August 12, 2018
A 52 Week Autobiography Through Music – Week 32 – Kind of Miles
A 52 Week Autobiography Through Music - Week 32 - Kind of Miles from Pancycle on Vimeo.
I could talk about Miles and his influence in general but this is my blog so I am choosing to focus on the 2 of his albums that had the most profound effect on me. Kind of Blue and Nefertiti have been in my listening rotation since I first heard them when I was 15 - 16. You won't, in my opinion, find many records that have such a completeness to their sound. I mean that these records are special and are more than the sum of their parts.
The ‘heads’ at the time fell for Bitches Brew. I still absolutely love it, that was my start. It actually took me awhile (years) before I ran into ‘In A Silent Way”. In the meantime I picked up a lot of Miles vinyl and pretty much ‘got it’. Add in the things he did with others and one can see what all the fuss was about when it comes to Miles Davis.
“Patience” is a perfect word to describe Kind of Blue! Like Tim, the first Miles Davis I heard was Bitches’ Brew. It was indeed embraced by the “heads” – and as I learned later, rejected by the jazz fans. They (mostly) eventually realized that Miles knew best, and came around to it. Now that I think about it, I wonder if that album was a significant step (was gonna say milestone, but that’s another record!) in musicians being able to free themselves from people’s attempts to force them into some musical category we made up. You never hear those kind of complaints nowadays.