The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Miles Davis · produced by Irving Townsend · Columbia · about 46 minutes
Mode
Modal jazz; a small group improvising on frames of one or two scales, given hours before the session
Mythos
The lament turned inward; a question and its two-chord answer; the single voice heard by a listening company; Spain glimpsed
Phase
Two sessions, 2 March and 22 April 1959, one to each side; each side closes on a rubato ballad that settles rather than ends
Presentation
Album; five instrumental tracks by a sextet, three on side one and two on side two, about forty-six minutes, no word sung or spoken
Register
Hushed and unhurried; trumpet, alto and tenor saxophones over piano, bass and drums; moderate and slow tempos only
Scale
Seven musicians, one New York room, two days in the spring of 1959
Governing Proposition
A working sextet is handed frames of one or two scales a few hours before the tape runs and asked not to navigate harmony but to fill space, and the record it makes shows that the blues can turn from complaint to contemplation, and that players given room and no rule will listen before they assert and make melody of what they hear.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens before it begins. Piano and bass play out of tempo, in a space that has not yet become a tune. Then the bass states a figure and the horns answer it with two chords, a question and a shrug, and the tune is under way. It is thirty-two bars in the song form AABA: sixteen bars on the scale of D Dorian, eight a half step higher on E flat Dorian, eight back on D. That is the whole of the frame. A soloist on it has no changes to run. He has a scale, a tempo that does not hurry, and as much time as the form gives him.
Davis’s solo, on open horn, is made of few notes, each placed, with the silences between them counted as phrasing. Across the record Coltrane crowds the scale with runs and never leaves its frame, and Adderley bends it back toward the blues. None of them is navigating. Each is deciding what to do with space, and the one event the frame allows, the lift to the bridge and the fall back from it, becomes an event because nothing else moves. The two chords of the reply are Bill Evans’s, built in fourths, and the voicing became a standard one.
Seven musicians made the record: Miles Davis, trumpet; Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, alto saxophone; John Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Bill Evans, piano, with Wynton Kelly in his place on one track; Paul Chambers, bass; Jimmy Cobb, drums. It was recorded at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York in two sessions, on 2 March and 22 April 1959, the first giving side one and the second side two. The opening track makes the claim the other four test in other frames: that a player given room will make melody instead of navigating harmony.
Movement II
The second track is the one conventional piece. It is a twelve-bar blues in B flat, played as the hard bop of the day, with Kelly at the piano in place of Evans and comping crisply. It swings and does not rise. It is the plainest statement on the record of the blues, the ground the record stands on before it leaves, and it is played with the patience of the rest. Lose it and the record loses nothing it could not do without, except the plain form that the second side will turn into something else.
The making is set down in the liner note. Evans wrote it, under the title “Improvisation in Jazz”, and it says that Davis brought the frames to the studio only hours before the sessions, and that the group had not played them before. It compares the music to a Japanese art of painting in which the stroke, once made, cannot be corrected. Most of the issued performances are reported to be first complete takes. The method is part of the form: frames given late and performances kept whole, so that what is heard is the first answer to the question rather than a rehearsed one.
The record is in part Evans’s. He is at the piano on four of the five tracks, nearly four-fifths of the running time, and his voicings set its colour. The original sleeve credits all five pieces to Davis; Evans’s claim to “Blue in Green” is widely accepted, and the authorship of “Flamenco Sketches” is disputed. Adderley keeps the record tied to the ground with his blues phrasing, and Chambers and Cobb hold time so lightly that the space seems to open of itself. Side one, the whole of the March session, runs about twenty-five minutes.
Movement III
The shortest track, a little over five and a half minutes, is a ballad on a ten-bar cycle. Adderley does not play on it, and the group is five. The cycle has no clear point of arrival. It turns and comes round and turns again. Evans’s voicings, Davis’s trumpet over them, and Coltrane’s solo in the middle of the cycle are all held in one hushed span, and the whole of it stands at the record’s height.
What it shows is a turn in the blues. The music of complaint has turned inward and become contemplation. The sorrow here has no object and no story; nothing has happened that the music reports, and nothing resolves. It is a state the players inhabit together, and the circling form is the state: given an arrival, the sorrow would have a cause and an end, and it has neither. The record says this without a word, and says it so that it can be recognised.
It shows a way of being together as well. The players listen more than they assert. Each is given room and none is given rule, and the frame is slight enough to be held by all of them at once. That is close to a statement about freedom inside a small constraint, and it holds on every track. The track closes side one. The image the record is known by, the night, the blue hour, a single voice in a small room, gathered around it later through the cover and the legend. The music builds the turned lament and the listening company. It does not build the night.
Movement IV
Side two, the session of 22 April, opens on the longest track, more than eleven and a half minutes and a quarter of the record. It is a twelve-bar blues again, in G, but in 6/8 and over a vamp, so that the form of “Freddie Freeloader” returns turned from lament to sway. The bass holds and the horns sway over it. The two blues together take nearly half the running time; the record never leaves the blues, it changes what the blues is for.
