music is better criticism than anything anyone could write. This goes to explain why I am trying to frame this more as a beginner’s guide than my own critical contribution. It is a matter of covering myself somewhat. I merely hope to convey my enthusiasm and pique your curiosity.

Now that is out of the way, I figured it would be good to get to one of the most clichéd jazz recommendations, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. This album is good to get out of the way early on because it is emblematic of some of the initial difficulties facing the novice jazz listener. And, if my ultimate goal is to provide a nice inroad into something people often find opaque, why not start with one of the first names that comes to mind regarding American jazz.

There is a certain degree of historical weight attached to many of the albums I have opted to focus on, it is hard to approach something like Kind of Blue without all of the critical weight that writers and other musicians have attached to it over the last 50 years. On top of this, I am approaching these records decades after their historical value has been well established. As with any classic album, it is difficult to approach it without feeling somewhat obliged to hold it in certain degree of reverence. In a certain sense, these become sacred, you could interpret in a number of ways but you are obligated to agree with its place in the cannon. I am not really interested in rewriting this cannon, my aim is again merely to point you towards this record and the others I intend to cover over the next several weeks.

Like Pet Sounds is to pop music, Kind of Blues reputation is very much well deserved. This album features, almost miraculously, a band of the 20^th Century’s most well-known/respected jazz musicians. Miles Davis on trumpet, John Coltrane (!) on tenor saxophone, Cannonball Adderly on alto saxophone, Jimmy Cobb on drums, Paul Chambers on bass, and Bill Evans on piano. While the history of jazz features many super groups and combinations of legendary players (we will be turning to Sonny Rollins and Coltrane’s Tenor Madness next), Kind of Blue feels special and the group meshes together incredibly. They also recorded it live, over a few days and only several takes. These musicians were so good and so much at the top of their game, they could record this legendary work in much less time than it took me to write a 1000 words on why I like it so much.

This record is also notable from a technical standpoint in that Davis and his band employs an entirely different mode of improvisation and composition, switching from a chord based format to a modal one. A discussion of musical theory would be pointless for the purposes of this column and leave me way out of my depth, but I want to make sure to note this decided sea change. This was one of the first instances of this shift and it was one that John Coltrane would go on to successfully use in his subsequent legendary string of works in the ‘60s.

There is a lot of preexisting critical baggage around this album and approaching it cleanly can be difficult, which brings me to a larger point, and one we often forget when writing about and discussing music, art, literature, movies, etc., how to form your own opinion on something determined to be universally loved and respected, especially when this status was determined decades before you were born. Also, how to attempt an honest reconsideration of the work without being accused of not knowing what you are talking about.

This has been the main difficulty in trying to navigate my fandom of a variety of cultural interests, but nowhere have I been as timid in forming an opinion as I have been with jazz. And yet, when Kind of Blue began to click with me, I saw that I was perhaps going about it the wrong way. It was not necessarily about technical appreciation of these pieces but of trying to respond to what was in front of you, the music itself, to begin to seek out the expressive core at the heart of the record. And here, we have quite a lot to work from because the record, for me at least, works by creating a series of moods of generating a nonlinguistic response in a way I had not previously experienced.

For Kind of Blue, the obvious response/mood is a melancholy one (blue…get it). It is a record of quiet reflection, each song evincing a calm that I have rarely experienced in any other album. The way Davis’ trumpet echoes across each piece is one of the few times I can allow myself to use the word beautiful to describe something, and I honestly feel that there is no other way to describe it. “All Blues,” the record’s penultimate track, is perhaps the best example. The percussion and piano work together to create a lightness, a nimbleness that drives the song despite the obvious sadness of the refrain. Even if the individual solos are playful and almost bouncy, they still return to the mood of the refrain, there is defeat in them, an extended sigh at the end of a long night. For me, this became Kind of Blue, whose emotional honesty is somehow able to bring closure within the reflective space it creates.

This short circuiting of critical vocabulary proved an opportunity to connect on a deeper level with the work itself. The closest analog I can think of here is poetry where one doesn't necessarily have to make sense of the poem’s content but instead react to the way the words and phrases play off each other, and how they sound in succession.

This is, subsequently why my column on this album can only circle the topic, I don’t think I can really write about the record and do it justice. I encourage everyone to listen to it, as in all the records I will be discussing, its effect on you may be totally different. If anything, these pieces are my own way of moving from writing about music in a way that is prescriptive towards something more informative, a means of sharing enthusiasm.

Over the course of my twenties, I have found that the wonderful thing about being a music nerd is the simple fact that there is always more to discover. Whether it is brand new or hundreds of years old, exploring these sounds is a seemingly infinitely rewarding process that challenges and excites me. It also takes me in a variety of directions, always leading me towards new ways of conceiving and thinking about music. Perhaps most importantly, these aesthetics journeys are ones that bring me closer to myself, finding new ways to conceive and think of who I am, what strikes me as important/interesting/beautiful. I use this perhaps over-earnest opening to begin what I hope to be a short series of articles devoted to my own coming to and trying to understand the most American of musical forms, jazz.

More so than other forms, jazz always stood almost monolithically in this opacity to me. With little idea of where to start and how to find something I would respond to, my early forays were difficult and unsuccessful. I knew that this music was crucial, something that my own intellectual development required as a person concerned with the history of music, especially popular American music (I am using pop music very loosely as a catchall term for the equally nebulous concept of mass cultural music, that is music intended for a wide audience and music that has come about during a period where it was easy to disseminate recorded sound to a general audience). However, there was so much and the music often dense and more complex than a 3 or 4-minute song that my initial attempts were always short lived. I made brief attempts in the first years of college, attempts that seem hilarious in retrospect because I was just trying way too hard. The time I stayed home from a party and decorated my bedroom with Christmas lights and read Nathanial West while trying to listen to Kind of Blue is most prominent in my mind. Still, even with all of these intellectual ornaments, the music never clicked. Nathaniel West clicked (by the way, all of you should read Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust if you have not done so), but not Miles Davis. In short, I didn’t get jazz and it bothered me.

Move forward about ten years from those early and clumsy attempts, and we are at a point where this music would finally register with me. I am not sure what changed, if my boredom with much of the new music coming out led me to seek out challenging works from unfamiliar eras or if I just heard enough stuff influenced by jazz to finally start making sense of what I was hearing. Either way, it finally clicked and I began to find what I was seeking 10 years ago and then some. This music hit me in a big way and I am still discovering my passion for it.

Jazz is, to me, is the definitive form of 20^th century American music. As much as we champion “Americana” today, what we end up with is watered down and saccharine folk music that is as boring as it is pointless. Jazz, while equally filled with its mediocre moments, is a much larger part of American music than it sometimes seems. What I hope to achieve over the next several weeks is to look at some of the cornerstone recordings and offer an introduction to this seemingly unassailable musical form. By the end, my goal is to give the novice something I did not necessarily have, an easily digestible run down of the major works, where to start, and what is important about them. This gives me an opportunity to not only learn more but to help others avoid my clumsy beginnings (cannot help with your decorating choices, some of you might still think Christmas lights are a good idea). 

For now, I am opening up this column to any recommendations for albums to cover or any resources you may have found useful in your exploration of jazz. Personally, I have found the Bluenote app on Spotify to be incredibly informative in providing context and recommendations for lesser known artists. 

Come back next week, when I will be discussing the most clichéd jazz record recommendation one could give, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. For now, I leave you with the masterful “Open Letter to the Duke,” by Charles Mingus. That sax line kills me every time.