“It bugs me, because I'm not that important," the trumpeter told Playboy. “Why is it that people have so much to say about me?"If he were alive, the grumpy genius probably wouldn't be happy about the lavish 50th birthday party being given to Kind of Blue, which comes out Tuesday as a four-disc box set with a list price of $110.
Nor would he agree with its reputation as the best album in jazz history – although he'd have a tough time convincing the world. So many critics and fans agree on the greatest-ever label that it's all but etched in marble.
The problem is that as sublime as the album is, it's too mellow to be canonized as the ultimate achievement in jazz, a music born in rowdy bordellos, bars and dance halls.
As the title suggests, Kind of Blue isn't so much a jazz album as an experiment in the blues. It's mournful, melancholy and slower than molasses in January.
“Miles sounded lonely, like he was sitting alone on an iceberg on the North Pole," Kind of Blue drummer Jimmy Cobb said in Made in Heaven, a 2005 short film about the album.
That's exactly the remote quality Mr. Davis was going for.
“The music has to have air in it – you can't fill all the holes," Mr. Davis told the St. Petersburg Times shortly before he died in 1991.
In the spring of 1959, 32-year-old Miles Dewey Davis III was at a crossroads.
He'd found fame more than a decade earlier in saxophonist Charlie Parker's band, but he struggled to lead his own group after he and various bandmates got addicted to heroin.
Eventually, he kicked the drug cold turkey and put together a dream team for Kind of Blue, featuring sax ace John Coltrane. The glue was Bill Evans, a classically trained pianist-composer whose introspective style jibed well with Mr. Davis' less-is-more approach.
Both Mr. Davis and Mr. Evans were already experts at cool jazz, but they envisioned Kind of Blue as a total deep freeze. Their secret weapon was modal jazz – a then-new concept where musicians improvised over basic scales, or modes, instead of complex chords.
Mr. Davis didn't invent modal jazz. But in one grand stroke, he taught the world how liberating it could be.
“It's one thing to just play a tune, but it's another thing to practically create a new language of music, which is what Kind of Blue did," pianist Chick Corea said in the book Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece.
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