The turn was against the jazz of its year, hard bop and its dense chord changes, in which the soloist’s task was to run the changes at speed. Here he is asked what to do with space. It was prepared. Davis had used a modal frame on the title track of Milestones the year before. George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization had been published in 1953. Gil Evans and Bill Evans had prepared the sound. And it was made by the best working band in jazz, on the largest label, in a surface that charms rather than alarms.
In the same year Ornette Coleman recorded and released The Shape of Jazz to Come, which broke with harmony itself, at far greater cost. Coltrane’s Giant Steps followed in 1960. Davis’s record was the more consequential turn of the two and the less dangerous one. What it staked was the method: a band of its standing put its record on material it had never played, and kept what it found the first time. The stake was smaller than Coleman’s, and the consequence was larger.
Movement V
The last track is a sequence of five scales, each held for as long as the soloist chooses. The form hands duration to the player, so that the structure is literally his judgment: how long to stay, when to move on. In the Phrygian section the Spanish inflection darkens the record for a moment, and each soloist chooses how long to stay in Spain, where Davis’s next record, Sketches of Spain (1960), would go at length. The close settles rather than ends. Both sides end so, on a rubato ballad that turns or settles and does not resolve.
What followed is dated. Coltrane built “Impressions” on the frame of “So What”, and his quartet years and A Love Supreme (1965) carried modal playing through the decade; the playing of McCoy Tyner and Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage (1965), worked the same ground. Evans’s trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, from 1959 to 1961, grew from the same idea of listening. Three of the five pieces became standards. Kahn’s book on the sessions appeared in 2000, the Library of Congress named the record to the National Recording Registry in 2002, and a resolution of the House of Representatives marked its fiftieth year in 2009.
For decades side one was heard a little fast and sharp, by the usual account about a quarter-tone, because the tape machine at the March session ran slow; later masterings corrected it. The record survived even its own pitch. Its limits are the limits of its choice: one mood, a band of slow and moderate tempos, few orders of the world, and no family, state or sacred among them. What it holds it holds completely. Five frames, two days, seven players, and the first answer kept: the stroke made once and not corrected.
Act III · The Twelve
Five tracks in about forty-six minutes, and the subtractive test finds little to take. Inside the pieces almost nothing is written that could go: “So What” is a bass figure and a two-chord reply, and “Flamenco Sketches” is a sequence of five scales. The frames are as small as frames can be and still hold a performance. The solos are long, and the length is the argument, since a scale held for as long as the player chooses means nothing unless it is held. The test bites once. “Freddie Freeloader”, a B flat blues played as the hard bop of the day, could go, but it is the plain ground that “All Blues” turns into a vamp.
Score: 8.6 / 10
What the record brings into the open can be stated, and it holds. The blues, the music of complaint, can turn inward and become contemplation: in “Blue in Green” and “Flamenco Sketches” sorrow has no object and no story, and the players inhabit it together without resolving it. And a player given room will make melody instead of navigating harmony, so that six players given room and no rule listen more than they assert. That is a claim about freedom inside a slight constraint, borne out on every track. Held below the summit by the line between mood and meaning: with no words, the disclosure is carried as sound and can be stated only by interpretation.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Height comes on four of five tracks, and in “So What” twice. Its rubato opening sets piano and bass in a space that has not yet become a tune, and Davis’s solo, on open horn, is few notes, each placed. The whole of “Blue in Green” holds at height: Evans’s voicings, the trumpet over them, Coltrane’s solo in the middle of the cycle. In “Flamenco Sketches” the Phrygian section darkens the record for a moment, and the close settles rather than ends. For forty-six minutes the frequency is very high. Held from the top by its kind: the height is beauty held, never grandeur or terror, and “Freddie Freeloader” swings without rising.
Score: 9.1 / 10
With no words, figures or story, the archetypal must be built by the music or not at all, and part of it is built. “So What” is a question and an answer, the bass asking and the horns replying in two chords. The blues stands as the inherited pattern of lament, and the record turns it, from the plain blues of “Freddie Freeloader” to the circling sorrow of “Blue in Green”, and out to Spain in “Flamenco Sketches”. On every track one voice steps out alone and is heard by the company. Held below the summit: the image the record is known by, the night and the blue hour, belongs to its cover and its legend, not to what the music builds.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The turn is from the jazz of 1959, hard bop and its dense chord changes, to frames of one or two scales held for long stretches. The soloist is no longer asked to run the changes; he is asked what to do with space. The stake was in the method: a working band of the first rank placed its record on frames it had never played, brought in the day they were recorded, and kept performances whole. The turn changed the harmonic ground of improvisation. Held from the top: Milestones, George Russell, Gil Evans and Bill Evans had prepared it, the band’s standing cushioned it, and Ornette Coleman’s break the same year cost more.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the record stops knowing the one thing it knows: that a player given room will make melody instead of navigating harmony. Its thirty-two bars hold one event, the half-step lift from D Dorian to E flat Dorian at the bridge, and because it is the only event the frame allows, it becomes an event. In “Flamenco Sketches” the form hands duration to the soloist, so that the structure is literally his judgment. “Blue in Green” turns in a ten-bar cycle with no clear point of arrival, and the circling is the sorrow. The method belongs to the form: frames given late, takes kept whole. “Freddie Freeloader” is borrowed rather than made.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and nearly seventy years of it, of two kinds. Musicians have transcribed and studied the solos of Davis, Coltrane and Adderley for decades, and “So What”, “All Blues” and “Blue in Green” have become standards that each generation plays again, finding the frames open rather than spent. The record of the making keeps yielding too: Ashley Kahn’s book on the sessions (2000), the dispute over who wrote “Blue in Green” and “Flamenco Sketches”, the correction of side one’s speed, which let it be heard at its true pitch, and the debate over how far the record is modal at all. The depth is more formal than semantic, and the proportion keeps it from the top.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The force reorganised what improvisation could be built on. The record replaced the chord sequence with the scale and the dense change with the long stretch of space, and showed that the result could be lyrical and widely heard. The credit is shared: Milestones, Russell and the two Evanses came first, the more radical turn of 1959 was Coleman’s, and part of the reach travels as an image of jazz rather than as a technique. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: modal jazz as a practice of the 1960s, in Coltrane’s “Impressions”, built on the frame of “So What”; Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage (1965); the playing of McCoy Tyner and Wayne Shorter; Evans’s trio with LaFaro and Motian; Davis’s later groups; three standards.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over nearly seventy years, and the axis is scored on the demonstration. The record still sells and still gains listeners, many of whom hear no other jazz; its three standards are played by musicians born decades after the sessions; it entered the National Recording Registry in 2002. The surface carries almost no date. An acoustic sextet recorded with great fidelity in a large room has aged less than most records of its period, and there is no topical content and no fashionable instrument. The one fault of technology, side one’s speed, was correctable and has been corrected. What keeps it short of the top is the length of the demonstration: nearly seventy years, not two centuries.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium is load-bearing throughout. Davis places every note and counts the silences as phrasing; Coltrane crowds the scale with runs and keeps to its frame; Adderley’s blues phrasing ties the record to the ground. Evans’s voicings carry it, above all the two-chord reply of “So What”, built in fourths, which became a standard voicing. Chambers and Cobb hold time so lightly that the space seems to open by itself, and the 30th Street room keeps each instrument clear and present. All of it was done at first sight of the frames, so the craft is part of the meaning. The costs are small: “Freddie Freeloader” is routine as composition, and a few passages in the longer solos mark time.
Score: 9.3 / 10
One law governs the record: restraint and room, few chords, a tempo that never hurries, each voice given space. The two most distant elements obey it. “Freddie Freeloader” is a hard-bop blues with Wynton Kelly’s crisp comping, “Flamenco Sketches” a rubato sequence of scales with no fixed length, and the blues is played with the record’s patience. The range of mood and tempo is narrow, one mood and a band of moderate and slow tempos; the range of form is wide: a standard blues, a thirty-two-bar song, a ten-bar cycle, a blues in 6/8 over a vamp, and a form without fixed length. The players change and the law does not.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held, in the interior state of the ballads. The group is held: a small society of equals in which each voice is heard, and the individual and the collective are integrated on every track, which is the record’s achievement. The blues tradition is carried in two of five forms and nearly half the running time, and with it, unstated, African American history. Spain is glimpsed in the Phrygian section. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the family, labour, the state, the sacred and the natural order do not appear. A wordless record of forty-six minutes holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier IV — Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, then The Sublime, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.1. A command of the medium exercised at first sight of the frames, height on four of five tracks, a record that changed what improvisation is built on, and nearly seventy years of survival behind a surface that carries almost no date. Below them, The Living Form and The Bottomless Well at 9.0.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8 — consciousness and the small society of the group are held and integrated on every track, the blues tradition is carried and Spain glimpsed, and the family, labour, the state, the sacred and the natural order are absent. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.4: the question and answer, the turned lament and the single voice are built in the music and the night of the legend is not, and what the record discloses is carried by sound rather than stated.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Swerve at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate, and by the aggregate, which stands below 9.0.
Basis · the LP as released by Columbia in 1959, five tracks in running order, three on side one and two on side two, about forty-six minutes; judged from knowledge of the recording, its documented making and its reception. Running times are approximate to within a few seconds. The alternate take of “Flamenco Sketches” and the studio fragments issued on later editions are evidence, not the object; the speed of side one, a mastering fault, is charged to nothing. There are no words. Nothing is quoted but the titles of the tracks and of Bill Evans’s liner note, whose argument is paraphrased. The solo order, the use of mutes, the production and engineering credits and the names of the scales of “Flamenco Sketches” are not given, being unverified here.